by Simon Brett
‘Probably the one that was found yesterday pushed into the Thames at Shoreditch.’
It never occurred to Twinks to ask where the Professor got this information from. She had long accepted that he did know everything.
‘Well, that might mean Will Tyler’s still in London.’
‘It might. Equally it might not. He would almost definitely have handed the shooting brake over to another League member. Will Tyler could be out of the country by now. You don’t have any other leads, do you?’
‘As a matter of fact I do.’ Twinks reached into her reticule to produce the scrap of paper and the other trophy that she had found in Will Tyler’s quarters.
She held up the latter for inspection. ‘I don’t think there’s any doubt what it is,’ she announced.
‘None at all.’ Professor Erasmus Holofernes took it from her and turned it over in his hands. ‘An opium pipe. Of Chinese manufacture.’ He sniffed the ceramic bowl. ‘Last smoked at ten seventeen on Saturday morning.’
‘Probably that stencher Tyler bolstering his confidence for the murder of the Dowager Duchess of Melmont.’
‘That would be a viable explanation, yes.’ The Professor scratched at one of the tufts on his chin. ‘So if the murderer has a taste for opium, that might give us a lead to tracking him down.’
‘In one of the many opium dens in London?’ Twinks suggested excitedly.
‘Yes. But which one? There are more of those ghastly places in London these days than there are post-boxes. It could take weeks to check them all out.’
‘I wonder if this might be a clue.’ Twinks passed across the scrap of paper. ‘Found in Will Tyler’s spare uniform.’
Professor Erasmus Holofernes scrutinized the evidence. ‘Well, at least it gives us another definite link to the League of the Crimson Hand. Pity it’s torn.’
‘But we do have part of the words that were written on it.’
Both of them looked hard at the enigmatic fragment:
HAI
LEE’S.
‘Hmm . . . I wonder . . .’ And once again the Professor was scurrying round the room, sending papers flying like leaves in an autumn wind. ‘Fortunately,’ he said, ‘I have recently updated my definitive guide to the opium dens of London.’ Gleefully he lifted up a battered ring-file and started to flick through its contents.
‘Ah, yes!’ he cried in triumph. He offered the file to Twinks, one of his ink-stained fingers pressed down on a particular entry.
‘“Shanghai Billee’s”,’ she read.
‘Exactly! I’ll wager my entire brain to a walnut that the missing half of this note contained the letters “SHANG” and “BIL”.’
‘Yes, of course!’ Twinks rose to her feet and replaced the clues in her reticule. ‘I can’t thank you enough, Razzy!’ She bent across to plant a kiss on his unaccustomed cheek. ‘I must go!’
Though he knew the answer, Professor Erasmus Holofernes still asked, ‘Where to?’
In a cheery shout that shattered the academic calm of St Raphael’s, Twinks cried out, ‘To Shanghai Billee’s!’
10
To London!
‘It all sounds a bit of a candle-snuffer,’ said Blotto, after his sister had shared with him the fruits of her researches in Oxford. ‘You wouldn’t have thought anyone – even in the servant classes – would be capable of such stenching behaviour.’
‘No, it’s all very murdy,’ Twinks agreed. ‘A wagonload of bad tomatoes, this League of the Crimson Hand.’
‘I mean, coffinating people just because of the class they happen to be born into – that’s not cricket, is it?’
‘Certainly not.’
It was evening at Snitterings. Though Blotto’s Lagonda was now safely in one of the garages, they’d decided there was no point in leaving for London till the morning. It was a longish drive and by the time they got there it would be too late to do anything useful. Besides, they needed to put in a bit of planning before they made their assault on Shanghai Billee’s.
Blotto still couldn’t get over the perniciousness of the League of the Crimson Hand’s intentions. ‘It’s not as if people can help being born into the upper classes. We don’t complain about our lot, do we? We just get on with things. You’d have thought people who happen to have been born into the oikish classes would have the decency to do the same.’
‘I’m afraid they don’t know when they’re well off,’ said Twinks. ‘They seem to have no concept of gratitude.’
