by Simon Brett
But Blotto really didn’t want to get married – and certainly not to ‘the Snitterings Ironing-Board’. This was a gluepot deeper than any of the previous ones whose depths he had plumbed. He had somehow to get her out of his bedroom before anyone saw her there.
Or heard her there. As Blotto knew too well, Laetitia had one of those voices that can talk to relatives in the Colonies without the intervention of a telephone. Murmured sweet nothings from her sounded like the shouts of shipwrecked sailors. And murmured sweet nothings were, unfortunately, the mode of speech she seemed to be favouring that morning.
‘Blotto,’ she said in a little girl voice (which didn’t suit her, because whatever Laetitia Melmont may once have been, she was no longer a little girl), ‘you are so chivalrous.’
‘Er?’
‘Not telling me you are unwell, slipping away quietly, not wanting your illness to spoil my day’s hunting.’
‘Um . . .’
‘But when I heard you had a bad cold, of course I had to rush back here to look after you.’
‘Who told you I had a bad cold?’ Surely Twinks wouldn’t have sold her brother down the plughole?
‘It was one of the Duke’s friends.’ Oh well, typical of that bunch to ruin a day that was going perfectly swimmingly. ‘Tell me,’ Laetitia went on, ‘do you feel really ill?’
Blotto hesitated. His first instinct was to laugh off the idea. He’d only got a cold, after all. But then the thought came to him that serious illness might have something going for it.
‘Oh, I’m sure I’ll pull through.’ The bravery in his voice was let down by a bout of feeble coughing, which he allowed to mutate into a gasping wheeze. ‘If only I could breathe. That’s the sty in the eye when it comes to life, isn’t it? We keep needing to breathe. If we didn’t have to do that, everything’d be all tickey-tockey, wouldn’t it?’
‘And are you having difficulty breathing, Blotto?’
‘Well, a bit, yes.’
‘Are you sure,’ asked Laetitia coquettishly (and ‘coquettish’ suited her precisely as well as ‘winsome’ did), ‘you are not having difficulty breathing because I am so close to you?’
‘Good Lord, no. I can put you right on that. It is just the cold,’ was Blotto’s less than gallant reply. But now she mentioned it, he noticed that Laetitia had got considerably closer to him. From sitting on the edge of the bed she seemed imperceptibly to have shifted to being draped over him like an extra counterpane.
Then he had a brainwave. ‘Actually, I wouldn’t get too close to me if I were you, Laetitia.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘Because this illness I’ve got is very infectious.’
‘How do you know?’
That stumped him. But only for a second. Then in a moment of brilliant improvisation he replied, ‘I know, because just before you came into my room I noticed a spider crawling across my pillow . . . and I breathed on it . . . and it immediately shrivelled up and died. And I really wouldn’t want you to shrivel up and die, Laetitia.’ It was true. He certainly wanted the girl out of his life, but he didn’t wish her any harm. Not of the shrivelling up and dying sort, anyway.
‘Wouldn’t it be rather wonderful,’ Laetitia Melmont trilled loudly, ‘to die of an illness one had caught from the man one loves?’
‘No, it’d be a total waste of gingerbread,’ said Blotto. ‘Bad enough the boddo dying but there’s no need for the filly who loves him to . . .’ He was silent for a moment while he mentally recapitulated Laetitia’s last speech. Then tentatively he asked, ‘What is this about “the man one loves”? Who, for example is “one” in this instance?’
‘I am “one”,’ Laetitia Melmont replied dramatically. ‘Oh, you foolish boy, Blotto. Haven’t you realized yet that I love you?’
‘Well . . . I . . . erm . . .’
‘Is it because you are too humble, Blotto? Is it because you do not think you are worthy of me?’
Sensing a possible escape route, he concurred: ‘Yes, that’s the right ticket. Not worthy of you. Totally wrong. If we got together, I’d just bring you down to my own pathetic level.’
‘No!’ came the magnificent reply. ‘I would raise you to my level, Blotto. I would make something of you.’
‘But I’m quite happy with what I’m currently made of, thank you.’
‘Don’t be so unambitious!’
‘I mean, look, Laetitia, I’m just an ordinary old pineapple like –’
‘Don’t worry, your lack of intelligence will not interfere with the plans I have for you.’
