by Simon Brett
Eventually she stopped by the arched doorway of the kitchen garden. ‘Blotto me old trouser button, I think I’m getting somewhere.’
‘You know who did it?’ her brother asked eagerly.
Twinks raised a delicate hand in a gesture of remonstrance. ‘Don’t bash before the bully-off, Blotto. Give me a chance. But what I do know is that whoever coffinated the Dowager Duchess, he – or she – came in through this archway and left by the same route.’
‘Ah.’ Blotto tried to keep disappointment out of his voice. He really had hoped for a bit more from his sister’s deductive skills. ‘What I want to know,’ he went on, ‘is why the victim was here in the first place. Dowager Duchesses don’t normally frequent kitchen gardens, do they?’
‘Well, that I can answer for you,’ said Twinks. ‘Come and have a look at this.’ She led her brother to the far side of the vegetable bed and pointed down to the scratch-marks in the raked soil. ‘What do you make of those, Blotto?’
‘Some small animal?’ he conjectured. ‘A rabbit?’
‘No, rabbit’s feet have five toes. The marks here show four pads and four nails . . .’
‘Do they? Toad-in-the-hole!’ murmured Blotto, uncertain.
‘. . . which means they are marks left by a dog. Now who’s got a dog here at Snitterings?’
The clouds cleared from his brow. ‘The Dowager Duchess! That ghastly little reptile called Clutterbuck. I see. So the old fruitcake decided to take her dog for a walk in the kitchen garden.’
‘No, she never walks the dog. She always carries it. Anyway, if you take a look at these marks in the soil, the Peke appears to have been dragged along.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means, Blotto, that Clutterbuck was seized from the Dowager Duchess, put on a lead and dragged down here.’
‘But why would anyone want to do that?’
‘Because the old vulture loved that dog like a pike loves troutlings. If Clutterbuck was taken away from her, she’d go anywhere to find him. Even into the kitchen garden.’
‘Where her murderer awaited her.’
‘Give that pony a rosette!’
‘So who actually –?’
But before Blotto could reiterate the whole whodunit question, Twinks had grabbed him by the hand and was leading him away from the corpse. ‘For the next part of our investigation, me old trombone, we need to go to the house and outbuildings. Ah, look!’
She pointed to the path in front of them. A tiny dot of crimson showed on the duller red of the bricks. ‘Paint, Blotto me old gumdrop! A drop of paint or I’m an Apache Dancer! The coffinator came this way!’
5
Twinks Points the Finger
There were a few other drops of red paint outside the kitchen garden, and Twinks, with Blotto in tow, had no difficulty in following them across to the Snitterings outbuildings at the back of the house. Half of the old stables had been converted into garages. In one of them the Tawcester Towers Rolls-Royce gleamed from Corky Froggett’s ministrations. Of the chauffeur himself there was no sign, though his black jacket still hung from a nail on the garage door-frame, so he couldn’t be that far away.
Since the majority of the weekend guests were off hunting, almost all of the Snitterings cars were in their allocated places. There was the usual mix of Rolls-Royces, Bentleys and Hispano-Suizas, as well as a handful of shooting brakes. Only the garage next door to the Snitterings Rolls-Royce was empty.
And it was there that the trail of paint spots led.
Twinks stopped to examine the tyre tracks leading away from the garage. ‘I’d put my last shred of laddered silk stocking on the fact that the vehicle which has driven out of here is an old Napier shooting brake. From the depth of the indentations, I’d say there was only one person in it . . . and from the dust that has settled back into the tracks he didn’t leave more than an hour and seventeen minutes ago.’
Blotto listened to his sister with his customary blank admiration. Then she leapt forward to rootle around in the dusty clutter at the back of the garage.
‘What are you looking for, old pineapple?’ he asked, as he moved across to make faces at himself in the chrome of the Rolls-Royce that gleamed from Corky Froggett’s polishing. Then he noticed a couple of unusual objects lying on the floor by the car. He picked up the one that looked like an oversized sink-plunger, and scrutinized it.