‘I agree. Well, there’s no way the stenchers are going to get away with it. I mean, if they actually succeeded in their plans, it’d be like . . . it’d be like . . .’ But such was the enormity of the concept that Blotto couldn’t find words to express it.
As usual, his sister helped him out. ‘It’d make the French Revolution look like a vicarage tea party.’
‘Yes.’ Blotto pondered the dreadful image for a moment before saying, ‘Thank strawberries we found out about it. Because now we’ll be able to thwart their evil schemes.’
‘Of course we will!’ said Twinks, confident as ever.
‘Do you think we should tell the Mater what we’re planning, me old biscuit barrel?’
‘I think we should tell her that we’re going to London,’ Twinks replied judiciously, ‘but I don’t think we should tell her why.’
‘Good ticket,’ said Blotto. Then he hesitated for a moment. ‘Will it involve actually lying to the old Madeira cake? Because I never quite feel comfy doing that.’
‘Don’t worry, me old gumdrop. If there’s any lying involved, I’ll do it.’
She’s a good greengage, my sister, thought Blotto fondly.
‘Explain this to me again,’ said the Dowager Duchess of Tawcester. ‘The two of you suddenly need to go to London tomorrow morning. Could you tell me your reasons?’
‘I’ve just realized that I don’t have a stitch to wear for all the round of Christmas parties coming up,’ Twinks lied blithely. ‘So I’m going to see my couturier in Bond Street.’
‘That sounds perfectly acceptable.’ Then the Dowager Duchess turned her dinosauric eye on her younger son. ‘And what about you, Blotto? I cannot imagine that you wish to attend your sister’s sartorial discussions.’
‘No, Mater.’
‘So why are you accompanying her? Is it a visit to your tailor in Savile Row?’
‘No, Mater.’
‘Your shirt-maker in Jermyn Street?’
‘No, Mater.’
‘Your gun-maker in St James’s?’
‘No, Mater.’
‘Then why are you going to London?’
Blotto squirmed. He looked to his sister for help. Twinks, rather enjoying his discomfiture, smiled mischievously.
‘Blotto,’ his mother thundered, ‘you are not going the way of the Duchess of Herrington’s boy, are you?’
‘I don’t know which way the Duchess of Herrington’s boy went, Mater.’
‘He has been a severe disappointment to her – and to the rest of his family. He has let down his entire heritage by developing something which I believe he refers to as a “social conscience”. He has taken recently to going to London and distributing soup to the poor. I would, needless to say, be profoundly vexed were I to discover that any child of mine had ventured on such a course.’ The unblinking eyes were once again focused on her wretched son. ‘Blotto, you are not going to London to do good works, are you?’
With complete honesty, he was able to reassure her that this was not the purpose of his visit.
‘Thank goodness for that. If you had taken such a course, I would never be able to hold my head up amongst my equals again.’
Blotto looked relieved at being off the hook. But his stay of execution was of course only temporary. ‘So why are you going to London?’ the Dowager Duchess asked implacably.
Her son’s mouth made the desperate movements of a goldfish trying to remember what the other side of its bowl looked like. ‘Erm . . . erm . . . erm . . .’ he stuttere
d.
Finally Twinks took pity on him. ‘What Blotto is going to do, Mater, is go to his club and join up with a lot of other boddos and slurp down the champers until he gets entirely wobbulated.’
A rare smile of nostalgia spread across the Dowager Duchess’s craggy features. ‘Just exactly as his father used to do.’ She turned the deadly beam on to her son. ‘That, of course, is perfectly in order, Blotto.’
He always got a fizzulating charge out of being on the open road in the Lagonda. It was a crisp autumn morning, one of those peculiar English ones which were summer in the sun and winter in the shade. But he and his sister were happy to brave the elements with the Lagonda’s roof down. Both wore goggles and leather helmets, and even in such unflattering headgear Twinks looked marvellous. Their leather suitcases were strapped on to the rack over the dickey at the back, and both of their minds were effervescing with the thought of a new adventure.
For Blotto there was another cause of joy. Every mile the Lagonda put between him and Snitterings was a mile further away from the unwanted attentions of Laetitia Melmont.