‘And I’m not interested in anything except hunting and cricket.’
‘I will regard it as my duty to inculcate you in the mysteries of the Arts.’
‘The Arts?’ Blotto echoed miserably. Once again he sought the security of his illness. ‘It’s very kind of you, Laetitia,’ he said in a frail voice, his eyes fluttering almost to closure, ‘and I do appreciate you making all these plans for me . . . but they may all be in vain . . . I really am not feeling at all well . . . in fact, I wonder whether I will last the day . . .’ He knew this was laying it on with a butter knife, but he was working towards a new solution that had just come to him. ‘In fact, I think it would be best if I were to get Corky Froggett, our chauffeur, to drive me back to Tawcester Towers as soon as possible. I would like to spend my last hours in those beautiful sylvan surroundings that I know so well.’
‘Blotto,’ Laetitia Melmont announced seriously, ‘if you are really dying . . .’
‘Well, it does feel that way at the moment.’ He was pleased she seemed to be accepting the idea so readily.
‘If you are really dying,’ she repeated, ‘it would be terrible for you to go to your grave without the real love of a woman.’
‘Oh, it’s been all right,’ said Blotto airily. ‘My sister Twinks loves me. And I think the old Mater does . . . in her way.’
‘When I said “the real love of a woman”, I meant not the love of Agape, but the love of Eros.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know the chaps you’re referring to . . .’ The words drained from Blotto’s mouth. He may not have known the individuals concerned, but suddenly he did understand what Laetitia was talking about. And to leave him in no doubt that he’d finally got the point, he observed that she was starting to undo the buttons of her hunting jacket.
Oh, broken biscuits. Religion did not play much of a part in Blotto’s life – he was Church of England, after all – but in this terrible extremity he found himself praying to someone or something to get him out of it.
And that someone or something was clearly a benign divinity. Before Laetitia had reached the lowest button of her jacket, they were both frozen by the sound of a terrible scream issuing from the garden below.
Not even pausing to cover his pyjamas with the decency of a dressing gown, Blotto sprang to the window and looked down.
In the middle of the kitchen garden, spread-eagled on her front in a recently raked bed where the four brick paths met, lay the Dowager Duchess of Melmont. She had been impaled by a pitchfork.
Blotto felt a little guilty. When in future he used prayers to someone or something to get him out of a gluepot, he’d try to do so with a little more discretion. It was as though he had actually prayed for a murder. A considerably less radical distraction to deter Laetitia from disrobing would have done the job. But he couldn’t stop himself from feeling huge relief that the ploy had worked.
4
The Body in the Kitchen Garden
‘Go to your room immediately!’ Blotto commanded Laetitia, who had yet to see the ghastliness that lay below.
‘But –’
‘Go to your room! A crisis has occurred at Snitterings, and dealing with it is going to be man’s work.’
‘Oh, Blotto,’ Laetitia simpered, ‘I do love it when you’re masterful.’ That word ‘love’ again. But he was too preoccupied to worry about it. And at least Laetitia did as she was told and went to her room.
As, throwing on dressing gown and slippers, he hurtled along the corridor, Blotto just had time to register that he’d had a very narrow escape, he’d been a mere batsqueak away from disaster. Hoopee-doopee, no one actually knew that Laetitia had been in his bedroom. He wouldn’t have to marry her after all.
Rushing down the creaking back stairs, he reached the kitchen garden in a matter of seconds. He was the first person there except for the now hysterical tweeny who had discovered the Dowager Duchess of Melmont’s body and whose scream had saved Blotto’s chitterlings. As he moved towards the corpse, other servants began to emerge from the house. Seeing that there was someone from ‘above stairs’ on the scene, they hovered together on the periphery of the action. It wasn’t their place to take any initiative when there was a toff around.
Blotto looked down at the body. There was no doubt that the Dowager Duchess was dead. Nobody had a pitchfork with eighteen-inch tines shoved through them and survived. There was surprisingly little blood visible staining the lilac silk georgette of her dress at the back, but small rivulets of red trickled out from under her body on to the raked earth of the vegetable patch.
But that was not the only red at the scene. On the dome of the Dowager Duchess of Melmont’s dowager’s hump was the imprint of a crimson hand!
