by Simon Brett
Blotto’s humiliation was complete when Mary Chapstick, having politely but firmly refused the offer of a second dance, was swept up into the arms of the Duke of Godalming for an expert and energetic Black Bottom.
With a look at her son which expressed deep disappointment, the Dowager Duchess announced to anyone prepared to listen that she was going to bed.
‘A good idea,’ commented the Dowager Duchess of Framlington. ‘You of all people need your beauty sleep.’
The real Dowager Duchess focused on the false one a stare that could have flambéed a banana. Harvey ignored it, as she ignored the comparably combustible look from Grimshaw, and accepted Luther P. Chapstick III’s invitation to dance. Soon the couple were involved in an energetically intimate foxtrot.
Blotto deposited himself in a seat next to his sister. (She had eschewed dancing because, though all the young men had instantly fallen in love with her, she didn’t want to cause any trouble by showing favours to her inferiors.)
‘This is beezer, Twinks me old biscuit barrel! Spoffing brilliant idea of yours! Give that pony a rosette! Mary Chapstick’s fallen for the Duke of Godalming hook, line and stinker.’
‘Sinker.’
‘What?’
‘Never mind. No, Blotto me old gumdrop, all the ducks are lining up. There seems to be an attraction there.’
‘Attraction? They’re all over each other like the measles.’ Blotto looked at the dancers for an illustration of his words, but saw no sign of the couple. ‘Toad-in-the-hole, though. Where’ve they gone?’
‘They slipped out on to the terrace for some air.’
Blotto grinned hugely. It was all going better than he dared hope. For two young people to slip out on to a terrace to get some air . . . well, that was tantamount to being engaged, wasn’t it? He felt the America-sized cloud above his head begin to dissipate.
‘You really are the panda’s panties, Twinks me old fondant fancy!’
‘It’s nothing,’ his sister responded casually. ‘It’s just . . .’ She stopped, her eye caught by some movement near the French windows. ‘Oh, Mary Chapstick’s just come back in.’
‘Probably doesn’t want to set tongues wagging too soon . . . let all the poor greengages wait till the official announcement in the Court Circular.’
‘Yes, I wonder . . .’ Twinks said as she picked up her silver beaded reticule. She sounded troubled. Blotto wondered what information her hypersensitive antennae had picked up this time. ‘I’ll just go out and see. You look after the gramophone for the moment, will you, Blotto?’
‘Tickey-tockey.’ He liked operating the machine – winding it up, putting a record on, placing the needle on its outermost groove. Amazing piece of equipment, he thought. A whole spoffing orchestra in a box. Right there in a boddo’s sitting room. All you had to do was wind the thing up. Nobody would ever come up with an invention for reproducing music that was as clever as the gramophone.
Twinks felt a chill as she walked out on to the terrace, and it wasn’t just the cool of the April evening. She looked to her left and saw a figure slumped over the balustrade.
It was the Duke of Godalming – or rather Briscoe Daubeney-Vere masquerading as the Duke of Godalming.
And though some blood still flowed from the wound in his throat, he was undoubtedly dead.
7
The Scene of the Crime
Twinks acted quickly and instinctively. She always carried a Scene of Crime kit in her reticule, and she took out its small torch to look at the dead man more closely.
There was a lot of blood from the wound, but it didn’t look as though Briscoe Daubeney-Vere’s throat had been cut. A cursory examination suggested to Twinks that he had been shot from a distance, the bullet severing his jugular vein and possibly, given the angle at which he had fallen, one of his carotid arteries too.
She made a quick estimate of the direction from which such a shot could have been fired and reckoned it might well have come from a small copse that lay beyond the ha-ha, some couple of hundred yards from the Tawcester Towers main building. She looked out to where she knew the copse to be, but could see nothing in the encroaching darkness.
She turned the thin beam of her torch to the shutter in front of which Briscoe Daubeney-Vere must have been standing, and was immediately rewarded by a splatter of blood surrounding something set deeply into the wood.
Extracting a small penknife from her reticule, Twinks held the torch in place with one hand while with the other she dug into the shutter.
