by Simon Brett
Praise for Simon Brett
‘One of the wittiest crime writers around.’
Antonia Fraser
‘Beautifully plotted, with a sharp eye for the social comedy of middle-class, middle England.’
Daily Mail
‘One of the exceptional story writers around.’
Daily Telegraph
‘Like a little malice in your mysteries? Some cynicism in your cosies? Simon Brett is happy to oblige.’
New York Times
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 2009
Copyright © Simon Brett 2009
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: 978-1-84529-935-4
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
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
To Pete,
who always had a taste for the silly
1
Blotto Finds a Body
‘It’s frightfully awkward, Mater, but I’m afraid there’s a dead body in the library.’
‘Not now, Blotto. We have guests.’ And, on waves of breeding, perfume and fine silk, the Dowager Duchess of Tawcester wafted away from her younger son to continue being the perfect hostess. Her eyes sparkled semaphore to Grimshaw, the butler, indicating which of her guests should have their drinks topped up and, more importantly, which should not.
An expression of confusion took up residence in the face of the Right Honourable Devereux Lyminster. This was not unusual. The impossibly handsome features of the Dowager Duchess of Tawcester’s younger son frequently wore an expression of confusion. The fine brow beneath his blond thatch would furrow, and lines would crinkle around his cornflower-blue eyes. Young women had on occasion been known to interpret this look as a sign of sensitivity and deep thought. They were invariably wrong in their estimation. Blotto’s thoughts rarely ran deep enough to dampen the soles of his handmade brogues.
He refused the proffered champagne from the butler’s silver salver. Devereux Lyminster drank little. His nickname certainly did not derive from his drinking habits. Amongst people of his class it was thought bad form for nicknames to have logical explanations; they were items to be scattered about with random largesse, like small donations to charity.
‘Grimshaw,’ he murmured, ‘you haven’t seen Twinks, have you?’
‘No, milord,’ the butler replied. ‘I believe her ladyship is still changing after her strenuous afternoon of tennis.’
‘Oh, rodents!’ The confusion on Blotto’s face made room for a little anxiety.
‘Was there something you wished your sister to sort out for you, sir?’ Long experience had taught Grimshaw that this would indeed be the case. Blotto always turned to Twinks when faced with one of life’s minor challenges, like which tie to wear or whom to marry.
‘Yes. Bit of bother in the library.’
‘What kind of bother?’
‘Dead body.’
‘I will deal with it at once, milord.’
Grimshaw enlisted the help of Harvey, who was one of the housemaids at Tawcester Towers. (Tawcester, it should be emphasized at this point, despite being spelt ‘Taw-ces-ter’, is pronounced ‘Taster’. Everyone knows that.) That Harvey was considerably above the age of most housemaids, and that she had remained in employment after certain ethical lapses which might have ended other careers, reflected the fact that she had an agreement with the butler. The precise nature of this ‘agreement’ was something that the family and staff at Tawcester Towers were far too polite to investigate.
Harvey wore the black dress and apron of her calling. On most women such costume is expected to obscure the details of femininity; on Harvey it accentuated them. This was partly because of the unusually short length of dress that she (or perhaps more accurately Grimshaw) favoured. She carried a feather duster, though not in the expectation that it might be of much use in dealing with a dead body. But it did give her an air of purpose. Any passing house guest or member of the staff would assume her to be engaged on some more innocent domestic mission.
The important point was that, from long experience of needing to, Grimshaw knew that he could trust Harvey’s discretion. And he knew that dead bodies could threaten considerable inconvenience to the smooth running of a country house weekend. Below stairs, Tawcester Towers had hardly yet recovered from the shock of discovering Lord Tawcester himself, seated in front of his study fire with a face the colour of the vintage port which proved to be his final indulgence. And his lordship’s demise had happened a full five years before.
The library, as most people of culture know, is one of the great glories of Tawcester Towers. It had been added during the substantial renovations of the property conducted by the seventh Duke, who unlike his predecessors, Black Rupert and Rupert the Fiend, had reversed the trend of losing the family money at cards. Instead he had proved himself an astute financial manager, had restored the Tawcester fortunes, expanded the Towers and earned the ungenerous nickname of Rupert the Dull.
The library is on the ground floor at the back of the mansion. Tall windows look out over the gently undulating fields of Tawcestershire, most of which is owned by the family. On the other three walls mahogany bookshelves, filled with symmetrical volumes, rise from floor to ceiling. The books are uniformly bound in brown leather with gilt lettering, and uniformly unread. Reading does not feature highly amongst the pastimes of the British aristocracy. Though many calves undoubtedly gave up their lives to provide bindings for their books, the Tawcester family tended to prefer their recreational killing to be more immediate. For them the inability to see what they were shooting at always took away much of the fun.
