by Simon Brett
To my goddaughter Elizabeth
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
1: Robbery at Tawcester Towers!
2: Enter Twinks
3: Twinks Brings Her Brain to Bear
4: A Matter of Insurance
5: To France!
6: Le Bistrot Julien
7: La Rive Gauche
8: Les Deux Mangetouts
9: Art for Heaven’s Sake!
10: The Message Arrives
11: A Case of Sabotage?
12: A Dangerous Rendezvous
13: Les Folies Bergère
14: Twinks in Jeopardy!
15: Hanging by a Thread!
16: Back at Les Deux Mangetouts
17: To the Riviera!
18: A Friend in the Right Place
19: The Villa Marzipan
20: A Top-Secret Conversation
21: A Marvellous Party
22: Another Disappearance!
23: The Château d’Erimes
24: A Secret Passage!
25: Escape?
26: A Devilish Experiment
27: A Fate Worse Than Death
28: The Plague!
29: A Villain Unmasked!
30: The Rodents’ Revenge
31: The Proper Authorities
32: Fairytale Ending
Also by Simon Brett
Copyright
1
Robbery at Tawcester Towers!
‘Obviously, they’re all portraits of our ancestors,’ said Blotto, as he continued his guided tour of the Tawcester Towers Long Gallery. He chuckled. ‘I mean, no one has pictures on their walls that aren’t of their ancestors, do they?’
‘I believe representations of other artistic subject matter have been observed on the walls of the middle classes,’ replied the Marquis of Bluntleigh.
Blotto was impressed. ‘Toad-in-the-hole, Buzzer!’
‘And some of them even have reproductions.’
Blotto knew the word. It brought back rather embarrassing memories of a very red-faced chaplain at Eton explaining that babies weren’t brought by storks or found under gooseberry bushes. He was confused. ‘Sorry, Buzzer? Not with you. I’m afraid my touchpaper hasn’t ignited yet.’
‘The middle classes sometimes have pictures on their walls that are reproductions.’
‘Pictures of people reproducing?’
‘No, reproduction pictures,’ the Marquis of Bluntleigh explained patiently. ‘The middle classes sometimes have on their walls paintings that are not originals, but are printed copies of originals.’
‘Broken biscuits,’ said Blotto. ‘I didn’t know you could get pictures that weren’t originals. How do you know guff like that, Buzzer?’
‘When he was alive, my pater always encouraged me to mingle with the middle classes.’
‘Well, I’ll be snickered! Why on earth did the old fruitbat do that?’
‘He said one never knew when one might want to borrow money from them.’
‘Oh, I read your semaphore. Yes, good ticket. Few of us can avoid all contact with those banking oiks.’ A shudder of distaste at the thought ran through every fibre of Blotto’s aristocratic body. ‘Now this is a portrait of the seventh Duke …’
More properly known as the Honourable Devereux Lyminster, younger son of the late Duke of Tawcester, Blotto was not enjoying himself. On such a crisp November morning, he would rather have been out hunting. In fact he would always rather be out hunting. And he’d certainly rather have been out hunting than entertaining the Marquis of Bluntleigh. But the Dowager Duchess had told him that that was his morning duty, and Blotto knew better than ever to question his mother’s orders, however unappealing they might be.
It wasn’t that Blotto had anything against the Marquis. The chap had also been at Eton, for a start, though a few years ahead, so obviously there were no worries about his gentlemanly credentials. Any Old Etonian was bound to be as straight as a six over the bowler’s head.
And even though the Marquis’s breeding wasn’t quite all it should have been – his mother was French – he almost ranked as high as families who could date their ancestry back to the Norman Conquest. And, of course, when Blotto came to think of it, the boddos who came over with the Conqueror had originated in France too. So having a wealthy widowed mother who lived in a large château in the Midi was not such a social minus as it might at first appear. And, in fact, the Marquis of Bluntleigh’s mother had had some kind of title in her own right (but a French one, so it didn’t count for much).
