Blotto, Twinks and the Rodents of the Riviera

by Simon Brett

And, joyfully, among the stacks of incalculably valuable artworks, Blotto and Twinks found the objects of their quest, the two Ruperts. Leaving all the other paintings where they were, they reclaimed the Gainsborough and Reynolds and looked forward to rehanging them in their proper place, the Long Gallery of Tawcester Towers.

  As soon as they got back to the Hôtel Majestic, Twinks began the task that she always took upon herself at this stage in one of their investigations. She wrote up a dossier of the devilment they had uncovered, detailing all the crimes of La Puce and exposing his real identity as the Marquis of Bluntleigh. She also pointed to the probable guilt of his mother the Marchioness, who must have been primed to direct Blotto and Twinks down the well into what was meant to be a fatal trap.

  Because of their location, Twinks wrote up her dossier in fluent French. She was awake all night finishing it, and in the morning instructed Corky Froggett to deliver the large folder to the office of the local gendarmerie.

  Whether its findings would be acted upon, or whether the local police chief had really been bought off by La Puce, was not her concern. Twinks had once again done her duty by passing the information on to the proper authorities.

  And if those authorities wanted to take credit for the success of the investigation, they would hear no objections from her.

  32

  Fairytale Ending

  They had all arranged to meet at the Café Floure, where it was still warm enough to sit outside. Blotto and Twinks were there first and after the briefest of commentaries on Hobbes’s mechanistic view of the Social Contract, the waiter departed to fetch the coffees they ordered. Blotto went off to use the toilet facilities which, like the ones Corky had described in Paris, were of the ‘Crouch and Hope’ variety.

  From inside his cubicle he heard the approach of two voices, which he quickly identified as those of Eugène Blocque and Gaston Tacquelle. Though they were speaking mostly French, he did catch enough sentences in English to deduce that the two painters had been to see Dr Cooper, the English chest specialist recommended by Derek Gringe. And they hadn’t liked what he had told them.

  ‘“Just a cold”!’ Blocque quoted contemptuously. ‘Le salaud!’

  Blotto just managed to restrain himself from saying, ‘Hello.’

  ‘Moi aussi. “Just a cold”!’ Tacquelle quoted with matching contempt.

  ‘Mais c’est la phtisie!’

  ‘C’est vrai. C’est la phtisie!’

  ‘Et cet idiot anglais, Dr Cooper, a dit …’ Eugène Blocque went into a diminishing impersonation of the chest specialist. ‘“Take this medicine twice a day and everything will have cleared up within a week.” Pouf!’ said Eugène Blocque.

  ‘Pouf!’ Gaston Tacquelle agreed.

  ‘“This medicine” – pouf!’ said Eugène Blocque.

  Blotto heard the sound of a bottle being uncorked and its contents being poured down a urinal.

  ‘“This medicine” – pouf!’ said Gaston Tacquelle.

  Blotto heard the same sequence of sound effects repeated.

  ‘Je suis malade de la phtisie,’ said Eugène Blocque proudly, his voice fading away as he left the facilities.

  ‘Moi aussi,’ asserted Gaston Tacquelle proudly, his voice also fading. ‘Je suis malade de la phtisie.’

  And they embarked on a fading polyphony of coughing.

  By the time Blotto went out to join Twinks, the table had filled up. Blocque and Tacquelle were there, still coughing. Chuck Waggen and Scott Frea had also appeared. And so had Giles Strappe-Cash, whose first words to his distant cousin were, ‘Hello. Could you lend me a fiver?’

  As he sat down, Blotto handed the note across. A look at his sister told him that she was getting rather bored by the conversation around her.

  It focused, of course, on her beauty.

  ‘You must come back to Paris with me,’ Eugène Blocque was saying once again. ‘I will immortalize you as the chef d’oeuvre of Triangulisme.’

  ‘No, no,’ Gaston Tacquelle protested. ‘You must stay down here with me. It is I who will make you the chef d’oeuvre of Triangulisme.’

  The two artists got into an argument so intense that they both forgot to cough.

