by Simon Brett
‘It is the only way,’ said Blotto nobly. ‘One last kiss – and then we part for ever!’
He made the kiss as short as he could, and shot off through the door to the staircase. Princess Ethelinde watched his departing form, reading anguish into its every lineament.
As he clattered down the stairs, Blotto’s body felt delight in its every lineament. His face was overwhelmed by a huge grin. Good old Twinks – what a brainbox that girl had!
27
A Sting in the Tail
The handover of power was achieved with the minimum of fuss. The short reign of King Blotto the First (and almost definitely the Last) ended, and the interrupted reign of King Sigismund the Thirty-Fourth recommenced. The restored monarch bought off his subjects with offers of access to the royal hunting grounds, free beer, and tax-cuts for the middle classes. (The fact that none of these promised benefits ever materialized did not seem to worry the Mitteleuropians one iota. Like goldfish, they seemed willing to be resurprised with every circuit of their bowl.)
King Sigismund offered his people another carrot in the form of a Royal Wedding. This caused great excitement, particularly in the Mitteleuropian ceramics industry. Souvenir crockery was produced in great quantity, but few who subsequently ate their breakfasts off plates decorated with the bride and groom realized the tragic secret nursed in the heart of Princess Ethelinde. Once married, she dutifully bore many children to the man she loathed. She smiled dutifully when she became Queen of the conjoined Kingdom of Mitteleuropia-Transcarpathia, and smiled equally dutifully when she and Fritz-Ludwig went into exile, following a coup by his brother Anatol, the Minister for War. No one would ever suspect how frequently her thoughts returned to the Eden of Tawcester Towers.
His royal duties discharged, Blotto wasted no time in returning to that Eden. He and Corky Froggett shared stints at the wheel of the Lagonda and, by driving through the night, they cut a full thirty-six hours from the timing of their outward journey.
They came back to find that little had changed at Tawcester Towers, except for one major improvement. There were no ex-monarchs or Mitteleuropians of any description on the premises.
Blotto thought that having the place to herself might have put his mother in a beneficent mood, but he was in for a disappointment. Something else had happened to discommode the Dowager Duchess. The day following the departure of ex-King Sigismund and his entourage, Loofah’s wife Sloggo had gone into labour. And produced another girl! Really, did any mother ever have to cope with such inefficient children?
Otherwise Tawcester Towers had settled back into the benign torpor from which it so rarely emerged. Grimshaw still exercised strong discipline over all his staff. Except for Harvey, who exercised strong discipline over him. And he loved it.
After dinner on the first evening of their return, Blotto went for a nostalgic twilight wander around the estate, to reacquaint himself with all of its much-missed features. His sister, meanwhile, went up to her room to commence work on a new project. Before she could get down to it, of course, Twinks had to check through the cards on the many bouquets and chocolate boxes from admirers that had accumulated during her absence. None of the names interested her.
Ringing for her maid, Twinks instructed the girl to take all the presents away and distribute them to the poor and the sick. Then finally she could settle down to work. She had been struck, in her reading before she went to the country – and indeed in the reading she had time to do while actually in Zling – by the inadequacy of the literature of Mitteleuropia. So that very evening, to remedy the situation – and to test her linguistic skills – Twinks started to write a three-volume novel in Mitteleuropian.
It was pitch dark when Blotto returned to the house. All he asked for from Grimshaw was a bottle of brandy and a glass. Once he had provided those, the butler was given permission to seek the comforts of his bed (and doubtless of Harvey).
Holding the brandy bottle by its neck, Blotto ambled comfortably into Rupert the Antisocial’s billiard room. Fires in a couple of the grates were still alight, and he settled into one of the hooded sofas in the warm red glow of the embers. Pale flickering ribbons of reflected flame across the ceiling gave enough light for him to see the familiar outlines of the room. Sparkles of red caught on the polished metal of the weapons displayed over the mantelpiece.
Pouring himself a large glass of the brandy, Blotto settled down to enjoy that time-honoured pastime of his ancestors, drinking himself into oblivion.
He was maybe on his third glass, half asleep and half awake, when he heard the noise.
It came from behind him. The creak of a floorboard? The soft pad of a footfall?
He froze. There was no more sound. He must have imagined it. Blotto leant forward in the sofa to refill his brandy glass.
Just as well he did. Because at that moment, he heard a grunt of effort behind him, and felt the pointed blade of a sabre brush his arm as it burst through the leather back of his sofa. Had he not moved, it would have impaled him as neatly as a butterfly on a pin.
Instantly Blotto was on his feet and had drawn a heavy cutlass from the display above the fire. He turned to face the man who was extricating his sabre from the sofa.
With no surprise, in the flickering light, he saw that it was Zoltan Grittelhoff.
The Mitteleuropian had freed his weapon and slashed it down over the sofa at his quarry. Blotto leaped backwards out of its path, then projecting himself off the fireplace, flew through the air, so that both of his feet dropkicked into the back of the sofa. It toppled over, the impact sending Grittelhoff flying.
But he was too canny an operator to be caught like that. Before Blotto could land on him, the Mitteleuropian had rolled away under one of the billiard tables, over which heavy shaded lamps hung.
For a moment Blotto contemplated putting them on. The fight would be easier with more light. But the switches were by the door. Who knew what Zoltan Grittelhoff could achieve in the seconds it would take Blotto to get there?
Besides, putting the lights on might alert the rest of the household. Blotto didn’t want any help to arrive. This was a one-to-one battle – Blotto against the murderer of Captain Schtoltz.
As the Mitteleuropian’s head appeared over the top of the billiard table, Blotto leapt on to its baize surface. Unfortunately, he had underestimated the height of the lamps and his head banged heavily into the metal shade.
