Blotto, Twinks and the Dead Dowager Duchess

by Simon Brett

  ‘And what kind of a pineapple was he?’

  ‘He was a dog.’

  ‘Well, I’ll be snickered, Twinks. Are you telling me that Will Tyler was shot by a dog? How did it get its paw round the trigger?’

  His sister’s patience was once again tested, but as ever it survived the challenge. ‘The point about Cerberus was that he had three heads.’

  Blotto let out a low whistle. ‘Well, I’ll be jugged like a hare! That’d be very nifty when you’re out shooting – dog could retrieve three birds at the same time. Where can one buy one of these spoffingly useful beasts?’

  ‘No, Blotto. You couldn’t buy one. Cerberus is mythological.’

  ‘Ah.’ Her brother nodded as though he understood the word. ‘Well, you wouldn’t want to bring that into the house, would you? The servants might catch it.’

  Not reacting to his words, Twinks continued with her reasoning. ‘So Cerberus is a three-headed dog. Now if there happened to be in London a pub called The Three-Headed Dog . . . well, it’d be all creamy éclair, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Good ticket,’ said Blotto, as his sister flicked through the directory.

  But for once one of her mental flashes failed to ignite. ‘Oh dear, no coconuts being awarded here, I’m afraid. How mizzly! There isn’t one.’

  ‘That’s a bit of a candle-snuffer.’

  But Twinks was only momentarily cast down. Then she saw an entry that brought a new sparkle to her eye. ‘Oh, splendissimo! There may not be a pub called The Three-Headed Dog, but there is one called The Three Feathers.’

  ‘Is that good?’ asked Blotto tentatively.

  ‘It’s more than good. It’s goodissimo with dollops of cream.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Don’t you see?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Davy ap Dafydd is a Welsh name, isn’t it?’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘So of course he’d frequent a pub called The Three Feathers. Right, let’s finish up these cocktails and then we’re back to the East End to track down Davy ap Dafydd.’

  ‘Now?’ asked Blotto plaintively. ‘I thought we were going to put away the bulk of the menu in the Grill first.’

  ‘No, no. If we solve the case in time, we can have a light supper when we come back.’

  ‘A light supper?’ That held about as much appeal for Blotto as a salad. What he demanded from a meal was a large slab of meat, garnished with good solid English vegetables. And all that batting against counterfeit Chinamen had taken it out of him.

  But he knew better than to try and change Twinks’s mind when she had that determined set to her jaw. So he just poured the remains of his St Louis Steamhammer from shaker to glass and downed it in one.

  When the lights stopped exploding in front of his eyes and the cocktail’s aftershocks had subsided, Blotto asked his sister as they left the suite, ‘Still not quite up to speed with you on this, Twinks . . . What is the connection between this Welsh boddo and The Three Feathers?’

  ‘The Three Feathers is the heraldic symbol of the Prince of Wales.’

  ‘Broken biscuits, Twinks . . .’ Blotto was shocked. ‘Are you saying the Royal Family are hand-in-glove with the League of the Crimson Hand?’

  15

  Spit and Sawdust

  The Three Feathers public house was not in such a squalid part of London as Shanghai Billee’s had been, but to Blotto and Twinks it still looked pretty murdy. The Lagonda had to drive through endless grimy terraces of houses which the Tawcesters would have considered too small to use as kennels, but where presumably oikish people managed to live, even with children. The buildings were cellars for the salt of the earth.

  At the end of one such terrace stood their destination. The pub building seemed hunched over itself, like a poor man with a chest infection. The windows were uncurtained and yellow light trickled out on to the pavement. Creaking on its gallows, the inn sign featured three greyish feathers emerging from a crown which might once have been gold.

  Blotto drew the Lagonda to a neat halt directly outside the entrance. There had been no opportunity to have repaired the slit in the fabric roof which had been made when Laetitia Melmont was abducted outside Shanghai Billee’s. ‘But I’m not going to don my worry-boots about that,’ he told his sister. ‘There nothing of value in the car, so it’s quite safe.’

  As they stood on the pavement outside The Three Feathers, Twinks became aware of what they were wearing. Dressed for dinner at the Savoy Grill, Blotto was in full boiled shirt, white tie and tails, while she wore a sleeveless, ankle-length number in eau-de-nil silk. A white mink stole protected her narrow shoulders, and the silver-sequined snood on her head exactly matched her small reticule.

