The Most Amazing Man Who Ever Lived (The Cornelius Murphy Trilogy Book 3) Read online

  One, by the name of Chris, who wore the robes of Initiate Novice Zero Grade, pushed aside his corkscrew hair and raised his eyes towards the heavens as if searching for a sign.

  ‘Surely’, he said, ‘that would be a Roman Catholic priest I see floating up there.’

  2

  The most amazing man who ever lived lay soaking in his bath.

  Those who personally attended to the most amazing man, who primped and pampered his person, plumped up his pillows and plucked his nasal hairs, knelt about the polished marble bath-tub in attitudes of supplication and readiness.

  Theirs was to do. His was only to be.

  Below, in the grand reception hall, its pink walls made gay with a priceless collection of Canalettos, Caravaggios, Carsons, Klees and Koons, servants in wigs of burnished golden wire and tasselled leotards greeted the visiting heads of state, the captains of industry, the archbishops, press barons, poets and princes.

  Daily they came, these great folk, to seek the most amazing man, that he might favour them with his advice, forward a solution to some world crisis or another, bless or father children. Offer them a word. Or just a simple gesture.

  In the most amazing man’s nympharium, his concubines lounged upon silken cushions, sucking sherbet lemons and soaking their Lotus-feet in bowls of baby oil. Some read copies of Hello! magazine. Others did not.

  In the kitchen, Dave the griddle chef turned a spam fritter in the frying-pan and whistled a Celtic Frost number (possibly “Necromantical Screams”, the last track on their classic To Mega Therion album).

  In a distant room, the most amazing man’s private secretary took the morning’s telepathic dictation from her master and clattered away on the typewriter.

  All was peace and harmony, the way that all should be. With half-closed eyes and belly breaking surface, the most amazing man broadcast in thoughts the words, And though I am naturally touched that you have named the flagship of your new cruise line after me, I regret that I shall not be able to swing the old bottle of Bol’, as I will be attending the world premier of my new movie. Yours, et cetera, et cetera.

  ‘Kindly read that back to me, Mavis, then be so good as to pop over to the kitchen and tell Dave he’s whistling that Celtic Frost number in the wrong key. Then you may take the rest of the day off.’

  In the distant room, Mavis plucked the sheet of Conqueror from the Remington and read from it aloud. ‘Thank you, master.’ Then she said, ‘You are, as ever, the nice one.’

  ‘I am indeed.’ The day’s mail taken care of, the most amazing man sank lower into his bath water and sought to compose the final mathematical equation needed to complete his formula for the universal panacea and elixir of life.

  And he would have had it too, if it hadn’t been for the violent pounding upon his bedsit door and the howls of complaint from his landlady.

  And had he not been the most amazing man who ever lived, it is probable that he would have awoken to find, that as in the very worst of comedy traditions, his amazingness was nothing more than a dream and he was very much less than amazing.

  ‘Get out of that bed, you lazy sod, or I’ll have my husband Cyril come and break down the door!’

  The most amazing man who ever lived awoke with a start. To find himself, once more in the swank West London office of his publisher.

  ‘My sincerest apologies,’ he said to this body. ‘I think I must have dozed off.’

  ‘No need to apologize.’ The publisher spoke though gritted teeth. ‘No need at all.’

  ‘On the contrary, my dear fellow. I momentarily deprived you of my scintillating conversation. Quite unforgivable on my part.’

  ‘Quite.’ The publisher leaned back in his big, red-leather publisher’s chair and puffed on a small cheroot. ‘You were perhaps about to scintillate me with an explanation regarding the overdue delivery of your manuscript.’

  The most amazing man shook his head. ‘On the contrary once again. I merely dropped in to give you my monthly expense chitty and pick up a cheque. And to bring untold joy to you, by my simply being here, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’ The publisher viewed the bringer of absolutely no joy whatsoever, who dwelt hugely in the guest chair beyond his big, red-leather-topped publisher’s desk. How, he asked himself, did he let this man persuade him to go on forking out great chunks of the firm’s profits each month, while he worked upon his autobiography? His autohagiography?

  A work entitled The Most Amazing Man Who Ever Lived. A work of which, as yet, the publisher had not seen a solitary page.

  Who was this man?

  What was he?

