by Simon Brett
Also by Simon Brett
Blotto, Twinks and the ex-King’s Daughter
Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in Great Britain by Constable,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2010
Copyright © Simon Brett 2010
The right of Simon Brett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library.
UK ISBN: 978-1-84901-317-8
Printed and bound in the EU
Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
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24
25
26
27
28
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31
32
33
To Louise,
who enjoys a good laugh
1
To Snitterings
If there was one thing Blotto (properly known as the Honourable Devereux Lyminster) didn’t like about weekend house parties, it was the inevitable gathering-together of a large number of people with dark secrets in their past, along with the tiresome near-certainty that one of them would get murdered. Not to mention the unavoidable presence of a know-it-all polymathic amateur sleuth who would happen to be staying for the weekend. And the obligatory moment when the aforementioned know-it-all polymathic amateur sleuth would dragoon everyone into the library to tell them whodunit.
So Blotto didn’t like going away to weekend house parties. In fact, he didn’t really like going away anywhere. Everything he loved and needed – like cricket and hunting – was readily available at his ancestral family home, Tawcester Towers.
But noblesse oblige and all that rombooley. When his mother, the Dowager Duchess of Tawcester, announced that she, Blotto and his sister Twinks (properly known as Lady Honoria Lyminster) were going to spend a weekend at Snitterings, the ancestral family home of that premier Catholic family the Melmonts, he knew where his duty lay. He also knew, from long experience, the hopelessness of any attempts to go against his mother’s wishes. The Dowager Duchess had certain physical characteristics in common with a Mark IV tank, and was equally difficult to deflect from her chosen course.
She also had another purpose that was ominous to Blotto. His mother prided herself on her match-making skills and the Melmont family boasted a daughter called Laetitia who was very definitely in the marriage market. In fact, she’d been in the marriage market since anyone could remember. She had been on the shelf so long that she was suffering from an advanced case of mildew.
An attempt had been made to hitch Laetitia Melmont up to Blotto straight after she’d ‘come out’, and he remembered thinking at the time that, so far as he was concerned, he just wished she’d go back in again. He’d yet to find in any woman those fine qualities of loyalty and companionship that you found in a good horse.
On that occasion the ghastly fate of matrimony had been avoided, but Blotto didn’t dare let his guard drop. To his mother an idea was like a bone to a terrier; however many times it got buried, it could still be dug up and chewed over again.
Blotto had once put to her what he thought was the rather cunning argument that he shouldn’t marry Laetitia because she was Catholic. ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter the way it used to,’ the Dowager Duchess had replied airily. ‘The rules of society have relaxed considerably. These days people of our sort are even marrying Americans.’ Blotto should have known that there was never any way of getting round his mother.
So when she announced that they were going to Snitterings for a long weekend – Thursday afternoon to Sunday, for heaven’s sake – to Snitterings they went. The Dowager Duchess had been with Pansy Melmont at one of those convent schools where girls of the right sort are taught to talk very loudly, wear tweed and sneer at their inferiors. Pansy had been skilfully manoeuvred by her parents into marriage to the Duke of Melmont. That unfortunate peer having succumbed to an excess of port and chambermaids, she had found herself in later life, like Blotto and Twinks’s mother, with the title of Dowager Duchess. And Blotto’s mother was a great believer in the principle that Dowager Duchesses should stick together.
Blotto had wanted to drive over to Snitterings alone in the Lagonda, but his mother slapped a veto on that little plan. She suspected (quite rightly) that, given his own transport, Blotto would spend as much time away from Snitterings on various errands as he possibly could. She therefore mandated that she, Blotto and Twinks would all travel together in one of the Tawcester Towers Rolls-Royces, with Corky Froggett acting as chauffeur.
Corky Froggett was a military man. Prepared from birth to give his all for King and Country, he was unable to disguise his disappointment when in 1918 King and Country had put an end to the war he was enjoying so much. A practical man, though, he did not brood on this setback, immediately transferring his undying loyalty from King and Country to his employers, the Lyminster family at Tawcester Towers. As he never ceased to tell them, he would readily lay down his life for any one of them. His only complaint about his life was that so few opportunities for laying it down occurred in the normal course of his chauffeuring duties.
Corky Froggett had the voice of a lovable cockney, but the killing instinct of a piranha that had just had a row with its wife. His black uniform covered a body so muscular that bumping into it could cause serious damage to the bumper-into. And though he was loyal to every member of the family at Tawcester Towers, Blotto was the one to whom Corky Froggett saw himself as unofficial bodyguard.
There was a logic to this. The Dowager Duchess cut such a daunting figure that no one had ever dared to threaten her. A look from her piercing blue eyes could freeze a tiger in mid-leap – and had once done so during a day’s hunting with the Maharajah of Pranjipur.
