Blotto, Twinks and the Dead Dowager Duchess

by Simon Brett

  It was early evening by the time they reached Croydon Aerodrome. While Blotto paid off the driver – and decided that buying a new car might have been cheaper – Twinks hurried into the booking hall and again gave a message for Jerome Handsomely. This time, though, the pilot wasn’t on the premises.

  Nor, to the deep chagrin of Blotto, was his Lagonda. The space where they had last seen it was empty. His face took on the expression of a mother sheep who had just seen her ewe-lamb served up with mint sauce and redcurrant jelly. ‘Toad-in-the-hole!’ he murmured savagely. ‘Now we know exactly what kind of stenching rotten tomatoes we are up against.’

  The driver who had been commandeered in Cwmgwynt would not have dared to refuse the command to drive Blotto and Twinks back to Tawcester Towers. But in fact it suited him quite well. Going via the Lyminster seat would not involve much of a detour on his route back to Wales. And he was being paid by the mile.

  Still having a potential eavesdropper in the driving seat, the aristocratic sleuths were again prevented from discussing their investigation. Nothing Twinks did by the way of smiles and reassurances could lift the pall of despair that had settled on her brother. ‘We’ll find the Lagonda,’ she kept insisting. ‘We’ll find it.’

  But Blotto’s spirits remained as low as a carpet’s under-felt. At one point, when they were driving through Oxford, he let out a groan so deep that his sister feared for his health.

  ‘What is it, Blotto me old gumdrop?’

  ‘I’ve just realized. Not only have the stenchers taken the Lag, but they’ve got its contents too . . . including my cricket bat!’

  Twinks did not underestimate the seriousness of the situation. There were three things that Blotto held dear in life, three things for which his love exceeded anything he could feel for a mere woman – his hunter Mephistopheles, his Lagonda and his cricket bat. Now of the three he only had Mephistopheles. If her brother was not to waste away from a broken heart, the Lagonda and the cricket bat must be reclaimed as quickly as possible. The sooner they could confront the Crimson Thumb, the better.

  It was not until the early hours, when their driver, smiling from a well-filled wallet, deposited them in front of the main doors of Tawcester Towers, that Twinks was finally able to pose the question she had been longing to since they had left Llanystwyth House. ‘So, Blotto me old battledore, tell me,’ she said as they entered their ancestral home, ‘what were the letters?’

  Her brother looked puzzled. ‘Letters?’

  ‘The letters which will give us the clue to the whereabouts of the Crimson Thumb. The letters which you read from the index finger of Wellborough Choat and then memorized.’

  His brow cleared. ‘Oh, those letters.’

  ‘Well, what are they?’

  There was a silence while Blotto raked through the empty prairies of his brain. Then he said, ‘Um . . .’

  ‘What?’

  Another ‘Um . . .’

  ‘What are they, Blotto?’

  ‘Twinks, me old sideboard . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve forgotten them.’

  22

  A Devilish Puzzle

  When they awoke the next morning, Blotto and Twinks took great pleasure in putting on clothes other than the evening wear which they’d had on since their abortive attempt to dine at the Savoy Grill. But when they went downstairs to breakfast, they found Tawcester Towers virtually in mourning. Sloggo, the wife of Loofah (a.k.a. the Duke of Tawcester), had recently been brought to bed of a child. Which would have been very exciting and a cause for great celebration, but for the fact that she had produced yet another girl. The Tawcester ducal line had once again failed to be extended into another generation. Its continuity still rested on the unreliable shoulders of Blotto. The Dowager Duchess was in a state of apoplectic fury.

  Said fury was not diminished by the discovery that her son – it would never occur to her to blame her daughter for such shortcomings – had allowed Laetitia Melmont to be abducted from under his protection, not once but twice. ‘This is in danger of becoming a habit with you, Blotto,’ she fulminated. ‘You did the same thing with that other wretched girl, the ex-King of Mitteleuropia’s daughter Ethelinda.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t exactly the same,’ Blotto protested.

  But his counter-arguments were, as ever, swept away like tissue paper in a tornado. ‘What matters is, Blotto, not the precise similarities between the two instances, but the fact that you are once again getting yourself in a position where the family honour can only be maintained by your rescuing a young woman.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I will rescue her.’

  ‘Well, I hope you do. I hope also, Blotto, that you are fully aware of the obligation your rescuing Laetitia Melmont will put you under.’

