by Simon Brett
Their spines didn’t make pretty reading for someone of her upbringing. Most of the bindings were red, and so were the contents. Das Kapital. The Communist Manifesto. Amongst these famous ones were other less familiar titles: Fair Shares for All, Robespierre Was Right, An End to Privilege, Socialism for Boys and Off With Their Heads: The Plain Man’s Guide to the Aristocracy. Twinks wondered how the Dowager Duchess of Melmont had not known about the serpent she was nurturing in the bosom of her household. How dared Will Tyler display his works of pernicious ideology so openly? What an absolute stencher he must be.
But when she reflected, she realized how safe he had been. He could have filled his bedroom with bomb-making paraphernalia and none of his intended victims would have been any the wiser. His security was guaranteed by the huge divide there existed between below and above stairs.
Having checked out the books, Twinks turned her attention to the rest of the room, though with no great expectation of finding anything. Taking a deep breath, she drew back the grubby covers of the bed and lifted the mattress. Ends of straw escaping the stained ticking scratched at her elegant hands, but Twinks didn’t allow that to hinder her search. Feeling along every inch of the mattress, she checked whether it had been used as a hiding place, but found nothing. She was about to replace the bedding when her eye caught a glimpse of a narrow cylinder protruding from the slats which would normally be covered by the mattress.
Twinks pulled the object from its cranny and scrutinized it. Though darkened and discoloured by much use, she could identify as ivory the foot-long stem to which what looked like a ceramic doorknob had been attached some three inches from the end. Seeing the hole in the top of this addition, Twinks knew immediately what the object she held was. And a sniff from her delicate nostrils confirmed instantly what the pipe has been used for.
Putting her find to one side, Twinks drew the bedding across the palliasse and turned to check through the pockets of Will Tyler’s noisome uniform. Her inspection revealed nothing but a torn scrap of paper on which someone had scrawled in pencil the words:
HAI
LEE’S.
Perhaps more significant, though, was what was printed across the top of the page. Though the tear had removed three of them, one finger and a thumb still remained. They came from the miniaturized imprint of a crimson hand.
Twinks realized that her investigation needed specialized assistance.
The County of Melmontshire abuts Oxfordshire and there was a good train service from the local station to the city of dreaming spires. Though she could easily have arranged for one of the Snitterings cars to take her all the way, Twinks decided to make most of the journey by the railway. She had often found that sitting anonymously in a compartment, listening to the rhythm of the train, freed her thoughts in a very constructive way.
There were plenty of taxicabs vying for business at Oxford station, but it was a brisk autumn day and Twinks decided she would walk to St Raphael’s College. She liked the city and enjoyed the sight of book-laden undergraduates scuttling around in their flapping black gowns. She was so used to the reaction that she didn’t notice the number of them who gawped, dropped their books or fell off their bicycles, dumbfounded by her beauty.
As she approached him, the porter at the main gate of St Raphael’s gave Twinks a distinctly old-fashioned look. Although there had been what he thought of as ‘undergraduettes’ at Oxford for some decades, it had never been a development of which he approved. In his view, there was a place for women, and it certainly wasn’t in universities. Under no circumstances was it in the all-male enclave of St Raphael’s College. Least of all at eleven o’clock in the morning.
Twinks smiled at him in a way that she knew to be winsome, but then winsomeness had never failed her before. The porter, though, was made of strong misogynist stuff and he was in no mood to be charmed.
‘The college is closed to visitors, miss,’ he announced.
‘Milady, in fact,’ Twinks riposted. It wasn’t her custom to stand on ceremony, but sometimes it was the only thing that people of the oikish classes understood.
‘Very well, milady,’ said the porter, ‘but you still can’t come in.’
‘I have come to see Professor Erasmus Holofernes,’ proclaimed Twinks.
The porter consulted some papers on his desk. ‘I have no record here of Professor Holofernes expecting any visitors this morning. Therefore he cannot be expecting you.’
