by Simon Brett
So, the conversation of Barmy Evans was a bit of a revelation to him. Not a revelation in the sense of something that would change his way of thinking (nothing would do that), but a revelation that the world could contain pot-brained pineapples who might actually believe the kind of meringue Barmy spouted out.
‘The fact that a toff like you thinks he can take advantage of a girl like Dolly Diller is typical of the corrupt values what we see too much of in this country.’
‘I didn’t “take advantage” of her,’ protested Blotto. ‘I just thought she was a bit of a breathsapper, and it’d be creamy éclair to share nosebags with her. I didn’t know I was treading on your private bit of lawn. Otherwise I would have taken off my golf shoes.’
‘Well, you just be careful. Like I say, Dolly Diller’s under my protection, and nobody messes with her. One of the other girls in the revue got uppity with Dolly – girl got sent a bullet to show she was treading on dangerous ground. She backed off; Dolly hasn’t had any more trouble from her.’
Blotto knew he was talking about Frou-Frou Gavotte, but didn’t have time to make any comment, as Barmy Evans went on, ‘You toffs have never thought about other people, never noticed anyone except for your own inbred chinless relatives. Well, that’s all going to change! The French got things right.’
‘What, you mean by having so many kinds of cheese?’
‘No. And the Russkies have got it right, and all.’
‘What, by having so many kinds of vodka?’
‘No! By having blooming revolutions! String up the aristos! Get them to the guillotine! Line them up against the walls and shout “Fire!”.’
‘Yes, Mr Evans, I know things like that have happened in France and Russia, but the lumps of toadspawn there are foreign, so what do you expect? That kind of wocky behaviour’s never happened in the good old GB.’
‘No? You seem to be forgetting we did once shorten one of our Kings by a head.’
‘Yes.’ Blotto had retained just about enough from what the history beaks had taught him at Eton to say, ‘But it didn’t catch on. We pretty soon had another King zapping back on to the throne. And that’s the track, I’m glad to say, we’ve been pongling along ever since.’
‘Well, it’s all about to change.’
Blotto chuckled. ‘Sorry, me old thimble, change is one of the things we just don’t do in England.’
‘You take my word for it. Let me tell you, I have built up the most ruthlessly efficient criminal network London has ever seen.’
It seemed churlish not to offer some kind of compliment, so Blotto said, ‘Give that pony a rosette.’
‘And so far,’ Barmy Evans went on, ‘the aim of my enterprise has been just to make money. Well, I’ve got enough money now. Too much, to be frank.’
‘So, what? Are you going to give some of the old jingle-jangle back to the poor pineapples you snaffled it from?’
‘No, of course I’m blooming not! I’m going to invest in building a fairer society!’
‘Sounds a jolly good wheeze,’ said Blotto heartily. ‘So long as you make sure the aristocracy are still in charge, you won’t put an edge of a toenail wrong.’
‘The aristocracy will not still be in charge!’ Barmy Evans roared with sudden fury. He crossed to a desk in the corner of the room, rolled down the lid, and locked it. ‘In there are my master plans. The aristocracy don’t know what’s about to hit them. I am already working to weaken their hold on power.’
‘How? Oh, I see. You’re involved in this devious frolic of Everard Stoop and Pierre Labouze, aren’t you? Getting aristocrats to twiddle the old reef-knot with showgirls, and diluting the breeding stock that way. Won’t work, I’m afraid. English aristocracy’s been self-diluting ever since Will the Conk. Marrying unsuitable females, running strings of mistresses, sprogs the wrong side of the blanket . . . it’s all happened many times before. Strengthened the spoffing stock, I’d say, rather than diluting it. You won’t roll up the map of the aristocracy that way.’
‘Never mind that.’ Barmy Evans raised his gun, until it pointed straight at Blotto’s chest. ‘My more immediate concern is how I’m going to deal with you.’
Detective Inspector Craig Dewar had suggested they meet in a small all-night café near Piccadilly Circus. It only had one entrance, and the minute Twinks walked through the door, she knew she had stepped into a trap.