In a matter of moments she had loosened and pulled out what she’d expected to find there. A bullet.
She focused the torch on her prize, and immediately recognized that it had been fired from an Accrington-Murphy PL23 hunting rifle.
Twinks slipped the bullet into an evidence bag, placed that in her reticule and went back into the Pink Drawing Room to arrange for the disposal of the body.
There was a routine to these things, and Twinks knew it well. Waking her mother was not part of that routine. The Dowager Duchess cherished her sleep (what Harvey had referred to impudently as her ‘beauty sleep’) and would have been extremely annoyed to have it interrupted by trivialities. The death of a houseguest – particularly one who wasn’t even a genuine aristocrat – would definitely have come into that category.
Tawcester Towers had a long history of the discreet disposal of bodies. In the early days of the family history a good few mutilated serfs had found their way into unmarked graves on the extensive estate. The wicked Duke ‘Black Rupert’ had been an enthusiastic despoiler of virgins and the bodies of many of those had conveniently disappeared. The same fate had awaited a young housemaid crushed in the Tawcester Towers library by a falling bust of Homer in the 1820s.
The basic rule was: if the dead person was from below stairs or otherwise insignificant, their body should be disposed of without troubling the proper authorities. Chief Inspector Trumbull and Sergeant Knatchbull of the Tawcestershire Constabulary were far too busy with such urgent cases as cats stuck up trees or the theft of radishes from a church’s harvest festival to be sidetracked by a case of murder at Tawcester Towers. Besides, bringing such a complex case to their attention could not fail to aggravate their perpetual condition of bafflement. It was only human charity to keep them in the dark about such matters.
So, having concluded her examination of the crime scene, Twinks slipped back into the Pink Drawing Room to have a discreet word with Grimshaw. The butler detailed the appropriate staff to tidy up the terrace, and within an hour the mortal remains of Briscoe Daubeney-Vere were buried deep in a freshly dug bed of thyme in the Tawcester Towers herb garden.
Having given Grimshaw his instructions, Twinks reckoned that the only person likely to be concerned about the Duke of Godalming’s disappearance was Mary Chapstick. She crossed the room to Blotto, still content with his role as record changer for the gramophone. ‘If by any chance,’ she whispered, ‘Mary should ask you where the Duke of Godalming has gone, could you say that he’s been called away urgently by the news of a fire at his country estate?’
‘Tickey-tockey,’ said Blotto. ‘Tough Gorgonzola for the poor old pineapple, though, isn’t it, having the family place burn down?’
‘Blotters,’ said his sister patiently, ‘the Duke of Godalming does not possess a family place. He doesn’t exist.’ As she spoke them she realized just how completely accurate her words were. ‘The man who’s been coffinated is a music hall artiste called Briscoe Daubeney-Vere.’
‘“Coffinated”?’ Blotto repeated. ‘Are you telling me the poor old greengage . . . ’
But he was stopped by his sister putting a finger to her lips as Mary Chapstick approached. Moving discreetly away, Twinks heard the American girl ask the whereabouts of the Duke of Godalming. He gave the reply that his sister had recommended to him. Mary Chapstick, only for a moment disappointed by the news, immediately focused her attention on Blotto. Within seconds she had dragged him away from the security of h
is seat by the gramophone to introduce him to a new dance called the Flea Hop (for which he showed the same aptitude as the old dances).
Catching the look of anguish that her brother cast in her direction, Twinks realized the full implication of Briscoe Daubeney-Vere’s death. There was no longer anything to distract Mary Chapstick from her single-minded pursuit of Blotto.
Her detective instincts alerted, she asked herself who could benefit from such a turn of events. For a moment she even wondered whether her mother had organized the murder. The Dowager Duchess was not given to sentimentality and, if it offered to bring about the salvation of Tawcester Towers, would have had no qualms about following such a course.
Blotto accompanied his sister the following morning after breakfast. She said they were just going to get some air, but he knew from her manner that the walk had a more serious purpose.