‘I’m looking for whatever it was that the murdy coffinator was carrying that dripped red paint,’ his sister replied.
‘Any idea what kind of thing it might be?’
‘If I’m right, it’s a kind of large rubber stamp in the shape of a hand.’
‘Like this?’ asked Blotto, appearing round the corner of the empty garage door.
Twinks looked up from her dusty searches. ‘Exactly like that!’ She inspected the object that Blotto held out to her. At the end of a three-foot wooden handle was a metal disc, to which was glued the outline of a hand. Its rubber showed traces of red paint. ‘Now all we need to find is the ink-pad – or perhaps I should say the paint-pad – that the stencher used to prime the thing.’
‘Oh, I think I could show you that too.’ Nonchalantly, enjoying the rare experience of taking the lead in one of their investigations, Blotto ushered his sister to the adjacent garage. With pride, he pointed down to a shallow metal dish containing a couple of inches of red paint.
‘Splendissimo!’ shrieked Twinks, and her brother felt positively fizzulated.
Then he noticed that, presumably when the dish had been placed down on the floor, a tiny amount of red paint had splashed up on to the Rolls-Royce’s back mudguard. ‘Corky’s going to be pretty vinegared off about that,’ he observed. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and went across to wipe off the droplet. But it had already set hard. ‘He’ll be more than vinegared off. He’ll be absolutely fumacious about it.’
Their attention was drawn to the sound of muffled yapping. Leaping up on the back seat of the Rolls-Royce and only intermittently visible due to his size, a very disgruntled Clutterbuck was assaulting the window. Round his neck was an improvised lead of coarse rope.
‘We’d better let the little slug out, I suppose,’ said Twinks. When Blotto had effected that, she continued, ‘We’ll take him indoors, then Proops can find someone to look after him.’
Tickey-tockey!’ As Blotto took a firm hold on the dog’s rope, he was rewarded by a meaty bite into his ankle, exposed between pyjama and bedroom slipper. ‘You little . . . Harrovian!’ he hissed, unable to think of a worse insult.
Below stairs there was a marked reluctance to take over the guardianship of Clutterbuck. It became clear that he was generally loathed, and the staff found much riper and less decorous descriptions of the creature than Blotto had. While the Dowager Duchess of Melmont had been alive, they’d had to keep their opinions to themselves. With their mistress out of the way, they showed no such inhibitions. Eventually Proops delegated a housemaid who’d recently allowed her feather duster to knock over a priceless Ming vase to look after the dog. It was part of her punishment.
With that task completed, the butler led Blotto and Twinks into his pantry. ‘You said you wished to ask me some questions, milady.’
‘Yes, Proops. It’s about the murder of the Dowager Duchess.’
‘Really? Well, I don’t believe there is anything else that needs to be done at this juncture. All customary procedures have been followed. Your mother has called in her own police investigators from Tawcestershire . . .’
‘Inspector Trumbull and Sergeant Knatchbull,’ Blotto supplied.
‘Those were the names she mentioned, yes, milord. So the proper authorities have been informed about the crime. All we have to do is wait. Though I would assume that, long before the police have arrived, the case will have been solved by the know-it-all amateur sleuth, Mr Troubadour Bligh, who is conveniently staying here at Snitterings for the weekend. That is what usually happens.’
‘Ah, but suppose the
re were another know-it-all amateur sleuth staying here at Snitterings for the weekend . . .?’
Twinks twinkled her azure eyes at Proops. Though trained as a butler never to show more extreme reaction to anything than a phlegmatically raised eyebrow, he was no more immune to her charms than the rest of his gender. ‘And who might that person be?’ he asked haltingly.
‘Little me,’ replied Twinks. ‘And to complete my investigation, I do need a bit of information from you, Proops.’
The butler was patently thrilled by the intimate use of his surname. (He must once have had a first name, but in the course of long service even he had forgotten it). A tremor ran through both of his eyebrows at the same time.
‘Anything I can do to help, milady.’