  ‘You don’t you think we’ll look out of place?’ Twinks suggested tentatively.

  ‘Oh, come on, Twinks, it is evening, after all. Surely even in a place like this boddos dress for dinner.’

  This surmise, when they entered the pub, proved to be untrue. The salt of the earth, who appeared to have been sprinkled all round the bar by an overzealous waiter, were dressed in various shades of muddy brown and grey. They belonged to a species alien to the Tawcester family, people who went out to work every day. And even Blotto, who was very generous in his assessment of his fellow human beings, reckoned they were a scummy lot.

  Nor did they seem pleased by the new arrivals. Ever polite, Blotto had ushered his sister into the pub ahead of himself, and at her entrance a total silence had fallen on the clientele. Jokes were stopped seconds before their punchlines, dominoes suspended in mid-air, pint glasses replaced on sticky tables. Matches held up to light cigarettes were allowed to burn themselves out, as the pub’s regulars glared at the apparitions in the doorway.

  ‘Evening, all,’ said Twinks, using the voice with which, every Christmas Day, she made her annual inquiry about the health of her maid’s parents. ‘No need to stand on ceremony with us.’

  ‘No,’ Blotto agreed. ‘We’re just ordinary greengages like you are. Just normal people nipping down the pub of an evening for a noggin of wallop.’ He moved towards the bar and grinned his most boyish grin at the stony-faced landlord. ‘Now what would you recommend, mine host?’

  ‘Depends what you want to drink,’ the man replied, reasonably enough.

  ‘Well, I’ve just been drinking a rather splendid tincture called a St Louis Steamhammer. Don’t suppose you could knock up one of those, could you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, my sister was on a Cobbler’s Awl. Any chance of mixing her one of those, me old pineapple?’

  One might have thought that the landlord’s face had reached its point of maximum glower, but this proved not to be the case. He raised his glower level by at least two degrees, as he said, ‘’Ere, you trying to pull my chain?’

  ‘No, no. Last thing I’d want to do. Not that I can actually see your chain, anyway. Still, fair enough, if you don’t stretch to cocktails. Probably not the demand for them in a place like this. And I’m sure my sister and I can make do with a dry white. Do you have a Château St Gilberton ’04?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh well, at a pinch I could settle for the ’05. Do you have some of that on ice?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘What’re you rattling on about, anyway? I haven’t understood a word you’ve said since you came in.’

  ‘I was talking about wine.’

  ‘Wine? In The Three Feathers?’

  For the first time the silence in the bar was broken. The landlord’s laugh was picked up slowly until the whole room rang with its contemptuous sound.

  When the derision had died down sufficiently for him to be heard, the man behind the bar continued: ‘This is a pub, not some poncy French restaurant.’

  ‘Tickey-tockey,’ said Blotto. ‘But you do serve drinks?’

  ‘Yes. That’s what a pub does.’

  ‘So what kind of drinks?’

  ‘Mild, bitter, whisky, gin, brandy.’ />
  ‘Oh, I think we’ll both have large brandies, thank you. Now there’s one I’m particularly partial to. When it comes to cognacs, though it’s just from a small château, it’s absolutely the lark’s larynx. So if by any chance you’ve got a . . .’ But a look from the landlord stopped Blotto from being more specific about the particular vintage of brandy he would have preferred.

  After their outburst of merriment the pub’s customers had reverted to suspicious silence. The noises made by the pouring of two drinks at the bar seemed suddenly very loud.

  Twinks decided it was the moment for a frontal attack. As the landlord passed across their brandies, she flashed him her most dazzling smile. It was the same smile that had cut a swath through the entire Eton First Eleven at one Eton and Harrow match, leaving many of them with symptoms of grogginess, weak knees and embarrassingly vivid dreams for weeks afterwards.

  But it wrought no change in the granite features of The Three Feathers’ landlord. Twinks made her next assault vocally, using the honeyed tones which had once persuaded an Archbishop to do the Charleston. ‘We are looking,’ she susurrated, ‘for a man called Davy ap Dafydd . . .’