Her elder son, Rupert Lyminster Duke of Tawcester, universally known as ‘Loofah’, did not need much protection either. His was not a personality full of get-up-and-go. He was more full of I-think-I’ll-stay-here-thank-you-very-much. Though he was entitled to attend the House of Lords and shape the future of his nation, he very rarely did. The only date on which he was guaranteed to be there was the Wednesday before Christmas when there was always a rather good Christmas lunch. In fact, the only – and indeed the greatest – challenge of Loofah’s life was to impregnate his angularly unappealing wife, known as ‘Sloggo’, with something that didn’t turn out to be another girl, and thus ensure the continuation of the Tawcester dynasty.
So that left his two younger siblings, and though Blotto and his sister both got involved in hazardous scrapes, Twinks was far too intelligent to put herself in unnecessary danger. Her brother, on the other hand, approached unnecessary danger with the lip-smacking rel
ish most people reserve for a cream tea. It was for this reason that having Corky Froggett to keep a protective eye on Blotto was entirely essential.
The drive from Tawcester Towers to Snitterings on the Thursday afternoon was not filled with the sparkle of conversation. The Dowager Duchess slept, her snores shuddering through the leather upholstery of the Rolls-Royce like a stampede of distant wildebeest. Twinks, who was a bit of a brainbox, was reading Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War in the original Greek, one of the many objects she kept in her reticule, while Blotto looked disconsolately out of the car window. He wasn’t much of a one for books. At least there was one called The Hand of Fu Manchu which he was quite enjoying, but he’d been reading it for two years and hadn’t got halfway yet.
All he really wanted to do at that moment was be back at Tawcester Towers, preferably out in the field astride his splendid hunter, Mephistopheles. There was nothing at Snitterings that he looked forward to seeing, least of all Laetitia. He had detected a new purposeful beadiness in the Dowager Duchess of Tawcester’s eye, and feared it was not unconnected to match-making.
Broken biscuits, what a gluepot, thought Blotto miserably. This weekend house party’s going to be about as much fun as a convention of undertakers. His impossibly handsome brow under its fine crest of blond hair wrinkled with distaste. His fine blue eyes lost their customary sparkle. Blotto’s brain wasn’t often troubled by thoughts, and most of those which did flit through the vacancy of his cranium were of an extremely cheering kind. But the one big thought that filled every cranny of his mind at that moment – the thought of going to Snitterings – really vinegared him off.
After Corky Froggett had brought the Rolls-Royce to a perfect stop on the arc of gravel in front of the great house, he opened the doors to let out his passengers. The two Dowager Duchesses approached each other like a pair of mastodons with pearl necklaces and territorial ambitions. Under the Dowager Duchess of Melmont’s arm was clutched her adored Pekinese Clutterbuck. His poppy eyes and squashed-in face perfectly matched in miniature the features of his mistress.
Since they had met at school, the friendship of the two aristocrats had always been based on intense rivalry. The Dowager Duchess of Tawcester had captured her Duke first, during the season in which she ‘came out’, and from that moment on Pansy had been determined to bag one of her own. It took a couple of years before she got her claws into the Duke of Melmont and since then, in the view of the Dowager Duchess of Tawcester, her rival had been just playing catch-up.
The pair greeted each other at the entrance to Snitterings with smiles that could have frosted hot toddies. Each kissed the air at some distance from the other’s heavily powdered face. ‘How brave of you to wear mauve,’ the Dowager Duchess of Tawcester boomed at her friend. ‘It brings certainly out your complexion.’
‘And how clever of your dressmaker,’ the Dowager Duchess of Melmont honked back, ‘to come up with a gown which makes it look as though you actually have a waist.’
These pleasantries exchanged, the two combatants advanced into the splendid interior of the house. Twinks looked back at her brother, dawdling with all the reluctance of a new bug at the beginning of term. She held out the hand that wasn’t holding her Thucydides. ‘Come on, Blotto me old gumdrop. Just think, in three days’ time, you’ll be back lighting the fireworks of fun at Tawcester Towers. You’ll be able to forget this weekend ever happened.’
Blotto grinned ruefully at his sister. She was a Grade A Foundation Stone, old Twinks, always ready to give her big brother a jockey-up. A breathsapper of a beauty too, he thought, as the afternoon sun gleamed off the ash-blonde of her hair, and her perfect azure eyes beamed encouragement towards him.
‘Nice of you to try and bolster my sagging spirits, Twinks me old bloater,’ he said, ‘but I’ve a nasty feeling that this time Mater and the Melmont hippo mean business.’
‘Laetitia?’
He nodded the nod of a man whose life sentence has just been commuted to hanging.
‘Oh, come on, you can get out of it, Blotto. You’ve managed before. Remember when Mater and the Melmont monster locked you and Laetitia into a Brighton hotel room and invited press photographers along? You got out of that by changing clothes with a member of the staff. And the Sunday smut-rags got their juicy story of a Duke’s daughter having a fling with a boot-boy. You’ve beaten the Dowager Duchesses before, Blotto me old whiffler, and you can do it again.’
‘I don’t know. Mater has in her eyes the look of an anaconda that’s identified the cow it’s going to swallow and live off for the next month. And in this case, I’m the cow.’
