Blotto, Twinks and the Phantom Skiers

Book 13: Blotto Twinks

by Simon Brett

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Thrillers

Synopsis

'A new Simon Brett is an event for mystery fans' P. D. James

'Murder most enjoyable' Colin Dexter

Blotto and Twinks are off on another adventure - and this time they're bound for the Alpine village of Luzvimmen in Switzerland, where Blotto participates in racing the prestigious and very fast Croissant Run, though someone seems determined to sabotage his chances.

Twinks, on the other hand, is on a mission to rescue her friend's sister from the sinister finishing school she is trapped in - the Convent of the Sacred Icicle. Once inside, Twinks is threatened by an elderly nun who shows her a secret glacier in which the Phantom Skiers are entombed... awaiting resurrection so they can wreak vengeance on people who are too curious... like Blotto and Twinks.

Meanwhile, up at Schloss Luzvimmen, the crazed Count von Strapp is set on global domination via a deadly arsenal of Swiss cheese hardware he's planning to unleash on the world...

Yes, everything's much as usual in the world of Blotto and Twinks

Praise for Simon Brett

'One of British crime's most assured craftsmen . . . Crime writing just like in the good old days, and perfect entertainment' Guardian

'Few crime writers are so enchantingly gifted' Sunday Times

'Simon Brett writes stunning detective stories. I would recommend them to anyone' Jilly Cooper

Release date: January 11, 2024

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 80000

Sample

‘Winter Sports?’ echoed Blotto. ‘Tickey-tockey! Of course I know what you mean. Hunting, shooting … even fishing if you’ve got the spoffing patience. Not to shimmy round the shrubbery, you mean the whole sporting rombooley, except for crickers and tenners.’

‘That wasn’t actually where I was dabbing the digit,’ said his sister Twinks.

‘You mean you do include crickers and tenners?’ asked Blotto incredulously. ‘Well, Twinkers, you’re very definitely shinnying up the wrong drainpipe there. Crickers and tenners are only played in the summer and—’

‘Blotters, Blotters, will you, just for a momentette, lock your lugs on to what I’m saying? I am not putting cricket and tennis into the same eggbasket as hunting, shooting and fishing. The winter sports I’m referring to are flipmadoodles like skiing.’

‘Oh, those aren’t proper sports,’ objected Blotto. ‘The people who do those live …’ he loaded the word with maximum contempt ‘… abroad.’

‘Some boddoes ski in Scotland,’ his sister pointed out.

‘Well, that’s spoffing well abroad!’ said Blotto, with all the certainty that would be possessed by any right-thinking upper-class Englishman. Though he enjoyed porridge and kippers as components in his huge breakfasts, and would never say no to a large whisky, Blotto was properly suspicious of people who played bagpipes and wore skirts. He was equally suspicious of Scotland’s so-called aristocracy which, in his view, were at least as tonky as their Irish equivalents.

Brother and sister were sitting over cocoa in Twinks’s boudoir, an oasis of lace and white silk nestling within the medieval stone austerity of Tawcester Towers, the ancestral home of the Lyminster family, which had been built soon after the Norman Conquest. The current Duke of Tawcester was the siblings’ older brother, universally known as Loofah. (The Lyminsters belonged to that level of the aristocracy where it was thought rather bad form for nicknames to have any relevance. They should be scattered randomly, like confetti.)

Though Loofah was nominally in charge, no one doubted that all affairs of the stately home and estate were run by their mother, the Dowager Duchess. She had worn the patrimonial trousers while her husband was alive, and saw no reason for a detail like his death and the passing of the title to their elder son to make any change to her habits.

‘Anyway, Twinks me old tooth-powder-box,’ asked Blotto, ‘why are you suddenly cluntering on about skiing?’

‘Because, Blotto me old trouser turn-up, I want you to join me in an excursionette to Switzerland.’

‘“Switzerland”?’ echoed her baffled brother. ‘But that’s abroad.’ The final word was, once again, marinated in centuries of xenophobia.

‘You’re bong on the nose there, Blotters!’

‘Then why, in the name of snitchrags, would you want to go abroad?’

‘Because, brother mine, the Mater is of the view that I need to improve my marriage prospects.’

‘Toad-in-the-hole, Twinks! I didn’t think you wanted to tie the old reef-knot for a while yet.’

‘I don’t, Blotters, but the Mater doesn’t know that. Did the gin-gen ever trickle into your brainbox that there are Jereboamsful of finishing schools in Switzerland?’

‘I have heard of such establishments. And met some of their products. Poor little droplets who seemed rather overkeen to get my wrists into the matrimonial manacles.’

‘Exactamento, Blotters! Swiss finishing schools stuff young gels up to their necks with desirable assets for the marriage market, rather in the way the foie-gras makers of Toulouse stuff geese with corn. It is my intention to persuade the Mater that such instruction could make me a more marriageable morsel for some predatory duke.’