  He was certainly somebody. His physical presence alone marked him far from the madding crowd. He was large in every sense of the word: well over six feet tall and generously proportioned around and all about. He swelled from within a three-piece green plus-fours suit of hand-loomed Boleskine tweed. A red silk cravat was secured at his massive throat by a diamond pin. Exotic rings sheathed most of his prodigious fingers. A watch chain, hung with amulets and crystals, adorned his straining waistcoat.

  His head was a great shaven dome. His face all beetling brows and jostling jowls. His nose was a hawk’s beak. His mouth wore a merry grin.

  But it was the eyes that had it. Black with white pupils they were. You didn’t see eyes like that every day of the week. And the way those eyes looked at you. As if focusing not upon your eyes, but at some point near to the back of your head. As if they could see right into you. Most disconcerting that.

  And he was doing it right now.

  The publisher flicked ash from his cheroot towards the ashbowl and missed. That was what he looked like, this man.

  But who was he?

  The stories regarding him were legion. He had travelled everywhere, met everybody and done everything. Sometimes done it twice. He had crossed the Sahara desert on a unicycle to win a bet with Humphrey Bogart and swum around Cape Horn because President Truman had told him it couldn’t be done. Mother Teresa referred to him as ‘a sexpot’ and his own grandmother gave him the credit for teaching her how to suck eggs.

  He’d wowed them at Woodstock, when he upstaged Jimi Hendrix with a ukulele solo and had twice won the Summerslam at Wembley. The beasts called him brother and the brothers called him bro’. And in Fiji he was worshipped as a god.

  His name was well known to the publisher, who had written it in the pay section of far too many cheques.

  It was Hugo Artemis Solon Saturnicus Reginald Arthur Rune.

  And he had fallen asleep once more.

  ‘It will not do!’ The publisher brought his fist hard down upon the red-leather top of his red-leather-topped publisher’s desk, upending the ashbowl and jangling the telephones.

  The Tallahassee Tap Dance Champion of 1934 awoke once more and enquired as to whether his cheque had been made out.

  ‘There will be no cheque until I see words on a page. Your words.’

  ‘I have many words,’ said Hugo Rune. ‘All of them profound and lots running to several syllables a piece.’

  ‘I want the completed manuscript by the end of the week. There will be no more cheques until I receive it.’

  ‘I’ll take cash then,’ said the man who shot the man who shot Liberty Valance.

  ‘You will take yourself off to your typewriter. And now!’ The publisher rose from his big, red-leather publisher’s chair, pointing the direction to the door.

  ‘Sit down. Sit down.’ Hugo Rune fluttered his porcine pinkies and the publisher sat down. The publisher jumped up again. ‘I will not sit down,’ said he.

  Rune cocked his head upon one side and perused the publisher. He observed a slim fellow, elegantly dressed in white cotton shirt, club tie, black blazer and grey flannels. Middle forties, neatly featured, own hair and teeth. Well-developed cerebellum.

  The publisher’s name was Andrew Jackson-Five. A name well known to Rune, who had seen it signed at the bottom of far too few cheques for his personal liking. And a name that the
man who once hopped the four-minute mile could read clearly on the tag inside the publisher’s shirt collar.

  Rune also noticed the increased motor-neuron activity in the publisher’s hypothalamus, indicating his desire to take an early lunch.

  ‘I know a nearby eating house’, said Rune, ‘that serves a most affable boeuf en croute, fried chicken livers with grilled pineapple, bread-and-butter pudding and banana custard. Also the griddle chef knocks out some home-brewed vodka that could strip the tiles off the nose cone of a Saturn Five. Shall we dine?’

  ‘No! We shall not dine.’ The publisher crumpled his cheroot into the ashbowl. ‘I have had enough of your extravagances, Rune.’

  ‘Mr Rune,’ said Mr Rune. ‘And I know not of which extravagances you speak.’

  The publisher sank back into his chair (same one, red leather), and took up Mr Rune’s expense chitty for the month. It was a very substantial expense chitty. It ran to twenty-three pages, closely typed. Leafing through he chose a random entry.

  ‘Toilet paper,’ he said.

  ‘Toilet paper?’ Rune buffed his watch chain with an oversized red, gingham hanky. ‘You can hardly call toilet paper an extravagance.’

  ‘Monogrammed toilet paper?’