The only other blemish on the Marquis’s copybook was that, presumably because of his mother, he was a Catholic. Now Blotto had no animus against Catholics, he just felt sorry for the poor old thimbles. It wasn’t only the permanent guilt that seemed to be an essential part of their religion, it was all that stuff they had to believe in. How much simpler, he thought, to be brought up like him – Church of England, which didn’t involve believing in anything very much.
So Blotto had nothing against the Marquis, but the fact remained that the two of them had about as much in common as a revolver and a radish. For a start, the Marquis of Bluntleigh didn’t like hunting. Almost worse, he didn’t like cricket. Or even shooting. And as if those shortcomings weren’t enough to snap the candle-snuffer on the prospect of any deep friendship between the two of them, he did apparently like books. Now, though Blotto had for some years been manfully working his way through The Hand of Fu Manchu, literature had never played a major part in his life. Tawcester Towers Library might have featured one of the most famous book collections in the British Isles but, in common with all his male predecessors, Blotto had never opened the leather-bound cover of any of them.
In this respect he was totally different from his sister, Lady Honoria Lyminster, known to everyone of her class (and of course, by definition, she wasn’t known to anyone who wasn’t of her class) as Twinks. His sister, Blotto had known from an early age, was a Grade A brainbox, and it was a source of constant wonderment to him that such a Rolls-Royce of an intellect could fit inside so delicate a chassis.
Readily recognizing her superior intelligence and his own inadequacy in that department, he had never felt a moment’s jealousy. In fact, he adored Twinks, but that particular November morning Blotto’s admiration was diluted with a little resentment. It was her fault that he had got saddled with the Marquis of Bluntleigh.
Twinks, you see, had an unfortunate propensity for making men fall in love with her. And, remarkably, it wasn’t her enormous intellect that attracted them. In fact, men in her circle wouldn’t have recognized a woman’s intellect until it came up and slapped them in the face – and in many cases, not even then. No, what translated every man who met her into an abjectly amorous swain was Twinks’s beauty.
The combination of white-blond hair and azure eyes set in a complexion of rose-tinted ivory has always rendered males vulnerable. Add to these a perfect figure whose apparent fragility belied its considerable strength, a voice like the tinkling of a crystal chandelier, a laugh as teasing as a summer breeze, and you had in Twinks a walking man-trap.
The Marquis of Bluntleigh was only the latest in a long line of victims who had tumbled into its jaws.
But for Blotto he presented a new and rather worrying challenge. Though the Dowager Duchess had frequently expressed her intention to breed from her daughter, so far Twinks had been cunning enough to frustrate these plans. Her main objection to most of the extremely wealthy aristocrats lined up as potential husbands for her was their intellectual poverty. But of course tha
t was of no concern to the Dowager Duchess.
The many criteria the old lady brought into her complex matrimonial calculations did not include a brain-cell count. The almost complete imbecility of the late Duke had not had any adverse effect on her own marriage – indeed in many ways may have improved it. And the inherited intellectual deficiency of his heir, the current Duke of Tawcester – known universally as Loofah – wasn’t a problem in his marriage either. The only trouble there was his angular wife Sloggo’s inability to produce any babies that weren’t girls, thus raising the ghastly prospect of the dukedom devolving to some distant black-sheep cousin from Australia. Or, even worse in the view of the Dowager Duchess, to Blotto.
No, although a lot of minor qualifications had also to be met, the two essentials the Dowager Duchess demanded in a prospective suitor for her daughter were breeding and wealth. Brains didn’t come into it.
The Marquis of Bluntleigh, however, did have quite a good brain. He had that slightly distracted air of someone in whose mind wheels were turning. Also, as already established, he liked books. Rumour even had it that he was an aspiring poet. These attributes made him, to Blotto’s mind, a rather menacing figure.