‘But – hate to put a lump in your custard, Twinks me old pineapple-peeler – aren’t you a bit over the horizon to be going to school?’

‘The finishing school which I am planning to attend – in the village of Luzvimmen – runs a special course for gels with a few more rings round the old trunk.’

‘Toad-in-the hole! Does it really?’

‘No, of course it doesn’t! But the important thingette is … that I will tell the Mater it does.’

‘Well, I’ll be battered like a pudding! So, what is your planette, Twinks me old horseshoe-stone-extractor?’

‘My planette, Blotto me old radio valve, is that you and I should pongle off to Switzerland …’

‘In the Lagonda?’

‘Of course in the Lagonda! Is the King German?’

A beam spread across Blotto’s handsome patrician features. Along with his cricket bat and his hunter Mephistopheles, the magnificent blue car was one of his most treasured possessions.

‘Then,’ Twinks continued, ‘while I attend my course at the finishing school, you can light up the fireworks of fun with winter sports!’

‘It all sounds creamy éclair,’ said Blotto.

‘It’ll be larksissimo!’ Twinks affirmed.

‘Except, of course,’ realised Blotto, to whom things came considerably more slowly than they did to his sister, ‘you won’t actually be attending your fumacious course at the finishing school, will you?’

‘Give that pony a rosette!’ said Twinks.

‘So, what, sister of mine, will you actually be doing in Switzerland?’

‘I’ll uncage the ferrets on that one, brother of mine,’ said Twinks, ‘when the time is right.’

And, for the time being, with that rather minimal amount of information, Blotto had to be content.

In the Blue Morning Room the following morning, the Dowager Duchess of Tawcester looked, without enthusiasm, at her two younger children. Breeding was one of the most important duties of people of her breeding but, once the offspring had been actually born, the parents felt no obligation thereafter to show much interest in them. The level of maternal nurturing shown by mothers in the British aristocracy is comparable to the amount a female frog shows for her tadpoles. Once spawned, ever forgotten.

And the idea of British aristocrats showing affection towards their offspring was positively bad form.

Once the succession had been secured, the job was done. And the Dowager Duchess felt she had fulfilled her commission beyond the call of duty in that respect. Her first child, commendably, had been a boy. Rupert – the firstborn in the Lyminster family was always called Rupert – was the ‘heir’, the one known as ‘Loofah’. But, in time-honoured aristocratic fashion, the Dowager Duchess (back then, of course, just ‘The Duchess’) went through the tedious process of producing a ‘spare’. In the form of Devereux Lyminster, the younger son who was seated in front of her that day in the Blue Morning Room.

Some ducal couples would have stopped there. An heir and a spare were traditionally all that was required. What use could a girl possibly be? But the Dowager Duchess, from her own family history, knew the precise answer to that question. By producing a daughter – in this case Honoria, universally known as ‘Twinks’ – she had created a useful bargaining counter. The sole purpose of such a daughter’s life was marriage to someone rich. And the Dowager Duchess had invested considerable effort into achieving that end. Twinks’s resistance to being clapped into the marital manacles was a source of constant frustration to her mother. Why could she not have produced a daughter who was more biddable? And, in a classic pot-and-kettle scenario, the Dowager Duchess conveniently forgot how unbiddable she had been throughout her entire life.

So, she was prepared to listen to her daughter’s account of a (fictitious) finishing school in which marriageability could be increased. She expressed the hope that the curriculum there included intensive classes in Biddability.

‘The subject is rated so highly that there is spoffing Biddability Cup awarded every year,’ Twinks fabricated with practised ease.

‘I will be even more disappointed in you than I usually am,’ the Dowager Duchess asserted, ‘if you do not return from Switzerland with that trophy in your luggage.’

‘I’m a copper-bottomed cert to bring it home,’ Twinks assured her. ‘I’ll come back as biddable as a Royal Flush.’

‘What I fail to understand at the moment,’ the Dowager Duchess went on, ‘is why your brother is required to accompany you to foreign climes. Though, of course, I always welcome Blotto’s absence from Tawcester Towers … and indeed would greatly welcome the news that you will both be away for Christmas.’ It was then late November. Because all the resident family were forced to gather together for at least one meal during the season, Christmas at Tawcester Towers was a time of particular grimness.

‘Nada problemo,’ said Twinks. ‘We can put the tin-lined guarantee on missing the mince pies.’

‘Excellent,’ the Dowager Duchess rumbled with satisfaction.

But Twinks’s hopes that her mother might have moved on from asking why Blotto needed to go to Switzerland were quickly dashed, as the old woman continued, ‘I cannot, however, see any justification for your brother’s travelling with you on an expensive jaunt of pure pleasure … particularly given the ongoing drain on the Lyminster finances occasioned by continuing problems with the plumbing.’