  So sharp was the intake of breath from every customer that The Three Feathers only just avoided becoming a vacuum. And the shock of the name even sent a minimal twitch across the impassive face of the landlord.

  ‘Davy ap Dafydd?’ he repeated.

  ‘Who’s asking for him?’ a deep Welsh voice boomed from the recesses of the pub. Blotto and Twinks turned to see a huge man rising from his seat. He was dressed in fuzzy tweed and woolly gloves, and had such shaggy hair and such a heavy beard that his outline was as imprecise as a badly taken photograph.

  ‘My name’s Blotto,’ announced Blotto in his usual open manner, but before he could compromise them by telling the truth, his sister cut in.

  ‘We bring a message for you from Will Tyler,’ she said.

  The giant nodded and turned to the landlord. ‘We’ll go in the snug,’ he growled, ‘and if you catch anyone trying to eavesdrop . . .’ He made an uncomfortably realistic throat-cutting gesture. The landlord nodded. ‘And that goes for you too.’

  With this threat Davy ap Dafydd led his two visitors through a door to the side of the counter. As he left a slow rumble of apprehensive conversation started up again in the main bar. The Welshman sent two old ladies scuttering out of the snug with their bottles of milk stout and gestured for Blotto and Twinks to sit down.

  The room in which they found themselves was snug only in the sense of being small. There was no cosiness about its dark discoloured panelling and it smelled as though behind its skirting boards many rats had lost the will to live.

  While the Welsh giant settled himself, Twinks looked with frustration at the man’s gloved hands. There was no chance of her surreptitiously noting the letters of the tattoo that she was sure lay beneath their woollen protection.

  ‘Will Tyler . . .’ said Davy ap Dafydd ruminatively ‘Will Tyler. Why didn’t he approach me himself in the usual way?’

  ‘Well,’ replied Blotto, ‘he’s in a bit of a gluepot so far as that’s concerned. You see, he’s been –’

  Once again Twinks intervened before any damage could be done. ‘He had orders from someone higher up the chain of command that we should be the ones who got in touch with you.’

  ‘That’s strange.’ The Welshman now sounded very suspicious. ‘The whole point of the cell system is meant to be that each of us only has one contact.’ He glowered at them. ‘If I find out that you’re up to something, I’ll strangle the pair of you with my bare hands.’

  While recognizing the benefit that baring his hands might bring her with regard to reading his tattoo, Twinks was also aware of the reality of his threat.

  ‘And don’t imagine that anyone in this pub would stand in my way,’ the giant went on. ‘They’d help me strangle you. And they’d help me dispose of your bodies. They enjoy cutting things into little bits in The Three Feathers.’

  He leered at them. Blotto opened his mouth to say something that Twinks knew would be chivalrous and foolhardy, but she managed to get in first. Improvising wildly, she announced, ‘When I said “someone higher up the chain of command”, I meant “someone very much higher up the chain of command”.’

  Davy ap Dafydd peered at her from beneath the thatch of his eyebrows. ‘“Very much higher”? How much higher?’

  ‘As high as you like,’ Twinks hazarded.

  Her luck held. A low whistle escaped from the thickets of Davy ap Dafydd’s beard. ‘You mean . . . The One Whose Name Cannot Be Known . . .?’

  ‘Yes, that’s exactly who I mean,’ Twinks replied dramatically. Then, for effect, she repeated, ‘The One Whose Name Cannot Be Known.’ And hoped to strengthen her position further by saying, ‘The Crimson Thumb.’

  Apparently impressed, the Welshman was silent for a moment. Then, disappointingly from Blotto and Twinks’s point of view, he asked, ‘Why should I believe you?’

  That was actually, it had to be confessed, a rather good question. And not one to which even Twinks could come up with an immediate answer.

  Her silence seemed only to fuel Davy ap Dafydd’s suspicion. He flexed his huge hands inside their woollen gloves, as if in preparation for strangling. Blotto tensed, fairly confident that if it did come to violence, he was in with a good chance. Pity he’d left his cricket bat in the Lagonda, though.

  He looked across at Twinks, to whom fortunately a new inspiration came at that moment. ‘You believe me, Davy ap Dafydd,’ she said evenly, ‘because I can tell you what Will Tyler had tattooed on his little finger.’