Twinks was already showing more interest in Buzzer Bluntleigh than she had in any previous besotted swain. This worried her brother on two counts. One, the idea of Twinks actually marrying threatened the charmed and unchanging idyll they both shared at Tawcester Towers. And, second, if the Dowager Duchess managed to get Twinks married off, there would be nothing to stop her focusing the full beam of her matrimonial energies on finding a bride for her younger son.
To Blotto, the prospect was appalling. He liked girls well enough, even enjoyed flirting a bit with some of his sister’s friends. But there was a huge difference between a girl and a wife. Something happened to a woman when she got a wedding ring on her finger. He’d seen the ghastly consequences all too often with his schoolfriends. One moment they’d been carefree, insouciant idiots sploshing their way merrily through their inheritances, then suddenly overnight they’d be in thrall to some woman and taking seriously her suggestion that they didn’t really need to open another bottle of claret. Blotto had even heard – unbelievable though the idea might be – of women who’d made their husbands give up hunting.
So he was in no hurry to engage with matrimony. Blotto was a great supporter of the status quo (or he would have been if he’d remembered the expression from his Latin lessons at Eton).
It was with mixed feelings therefore that he escorted the potentially dangerous Buzzer Bluntleigh through the Long Gallery of Tawcester Towers. And though noblesse oblige might have been an expression Blotto had forgotten from his French lessons at Eton, he understood its principle all right. The Marquis was a guest in the house and so, whatever designs he might have on Twinks, he must be accorded appropriate politeness.
‘Now this …’ a gesture to another portrait, ‘is the high-spending fifth Duke, known as “Black Rupert” … his son the equally irresponsible sixth Duke, known as “Rupert the Fiend”… and this one’s his son whose success in restoring the financial stability of Tawcester Towers earned him the nickname of “Rupert the Dull”.’
‘Rupert a bit of a family name for you, is it?’ asked Buzzer Bluntleigh, raising the comforting hope in Blotto that perhaps his intellect wasn’t all it had been cracked up to be. And the comforting possibility that this might make the Marquis less attractive to Twinks.
He confirmed the self-evident truth. ‘With the Tawcesters the eldest son’s always a Rupert. Second son’s always a Devereux.’
‘And what about further sons?’
This was another encouraging indication of Buzzer Bluntleigh’s stupidity. ‘There aren’t any further sons,’ Blotto explained patiently. ‘Just me and Loofah. Oh, and Twinks obviously. But she’s not a son, she’s a daughter.’
‘I am well aware of that.’ A disturbingly soupy look came into the Marquis’s eyes. ‘And what a beautiful daughter.’
Blotto was momentarily tempted to start listing his sister’s faults with a view to dampening this dangerous ardour, but he realized that would be disloyal. Besides, when he came to think of it, Twinks actually hadn’t got any faults. No, he was going to have to find another way of sabotaging Buzzer Bluntleigh’s matrimonial ambitions.
In the meantime, his guided tour had to continue. He gestured wearily up to the panelled wall. ‘And here we have the sixth Duke and the seventh Duke, known respectively as “Rupert the Smug” and “Rupert the Incapable”.’
‘Where?’ asked the Marquis of Bluntleigh.
‘Well, there.’ Rather petulantly Blotto repeated his gesture. But the look in Buzzer’s eyes made him turn to look where he was pointing.
On the wall were two rectangular shapes, darker than the surrounding sun-bleached panelling, their outlines defined by dusty cobwebs. High up in the middle of each empty space, picture hooks poked out pathetically.
Rupert the Smug and Rupert the Incapable had been stolen!
2
Enter Twinks
Blotto should have realized that, having announced he was off to fetch his sister, he would inevitably find the Marquis of Bluntleigh still waiting in the Long Gallery on their return. The poor droplet was so besotted with Twinks that, for a glimpse of her, he would have waited forty-eight hours in his jim-jams under a leaking drainpipe. And indeed when she appeared, Buzzer Bluntleigh’s jaw dropped down to near sock-suspender level, and his eyes took on the qualities of nearly hatched frogspawn.