Blotto was about to crouch for a closer look at the body when he heard a familiar voice behind him and turned to greet his mother.
The Dowager Duchess of Tawcester looked down at her rival with contempt. ‘Absolutely typical of Pansy. I get a broken hip, so, not to be outdone, she has to go and have this visited on her.’
And she stumped off back towards the house, as fast as her broken hip and walking stick would allow. As she approached the back door, Proops the Snitterings butler intercepted her with appropriate deference. One Dowager Duchess was dead, so he turned immediately to the other for instructions. From long experience, it never occurred to him for a moment that the Duke might have anything useful to contribute to the situation.
‘Your Grace,’ he intoned, ‘is it your wish that the police should be summoned to investigate this crime?’
‘Oh, I suppose they’ll have to be,’ the Dowager Duchess of Tawcester replied pettishly. ‘It’s not as if it’s just a servant who’s been murdered. I suggest that you telephone Inspector Trumbull.’
‘Inspector Trumbull? I am not familiar with him, Your Grace. I don’t believe there is anyone of that name in the Melmontshire Constabulary.’
‘No, of course there isn’t. Inspector Trumbull’s from the Tawcestershire Constabulary.’
‘I believe it is the normal custom, Your Grace,’ Proops hazarded, ‘for the initial investigation into a murder to be undertaken by the police force from the area closest to –’
‘Any murder I’m involved in,’ the Dowager Duchess boomed, ‘is investigated by Inspector Trumbull and Sergeant Knatchbull of the Tawcestershire Constabulary! They understand their role in such proceedings and can be relied upon to be permanently baffled. Telephone them immediately!’
The Snitterings butler bowed. ‘Very good, Your Grace.’ And he watched her totter majestically into the house. Proops then, in the precise same tone with which the Dowager Duchess of Tawcester had diminished him, ordered his staff to stop gawping and get back to their work. Leaving Blotto alone in the kitchen garden.
He looked more closely at the handprint on the Dowager’s hump, and noticed something strange. Its red was different from the colour of the blood that still ran and eddied from beneath the corpse. He sniffed close to the dead Dowager’s back. There was no doubt about it. The mark of the crimson hand had been made in paint.
‘What’s the bizz-buzz, Blotto? Another corpse, I gather?’
He turned with relief – as he had so many times before – at the sound of his sister’s voice. Now Twinks was on the scene, everything would be all right.
‘I thought you were out making life difficult for the foxes,’ he said in puzzlement. She was still dressed in her tenue de chasse.
‘Yes, I was. But when I saw Laetitia had slipped the collar, I came back to rescue you from her grasping talons.’
‘You’re the absolute top of the milk, Twinks.’
‘When I know my brother’s in danger, I come flying to the rescue like a hare on roller skates. Tell me, did Laetitia find you?’ Blotto’s Adam’s apple bobbled awkwardly in his throat. Pity filled his sister’s azure eyes. ‘Tough Gorgonzola, me old bull’s-eye. But you managed to evade the deadly tentacles?’
A pallor crossed Blotto’s face as he twigged just how close he had come to disaster. ‘Only just,’ he croaked. ‘If there hadn’t been a scream from the pipsqueak who found this body . . .’ The full awfulness of what might have happened drained the words from his mouth.
‘Anyway, talking of the body,’ said Twinks, taking a look at it, ‘tough rusk for the old Dowager Duchess, but . . . it’s an investigation, isn’t it? Grandissimo, what?’
A glow suffused not only Blotto’s face, but his entire body. He hadn’t really registered the investigative aspect of the murder. Twinks was always quicker at spotting stuff like that. But now he realized the two of them actually had a case to solve. For the first time his weekend at Snitterings offered a chink of sunlight through the curtains.
He watched with appropriate deference as his sister inspected the crime scene. There was an established demarcation of duties in all their investigations. Anything that involved derring-do, reckless bravery or physical confrontation – that was Blotto’s half of the Camembert. Anything that involved observation, deductive skill . . . in a word, brainwork . . . then Twinks took up the baton.
She started with a close examination of the body. Aware of the basic rules of Scene of Crime procedure, she did not touch the defunct Dowager Duchess, but she went as close as she dared, allowing all of her senses to make their observations.