  ‘Er . . . not quite on the same page as you, Mater . . .?’

  ‘Any man who rescues an abducted woman will, almost of necessity, have had to spend a certain amount of time alone with that woman.’

  ‘Ye-es,’ Blotto agreed cautiously. ‘But where’s the chock in the cogwheel there?’

  ‘The view of Society,’ his mother pontificated heavily, ‘is that when a young man and a young woman spend time alone together, they are automatically putting themselves under an obligation.’

  ‘To do what?’ asked Blotto wretchedly, all too sure that he knew the forthcoming answer.

  It came. ‘They have to get married,’ the Dowager Duchess pronounced. ‘And in the case of Laetitia Melmont, there are of course other pressing reasons why you two should tie the knot.’

  ‘What are they?’ came the feeble response.

  ‘Her mother, the Dowager Duchess of Melmont, was very enthusiastic about the match. Since Pansy is now dead, that enthusiasm has effectively become a dying wish. And it is thought impolite to deny the dying wishes of members of the aristocracy – particularly when they have been murdered.’

  If he had dared, Blotto would have groaned audibly. As it was, he contented himself with a silent groan.

  ‘Furthermore,’ his mother continued, ‘Laetitia Melmont is Catholic. And Catholics are even less tolerant than normal people of unchaperoned young persons of different genders being alone together. They have some very odd ideas when it comes to . . . certain unpalatable duties.’ This was the closest the Dowager Duchess ever got to the mention of sex, something she had tolerated with the late Duke three times (to produce an heir, a spare and a daughter), and to which she had subsequently closed her mind (amongst other things).

  ‘No, I’m afraid there is no way around it, Blotto. If you fail to rescue Laetitia Melmont, you will have besmirched the honour of the Tawcesters! If you succeed in rescuing her, you will be obliged to marry her.’

  What a gluepot, thought Blotto miserably, what a spoffingly fumacious gluepot!

  Normally, after a sand-blasting from the Dowager Duchess, he would go to Twinks’s boudoir, where his sister was unfailingly ready to provide reassurance and cheeriness. But that particular day she reacted to him almost as frostily as his mother had.

  ‘Come on, Twinks me old carrot cake, what’s put lumps in your custard? Tell me what I’ve done wrong.’

  ‘If you don’t know, then you’re stupider than I thought you were.’

  Blotto was shocked. He’d heard his sister talk that way to some of her amorous swains, which had been fair enough, but she’d never before used language like that to him. It was a measure of how deeply he had upset her. And he hadn’t a clue why. What could he have done that would so change her usually tolerant attitude to him?

  ‘Sorry, not on the same page,’ he said feebly.

  Twinks looked at him and her expression softened. She found it almost impossible to be cross with her brother for long. ‘Blotto, what you have done wrong is to fail to remember the letters tattooed on Wellborough Choat’s index finger.’

  ‘Ah, with you, me old greengage. Sorry about that. Bit of a candle-snuffer, isn’t it?’

  ‘There are
twenty-six letters in the alphabet. I’m only asking you to remember four of them.’

  ‘Good ticket. You make it sound easy.’ His brows furrowed as he sifted through the contents of his brain. The exercise did not take long. ‘Sorry, Twinks. It’s a dead dormouse, I’m afraid. Nobody at home in the memory department.’

  ‘Maybe you could remember some of the letters?’

  He considered this suggestion for a moment, then shook his head. ‘Sorry, could be any of the twenty-six.’

  Twinks sighed and turned to the large sheet of paper on her dressing table. Taking a silver propelling pencil out of her reticule, she wrote down three groups of four letters each. They read: GGEC LLRA EOSN.

  ‘What are those?’ asked Blotto.

  Patiently his sister reminded him, ‘These are the letters we found tattooed on the fingers of Will Tyler, Davy ap Dafydd and Gerhardt Sachs.’

  ‘Ah, tickey-tockey, with you. Back on the same page.’

  ‘They represent three-quarters of the information which would take us to the lair of the Crimson Thumb.’

  ‘So how do they do that?’

  ‘Anagram.’

  ‘Who’s she?’ asked Blotto.

  ‘No, not “Anna Gram”. “Anagram”.’

  ‘And what’s that when it’s got its clothes on?’

  ‘An anagram is a word made up from the letters of another word or words.’

  ‘Er?’