‘Do you know precisely where all your staff are at this moment, Proops?’
‘My own staff, yes. I cannot account for all the grooms and coachmen who are probably with the hunting party. Nor the gardeners, though presumably they’re off gardening somewhere. Anyway, such people answer to the estate manager, not me. Of my own “below stairs” staff, however, I can account for every one.’
‘So if I asked you to find any single member of your staff, you could do it immediately?’
‘A matter of moments, milady.’
‘I am looking,’ Twinks trilled, fully aware of the effect she was having on the butler, ‘for a young man of about six foot four inches in height. He has dark hair which he wears rather longer than most young men, and he walks with a slight limp, probably due to a recent injury to his left foot.’
‘There is only one member of my staff who fits that description, milady. One of the younger footmen. His name is Will Tyler.’
‘Would it be possible for you to bring him here to talk to me?’ Twinks cooed.
‘Of course. As I say, a matter of moments, milady.’ And the butler bustled out of his pantry, as determined as any knight errant to do doughty deeds for his damsel.
‘Well, Twinks,’ observed Blotto, ‘that’s another man you’ve got dangling on your charm bracelet.’
His sister giggled. She didn’t even bother to make the giggle self-deprecating. Having vacuumed the breath out of so many of them, she knew the power she had over men.
‘Incidentally,’ Blotto went on, ‘how did you know all that stuff about the stencher who coffinated the Dowager Duchess? Did you actually see the running sore in action?’
‘No, of course not. I deduced it.’
‘How?’
‘It was terribly simple. The angle that the pitchfork was shoved into the old fruitcake’s back told me how tall he was. Stuck on the rope he’d used as a lead for Clutterbuck was a long dark hair which smelled of that nasty cheap brilliantine favoured by the oikish classes. And the uneven footprints on the edge of the vegetable bed told me about his foot injury. Whole thing was easy as a housemaid’s virtue, Blotters.’
Her brother blushed. Twinks could be quite racy at times. But his embarrassment was short-lived, as a very concerned-looking Proops bustled into his pantry, followed by an equally concerned-looking housekeeper.
‘Will Tyler is not on the premises,’ the butler announced.
‘No,’ said Twinks coolly. ‘He left Snitterings . . .’ She consulted her watch. ‘. . . an hour and fifty-three minutes ago. Driving an old Napier shooting brake.’
‘But why would he do that, milady?’
‘Because . . .’ She paused for maximum effect. ‘. . . Will Tyler had just murdered the Dowager Duchess of Melmont.’
Even though there was no perpetrator present to point at, Twinks’s finger moved up by habit into an accusatory position.
6
A Denouement in the Library
And because he entered Proops’s pantry at that precise moment, Troubadour Bligh found that Twinks’s finger was pointing at him. ‘Ooh, what do you think I’ve done wrong then, you little minx?’ he asked in his shrill feminine voice.
Now Blotto didn’t normally stand on ceremony. He was the last person to bother about whether anyone called him ‘milord’ or not. But he did find his bristles bristling at a common know-it-all polymathic amateur sleuth calling his sister a ‘little minx’. Bligh certainly didn’t know her well enough to exercise that kind of familiarity. Blotto was about to remonstrate, but then he caught the negative instruction in his sister’s eye.
‘I doubt that you have done anything wrong, Mr Bligh,’ said Twinks.
‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that,’ the know-it-all polymathic amateur sleuth responded archly. ‘Anyway, I’m here on important business. The Dowager Duchess has been murdered, and I’m about to deduce whodunit. I don’t come on country house weekend parties just for the fun of it, you know.’
‘Well, actually you’re a bit late on the deducing whodunit routine, because . . .’ Again Blotto caught his sister’s eye and his words trickled away.
‘I don’t think this one’ll take long,’ Troubadour Bligh announced confidently. ‘Proops, have the hunting party returned yet?’
‘Not quite, but I can hear their horns approaching. I would have thought they would be back in the house within the next half-hour, sir.’