That morning he didn’t even mind that their destination was London, a city whose close-packed buildings usually cast a shadow over his wide-open-space-loving spirits. Going there was a necessary step in the eradication of the threat presented by the League of the Crimson Hand. And he’d seen his beloved Tawcester Towers only the day before when he’d gone to pick up the Lag.
As they had done when they were children, Blotto and Twinks whiled away the journey by playing I-Spy. As it had done when they were children, the game proved to be a rather frustrating experience for Twinks. While she chose objects inside the car for her brother to guess, Blotto always chose things outside the vehicle, which frequently, by the time he gave their initial letter to his sister, turned out to be miles behind them.
Very rarely was he able to best her in any intellectual exercise. Very rarely in the nursery had he been able to thumb his nose to her and utter the cry of childhood triumph: ‘So snubbins to you, Twinks!’
Their mood sobered as the Lagonda slowed and they started to grind through North London’s thickening traffic and greater density of buildings. Blotto and Twinks both felt increasingly aware of the seriousness of their mission. As the villas of leafy suburbs gave way to smaller, grimy, gardenless dwellings, neither of them could remove from their minds that, amongst the oikish people who lived in them, there might be some who subscribed to the appalling precepts of the League of the Crimson Hand.
In a sooty inner suburb Blotto had to stop at a filling station to top up the Lagonda’s tank with petroleum. And while, under his watchful eye, a grubby artisan manned the pump, he was suddenly aware of a strange sound which seemed to be emanating from the car’s dickey. Intrigued, Blotto moved closer.
Yes, there definitely was something. A tapping, scraping noise and a mewing.
Blotto was puzzled. The dickey was a folding contraption, whose seat and back pressed close together when it was closed. There was no room there for a human being to squash in. But he supposed it was possible that one of the Snitterings cats had crept in when the dickey was open and found itself an unwilling prisoner when the door was slammed shut.
He gestured to Twinks to come round from the passenger seat and make her own judgement of the phenomenon. ‘Must be a cat,’ he suggested.
His sister was unconvinced. ‘It sounds to me like a human making that noise.’
‘But a human wouldn’t fit in there.’
Uncharacteristically serious, Twinks looked her brother in the eye. ‘Removing the seat and back would allow someone to get in. I wouldn’t have thought that was beyond the wit of a member of the League of the Crimson Hand.’
Blotto gasped. Deftly he opened his leather suitcase on its rack, and drew out his trusty cricket bat. He held it poised over the door of the dickey and gestured to Twinks.
She flicked the handle open and jumped back to avoid potential gunfire.
The leather seat components had indeed been removed, and the dickey did contain a human being. But it wasn’t anyone from the League of the Crimson Hand. It was Laetitia Melmont.
She looked up coyly at Blotto. ‘You rescued me! My hero!’
11
Shanghai Billee’s
Being so close to their destination, Blotto and Twinks could not even consider turning round and delivering the stowaway back to Snitterings. Twinks wanted to drop her at a railway terminus so that she could return by train, but Laetitia claimed to be terrified by the idea. She had never in her life travelled on public transport and she could not tolerate the close proximity of people from the oikish classes. Twinks tried to explain to her the system of First, Second and Third Class compartments, which had been expressly designed for the admirable purpose of separating those who could afford more from those who couldn’t, but her words fell on deaf ears.
And then Blotto, who Twinks would have expected to have wanted rid of their supernumerary passenger even more than she did, turned chivalrous. He announced that they couldn’t possibly allow the poor girl to be alone in a city where she had never before travelled without a huge retinue of servants. It was their duty never to let Laetitia out of their sight.
Twinks was forced yet again to observe that her brother was a fool to himself. He was ensuring that they would be stuck with ‘the Snitterings Ironing-Board’, and, what was more, his actions on her behalf would be construed as further proof of the love Laetitia was still convinced he felt for her. Which would play into the hands of the Dowager Duchess and her match-making plans. Chivalry could sometimes be awful guff, thought Twinks.