‘Well, the first thing that’s obvious, Blotto me old sideboard, is that the old girl hasn’t been dead long.’ She didn’t give him a chance to ask his customary ‘How do you know that, Twinks?’, but went straight on. ‘The blood flow’s stopping now, but I’d say she was coffinated within the last half-hour. Which of course means . . .?’ Again she didn’t wait for her brother to supply an answer. Time was of the essence. ‘It means that the stencher who did this can’t have got far off the old prems, can he?’
‘Or she,’ said Blotto, knowing how much his sister believed in fair biddles amongst murderers of either gender.
‘“Or she” – good ticket, Blotto.’ He glowed in the beam of his sister’s approbation. ‘Now the other fruity crumb about this murder is that we’ve got a limited number of suspects.’
‘Have we?’ Blotto’s glow was quickly extinguished. It never took long for him to get left behind when Twinks’s brain was really sparking.
‘Think about it. Where are most of the boddos who’re staying at Snitterings this weekend?’
Blotto glowed again. ‘Out hunting.’
‘Top ticket, Blotto, you’ve won the coconut!’
‘And it’s also dashed convenient, because, with all our sort of people out in the field, it means this ghastly crime must’ve been committed by someone below stairs . . . which is always rather a relief.’
‘Unless, of course, our old Mater did it.’
Blotto looked at his sister aghast. ‘You don’t really think –’
‘Of course I don’t, you Grade A poodle. I was only joking.’ Relief flooded Blotto’s countenance as Twinks went on: ‘Because I was out with the tally-hoes, I know for a fact that the only person to leave the hunt and return to Snitterings was Laetitia Melmont. Now we know she didn’t kill her mother . . .’
‘Do we, though?’ asked her brother. ‘You read some pretty whiffy stuff in the Sunday papers about that sort of thing. Mothers and daughters can brush each other’s fur the wrong way. Very deep rivalry, according to that German woodlouse Frood.’
‘I think you mean Freud, Blotto. And he’s
Austrian.’
‘Maybe, but –’
‘Anyway, the reason we know Laetitia Melmont didn’t kill her mother is that she has an alibi.’
‘Does she?’
‘She was with you, Blotto.’ Twinks would never show anything as extreme as exasperation to her brother, but there was a slight edge in her voice.
‘Oh yes.’ He nodded blithely. But his reassurance was short-lived. ‘Rodents, though, suppose that comes out in the course of the investigation . . .? I’ll be in a real gluepot if we have to tell the world Laetitia was in my bedroom. I won’t be able to avoid marrying her then, will I?’
A furrow spoiled his sister’s perfect brow. ‘No, you’re right there, Blotto me old cabbage. That would be a real rat in the larder.’ But Twinks was never cast down for long. She could always find a solution to every problem. ‘Don’t go and pull on your worry-boots, though. We’ll see to it that Laetitia’s whereabouts are kept under the dustbin lid. And the best way to do that is to find out who actually killed the Dowager Duchess. When we can announce that little detail, nobody’ll give a half-slice of burnt toast for other people’s alibis.’
‘Good ticket,’ said Blotto, relieved. ‘So who do you think did it, Twinks me old biscuit barrel?’
‘Well, I’m not quite in the home straight yet, but I’m sure it won’t take me long to string the flag up.’ Her eyes moved back to the dead Dowager Duchess. ‘Now I must really concentrate on this . . .’
Blotto was, as ever, reverently silent while he watched his sister’s clue-gathering. Even in her tenue de chasse she carried her reticule, in which, amongst many other things, was her basic Scene of Crime kit. A magnifying glass, a miniature camera, a tape measure, tweezers, cotton wool and a pack of small brown envelopes to put the evidence in.
Twinks started with the raked earth of the vegetable bed in which the Dowager Duchess of Melmont lay. She inspected the scuffled marks near the edge with her magnifying glass and took a couple of photographs. She measured the length of the pitchfork handle and its angle to the horizontal. Then she went across to the far side of the bed and showed interest in some very small scratch-marks. Satisfied with what she had found there, she next inspected the four brick paths that radiated out from the central bed, paying particular attention to the one that led back to the house. Every now and then she would crouch down to scrutinize something with her magnifying glass before photographing what she had found.