‘Oh, look, Blotters, you don’t even like Laetitia. You can’t let her be stuck on you like an unwanted corn plaster. Laetitia’s a –’
But even as Twinks spoke, the subject of their conversation came skittering down the main steps of Snitterings, smiling winsomely and giving Blotto yet another opportunity to assess the threat she posed to his happiness.
The Dowager Duchess of Melmont’s daughter’s heart may have been in the right place, but providence had been a little random in the disposition of her other body parts. She in fact looked like the Netherlands, completely lacking in contours (so much so that at school – and indeed for a long time thereafter – she had had the nickname of ‘the Snitterings Ironing-Board’). Her face bore the pallor of wallpaper that had had the sun on it too long. And her teeth were of a size to make piano tuners come over all wistful. Add to this a voice which could have sand-blasted the south elevation of Westminster Cathedral and you begin to have an accurate estimation of her charms.
But it wasn’t Laetitia’s looks that put Blotto off the idea of marrying her. He had, after all, watched his brother Loofah bite the rather long bullet that was his wife Sloggo. Blotto knew that, for people like him, the right bloodline in a spouse was infinitely more important than such evanescent details as physical charms. It was nothing personal. Laetitia didn’t put him off. It was the very idea of matrimony always that made him feel like he’d swallowed the whole lemon.
Once on the gravel drive, Laetitia gambolled towards them like a particularly girlish lamb. Even Blotto, the most chivalrous of men, was unable to suppress the thought that girlish gambolling was not the ideal style of movement for a woman of her proportions.
From long experience, he tensed his leg muscles in anticipation of the vocal typhoon ahead. Twinks, unprepared and slighter in physique, bent daintily backwards like a sapling as Laetitia began to speak.
‘Blotto! Twinks! Darlings!’ she bellowed at them. ‘It’s simply scrumplicious to have you here at Snitterings!’ She enveloped Twinks in the kind of embrace sea anemones reserve for particularly slow shrimps.
She then turned to Blotto. Before she could repeat the sea anemone manoeuvre he stretched out his hand. Disappointed, Laetitia took it. Hers in his felt like uncooked veal.
‘Oh, Blotto!’ She fluttered eyelashes like woodshavings at him, before blaring out, ‘Isn’t it wonderful? A whole long weekend! Now we’ll really have a chance to get to know each other!’
He caught the look of pitying amusement in his sister’s azure eyes as feebly he enthused, ‘Pure strawberry jam with dollops of cream, Laetitia.’
Blotto wasn’t very good at having new thoughts. So he had the same one again: Broken biscuits, what a gluepot.
2
Romance in the Air
Dinner that Thursday evening at Snitterings made Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow look like the height of jollity. While the two Dowager Duchesses sniped endlessly at each other, Blotto had to keep trying to avoid the gaze of the besotted Laetitia. He thought she was probably trying to make cow’s eyes at him, but her physical limitations prevented her from coming up with anything better than frog’s eyes.
Twinks wasn’t faring much better at her side of the table. The current Duke of Melmont was, like his sister, as yet unmarried, and he had invited down some of his former Harrovian friends ‘to liven things up’. For
Blotto, an Eton man, their presence was about as welcome as a slug in the shower. What’s more, he quickly established that none of the stenchers had played or even liked cricket. In fact, like the Duke their host, none of them had ever displayed any talent for anything other than spending their large inherited fortunes.
They were all large young men with protruding elbows and knees who, in common with most of their class, had never progressed beyond adolescence. Braying unintelligible anecdotes about their school days, all of which prompted fusillades of raucous laughter, they behaved as British public school boys normally do in the presence of a beautiful woman. They blushed, sniggered, and muttered hilarity-inducing innuendoes behind their hands. Twinks, with one of the young blades either side of her, found the whole business very tiresome.
To cast an even deeper shadow over the evening there was present, as Blotto had gloomily anticipated, a know-it-all polymathic amateur sleuth who just happened to be staying for the weekend. Troubadour Bligh was a small man in tight-cut dapper evening dress and spats (which even Blotto, who never took much interest in protocol, knew were inappropriate for dinner wear). The sleuth affected long silver hair and a golden monocle. His fingers bore far more rings than a gentleman would wear and – to add to his social solecisms – there was an aura of lavender water around him. Blotto was the most reasonable of men is most respects, but when it came to scent . . . well, he did feel quite strongly that chaps should smell of chap and nothing else.
Troubadour Bligh, though without breeding of any kind – and dining amongst his betters – still had no inhibitions about dominating the conversation at dinner. All he could talk about was his prowess as an investigator. His voice too grated; it was high-pitched and quick, sounding more like a woman’s than a man’s. Blotto had heard dark rumours at school that there were some chaps who were more like women than men in other details than their voices. Before, he had always dismissed the notion as completely outside the rule book, but as the sleuth prattled girlishly about another of his investigations, Troubadour Bligh made him wonder.