Because the man who greeted her, and identified himself as the Inspector, only came up to her shoulder. She knew that there was a minimum height requirement of five foot ten inches for English policemen, so the idea that the short man in front of her had any connection to Scotland Yard was laughable.
He had the nerve to introduce himself as ‘Detective Inspector Craig Dewar’.
‘Puddledash!’ said Twinks. ‘You’re no more a policeman than I am. You just pretended to be a cop, so that my brother would tell you how things were going in our investigation.’
The little man grinned. ‘Yes, and that’s exactly what he did. Very obliging chap, your brother.’ He stepped forward. ‘And now I think it’s time that you joined him.’
Twinks turned to rush from the café, but outside, waiting for her, were two men in black overcoats, with black hats pulled down over their eyes. Though she carried a variety of weapons in her sequinned reticule, Twinks made no attempt to evade capture. Like Blotto before her, she reckoned being abducted would get her closer to the villains she was after. She made no fuss about getting into a black saloon with tinted windows, along with the two men in black and the false Inspector Dewar.
17
To Catch an Earl
It was a phone call that had got Blotto off the hook. Just as it looked as though Barmy Evans was about to shoot him, the villain had been interrupted by the ringing from the hall. Though Blotto didn’t know, the call was from the man he knew as Detective Inspector Craig Dewar, who was announcing that he’d captured Twinks, and asking his boss what to do with her.
Barmy Evans told his subordinate to bring their latest captive to the house where he was holding Blotto and Whiffler. He would deal with all three of them together in the morning.
The result of this was that, sometime during the night, Blotto woke up to find his sister in the same room as him, handcuffed to the middle of the same radiator. He couldn’t have been happier.
‘It’s heaven on a pickle-fork to see you, Twinks me old nail-file,’ he enthused.
‘Yes, Blotto me old back-scratcher. The fact remains, though, that we are in something of a fumacious treacletin.’ Her customarily sunny mood had been shadowed by what Professor Erasmus Holofernes had told her about the full extent of Barmy Evans’s villainy.
‘Oh, come on, tickle up your mustard, sis! Unarmed, chained to a radiator, in the hands of a homicidal lunatic with a gun and a battalion of men in black armed to the teeth – those are the kind of odds we Lyminsters relish!’
‘Tickey-Tockey,’ said Twinks, though without the vim she usually put into a ‘Tickey-Tockey’.
‘Well, I’m rolling on camomile lawns,’ said Blotto. ‘Now we’re both here, nobody can defeat us. You and I, Twinks, we could take on the hordes of Genghis Corn.’
‘Khan, I think,’ suggested Twinks.
‘Whoever. You know the boddo I mean.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I’m going to shut the odd eye. So that I’m ready for whatever tomorrow’s first bird-burp will bring.’
And Blotto went straight to sleep.
His sister, however, lay awake for quite a long time. Planning how to defeat the greatest evil on earth.
The Reverend Enge operated out of a small church in the City of London, called St Peter-Under-the-Counter. It was there that he conducted the aristocrat-to-showgirl weddings which proved such a lucrative sideline for Everard Stoop and Pierre Labouze. He also officiated at funerals, of the kind at which the mourners did not wish to be publicly seen. Some of these might proceed in the absence of the deceased (in the event, say, that the de
arly departed had ended his life in the Thames, attached to a barrel of cement). But they were all done according to the dictates of the Book of Common Prayer.
There were other services, ones not involving prayer books, that the Reverend Enge provided in St Peter-Under-the-Counter. Behind the altar, for example, was one of the best-stocked armouries in London. And the niche in which a statue of St Peter stood, blessing his flock, also contained a large percentage of the illegal drugs available in the metropolitan area. At Communion in St Peter-Under-the-Counter, rather than wafers, many of the faithful were offered small envelopes of white powder.
The Reverend Enge was one of those vicars who believed that his ministry should centre on the community, and, in his case, it was the criminal community.