  Twinks looked wearily across at her brother. From her expression Blotto detected that, whatever vanity she had once entertained about the idea of being immortalized as a painter’s muse, it was rapidly evaporating.

  Nor did she seem much keener on the idea of becoming a writer’s muse either. Her eyes were glazing over as she listened to the two Americans.

  ‘I’ll make you famous. For all posterity. Not only in my books. The books I write,’ Chuck Waggen was saying, ‘but also in all the biographies. Biographies of me. You’ll be in all of them.’

  ‘And in mine,’ said Scott Frea. ‘I’ll make you famous. You’ll feature in all the biographies of me too.’

  ‘I’ll bet there’ll be more biographies of me than there are of you,’ said Chuck Waggen.

  ‘No, there will be more of me,’ said Scott Frea.

  And, like the two painters, the two writers started bickering with each other.

  Blotto looked at Twinks, who with a little jerk of her head conveyed the ‘let’s get the hell out of here’ message. He nodded.

  The two writers and the two painters were far too preoccupied by their arguments to notice Blotto and Twinks’s departure. Giles Strappe-Cash might have spoiled everything by drawing attention to them, but the couple of fivers thrust into his hands by Blotto bought his silence.

  The two aristocratic sleuths crept away on tiptoe to where the Lagonda and its patient chauffeur waited.

  ‘Full throttle, Corky!’ cried Twinks. ‘Back to the Hôtel Majestic and we’ll leave as soon as our bags have been packed – and we’ve got the Gainsborough and the Reynolds safely stowed. Oh, and as soon as I’ve sent a cablegram.’

  ‘To whom?’ asked her brother.

  ‘Dimpsy Wickett-Coote. I’m going to tell her the field is hers. Once Blocque and Tacquelle and Chuck and Scott are in Paris again, it won’t take them long to get back to the idea that she’s the most beautiful woman in the world. She can be made famous as the chef d’oeuvre of Triangulisme. And I …’ Twinks hugged herself in relief, ‘will be shot of the lot of them.’

  ‘So once you’ve done the cablegram, milady,’ asked Corky Froggett, ‘it’ll be full speed back to Tawcester Towers, will it?’

  ‘It certainly will. Home in time for Christmas – larksissimo!’ Twinks was surprised to see a shade of melancholy in her brother’s expression. ‘What’s up, Blotto me old clothes-brush? What’s pulled your face down?’

  In a sombre tone he replied, ‘There’s just something I must do before I go back to Tawcester Towers.’

  Blotto and Mimsy La Pim stood on a terrace of the Hôtel Majestic, enjoying the view of the Mediterranean and the surprisingly mild December evening air. She was once again dressed in black and white and carried a black handbag, but her lips were once again a luscious red.

  ‘Gee, Blotto,’ she murmured. ‘You were so brave when you defeated La Puce.’

  ‘Oh, don’t talk such toffee,’ he said, as ever embarrassed by compliment. There was a silence. Blotto’s Adam’s apple bobbled like a balloon caught in a high wind. Then he said, ‘Erm …’

  ‘Erm what?’ asked Mimsy.

  ‘Just erm …’ he said.

  ‘I’m so glad we met,’ said Mimsy.

  Blotto agreed that he was very glad they’d met, too.

  ‘Otherwise we wouldn’t be here now talking,’ said Mimsy.

  ‘No … Well, I suppose it’s just possible … you know, that we might have bumped into each other this evening just by chance, both being in the same hotel and … but that chance is a hundred-to-one outsider. No, it’s more likely that we’d be here talking if we had already met and made an arrangement to meet again this evening.’

  ‘Like we did.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Another silence ensued. Blotto’s Adam’s apple
bobbled like a tennis ball going over a weir.

  ‘Gee,’ said Mimsy, ‘we don’t have a lot to say to each other, do we?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Though there’s a lot I want to say to you.’

  ‘There’s a lot I want to say to you too, Mimsy. But I can’t find the words.’

  ‘Gee, I hope you do find them. It’s not easy talking without words.’