Mary Chapstick had so monopolized Blotto for the remainder of the previous evening that brother and sister had had no opportunity for any tête-à-tête conversation, so as they walked across the neat lawns to the side of Tawcester Towers, Twinks brought him up to date on the fate of Briscoe Daubeney-Vere.
‘Poor old greengage,’ said Blotto in an appropriately condolent voice. ‘I know masquerading as one of us when you’re not the genuine article is a bit beyond the barbed wire, but I wouldn’t have thought it was a reason to coffinate the poor thimble.’
‘I don’t think that was why he was shot,’ said Twinks thoughtfully.
‘But you do know the real reason . . . ?’ Blotto prompted.
To his surprise Twinks said she didn’t. He was so used to her zapping to solutions of crimes like a hare on roller skates that he couldn’t help feeling a bit let down.
She was, however, striding very purposefully along a route different from their customary walks, so he asked her why.
‘I checked the trajectory of the bullet that did for Daubeney-Vere, and I reckon we should be looking for the copse.’
‘What, you mean Chief Inspector Trumbull and Sergeant Knatchbull?’
‘No, not that kind of “cops”, Blotto. “Copse” as in a small wood.’
‘Ah, read your semaphore, Twinks me old collar stud. This copse over here, you mean?’
‘The very same.’
Twinks paused at the beginning of the trees and squinted back at Tawcester Towers. Taking an eye-line on the terrace outside the Pink Drawing Room, she slid gracefully along the edge of the copse and then suddenly moved in.
‘This is where the stencher shot from,’ she announced, pointing to an area of trampled grass behind a tree. She moved towards it and, taking a magnifying glass from her reticule, examined the lower branches. ‘Yes, see, the bark’s a little abraded here. I think he rested the barrel of his rifle in this vee to steady his aim. With a target nearly a hundred yards away he’d have needed that. Given the fact that there are other branches he could have rested the gun on . . .’ Twinks screwed up her azure eyes as she made the calculation ‘. . . our murderer’s about five foot seven in height.’
She dropped down to examine the crushed grass behind the tree. ‘But the indentations made by his feet suggest he carries a lot of weight, far more than the average boddo of five foot seven. He’s positively corpulent, I’d say. And the lump of toadspawn was wearing a size 6 climbing boot with a ribbed sole.’ She scrutinized the footprints more closely. ‘The boot’s not of British manufacture.’
‘How for the love of strawberries do you know that?’ asked her astonished brother.
‘I am familiar with the sole patterns of all British bootmakers,’ Twinks replied casually. ‘I did in fact write a monograph on the subject.’
‘Toad-in-the-hole!’ said Blotto.
‘No, our murderer was either wearing a boot of German manufacture . . . that distinctive W-shaped ribbing is used by the Plotzlein Jagengeschäft in Regensburg . . . ah, but of course they always feature the “PJ” monogram on their soles, don’t they?’
‘Do they?’ murmured Blotto.
‘So this boot must have been made by The Acme Shoe Company of Detroit, established by Engelbrecht Plotzlein after he emigrated from Regensburg in 1893 . . . which taken together with this . . .’ She snatched something from the ground and held it up for her brother’s inspection. ‘Do you know what it is?’
‘Looks like a cigarette end.’
‘You’re bong on the nose there, Blotto! But it’s not just any old cigarette end. This is a K&J Gold Nugget cigarette, which, as you know . . .’ Blotto nodded feebly ‘. . . is an American brand.
‘All of which makes me think,’ Twinks concluded magnificently, ‘that our murderer is a citizen of the United States . . . which raises another possibility, doesn’t it, Blotto?’
‘Just tell me,’ he pleaded, acknowledging his total incompetence at guessing games.
‘It raises the possibility that our murderer might have made a mistake.’
‘Does it?’
‘Shooting from this distance after dark, he couldn’t be very accurate. I think there’s a strong chance that he killed Briscoe Daubeney-Vere by mistake. And his intended target was Mary Chapstick!’
Blotto received this news with profound gloom. He’d already got the American heiress stuck on to him like an unwanted corn plaster. But if her life was in danger at Tawcester Towers, then to uphold the family honour he would have to protect her. And he knew from bitter experience how readily girls misinterpreted masculine protectiveness as a demonstration of love.