She did, even her brother noticed, look particularly breathsapping that morning. The dress of silver-grey silk that encased her stopped just above the knee, revealing an enticement of silk-stockinged leg. A string of pearls dangled down almost to the hem of her dress, and nonchalantly from her wrist hung a silver-sequinned reticule.
The Marquis of Bluntleigh’s jaw dropped further as it took in her loveliness. ‘Um, er … um, er … um,’ was the nearest he got to speech.
‘So what have we here?’ asked Twinks.
Blotto felt a sudden pang in his heart. He didn’t think he’d ever had a pang before, and if that was what they felt like, then he didn’t want any more of them. But the cause of this particular pang was his sister’s use of the word ‘we’. Could it be possible that she was including the Marquis of Bluntleigh in that all-enveloping pronoun? Was it conceivable that this incomer might not only steal Twinks away in marriage, but might also hope to share in the brother and sister’s sleuthing activities? Just spelling out the question in his mind gave Blotto another pang.
Suppressing it, he tried not to show there was anything wrong as he replied to her question. ‘It’s not so much what’s here, Twinks me old muffin – it’s what isn’t here.’ And he directed her attention to the gaps on the wall.
‘Great whiffling water rats!’ she responded. ‘There’s been some sneaky backdoor-sidling going on here. We must find the stenchers who’ve done this!’
Another pang. Blotto tried desperately to remember whether his sister had ever talked so openly about a potential investigation with a third person present. Was she really considering turning their precious duo into a sleuthing trio?
But even as he had the thought, his fears were allayed. Turning on her goldfish-mouthed swain a smile that could not fail to sink him deeper into the morass of his love, Twinks asked sweetly, ‘Haven’t you got anything you should be doing, Buzzer?’
‘Er … what kind of thing?’ he managed to reply.
Blotto was sympathetic to the Marquis’s confusion. His sister’s question was a really tricky one. Was there anything that someone of their class should be doing? Particularly if that someone didn’t like hunting … or cricket … or shooting. Bit early in the day to be settling down in the billiard room with a decanter of brandy. No doubt about it, what Twinks had asked was a real stumper.
‘Well, erm … anything, really,’ she replied in an atypically feeble manner. She too must have been realizing the extent of the
dilemma she had raised for her prospective fiancé.
But Twinks was never defeated for long. Her brother had seen her get out of much worse gluepots than this, so he was entirely unsurprised when she turned another ensnaring smile on the Marquis and said, ‘You told me you were a poet, Buzzer …’
‘Ah, well, um, er …’
‘Why don’t you go off and write a poem?’
‘I … er … um …’
‘For me.’
Of course that clinched it. Whether the ugly rumour about the Marquis being a poet was true or not, it was one that he had volunteered to Twinks, and now that she’d asked him specifically to write something for her, his bluff had been called. Blotto watched gleefully as Buzzer Bluntleigh left the Long Gallery in search of quill pen and papyrus or whatever else it was that poets used in the plying of their unholy trade.
Twinks seemed as happy as he was at the departure of her amorous swain, so Blotto didn’t even raise with her the question that had been troubling him. Twinks wouldn’t play him a diddler’s hand. Brother and sister were a team; it was unthinkable that anyone else would ever take a major part in one of their investigations.
He was relieved to see that Twinks didn’t even cast a lovelorn eye towards her swain’s retreating back. She seemed, encouragingly, to have forgotten all about the Marquis the moment he was out of her sight. And all she was interested in was the case in hand. Which realization was, for Blotto, all creamy éclair.
His sister’s azure eyes sparkled as they looked up at the wall and focused on the two rectangles of darker wood. ‘Our thieves knew what they were looking for,’ she announced. ‘Gainsborough and Reynolds!’
‘Well, kipper me with a fish knife!’ said her brother in awestruck tones. ‘You absolutely are the lark’s larynx, Twinks. Just one look at the wall and you know the names of the stenchers who snaffled the Ruperts.’
The pale skin of Twinks’s forehead wrinkled in puzzlement. ‘Not on the same page, Blotto me old trouser-button …?’