  ‘No, they are essential.’

  ‘They sure are. Except in movies, of course.’

  ‘Except in movies.’ Another silence stretched between them. ‘I’ll never meet anyone like you again, Mimsy.’

  ‘Well, you might.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Well, if you met me again. I’m like me. In fact I’m more like me than anyone else you might meet.’

  ‘Good ticket,’ said Blotto, and was once again silent.

  Mimsy La Pim helped him out. ‘What you’re saying, Blotto, is that we’re not going to meet again, aren’t you?’

  He nodded miserably. ‘You’ve felt it too, haven’t you?’

  She sighed. ‘Yes.’

  ‘There are just too many differences between us.’

  ‘I know. You’ve got a title and I’m just plain old Pookie Klunch from Idaho.’

  ‘That’s not it!’ Blotto protested. ‘I wouldn’t let something like that get in our way. I’d marry you if you’d been brought up in a pigsty.’

  ‘I was, actually,’ said Mimsy La Pim. ‘There wasn’t too much room in the farmhouse.’

  ‘But …’ Blotto gulped. The words just wouldn’t come.

  Again Mimsy helped him out. ‘But we’re not talking about marriage, are we?’

  Blotto shook his head sadly. ‘No.’ A silence. ‘When did you realize it, Mimsy?’

  ‘I think I knew when you said no wife of yours could ever have a job.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I love my work. I love making movies. I couldn’t stop doing it.’

  ‘Ah.’ There was a wealth of meaning in that monosyllable. It encompassed all of Blotto’s upbringing, everything he’d ever been taught to believe in, and – most of all – the thought of the Dowager Duchess’s reaction to his marrying a film actress. The code of noblesse oblige could sometimes be cruel.

  ‘And when did you know, Blotto?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve known myself most of my life, really.’

  ‘No. When did you know – pause – Blotto? When did you know that we couldn’t get married?’

  ‘I’m afraid it was in the chapel.’

  ‘Gee, you mean when you confronted La Puce?’

  ‘Just before that. When I reclaimed my cricket bat … and you saw it and …’ The words were dried up by the strength of his emotions.

  ‘And what, Blotto?’

  ‘And you didn’t know what it was. Broken biscuits, I thought. I am actually in the same room as a poor thimble who doesn’t know what a cricket bat is. And that became a … oh, what’s the word … one of those things you bash with a stick.’

  ‘A servant?’

  ‘No, a cymbal, that’s it. The fact that you didn’t know what a cricket bat was became a symbol of the vast difference between us.’

  ‘Yes, Blotto. I knew it too.’

  The silence that followed this was huge, all-encompassing. Blotto’s honest blue eyes gazed hopelessly into Mimsy’s black ones. Hers filled with tears.

  Bereft of words, Mimsy La Pim reached into her handbag. She pulled out a decoratively bordered caption and held it up to Blotto. It read: ‘I WILL NEVER FORGET YOU.’

  Brother and sister were back in Tawcester Towers well in time for Christmas. For a few days Blotto moped around, coming to terms with the idea that he’d met a woman who had very nearly meant as much to him as his cricket bat.

  But he wasn’t very good at being miserable, least of all back on his home ground. He comforted himself with the thought that he could pick up his old habit of going to the cinematograph. There he could sympathize with Mimsy La Pim’s latest problem, being swapped at birth for another baby or whatever it might be. He could rail against the moustache-twirling villains who kept tying her to the railway lines. And he could share with her a relationship that was much purer and easier than the kind that involves spending lots of time together.

  So by Boxing Day – and particularly by the time of the Boxing Day Hunt, when he felt the massive power of Mephistopheles between his thighs as they tore great holes out of the local farmers’ fields, the barometer needle of Blotto’s disposition had returned to its habitual setting of ‘Sunny’.

  Also by Simon Brett

  Blotto, Twinks and the Ex-King’s Daughter

  Blotto, Twinks and the Dead Dowager Duchess

  Copyright

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Constable, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2011

  Copyright © Simon Brett, 2011

  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 including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978–1–84901–784–8