All his hopes of escaping the current gluepot had, he realized, died with Briscoe Daubeney-Vere. Farewell, hunting. Farewell, cricket. Farewell, Tawcester Towers. Now he was inevitably destined to spend the miserable remainder of his days in America.
Oh, broken biscuits, thought Blotto savagely.
8
An Unfair Dismissal
The absence of the Duke of Godalming was unremarked on throughout the Saturday. Those who needed an explanation were satisfied with the story about his estate being on fire, while Briscoe Daubeney-Vere’s fellow thespians were having far too much fun playing their roles, and enjoying the fine food and wines that came with those roles, to give him a second thought.
As Blotto had feared, Mary Chapstick stuck on to him for the rest of the day like a leech, albeit a very pretty leech. She was clearly totally besotted. This was a common phenomenon that his sister had frequently had to explain to him. Though Blotto thought of himself as just a normal old greengage like any other, his combination of devastating looks, sporting prowess, breeding and perfect manners cut a swathe through the ranks of young women, rather as the recent difference of opinion with the nation’s Teutonic cousins had through the ranks of young men.
So, though on the Tawcester side marriage to Mary Chapstick would be seen only as a commercial necessity, for her it would clearly be a love match. She hung on Blotto’s every word, which, given how tongue-tied he tended to become in the presence of the fair sex, didn’t give her a lot to hang on.
Blotto himself kept devising excuses that would mean he had to part with Mary for a few hours’ respite, only to remember that because there was quite possibly a man with a gun on the estate, he should stay at her side to guard her. It was for Blotto a long day of discomfort and frustration.
Inevitably the Dowager Duchess’s placement once again had him seated beside the American girl at Saturday night’s dinner. On that occasion he did manage to bridge the conversational gulf between them by explaining to her the laws of cricket. Again she hung on to every word, glad at last to have a few more to hang on to. Whether she understood any of them is another matter, but the tender tête-à-tête of the young couple was observed with great satisfaction by the Dowager Duchess and by Luther P. Chapstick III.
The behaviour of the other dinner guests was moving towards the raucous. As actors relax, they tend to become more at ease in their roles, and of course there is no more popular relaxant for actors than alcohol. The fine wines of the Tawcester Towers cellars
encouraged a greater flamboyance in the performances of Harvey’s troupe. Speaking loudly soon turned into shouting; mock arguments swelled into real arguments; bread rolls and, later, soft fruits were thrown about the dining room with wild abandon.
The Dowager Duchess watched all this with an expression that was as near as her face could do to benign. She congratulated herself on the skill of the actors she had employed – because of course she’d seen far worse behaviour from genuine aristocrats.
The counterfeit aristocrat enjoying her role more than any of the others was the Dowager Duchess of Framlington. Once again the placement had seated her next to Luther P. Chapstick III, and the growing intimacy of their exchanges could be measured by the frequency of the almost imperceptible tic of the brow above Grimshaw’s watchful eyes.
For Blotto the day finally dragged to its weary close. He faced the Sunday with a little more optimism. His exegesis of the laws of cricket to Mary Chapstick had not been a random act. There was actually to be a match the following day. A hastily arranged fixture for the benefit of their American guests, a Tawcester Towers Gentlemen and Artisans eleven would take on a nomadic team composed mostly of writers and poets who gloried in the name of the Semi-Colons. Blotto could have got together an opposing team of classier credentials, Old Etonians and what-haveyou, but the Dowager Duchess still insisted the Chapsticks had to be kept apart from real aristocrats. And she felt quite safe with the Semi-Colons. There was no danger any of them might have contacts in the real aristocracy. On her scale of values writers and poets were the scum of the earth, ranking around the same level as solicitors and bank managers.
At least Blotto’s duties at the crease and in the field on the morrow would prevent him from having to spend every minute at the side of Mary Chapstick. But even that relieving prospect was overshadowed by a darker question. How many more carefree days of cricket would there be in his life? Was that fine all-rounder the Honourable Devereux Lyminster doomed to spend the rest of his days in the United States of America watching rounders?