  ‘Like, for instance, “star” is an anagram of “rats” – or indeed “tars” or “tsar”.’

  ‘Is it, by strawberries?’ asked Blotto, still befuddled.

  ‘Look, here’s another example. The third sequence of letters here – “EOSN”, the one that was tattooed on Gerhardt Sachs’s hand – is an anagram of “nose”.’

  ‘Ah.’ Enlightenment dawned in Blotto’s honest features. ‘So if we can find his nose, then we can find the rest of the Crimson Thumb.’

  ‘That is undeniably true, Blotto, but it wasn’t the point I was trying to put across.’

  ‘Oh.’ He looked deflated. ‘So can you make one of these anaconda things –?’

  ‘Anagram.’

  ‘Yes, that. Can you make one out of the letters you’ve got there?’

  Twinks glanced down at the letters she had written down. GGEC LLRA EOSN. After a couple of seconds she announced, ‘“CALL EGG-NOSER”. “CLARE’S GONE L.G.”. Or “ROG CAGES NELL”.’

  Blotto was aghast with admiration. ‘How do you do that, Twinks?’

  ‘I do a lot of crosswords,’ she replied dismissively

  ‘But it’s spoffulatingly clever.’ He grinned with triumph. ‘And you’ve solved the case for us. All we have to do now is find these people – Clare, Rog, Nell and whoever the “egg-noser” is and we –’

  ‘Blotto,’ his sister interposed gently, ‘these anagrams are meaningless. We’ll only get the anagram we want when we’ve got the four other letters, the ones that were tattooed on Wellborough Choat’s index finger.’

  ‘Oh, biscuits!’ said Blotto. ‘We’re back to that, are we?’

  ‘Still no recollection of what you saw?’

  Blotto’s face was so scrunched up with the effort of remembering that, for a moment, he almost ceased to look handsome. Eventually he announced, ‘No, sorry, it’s gone.’

  ‘Hm. Well, maybe we’ll have to use scientific methods to dig it out.’ And Twinks reached into her reticule.

  Her brother was alarmed. ‘What’re you up to, old pineapple? Are you going to drill holes in my brainbox?’

  ‘No, nothing so dramatic. I’ll just use this.’ And from the reticule she produced a piece of ribbon with what looked like a pendant on the end.

  ‘What the strawberries is that?’ asked Blotto.

  ‘It is something I have sometimes used for mesmerism.’

  ‘Er?’

  ‘Hypnotism.’

  ‘Er?’

  ‘I will use it to put you into a trance.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Twinks raised her hand and let the pendant swing from side to side in front of her brother’s puzzled blue eyes. ‘You are going to sleep,’ she intoned.

  ‘No, I’m not. It’s nowhere near bedtime and I –’ Blotto’s chin slumped forward on to his chest.

  ‘You are in a deep sleep now,’ Twinks intoned, ‘and you will stay in that sleep until I wake you by snapping my fingers. Now, Blotto, I want you to go back in time.’ Her brother started crying like a baby. ‘No, not that far back. I want you to go back to the moment in the early hours of yesterday morning, when you looked at Wellborough Choat’s hand in Llanystwyth House . . . Are you there yet? Are you there yet?’

  Blotto nodded. Suppressing her excitement, Twinks continued in the same level, spell-binding tone. ‘What do you see tattooed on Wellborough Choat’s index finger?’

  After a long silence, Blotto announced: ‘Shoe.’

  ‘“Shoe”!’ Twinks turned gleefully to the dressing table and added the four letters to the existing twelve. Then she tried producing anagrams. She very quickly got ‘CHEESE ROLL GAG, SON’, which possibly sounded like an order from an oikish person in a café, but which didn’t seem to have much relevance to the League of the Crimson Hand. Nor was ‘L.E.C. EGGS ARE ON HOLS’ much more helpful. In fact, nothing she came up with seemed to work.

  Cast down, she turned back to her entranced brother. ‘Blotto, are you sure it was “shoe”?’

  ‘To do with shoe,’ came the inert reply.

  ‘To do with “shoe”? A four-letter word to do with shoe. Sole!’ Twinks cried gleefully.

  She returned to her propelling pencil and paper. At lightning speed she wrote down ‘ALL GREEN COGS LOSE’ and ‘LARGE LEG COOLNESS’. But, though she felt some satisfaction in working them out, once again she couldn’t see how either solution was about to help their investigation.

