Dunster by John Mortimer

Author:John Mortimer [Mortimer, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471302282
Publisher: AudioGO

Chapter Seventeen

‘Good news! You’ve got Sir Percy Blakeney.’ Dennis, the dentist, picked up the spectacles that hung round his neck, elevated them to his nose and looked at me closely, as though doubting whether I was an appropriate choice for the Scarlet Pimpernel in the light-hearted romp that was to be the Mummers’ big autumn production.

‘And we’ll be playing opposite each other again,’ Lucy said in her quiet and businesslike manner, ‘I’ve got Marguerite. Martin was trying to get hold of you to tell you all about Pimpernel.’

‘I’m sorry. I’ve been out of London.’ I had been down to Windhammer and had called in at the Mummery for a drink, hoping to find something to talk about other than long-ago deaths in the High Apennines. So I discovered that I was to play, for the first time, a positive hero engaged, despite his languid and flippant manner, in springing aristocrats from the guillotine. I would be raising a weary eye-glass and saying lines like, “Odds my life, Lady Blakeney! I have spent the entire morning in the perfection of me demned cravat.’ Dunster would have found that entirely ridiculous, but then I no longer cared what Dunster thought about anything. I was now at war with Dunster. I had talked to Cris and made up my mind that, at whatever cost, Dunster had to be defeated.

When I had paid my first visit – and I hoped to God it was my last – to the Imperial War Museum and got back to the Streetwise office, I had found Peregrine Gryce agitating because on his return from the North of England I wasn’t waiting in my cell, staring at the back wall of the Malibu Club, breathing in the smells of last night’s dinner and eager for instructions. ‘Pippa tells me you’ve been looking through the files. I hope you’ve come up with some ideas?’

‘Yes, I have. I’ve also been talking to our writer.’

‘And did you manage to get any sense out of him?’

‘I don’t think so. I hope not.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I’ll tell you what I can, after I’ve spoken to Cris, Pippa, get me Megapolis, will you? The chairman’s secretary.’

Miss Pippa Marching looked at Peregrine for confirmation and then made the telephone call. You have seen from this passage that I was, in some ways, a different associate producer. It was as though Dunster, riding away on his huge black motor bike, had left me some of his determination to act, whatever the consequences. I felt frustrated when Pippa got me through to Megapolis and I discovered that the chairman was spending a couple of days at Windhammer, when once I should have been relieved at the postponement of an almost impossible meeting. I left Peregrine Gryce protesting at my going to Cris over his plaintive little head and I took a taxi to Liverpool Street Station.

I sat in the corner of a dusty railway carriage, looking out at the trailing farewell of London, the back gardens full of weeds and broken toys and grimy, lean-to greenhouses, and the new but already shabby suburban stations.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.