He heard a laugh from Grittelhoff and then the swish of the sabre set to scythe through his shins. Blotto grabbed hold of the shade and lifted his legs off the table-top. He could almost feel the air of the sabre-blade as it arced beneath the soles of his handmade brogues.
He dropped back on to the baize and drew back his cutlass for a stab at his overbalanced opponent. But Blotto’s weight had broken one of the wires fixing the lamp to the ceiling, and the metal shade swept down like an avenging fury and sent him flying on to the adjacent table.
Blotto scrabbled to his feet, but stood on a couple of billiard balls and found himself on his back, spread-eagled over the table-top.
Worse, in the fall, he had lost his grip on the handle of his cutlass, which had gone flying off into the darkness.
Worse still, Zoltan Grittelhoff had leapt on to the table and stood over him, sabre at the ready. On the man’s thin lips was a smile of satisfaction.
‘This will give me greater pleasure, the Right Honourable Devereux Lyminster,’ he hissed, ‘than any other killing I have ever performed. And there have been a good few. I have followed you all the way from Zling, thinking only of this moment. You have caused a lot of trouble, the Right Honourable Devereux Lyminster – not only to me, but also to my master, King Vlatislav!’
‘Shouldn’t that be “Usurping King Vlatislav”?’ Blotto’s hand felt the edge of one of the table’s pockets. ‘Or, more properly, “Usurping ex-King Vlatislav”?’
‘You know nothing of Mitteleuropian politics! And now, prepare to die!’ Zoltan Grittelhoff drew back his sabre
for the blow.
‘Oh, I’m prepared,’ said Blotto, just as his hand closed round one of the pocketed balls (a green as it happened).
As the sabre started to move on its downward trajectory, he tried to visualize his adversary as a set of cricket stumps. This would be the most important run-out of Blotto’s life. Bigger even than went he’d sent the bails flying to put Twonker Mincebait back in the pavilion at the Eton and Harrow match.
Blotto hurled the green ball straight and true. It caught Grittelhoff’s wrist and the sabre clattered away into the darkness. The tall man jerked backwards, catching his head so hard against the metal lampshade that it caused momentary concussion.
When he returned to himself, he was lying on his back on the billiard table. Above him loomed the figure of Blotto. With the business end of his cutlass a paper’s breadth away from his enemy’s throat.
‘Go on, kill me!’ hissed Zoltan Grittelhoff. ‘I am not afraid to die! Indeed, now I have failed my master, King Vlatislav, I wish to die! Go on, kill me! That is what you’re going to do, isn’t it?’
‘Good Lord, no,’ said Blotto. ‘I’m not going to kill you.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’m afraid, me old trouser button, that’s not how we do these things in England.’
‘What are you going to do with me then?’ demanded the murderer.
‘I am going to hand you over to the proper authorities.’
28
The Proper Authorities
Inspector Trumbull was pleased to receive a summons from Tawcester Towers the following morning. He and Sergeant Knatchbull had spent the past fortnight being baffled at Tawsworthy police station, and they both relished the prospect of another venue in which to continue being baffled.
The prisoner had spent the night trussed up in Grimshaw’s pantry, guarded by two sturdy footmen.
Blotto had deliberately refrained from summoning the proper authorities until the morning. He knew Inspector Trumbull not to be the sharpest fly in the fishing hat, and worried that the officer’s ponderous enquiries could seriously eat into his beauty sleep. And after that dash back from Zling, Blotto needed his beauty sleep.
He hadn’t bothered Twinks till the morning either. He knew her paperwork was always very efficient, and it would only be a matter of moments for her to assemble a dossier of evidence to prove that Zoltan Grittelhoff had murdered Captain Schtoltz.
‘Rather handy that we’ve got the perpetrator on the premises, isn’t it, Blotto me old gumdrop?’
‘Tickey-tockey,’ he agreed. ‘Well done on the whole rombooley, actually. Damned clever, that Klaus Schiffleich disguise.’
‘Though of course you recognized it was me right from the start, didn’t you?’ teased Twinks.
‘Yes, of course I did.’ Before she could question him further, Blotto went on, ‘Damned clever, you speaking Mitteleuropian too.’
‘Speaking Mitteleuropian was pure creamy éclair,’ said Twinks. ‘It was remembering to use a Mitteleuropian accent when I was speaking English that was the gristly bit.’
Her brother chuckled. ‘Oh well, at least now you can let all that language guff drain out of the old brainbox.’
‘Certainly not,’ said Twinks. ‘I’m just about to start the third chapter of a novel in it.’
‘In Mitteleuropian?’
‘Yes.’
‘Toad-in-the-hole . . .’ Blotto was very impressed. ‘You know, Twinks, when it comes to brainboxes, you really are the lark’s larynx.’
She smiled, then handed him her dossier. ‘You going to give this to Trumbull, are you?’
‘No, I’ll send it via Grimshaw. No need for us to be involved, is there, Twinks?’
‘No, Blotto. As ever, Inspector Trumbull will have solved the mystery by his own efforts, assisted only by the eagle-eyed Sergeant Knatchbull. That’s how it always works, isn’t it?’
‘Good ticket, Twinks,’ said Blotto.
She grinned and went off to get on with her novel.
When the two policemen arrived at Tawcester Towers, Grimshaw duly handed over the dossier. When they had read through it, they interrogated Zoltan Grittelhoff at very great length. And, by the time they finally arrested him for the murder of Captain Schtoltz at Tawcester Towers, Inspector Trumbull and Sergeant Knatchbull really did believe that they’d solved the case themselves.
As he was leaving, Inspector Trumbull asked Grimshaw whether the Right Honourable Devereux Lyminster might be available for a quick word.
No, he was informed by the butler, his lordship was not available. Blotto was out hunting.