  ‘Other words to do with shoe . . .?’ Twinks had a go adding lace’ to her anagram. The results – CLEAN CLOG REGALES and CLEGG’S REAL ALE CON – may have been intellectually pleasing, but didn’t lead to any destination.

  Starting to feel a bit desperate by now, she tried adding ‘heel’, which produced the nugatory anagram ‘GALES LEECH LONGER’. With the same letters she got momentarily excited that she’d identified the Crimson Thumb as ‘NOEL CRAGSHELL-GEE’, but then remembered Will Tyler had confirmed that the letters would lead to his headquarters rather than the man himself.

  Furious with her lack of progress, Twinks looked down at her own dainty slipper as a visual aid and tried to think of a four-letter part of it she hadn’t already used. Finding nothing, her scrutiny moved to her brother’s black brogues. And there she saw it. Joining the upper to the sole was a . . . ‘welt’.

  ‘GGEC LLRA EOSN WELT’. So obvious.

  Instantly she wrote the solution down. Then snapping her fingers to wake her bemused brother, she told him she knew where the headquarters of the Crimson Thumb was.

  ‘Where?’ asked Blotto blearily

  ‘Glenglower Castle,’ announced a triumphant Twinks.

  23

  Preparing for a Confrontation

  Twinks kept a comprehensive research library at the back of one of the wardrobes in her boudoir, and it was a matter of moments for her to produce from it a gazetteer, an atlas and a copy of Burke’s Peerage.

  Only a few more moments were required for her to locate Glenglower Castle. It was in Argyllshire, on the Firth of Lorne, just a little south of Oban. And the Peerage informed her that the castle was the ancestral seat of the Earls of McCluggan.

  A further rummage in her wardrobe produced an illustrated volume called The Ancient Castles of Scotland (With Engravings on Steel). She quickly flicked through to the relevant illustration and turned over the page of translucent paper which protected it. Revealed was a forbidding stone structure with many turrets, set on a rocky outcrop on the edge of what could have been the sea or perhaps a large loch.

  Twinks grew pensive. ‘I don’t like the look of this.’
>
  ‘The look of what?’ asked Blotto.

  ‘Glenglower Castle is owned by an aristocrat . . . well, only a Scottish one, true, but still a sort of aristocrat . . .’

  ‘And . . .?’

  ‘And the League of the Crimson Hand is an organization dedicated to the destruction of the aristocracy . . .’

  ‘Ye-es.’

  ‘But their headquarters is in Glenglower Castle.’

  ‘Sorry, not on the same page, Twinks me old bicycle pump.’

  She explained: ‘Look, an aristocrat is not going to support an organization whose sole purpose is the coffination of the entire aristocracy. Not even a Scottish one.’

  ‘Take your point.’

  ‘So I’m beginning to wonder whether the owner of Glenglower Castle is in fact being held there against his will.’

  ‘Well, if so, he must’ve been held there a spoffing long time. I mean, it would have taken a while to get all those boddos’ hands tattooed. They wouldn’t do that if Glenglower Castle was just a temporary address, would they?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Anyway, who is the owner of Glenglower Castle?’

  Twinks once again consulted Burke’s Peerage. ‘He’s called The McCluggan of McCluggan.’

  ‘Do we know anything about the poor old thimble?’

  ‘I’ve never heard the name before. I wonder if he often attends the House of Lords . . .?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because, if he does, Loofah might have met him, mightn’t he?’

  ‘Good ticket, Twinks.’ A shadow crossed Blotto’s brow. ‘But then again, it’s pretty unlikely. I mean, when did Loofah last attend the House of Lords? Except of course for last year’s Christmas lunch.’

  Twinks nodded, acknowledging the lapse in her thinking. In common with many other peers, their brother the Duke of Tawcester had absolutely no interest in politics. So long as no legislation was brought in to diminish his wealth and power, he was quite content for the country to be run by people of the oikish classes in the House of Commons.

  ‘Do you know anyone else in the Lords who we could ask about The McCluggan of McCluggan?’ asked Blotto.

  Of course she did. Twinks had contacts everywhere. In most cases they were men who had asked her to marry them and been brushed off with the firm delicacy of a cat-lover stroking a kitten. In the current necessity the right person to ask was the Marquis of Godalming. Twinks went down to Tawcester Towers’ one telephone in the hall, and asked the operator to connect her with the Marquis’s number.