‘No, of course he’s not expecting me. But he’ll be free to see me.’
‘I would think that extremely unlikely, milady. The Professor works in his room all day. He never stirs from the college premises. His oak is permanently sported. Perhaps I should explain that expression, milady . . .?’
‘Don’t talk toffee. I know what it means. He closes his outer door to indicate that he doesn’t want visitors.’
‘Given that you know that, milady, I wonder why it ever occurred to you that the Professor might see you at this time of day. He does not see anyone while he is working . . . except the college servant who takes him his daily post.’ The porter indicated a huge pile of letters, many of which bore stamps of foreign origin. ‘The Professor works in total solitude until he joins his fellow dons for drinks at 6 p.m. in the Senior Common Room, followed by dinner in the Great Hall. And even then he doesn’t see people of your . . . er, gender.’
‘He’ll see me. Use the telephone to inform him of my presence,’ Twinks commanded.
Something in her voice, some atavistic intonation echoing centuries of mistreating the lower orders, had the desired effect. Cowed, the porter reached for the receiver. ‘Who shall I say wishes to see the Professor, milady?’
‘Twinks.’
‘Twinks?’ he echoed, scepticism returning to his voice. ‘I cannot imagine that Professor Erasmus Holofernes includes in his acquaintances anyone by the name of “Twinks”.’
‘Will you please do your job, dial the relevant number and announce my presence to the Professor?’ Twinks could at times sound dauntingly like her mother, and the porter did exactly as he was told.
To his astonishment he was immediately ordered by the voice at the other end of the telephone to direct Twinks to the rooms of Professor Erasmus Holofernes.
9
Two Brains Are Better Than One
The professor’s study matched his appearance perfectly. Just as hair sprouted at odd angles from his cranium, eyebrows, ears and nostrils, so books, letters and other papers stuck out from every shelf, desk and table. Presumably under the piles of chaos other furniture, like chairs, existed, but the mountains of documents gave no clues as to where.
In other details too there were parallels between the room and its owner. The dingy brown of the decor toned with the fustiness of the Professor’s blurred tweed suit. The general untidiness was reflected in the tufts of beard he had missed when shaving. Smoke from an ill-ventilated grate permeated the room, as did fumes from his clenched tobacco pipe. The metal rims of his large spectacles seemed to be echoed in the leading on the window glass.
It was hard to believe that within this scene of chaos ticked one of the finest academic brains of his generation, whose extensive correspondence with experts around the world ensured that his memory was stocked with more information than any encyclopedia. Though never straying outside the walls of St Raphael’s, he knew everything there was to know about everything.
Professor Erasmus Holofernes was ecstatic to see Twinks. Whatever his normal reservations about mixing with humankind during daylight hours, for her he made an exception. ‘My dear girl,’ he cried in his slightly cracked, over-excited voice, ‘this is the best thing that’s happened since the invention of cheese. You’re looking, as ever, absolutely enchanting.’
With one huge gesture, he swept a precarious pile of books and letters to the floor, revealing underneath them the outline of a leather armchair. ‘Please, Twinks, please, take a seat. Now can I offer you something to drink?’
Sittin
g neatly down and noting the level of squalor prevalent in the room, Twinks refused his offer. ‘Thank you, I just had some coffee,’ she lied.
‘Coffee?’ he echoed as if unfamiliar with the word. Then his brow cleared. ‘Yes, of course, I’ve just poured one for myself,’ said the Professor. A doubt struck him. ‘Or was that yesterday? Or last week?’ He looked vaguely around the room, under whose strata there no doubt lurked many a congealed cup of coffee.
‘Don’t worry, Razzy,’ said Twinks. ‘I’ve come to see you on a criminal matter.’
A light sparkled behind his metal-rimmed glasses. ‘It wouldn’t be a murder, by any chance, would it?’
‘Good ticket. You’ve winged a partridge with your first shot.’
The Professor rubbed his hands together gleefully. ‘This is the best news since the death of Oliver Cromwell. You know how much I love a good succulent murder.’