So it was no surprise that the venue was St Peter-Under-the-Counter, early the following morning, where he briefed his men in black about the forthcoming abduction of the Earl of Hartlepool. There were, incidentally, more men in black than the two who had abducted and guarded Whiffler Tortington. Barmy Evans commanded a nationwide army of such villains.
Needless to say, the Reverend Enge had inside knowledge about their quarry’s movements during the day ahead. Barmy Evans paid informants in all the major London gentlemen’s clubs, who provided him with much useful dirt about the doings of the hated aristocracy.
So the aspiring abductors knew that that day the Earl of Hartlepool would be visiting his Jermyn Street pipe-maker to restock with matches for his model of Little Tickling. He would next go to his tailor in Savile Row to be measured for a new morning suit to wear at his forthcoming wedding to Twinks. After that, he had a table booked at Rules for lunch with the Countess of Lytham St Annes. And his chauffeur would then drive him back to Little Tickling in the Rolls-Royce.
Except, of course, the villains in St Peter-Under-the-Counter would see to it that the Earl’s schedule was never completed. The men in black took idle bets with each other as to how far through his itinerary the Earl would get before he was abducted. The general view was that he wouldn’t make it past Jermyn Street.
The Earl of Hartlepool could not fault the breakfast served that Saturday morning in the Biddles dining room, but he felt restless. His trip to London had been successful. He had got the EGGS committee to set up a subcommittee about the definition of the word ‘gun’. He had successfully negotiated with the Dowager Duchess of Tawcester about his marrying her daughter. The only other task he’d set himself before he left Little Tickling was to replenish his stocks of matches in the arcade off Jermyn Street.
So he now rather regretted the appointment he’d made with his tailor and the luncheon engagement at Rules with the Countess of Lytham St Annes. All he wanted to do was to get back to Little Tickling as soon as possible, and start gluing matchsticks on to the vaulted roof of the Winter Ballroom.
Just around the time that the Earl of Hartlepool was settling down to his breakfast at Biddles, in the anonymous prison house, two silent men in black brought Whiffler Tortington back into the room to join Blotto and Twinks. They re-handcuffed him to the unoccupied end of the radiator.
The breakfast on offer there was nothing like the one the Earl was enjoying. On a bench laid parallel to the radiator were placed three bowls of tepid porridge. In their handcuffed state, the only way the prisoners could eat was by kneeling and slurping up the food like animals. Twinks was far too sophisticated a creature to descend to such behaviour. Blotto and Whiffler, however, both blessed with hearty appetites, suffered from no such inhibitions. Having wolfed down their own portions, they, with Twinks’s permission, took alternate slurps to wolf down hers.
‘Now,’ she said, when their noisy eating had finished, ‘we must focus the brainboxes on how we’re going to get out of this swamphole.’
Blotto looked at her expectantly. Long experience had taught him that his sister was only being polite. When she used the plural word ‘brainboxes’, she didn’t include his. Nor in this instance, he reckoned, was she expecting a lot from Whiffler’s.
‘The first thing to do,’ Twinks went on, ‘is to get out of these handcuffs.’
‘Easier said than done.’ Whiffler groaned. ‘I’ve spent the night trying to work my way out of them and got nothing for my pains except more pain. My wrists are shredded. The cuffs’re as tight as a nun’s drawers.’
‘Oh, we can get out of them as easy as raspberries,’ said Twinks airily.
‘Well, then let’s get out of them!’ cried Whiffler in desperation.
‘No rush,’ said Twinks. ‘The more important question is: what do we do once we’ve got out of them?’
‘We depart this murdy place,’ said Blotto, ‘find Corky Froggett and the Lag and zap back to Tawcester Towers, like hares on roller skates.’
‘And I,’ said Whiffler, his anguish giving way to sentimentality, ‘find Frou-Frou Gavotte, and marry her as quick as a lizard’s lick.’
‘No, we don’t do either of those things,’ said Twinks. ‘First, we have to foil the horracious plot which that lump of toadspawn Barmy Evans is about to inflict on the civilised world.’
‘What is his plot?’ asked Blotto.