London grew dingier and dingier as the Lagonda nosed its way into the East End. Visibility shrank as the autumn gloom was augmented by fog. If an ordinary fog in the city was known as a ‘London Peculiar’, then that day’s was very peculiar indeed. If it was known as a ‘peasouper’, then that day the soup had been made with insufficient stock and the peas hadn’t been properly puréed.
There were few other cars around on the dark streets. Dilapidated wagons were pulled along by spavined dray-horses, frightened-looking men dragged handcarts. Though it was only late afternoon, in the narrow space between looming buildings the autumn sun had not penetrated down as far as the roadway. The high-bred noses of the party in the Lagonda were assailed by smells of river mud, rotting fish and other less mentionable aromas. Even the ebullient spirits of Blotto and Twinks were cast down by the squalor that surrounded them. And Laetitia Melmont, hitherto unaware that human beings could survive in such conditions, looked about her, open-mouthed with disbelief.
In the dark, fogbound streets the Lagonda gleamed like a pearl in a rotten oyster.
Twinks, who was good at navigation as well as everything else, gave Blotto directions from a map which Professor Erasmus Holofernes had drawn for her. Neither of them could suppress a feeling of dread as they approached their destination.
Without the map they would never have found Shanghai Billee’s, so filthy and insignificant was its entrance. Glimpses of scummy water through gaps between nearby buildings, as well as the more intense stench of fetid mud, suggested they were very close to the Thames, and indeed that the opium den must be right on the waterfront.
When the Lagonda drew to a halt outside the filthy doorway, over which hung an even filthier scrap of canvas, brother and sister exchanged looks. Twinks’s head almost imperceptibly jerked towards Laetitia Melmont in the dickey, and the expression in her azure eyes demanded: What are we going to do about her?
But Blotto had already decided. Turning towards their unwelcome passenger, he announced, ‘Laetitia, I’m going to put the roof up. You sit inside the car and I’ll lock it. Whatever you do, don’t open the door to anyone until we come back. Tickey-tockey?’
‘Absolutely tickey-tockey,’ she replied, then, simpering, said once again, ‘I do so love it when you’re masterful, Blotto.’
He realized that he was getting deeper and deeper into the glue
pot so far as Laetitia Melmont was concerned, and at some point the problem of extricating himself from her talons would have to be faced. But time enough for a solution there. At that moment he had more urgent priorities.
Silently he put up the Lagonda’s roof, ushered Laetitia into the passenger seat and, pausing only to pick up his cricket bat, locked the car doors. Then, turning to his sister with an expression of impossibly brave determination, asked, ‘Loins girded, Twinks me old fruitbat?’
‘Loins girded, Blotto me old bloater.’
‘Ready to meet Dr Fu Manchu, are you?’
‘Erm . . . Dr Fu Manchu doesn’t exist, Blotto. He’s just a character in books.’
Any other time he would have stopped to take issue with his sister on this point. In a life of minimal reading, the works of Sax Rohmer were amongst the very few that Blotto had ever enjoyed. He fully believed in the evil Doctor’s ambition of world domination and he knew how important it was that the man was stopped before his evil tentacles had . . .
But Blotto recognized that this was not the moment to put Twinks right on the reality of Fu Manchu. Time enough for that. Instead, with a boyishly bold grin to his sister, he called out, ‘Right, in we go!’
And Blotto pushed aside the frayed and filthy canvas that hung over the entrance to Shanghai Billee’s.
In the interior there was so little light – its sources only a couple of guttering candles and a glowing brazier – that it took a moment or two for their eyes to accommodate. They could hardly breathe in the fog of opium fumes that assaulted their nostrils. When they could see, they were greeted by a scene of terrible human degradation.
On makeshift straw-filled mattresses around the room lay the flotsam and jetsam of ruined lives. Thin light from the candles flickered across pale parchment-like faces of men who had escaped their miseries for a little while in the oblivion of the pernicious drug. Here and there embers glowed in the bowls of pipes from which their owners sucked a lingering death. Twinks immediately visualized that another circle of hell had been added to Dante’s Inferno. Blotto, who wasn’t such a whale on literary allusion (except, of course, for Fu Manchu), reckoned the place was a spoffing great stench-hole.