‘Are Scotland Yard consulting you as much as ever?’ asked Twinks.
‘Oh yes.’ He shrugged off the thought. ‘But I find them all very simplistic in their reasoning. Shallow minds they have, like all professional policemen. I don’t get the intellectual engagement with them that I used to when I was working with you, Twinks.’
She smiled, acknowledging the compliment. There was no point in false modesty. She knew she was possessed of one of the finest deductive brains in the entire world. Matched perhaps only by the brain of the man she was sitting with. They had first met when Scotland Yard, knowing the pair’s reputations and baffled by the disappearance of a minor royal’s illegitimate son, had brought them together to work on the case. Twinks’s understanding of the aristocracy, combined with Professor Holofernes’ knowledge of contemporary history, had brought them quickly to a solution which involved two tiger cubs, a cross-dressing bishop and a thieves’ kitchen in the vaults beneath St Paul’s.
From that time onwards there had been many more pleas for help from Scotland Yard, but generally speaking Holofernes had dealt with them on his own. Though he would have liked to work more with Twinks – even as unworldly a creature as the Professor would have liked to have spent time in her company – she preferred to conduct investigations with her brother. She knew that the ideal aspired to in the world of amateur sleuthdom demanded a wide discrepancy between the intellectual capacity of investigator and sidekick. Twinks and Holofernes were too similar in their gifts, whereas with Blotto at her side she had never had any difficulty in achieving that ideal.
She did, however, retain a great affection for Professor Holofernes and never hesitated to contact him when, as in the current case, she had need of his expertise. So, while he perched on what under its layer of papers was probably a desk, she quickly spelled out the circumstances of the Dowager Duchess of Melmont’s murder and the unlawful arrest of Corky Froggett. She watched the Professor’s excitement mount as the details emerged. He did a lot of grunting and nodding.
At the end of her narrative, he let a silence elapse before saying slowly, ‘Red Hand, Red Hand . . . I suppose that could be “Crimson Hand”.’
‘Why? Would that tinkle any cowbells with you, Razzy?’
‘It might. It might.’ Lugubriously he stroked his whiskery chin. ‘This could be a bad business, Twinks.’
She didn’t prompt him further. She knew the Professor had his own ways of doing things, and that it was folly to try and make him change them. He leapt suddenly from his perch and homed in like a retriever on a haphazard pile of correspondence carpeting the floor beneath the window. Shuffling through the papers at great speed, rather like the same dog kicking up sand, he quickly found the bulging brown manila files he was looking for.
He spread them out on top of the existing paper mountain of his desk. ‘Yes, a bad business, a bad business,’ he muttered. With difficulty Twinks managed to hold her tongue as the Professor continued, ‘I knew the organization was active on the Continent, but I hoped its evil had not yet invaded our shores. I thought the white cliffs of Dover would have been proof against such a perfidious ideology, but it appears that my optimism was misplaced.’
This time Twinks could no more have stopped herself speaking than a flapper could keep off the dance floor. ‘What organization are you talking about, Razzy?’
Professor Erasmus Holofernes peered at her through his thick glasses as though he had forgotten that there was anyone else in the room. And when he spoke, it was more as if he was talking to himself than answering her question. ‘It started, like so many pernicious new ideas, in the late 1840s. There had been other groups promoting the evil concept of equality for all before that time, but none of them had caused any major disruption.’
‘Erm, Razzy old fruitcake,’ Twinks interposed, ‘wouldn’t you call the French Revolution a major disruption?’
‘Oh, that doesn’t count.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because the people behind it were French, of course.’ Which seemed to end the argument as far as the Professor was concerned. ‘Anyway, everything was all right until the 1840s. There were a few isolated stenchers around with misguided notions about everyone being equal, but of course they were all from the oikish classes – you’d never catch a genuine aristocrat having any interest in that kind of guff, would you? And because the bad tomatoes who had those egalitarian ideas were all peasants who couldn’t afford to travel anywhere, they were unlikely to meet any others of their persuasion and so couldn’t get themselves organized into any kind of protest group.’