(A short digression is called for here, on the subject of the Tawcester Towers plumbing. The expectation of weekend guests in that kind of stately home was that their bedrooms would feature icy draughts and damp sheets, and that the taps in the bathrooms – of which there were far too few – would yield only a tepid trickle of brownish water. This had always been the case at Tawcester Towers, and many of Blotto and Twinks’s adventures had been embarked on to raise funds for improvement. But, however much loot they brought back, in the form of gold or diamonds, the costs of the plumbing soon swallowed them up. Even the introduction of a new boiler and radiator system by a crooked plumber called Rodney Perkins had only brought temporary relief. His efforts, and those of an equally crooked hotelier called Ulrich Weissfeder, who had organised a major make-over of the Tawcester Towers interiors, had not had a lasting effect. Once again, weekend guests encountered icy draughts, damp sheets and tepid trickles of brownish water.

And, rather shockingly, aristocratic house guests, mostly through the traffic of marrying Americans, now knew that such low standards were no longer unavoidable. Some had even been known to go completely the wrong side of the barbed wire and complain to their hosts about the plumbing.)

Aware of this history, Twinks had anticipated her mother’s reaction to the idea of Blotto going to Switzerland and had her own response ready. ‘The fact is, Mater, not to fiddle round the fir trees, that I won’t be the only twig off a family tree being spring-cleaned at the finishing school.’

‘I don’t comprehend your drift, Twinks. I was talking about Blotto.’

‘My drift is, Mater, that the finishing school attracts many shrimplets of the right background like myself, scions of the gentler gender, whose parents are as desperate to get them off their hands by twiddling the marital reef-knot as you are with me.’

‘So, you are suggesting … ?’

‘I am suggesting, Mater, that, as these “finished” debs roll off the production line, with their marriageability and biddability freshly enhanced, the pick of the punnet could be appropriated by a younger son who was actually on the spot.’

‘Ah.’ The ancestral head nodded slowly. ‘I think I see the direction in which you are wending.’

Twinks finished the thought for her. ‘Just in the same way that I’ll be more likely to ding the church bells with someone after the “finishing” process, Blotto will be right on the prems to snatch the Catch of the Day and find himself in the “Forthcoming Marriages” section of the Court Circular.’

‘I take your point,’ said the Dowager Duchess. ‘So, by both of you travelling to Switzerland, I raise the chances of both of my unmarried offspring dinging the church bells?’

‘You’re bong on the nose there, Mater,’ said Twinks, rolling on camomile lawns because her mother appeared to have swallowed whole the gubbins she’d just been fed.

Blotto didn’t take it up immediately with his sister, but he did feel a little put out by what had been said in the Blue Morning Room. More than put out, even slightly cheated. He knew Twinks would never play him a diddler’s hand, but she had led him astray. She’d told him that his excursion to Switzerland would be to enjoy the winter sports. She had told their mother he would be out there on a bride-hunt. Whereas the first suggestion tickled his trews mightily, the second really put lumps in his custard.

‘I mean, maybe,’ Blotto said to his confidant, ‘Twinks has got some plumpilicious planette in her brainbox and everything’ll turn up sunny-side, but she could have uncaged the ferrets to me about it beforehand. When she was talking to the Mater, she sounded like they were both tickling the same trout. By Denzil, if the Mater’s recruited Twinks into her murdy plots to snap the marital manacles on me, then I may as well hoist up the white flag straight away. But I mean, Twinks would never sell me down the plughole, would she?’ he ended on a note of positive pleading.

From inside his stall, the hunter Mephistopheles whinnied assurance that Twinks would never do that.

Still, Blotto didn’t feel completely reassured.

And then, of course, he had to apologise to Mephistopheles for the fact that he was going abroad during the hunting season.

When in London overnight, the habitual accommodation for Blotto and Twinks was the Savoy Hotel. But if they were only in Town for the inside of a day, both of them had favoured haunts. For Blotto, it was The Grenadiers, a gentlemen’s club know to all its members as ‘The Gren’. Here he was guaranteed copious supplies of nursery food, club claret, brandy and circular conversations with his old muffin-toasters from Eton.

Like most clubs, The Gren had many regulations, but the most important one was that, on the premises, nobody should talk about work. Since none of the members did any work, this wasn’t hard to comply with.

Twinks’s regular watering hole was also a club, but in more gracious and soigné style. It was called ‘The Lady Graduates’ Club’, though there was a level of irony in the name. At the time, there were very few Lady Graduates. Though the University of London had granted degrees to women in 1878, Oxford didn’t get round to doing so until 1920. And Cambridge still showed no signs of following those pioneering examples.

So, many members of The Lady Graduates’ Club were not graduates at all. They were just highly intelligent women who thought they deserved graduate status – and would have had it but for the retrograde educational system of the time. The LGC was one of the few London clubs where prospective candidates had to pass an entrance examination. (Had such a system obtained at The Gren, its membership would have been considerably reduced. And there was no way Blotto would have been allowed in. He had never passed an examination in his life.)

So it was that Twinks, whose dainty toes had never touched the ancestral paving of a university except as a visitor, had no difficulty in joining the club. In fact, she was . . .