  ‘And why should it not be so? Are you suggesting that toilet paper which has been handmade in Japan from ground water iris, gladioli and tinted cotton flax, scented with bergamot and sassafras, then individually crafted into the shape of the sacred lotus, does not deserve to be monogrammed?’

  ‘You have lotus-shaped toilet paper?’ The publisher’s jaw hung positively slack.

  ‘I am Rune,’ quoth Rune. ‘I unscrew the inscrutable and eff at the ineffable. Do you think that I should have my bottom wiped for me with some proprietary brand of bog roll?’

  ‘Did you say, have your bottom wiped for you?’

  ‘I find your interest in my bodily functions somewhat unhealthy,’ said Rune. ‘You’re not a member of the Coprophilia Club, are you by any chance?’

  ‘What?’ Mr Jackson-Five fell back in his chair. ‘How dare you, sir!’ said he.

  ‘Sir is a bit more like it. And if you want to know, I flush the poo-poo all away. Unlike my good chum the Dalai Lama, whose dung used to be collected, dried, ground up and used as a sacramental host.’

  ‘It never was.

  ‘It was too.’

  ‘That is disgusting.’

  ‘Not nearly as disgusting as any one of a number of things I could call immediately to mind.’

  ‘Enough,’ said Mr Jackson-Five, rising once more to his feet. ‘Enough, enough, enough. I am a busy man. Kindly depart at once and furnish me with your finished manuscript by no later than Friday. Goodbye.’

  ‘Sit down,’ said Rune. ‘Sit down, answer your telephone, then write out my cheque.’

  ‘My telephone is not ringing.’

  ‘But it will. As surely as a big-boned girlie with a cold sore will issue through your door at any moment, to tell you that your car has been wheel-clamped.’

  ‘My car is in the car-park. Goodbye, Mr Rune. Manuscript by Friday and no later.’

  ‘Phone,’ said Rune and the telephone began to ring.

  ‘Sheer coincidence,’ said the publisher. ‘Goodbye.’

  ‘Head office,’ said Rune. ‘On the line, New York, the Managing Director. Urgent call, you’d best pick it up.’

  ‘Nonsense.’ Mr Jackson-Five sat down and picked up the telephone receiver. ‘Hello,’ said he.

  Words entered his ear via the transatlantic undersea cable link or the geo-stationary satellite telecommunications jobbie, or some other unlikely piece of advanced technological hocus-pocus.

  ‘Hello, sir.’ Mr Jackson-Five sat up very straight in his seat. ‘Rune? Mr Rune, yes. He’s with me now, sir. Do what, sir? But, sir, do you know how much his expenses are this month? What? Money no object? But, sir . . . Yes, yes, all right; at once, sir.’

  ‘Perk up,’ said Hugo Rune as Mr Jackson-Five put down the phone and took out his cheque-book. ‘No sign of the big-boned girlie with the cold sore. Make that out for cash, if you’d be so kind.’

  ‘You would appear to have friends in very high places,’ said the publisher.

  ‘It would appear that way, yes,’ replied Hugo Rune. ‘But now I must away. Are you sure you will not join me for lunch?’

  Mr Jackson-Five shook his head. ‘The manuscript by Friday?’ he asked in a tone all forlorn.

  ‘I will have my private secretary fax it up from Skelington Bay.’

  ‘Taking a little holiday then, are you?’ The bitter edge returned to the publisher’s voice.

  ‘Rune has no time for holidays. I am going there in connection with a project I am currently engaged upon for the British government. Very hush-hush. Official Secrets Act and all that kind of thing. Regret I cannot tell you more.’ Hugo Rune tapped at his hawk’s-beak hooter. ‘Highly classified.’

  Jackson-Five buried his face in his hands. ‘Go home, Mr Rune, go home.’

  ‘Via the bank,’ said Rune, whisking his cheque from the publisher’s desk and folding it into his beaver-skin wallet (a gift from Mae West). ‘Good-day to you.’

  ‘Good-day.’

  And Hugo Rune took his leave.

  Away across the water in the city of New York, the Managing Director of Transglobe Publishing had replaced the telephone receiver after his conversation with Mr Andrew Jackson-Five.

  Now he sank back into the perfumed water of his marble bath-tub and sought once more to compose the final mathematical equation which would complete his formula for a universal panacea and elixir of life.