  This did seem to stop the Welshman in his progress towards strangulation. ‘Oh yes? So what does he have tattooed there?’

  Twinks opened her mouth to reply, but the giant raised a hand to stop her. ‘The tattoos must not be spoken out loud. Write down what is written on Will Tyler’s little finger.’

  Twinks produced a small silver-jacketed notebook and a silver propelling pencil from her reticule and did as instructed. ‘GGEC, she wrote, then tore out the sheet and passed it across. Davy ap Dafydd looked at the letters and grunted approval. For the moment – though who could say how long a moment? – the threat of strangulation was lifted.

  ‘So what do you want from me?’ he asked.

  ‘We want the name of the person above you. The Letter-Bearer of the Middle Finger.’

  The Welshman’s resistance seemed to have crumbled. In the voice of an automaton, he announced, ‘The Letter-Bearer of the Middle Finger is Gerhardt Sachs.’

  ‘And how do you contact him?’

  Machine-like, Davy ap Dafydd replied, ‘I always meet him at Croydon Aerodrome.’

  ‘How do you know when to meet?’

  ‘He puts an encoded message in the Personal Column of the Daily Bugle.’

  ‘Do you meet at Croydon Aerodrome because Gerhardt Sachs flies in there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And where does he fly in from? From some Continental city?’

  ‘No. He flies in from within the British Isles.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Somewhere I know well. Gerhardt Sachs is based in –’

  But Davy ap Dafydd did not manage to articulate the location. He suffered the same fate as Will Tyler had done when about to release vital information. The sound of a gunshot coincided with the shattering of glass and a bullet-hole appeared in the giant’s forehead. He slumped forward. Dead.

  Blotto was instantly on his feet. ‘If I’m quick, I’ll catch the stencher who’s done this!’

  ‘You go!’ said Twinks. ‘I’ll just check what Davy ap Dafydd has tattooed on his hand.’

  As her brother shot out of the snug, Twinks removed the dead giant’s right-hand glove.

  On his ring finger were tattooed the letters: ‘LLRA’.

  Twinks rushed out into the street, just as the door from The Three Feathers’ main bar opened to reveal the curious faces of the landlord and mo
st of his customers.

  She found Blotto standing on the pavement, with the saddest expression she had ever seen on his face.

  ‘What’s up, old pineapple? You look like a squirrel who’s had his last nut nicked just before the onset of winter.’

  ‘Look.’ He pointed bleakly into the road. Where there was nothing to see. Least of all an extremely beautiful Lagonda.

  Blotto’s jaw line set in an uncharacteristic expression of fury. He’d got into this investigation because the Dowager Duchess of Melmont had been murdered. Laetitia’s abduction had given him an extra incentive. But now the stenchers had stolen his Lagonda the case had become personal.

  16

  The Sky’s the Limit!

  ‘Where will they have taken it?’ Blotto asked despairingly. ‘Rodents! I’ll never be able to look Corky Froggett in the face again. It’ll be bad enough for him to be hanged for a murder he didn’t commit. A man with the sterling qualities of Corky’ll get over that, but he’ll never survive the loss of the Lag. He loves that car like a mother sheep loves her favourite yew tree.’

  ‘I think you mean ewe lamb, Blotto.’

  ‘Oh yes. All right, tickey-tockey. But where are we going to start looking for the Lag? We don’t have a clue where the thieving bad tomato has taken it.’

  ‘Oh, but we do.’

  Blotto looked curiously at his sister, then was suddenly aware that behind her the sullen regulars of The Three Feathers were pouring out on to the street. The expressions on their oikish faces were far from philanthropic.

  ‘Tell me later, Twinks. I think right now we need to make ourselves as scarce as a lawyer’s conscience.’

  His sister turned to take in the advancing mob, then instantly pushed two fingers into her dainty mouth and let out a whistle that would have shattered wineglasses (had there been any wineglasses in the vicinity of The Three Feathers, which, as their inquiries at the bar had proved, there weren’t).

  The noise had the effect of stopping the vengeful mob in their tracks. Only for a second, but in that second a taxi had appeared beside Blotto and Twinks and they had bundled themselves into it.