So Twinks told them. She repeated every ghastly detail that Professor Erasmus Holofernes had revealed to her. Both of her listeners were so appalled that they were momentarily deprived of speech.
‘You see,’ Twinks concluded, ‘that’s the kind of Grade Z stencher we’re up against. We can’t think of getting back to Tawcester Towers – or getting married – until we’ve put some permanent chocks in his cogwheel, can we?’
‘No, by Denzil!’ said Blotto enthusiastically.
‘No,’ said Whiffler, with less enthusiasm.
‘If only we knew precisely how Barmy Evans was going to start his campaign of evil . . .’
‘Yes, that would be a handy handle,’ Blotto agreed.
Further discussion was suspended by the entrance into the room of their two guards. One man in black turned to the other and said, ‘See, they are talking. Just like the boss said they would be.’
‘He said “plotting”.’
‘Right. And he doesn’t want them plotting.’
‘Which is why he wants us to sit in here with them.’
It was a long, slow morning. Twinks tried to make conversation with the guards but didn’t get any change out of them. And the three prisoners couldn’t really discuss their escape plans with the men in black there. Whiffler daydreamed of Frou-Frou Gavotte, and Blotto tried to put the dates of his first-class cricket centuries in order.
Twinks did have a variety of plans to ensure their release – she had long since worked out how to get away from the guards – but she didn’t want to implement them yet. She wanted to wait until Barmy Evans was there. Because she was absolutely certain that, sooner or later, he would be.
Like a lot of inordinately wealthy people, the Earl of Hartlepool was constantly in fear of chicanery. He had been known to measure the amount of space in the top of milk bottles to ensure that he wasn’t being short-changed. And he brought this same level of paranoid caution to the business of buying matches.
His attitude in such matters was more complex than simple meanness. Had the price of the goods been his main priority, he could have bought his matches considerably cheaper at the average street-corner tobacconist. But though the Earl insisted on paying a Jermyn Street pipe-maker’s prices, he remained wary of their cheating him.
The staff of that respectable establishment were well used to his little ways and, given the size of his regular orders, prepared to indulge them. Most of their out-of-town customers would send letters detailing their requirements. A few of the more daringly modern of them would order by telephone. But they knew that the Earl of Hartlepool would always conduct his business in person.
And his regular orders were so large that they had to increase their stock considerably when he announced that he would be paying them a visit.
Once the proprietor of the pipe-maker had discov
ered the purpose to which the noble Earl was putting his purchases and, since the volume of boxes had to be ordered specially, he had put to the customer the suggestion that the matchsticks could be delivered without flammable tips, thus saving him the trouble of cutting those off before gluing the headless sticks in place on his model.
The reaction this proposal received was as incandescent as the flare of one of their overpriced matches. The proprietor was told in no uncertain – in fact, extremely certain – terms to mind his own spoffing business. For the Earl, cutting the head off each individual match was a part of his creative ritual. Woe betide the person who tried to tell him how to make his own model.
The resulting brouhaha nearly saw the end of the commercial relationship between Jermyn Street and Little Tickling. It took a grovelling letter from the company’s Managing Director and a gratis delivery of the next order of matches to stroke the ruffled feathers back into place. And it did nothing to diminish the Earl’s suspicions of his supplier.
In anticipation of his arrival at the pipe-maker in the arcade off Jermyn Street, the order of matchboxes had been piled up on one of the counters. Since there were a thousand of them, the height of the stack was considerable.
The proprietor greeted his noble customer fulsomely and stood back to watch the routine which invariably ensued. The Earl would begin by counting the number of boxes. Though he always threatened that he would do this individually, box by box, every time he ended up multiplying the numbers visible on the three sides of the cube.
He was less prepared, however, to take the contents of each box on trust. They bore on the outside the legend: ‘Average Contents 48’, and he had, after the headless-match-suggestion debacle, proposed to open every box to check he wasn’t being diddled. Even now, he never opened fewer than five boxes to estimate the accuracy of this claim. Then, on the back of an envelope, he would work out whether the average actually did come to forty-eight.