The impression should not be given that the Tawcesters did not value their library. It was one of their proudest boasts, and no weekend house guest was in Tawcester Towers for more than half an hour before being invited to marvel at its splendours. The books were acknowledged to form a unique collection, and over the years many minor academics had been employed on the task of compiling and updating the catalogue. The Dukes of Tawcester had always had great respect for books; just so long as nobody expected them to read any.
The library had witnessed many scenes of misbehaviour and depravity – particularly during the time of Rupert the Dull’s profligate heir Rupert the Libertine – but this was its first dead body . . . (if one discounts domestics . . . and in Tawcester Towers domestics had always been discounted. So the fact that in
the early 1820s an under-housemaid had been crushed in the library by the descent of an ill-balanced bust of Homer had never even been mentioned to the ducal family. Staff problems had always been the butler’s responsibility).
The dead body which confronted the current butler and Harvey that afternoon was not in that state of serene repose recommended by the ancients for the final act of life. Its passing from the corporeal to the incorporeal had been neither willing nor elegant. Fortunately it was the body of a man, for the paroxysms which had preceded death would have rendered unbecoming the costume of a lady. He wore white tie and tails, the uniform that identified him as one of the Dowager Duchess’s house guests. Which, Grimshaw recognized, was extremely inconvenient. Here was no servant, whose body could be discreetly shuffled off to the local undertaker with no questions asked. This death was going to require investigation.
‘Shall I tidy him up, Mr Grimshaw?’ asked Harvey. To her the butler was always ‘Mr Grimshaw’, even in private moments when a less formal appellation might have been expected. She stood, feather duster poised, as though that implement might somehow prove useful in the disposal of a corpse.
Grimshaw shook his head. ‘I fear not. Until proved otherwise, this library must be treated as a crime scene.’
‘You mean the police will have to be called?’
‘Yes. And, once they have failed to identify the murderer, there will no doubt turn out to be a private detective among the Dowager Duchess’s house guests, who will continue the investigation. Either way, the household is liable to undergo a period of irritating disruption.’
Harvey’s feather duster quivered instinctively in her hand. ‘So shouldn’t I even dust him, Mr Grimshaw?’
‘I fear not. At such moments, even the most basic instincts of domestic hygiene must be curbed.’
‘How do you think he died, Mr Grimshaw?’
The butler’s eyes narrowed as they focused on the contorted corpse before him. The face was claret red, eyes bulging, mouth gaping, hands still clasping at the throat as though to remove a collar that had been bought in too small a size.
‘I would imagine it was something he ingested.’
‘Poison?’
‘That might be the logical conclusion which a professional investigator might reach, but it is not our place to reach conclusions, Harvey, logical or otherwise.’
‘No, Mr Grimshaw.’ There was a tentative silence before she continued, ‘But might it be our place to speculate who the dead man is – or was?’
The butler conceded that it might be. The face, now so hideously distorted, had once been that of a good-looking young man, though of a sallow complexion that suggested he had not grown up on a diet of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Across his stiff shirt-front was a purple sash, clasped in place by a starburst of jewelled insignia. The flamboyance of this suggested that the man had not been trained in sartorial reticence by an English public school.
‘My surmise would be,’ said Grimshaw, ‘that he is – or was – part of the entourage of the ex-King of Mitteleuropia.’
‘I am sure you are right, Mr Grimshaw,’ Harvey agreed. ‘Are you going to ring the police?’
‘Yes. That is my next duty.’
‘Not yet!’ The voice tinkled through the library like a cut-glass chandelier caught in the gentlest of zephyrs. But it was not a feeble voice. It carried the upper class authority that can only be developed by exploiting serfs through many generations.
The voice belonged to Lady Honoria Lyminster, known to her brother Blotto and everyone else the right side of the green baize door as ‘Twinks’.
Her beauty had frequently been remarked on by the swarms of young swains who had fallen in love with her. But since they were all of her own class, their descriptions had rarely been more articulate than ‘a fine filly’, ‘a corker’, ‘a bit of a looker’ or ‘an absolute bobbydazzler’. To do proper justice to her charms would have required the skills of a poet, and sadly, in the social circles where she moved, Twinks was never likely meet one.
But in the unimaginable event of a poet ever being invited to Tawcester Towers, he might have commented on the deep azure of her bewitching eyes, a complexion of ivory overlaid with rose petals, and ash-blonde hair spun as fine as the filigree of a spider’s web. He might have lauded the fragile voluptuousness of her perfect figure, and observed that she moved in a way that made butterflies look clumping.