‘Grandissimo,’ murmured Twinks.
‘Couldn’t agree more. But, like most good things, that state of affairs couldn’t continue for ever. In Spain a small number of agricultural workers with ideas above their station formed an organization whose stated aim was to eliminate the aristocracy.’
‘“Eliminate”?’
‘Kill the lot of them.’ Twinks was silent with shock as the appalling implications of this sank in, so the Professor went on: ‘These of course were dangerous ideas, spread by people with no understanding of history. From time immemorial in almost all societies the upper classes have owned more or less everything and the rest of the population have slaved away for them – usually for nothing. That’s the way things always have worked and the way things always should work. Start messing with that system and chaos ensues. But chaos of course was what said group of Spanish workers was trying to achieve. And . . .’ He paused for effect. ‘. . . and this is the important detail, Twinks. That group of workers in Spain was called La Sociedad della Mano Crimisí.’
Since Spanish was one of the thirty-seven languages which Twinks spoke fluently, she had no problem in making the translation. ‘So what happened to them, Razzy?’ she asked.
‘Oh, the proper thing. The ringleaders were rounded up and shot, and their families were turned out of their tied accommodation. Sadly, though eradicating the members of that particular group was easy enough, eradicating their poisonous ideas proved to be a tougher rusk to chew. Further cells developed in Spain, and the contagion spread into France, Italy, Germany . . . throughout Continental Europe, in fact. There was Der Bund der Blutrote Hand for the Huns, La Société de la Main Cramoisie in France, and so on. And all of them bound by the same vile code. Over the last few decades almost all apparently unexplained murders of European aristocrats can be laid at the door of the League of the Crimson Hand.’
‘But did they leave the same deadly imprimatur on the corpses as was found on the Dowager Duchess?’
‘My information is that in most cases they did, yes.’
‘Then why didn’t someone make a connection between the crimes?’
‘Twinks . . .’ He let out a pitying sigh. ‘Remember we are talking about investigations by Continental police forces. They are even less efficient than our own. Few of them, I imagine, would be able to tell the difference between blood and red paint.’
‘True.’ Twinks was thoughtful for a moment. ‘So the League of the Crimson Hand has been murdering aristocrats on the Continent for s
ome time?’
‘Yes.’ The Professor shook his head ponderously. ‘And now they’ve somehow infiltrated their way into England.’
A shudder ran through Twinks’s slender body. ‘I always think it’s peculiarly horrid when ghastlinesses like that appear over here. They should stay in Europe, where they belong.’
‘Of course,’ the Professor reminded her gently, ‘England is part of Europe.’
‘Only geographically,’ snapped Twinks. ‘Not in any other way.’
‘True. Well, that’s what we’re up against. A secret society whose vile code encourages them to kill as many of the aristocracy as possible. They have also proved very successful at killing anyone who tries to investigate or infiltrate their organization.’
‘Huh.’ Twinks looked at her most magnificent as she announced, ‘They may have been successful so far, but they haven’t yet been challenged by me and Blotto.’
‘No.’ A sadness spread over Professor Erasmus Holofernes’ craggy face. ‘I cannot exaggerate the danger of tackling the League of the Crimson Hand. They are conscienceless killers, indifferent to who their victims are. I would strongly discourage anyone from taking them on.’ He sighed. ‘Though I’m sure my warnings are a waste of breath so far as you are concerned.’
‘You’re bong on the nose there, Razzy. This is going to be pure creamy éclair for Blotto and me. We’ll nab the stenchers and see they’re handed over to the proper authorities.’
‘May be easier said than done, Twinks. The League of the Crimson Hand are very good at covering their tracks. Will Tyler’s going to be as hard to find as one particular piece of plankton in the Pacific Ocean. You don’t have any ideas as to where he went, do you?’
‘We know he left Snitterings driving an old Napier shooting brake.’