‘Very good. That gives me plenty of time to conduct my investigation.’ The know-it-all polymathic amateur sleuth consulted the watch that dangled rather foppishly from a chain in his waistcoat pocket. ‘Would you see to it that all the guests are assembled in the library at six o’clock this evening?’
The butler inclined his head. ‘Of course, sir.’
‘And,’ Troubadour Bligh continued grandly, ‘could you see that all of the below stairs staff are also there as well?’
Proops could not prevent an indrawn breath before replying evenly, ‘Of course, sir.’ He knew that a lot of the below stairs staff had never ventured into that aristocratic sanctum. Most of them wouldn’t have recognized a library if it had jumped up and bitten them on the shin.
Blotto had been at enough of these everyone-gathered-in-the-library occasions at country house weekends to know the form. Even when Twinks, something of an innovator in such time-honoured routines, was the amateur sleuth doing the finger-pointing, she still started with the traditional formula of words.
And so, sure enough, did Troubadour Bligh. ‘You may be wondering why I’ve asked you here . . .’ he began.
Since everyone present knew the answer, no one bothered to respond. They made up a strange party. Except in the event of a patronizing moment at Christmas or a house fire, ‘above stairs’ and ‘below stairs’ never mixed like this, and the two factions regarded each other with considerable suspicion. There was no intermingling of them in the library. On one side sat the toffs, on the other stood the common people.
Needless to say, seated in a leather-covered throne-like chair, Blotto and Twinks’s mother was in charge of proceedings. With one Dowager Duchess permanently off the scene, it was naturally assumed that another of that doughty breed would take over the reins. Again no one considered for a moment the possibility of the Duke of Melmont having any role in the proceedings.
He stood, looking rather uncomfortable, surrounded by his Old Harrovian chums. Neither he nor his sister Laetitia had shown any evidence of grief at their mother’s demise. Whether this was because their upper lips had been stiffened rigid by their upbringing, or because neither of them had ever liked the old fruitbat, was impossible to judge.
Some of the younger members of the below stairs contingent – tweenies, scullery maids and so on – were awestruck by their unfamiliar surroundings. They looked with bewilderment at the shelves which covered all of the room’s walls, wondering what on earth all those leather-bound objects on them were. Some of the Duke’s Old Harrovians demonstrated the same ignorance.
Grinning across at Corky Froggett, who stood, as ever, at attention in his black uniform, Blotto observed that there was someone else trying to catch the chauffeur’s eye. One of the cooks, a splendidly upholstered woman in her early thirties, seemed anxious to make eye
contact, but Corky studiously avoided her gaze.
Blotto did not, however, have time to think further about this oddity as Troubadour Bligh, clapping his hands effetely for attention, said, ‘Your Grace, Your Other Grace, Milord, Milady, Ladies, Gentlemen and Members of the Lower Orders, we are here in this library following the mean and cowardly murder of the Dowager Duchess of Melmont. The crime is rendered all the more despicable by the fact that it took place here at Snitterings, the Dowager Duchess’s own home, where she was entertaining a party of her friends and equals for the weekend.
‘Now the nature of the offence is such that no one could imagine that it could have been committed by a member of the upper classes, and fortunately in this case all of the people who fit that description are excluded from suspicion by the fact that they were out hunting at the time the murder took place. They all have alibis.’ He looked around the library. ‘I am correct in making that assumption, am I not?’
Blotto felt he had to say something. ‘Erm, in fact I hadn’t joined the other boddos out in the field. Laid up with a bit of a cold, don’t you know?’
‘Very good, milord,’ said Troubadour Bligh. ‘And you were in fact the first person to discover the body.’
‘Well, one of the tweenies –’
‘I did say “person”, milord. I don’t believe that tweenies come within the definition of that word.’
‘No, of course not.’
‘So, milord, you were the only member of the weekend party to stay here while everyone else went hunting?’
‘Well . . .’ Blotto, naturally as straight as a billiard cue, was about to mention Laetitia’s presence in the house at the relevant time, but he caught a fierce look from his sister’s azure eyes and thought better of the idea.