  He was a large man and amply proportioned, and the resemblance he bore to a certain Mr Hugo Rune was so striking that one might have taken him, if not for an identical twin, then to be none other than the self-same person.

  But how could this be?

  For, after all, here is Hugo Rune now, entering the lift at Transglobe’s British headquarters. He is entering just as a big-boned girlie with a cold sore is leaving it. She is bound for the office of Mr Jackson-Five as it happens. And she has a sad tale to relate, about how Mr Jackson-Five’s Mercedes had to be moved from the car-park to make way for Mr Hugo Rune’s chauffeur-driven limousine. And how it had not only been wheel-clamped in the High Street, but now towed away to boot.

  Being the great humanitarian he is, Hugo Rune will not be returning to the publisher’s office to tell him, ‘I told you so.’

  3

  ‘Ashes to Ashes, funk to funky,’ said the Reverend Cheesefoot.

  ‘Dust to Dust, you bastard.’ His lady wife tugged at his vestments and made that kind of face that some wives do when they find their husbands stoned at quite the wrong time of the day. ‘Dust to dust.’

  ‘Bless you,’ said the reverend, squinting at his prayer-book. ‘Dust to dust it is then.’

  A warm, spring sun breathed blessings upon Skelington Church, with its picturesque Gothic bits and bobs, its topiarized yews, its fifteenth-century lich-gate, its medieval brasses, and its ‘Kinky Vicar made love to my luggage,’ scandal now running to its third week in the Sunday press.

  The lads of 3A, each now an avid reader of the Sunday press, were grouped untidily about the open grave, where the coffin containing the mortal remains of Norman the younger had come to take its final rest. It had come there by a rather roundabout route from the church, but the lads had enjoyed the ramble. And it was a nice day for it, at least.

  Norman’s dad, wheelchair-bound, with both legs in plaster, blubbed quietly into a Kleenex tissue. Norman’s mum, who had run off with a double-glazing salesman five years before and left no forwarding address, sat in a bungalow a good many miles to the north, eating cheese biscuits and watching daytime television.

  ‘Dust to Dusty Springfield,’ tittered the Reverend Cheesefoot. ‘Who giveth this woman to be taken in matrimony? No, I’ve turned over two pages there.’

  ‘Bit of an old cliché, drunken vicars, aren’t they?’ whispered B
oris Timms to Charlie Huxley. ‘I have an uncle in the priesthood, you know. He can inflate his stomach with helium and propel himself through the air by fa—’

  ‘I had an uncle called Aldous,’ whispered Charlie. ‘And he really knew how to get high.’

  ‘Shut up, you two, and show some respect.’ Mr Bailey dealt Timms and Huxley blows to the left earholes.

  ‘Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live and is filled with muesli,’ went the lover of luggage.

  ‘Muesli’s not bad,’ sniggered Timms. ‘And . . . ouch!’ he continued, as his right ear got a clouting.

  Rather too near to the graveside for his own comfort, Teddy Bilson shuffled his big feet, blew a dewdrop from the end of his nose and made snivelling sounds. ‘It’s a crying shame, so it is,’ snivelled he. ‘A crying shame.’

  ‘Death is a purely human concept,’ the Buddhist Blenkinsop consoled him. ‘You see consciousness, being chemical in nature, changes as its chemistry changes. The one merges into the all, the all into the one. Now, the Sufis say—’

  ‘Shut it!’ Mr Bailey leaned forward to clout Blenkinsop in the ear. Blenkinsop, however, ducked nimbly aside and Mr Bailey disappeared into the open grave. Which is another thing you don’t see every day of the week.

  ‘The Sufis say,’ continued Blenkinsop, ‘what goes around, comes around. Or something so near as makes no odds at all.’

  Seated upon a nearby gravestone was a pale-looking youth. He was somewhat short for his height, but old for his age. His hair was red and worn in a style that used to be known as The Beatle Cut. He had those freckles that some people with red hair have, and those unsqueezed spots that all teenage boys sometimes have. He wore a grey school uniform and a puzzled expression.

  His name was Norman.

  Norman the younger.

  ‘Who is that woman holding hands with my dad?’ he asked the lad in white, who stood beside him, smirking like a good’n.