Had, however, this conjectural poet ever expressed such views to Lady Honoria Lyminster, he would have received the dismissive response, ‘What guff!’ Twinks was not unaware of her beauty; she just didn’t regard it as important. There were more interesting things in her life. And of these the most interesting was acting as an amateur detective.
So the appearance of a dead body in the library in the middle of a particularly dreary house party was to Twinks a bonus comparable to finding a pearl in the grittiest of oysters.
At her arrival Grimshaw and Harvey had dutifully drawn back, to allow her unimpeded access to the body.
‘Oh, larks!’ she said. ‘A poisoning at Tawcester Towers! Larksissimo!’ She lowered her elegant head to the victim’s mouth and sniffed the evanescent aroma of almonds. ‘Cyanide – or I’m very much mistaken.’
Even had he been unaware of Twinks’s exhaustive knowledge of toxins, Grimshaw would still have known his place sufficiently to say, ‘I’m sure you are right, milady. Is there anything you wish me to do?’
‘No, you and Harvey go back to the guests. Keep topping them up with bubbly. I’ll just have a snoopy-snuffle round here.’
‘And, milady, would you wish me to alert the proper authorities?’
‘No, Grimshaw, I’ll do it. I will summon the estimable Chief Inspector Trumbull. I like to do these things honourably – level playing field and all that. I must allow the police to have a fair wallop at the investigation . . . before I run circles round them and tell them who really committed the murder.’
‘Very good, milady.’
‘Oh, there you are.’ It was Blotto, who had just appeared in the doorway of the library. He nodded to Grimshaw and Harvey as they melted imperceptibly past him, then moved forward to his sister. ‘Rum do, Twinks me old muffin. Bit of a candle-snuffer, isn’t it?’
‘But very jolly. Jollissimo!’ The blue eyes sparkled like the scales of a leaping salmon caught in a shaft of sunlight.
‘Do you recognize the poor old pineapple?’
‘One of ex-King Sigismund’s factotums.’
‘Got a moniker for him?’
Blotto knew his sister would have. Had only to be introduced to someone once, and the name would stick in her retentive brain like a limpet. Whereas the interior of Blotto’s brain had more in common with a well-used toboggan run; everything slid away down the sides.
‘Captain Schtoltz, he was called.’
‘Oh yes, vaguely remember the name from when they all arrived. Odd to be in ordinary evening blacks, though. If he was a Captain, why wasn’t he wearing his dress uniform?’
‘That, Blotto, is exactly the question I was asking myself.’
‘Oh, really?’ He was rather cheered to hear that. Blotto had accepted from an early age that, when it came to brainpower, his younger sister was a huge ocean liner to his little rowing boat. So to have actually had the same idea as her gave him quite a lift.
‘And I think I know the answer,’ Twinks went on.
‘Well, don’t keep it to yourself. Uncage the ferrets, old thing.’
‘The reason Captain Schtoltz was not in uniform was . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Because he was a spy.’
‘Crikey.’
‘Now, Blotto, will you hurry and get my camera? Before the peelers arrive with their hobnail boots to tread in all the evidence, I want to make a very detailed examination of the crime scene . . .’
2
The Police Are Called
Chief Inspector Trumbull had not been at the front of the queue when the
intellect was handed out. Indeed, he appeared not to have been in the same county. But that did not prevent him from rising through the ranks of his chosen profession. Indeed, in those days for anyone in that profession to have shown intelligence or originality would have been a positive disqualification. The role of the police was to do a lot of boring legwork and paperwork, to trail up investigatory cul-de-sacs, to be constantly baffled, and dutifully amazed when an amateur sleuth revealed the solution to a murder mystery.
These skills Chief Inspector Trumbull possessed in abundance. He also knew his place, particularly when the aristocracy was involved. It therefore seemed to him entirely appropriate that he should obey the Dowager Duchess’s summons to the Blue Morning Room before investigating the body in the library.
Though a deeply stupid man, Trumbull was not without bravery. But he, like most of his gender, always quailed in front of the Dowager Duchess of Tawcester. She was constructed on the lines of a transatlantic steamer and it was comparably difficult to make her change her course once she was under way.
‘Now, Trumbull . . .’ she said to the quaking Inspector. She always called him ‘Trumbull’. She would address appropriate royal personages by their titles, friends of her own class by their nicknames, and everyone else by their surname. For the Dowager Duchess the difference between a Chief Inspector, doctor, solicitor, vicar or under-housemaid was imperceptible. ‘The main thing about this situation is that it’s incredibly inconvenient. I have guests for the weekend.’
‘Yes, Your Grace,’ Trumbull concurred. ‘Most unfortunate.’