Blotto, Twinks and the Stars of the Silver Screen Read online

  Also by Simon Brett

  Blotto, Twinks and the Ex-King’s Daughter

  Blotto, Twinks and the Dead Dowager Duchess

  Blotto, Twinks and the Rodents of the Riviera

  Blotto, Twinks and the Bootlegger’s Moll

  Blotto, Twinks and the Riddle of the Sphinx

  Blotto, Twinks and the Heir to the Tsar

  CONSTABLE

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Constable

  Copyright © Simon Brett, 2017

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-47211-830-1

  Constable

  An imprint of

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.hachette.co.uk

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  To Daisy

  who hasn’t had a book dedicated to her yet

  Contents

  1 The End of the Season

  2 A Meeting With the Mater

  3 A Conference With Corky

  4 Crossing the Pond

  5 State Room Keys

  6 From Sea to Shining Sea

  7 White Knights v. The Trojan Horse

  8 Party People

  9 Virtue in Danger?

  10 A Chivalrous Quest

  11 On the Set of The Trojan Horse

  12 Blotto Investigates

  13 Lenny ‘The Skull’ Orvieto

  14 A Surfeit of Amorous Swains

  15 Heddan Tales

  16 Kidnappers Beware!

  17 A New Helen of Troy?

  18 On the Trail of Mimsy La Pim

  19 The Barolo Brothers

  20 Outside Help

  21 Kopz Kalamity!

  22 Confrontation in a Carriage

  23 Exchange of Contracts

  24 The Plot Thickens – Again!

  25 Corky Fills the Role

  26 Blotto’s Lonesome Stand

  27 Rescue!

  28 Gratitude

  29 A New Star in the Hollywood Galaxy!

  30 Home Sweet Home

  1

  The End of the Season

  It was approaching the conclusion of an idyllic September day at the Tawcester Towers cricket pitch. Swallows soared and swooped in the pure blue sky, feeling vaguely that they ought to be migrating southwards soon, but in no hurry to do anything about it. It was one of those perfect English days when nobody feels any great urgency to do anything.

  Devereux Lyminster, younger brother of the Duke of Tawcester and known universally as Blotto, sat on the pavilion’s veranda sipping iced barley water with one of his old muffin-toasters from Eton, Ponky (whose surname was spelt ‘L-a-r-r-e-i-g-h-f-f-r-i-e-b-o-l-l-a-u-x’ but was pronounced, as everyone who mattered knew, ‘Larue’). Both of them glowed with the aura of a day well spent.

  They had met as boys at prep school, the stage of their education before Eton. Their love of cricket had brought them together. They could still spend whole days, just the two of them, messing around with bat and ball – not practising, of course, British sportsmen thought it rather bad form to practise – but simply having fun throughout the livelong day.

  Ponky ran an occasional cricket team, made up mostly of other Old Etonians, and called the Peripherals. Every autumn their final fixture of the season was a match against Blotto’s Tawcester Towers XI. And every year the home team won. Though their numbers were made up from supernumerary footmen, estate gamekeepers and under-gardeners, the extraordinary skills of their captain always ensured victory.

  Blotto was one of those young men to whom any kind of sporting activity came naturally. Far too much of a gentleman ever to indulge in such below-the-belt activities as training, he just always excelled. So long as there was a ball or a horse involved, he was unbeatable. (When there was anything else involved – like, say, something requiring intellectual effort – Blotto was at the opposite end of the spectrum. Indeed, the more churlish of his acquaintances had been heard to express the view that beneath his golden thatch of hair, behind his honest blue eyes, between his fine patrician ears, there existed a total vacuum. Had Blotto ever heard these unworthy slights, they would have worried him not a jot. Brains, he knew, only complicated things. For the second son of an English Duke in the 1920s, they were completely surplus to requirements.)

  Ponky Larreighffriebollaux’s congratulations over barley water on Blotto’s feats in the field that day – carrying his bat to score two hundred and seventeen out of his team’s total of two hundred and eighteen, and taking eight wickets for fourteen runs – were met with characteristic self-deprecation. ‘Oh, don’t talk such meringue, Ponky. Just a few lucky bounces, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, you say that, but—’

  Blotto looked as embarrassed as any Englishman does when confronted by a compliment, and hastily moved the conversation on. ‘You know, Ponky, this is the time of the year when I always get a strange feeling.’

  ‘Oh,’ said his friend with some surprise. Boddoes who’d been through the same public school rarely spoke about feelings, least of all strange ones. Ponky Larreighffriebollaux wondered whether he was about to be embarrassed.

  But the danger passed, as Blotto went on, ‘I mean, you know, today we’ve just played a spoffing good game of cricket, Tawcester Towers is looking like one of those landscapes by Sargent . . . or was it Constable . . . ? I don’t know, one of those natty brush-wielders who’s named after a police-wallah . . . and God’s in his heaven and all’s tickey-tockey with the world.’

  Ponky could not argue with these sentiments.

  ‘And yet,’ Blotto continued in an uncharacteristically thoughtful tone of voice, ‘I can’t help feeling there’s a bit of a cloud over the sun.’

  Ponky looked upwards. ‘No, there isn’t,’ he said. ‘Blue from horizon to horizon.’

  ‘I didn’t mean the real sun. Or a real cloud, come to that.’

  ‘Oh?’ Ponky Larreighffriebollaux sounded perplexed. He very rarely dealt with things that weren’t real.

  ‘It’s one of those things that the beak who taught us English at Eton was always cluntering on about. A meta . . . meta-something . . . ?’

  ‘Metronome?’ Ponky offered helpfully.

  ‘No, I don’t think it was that.’

  ‘Meteor? Metropolis?’

  Blotto shook his head. ‘No, those both miss the bull. Oh . . .’ His brow furrowed in frustration. ‘Can’t remember the exact word, but it starts with “meta” and then has a number after it.’

  ‘“Meta-five”,’ Ponky suggested.

  ‘No.’ Then it came to Blotto, like a lightning bolt slicing through ice cream. ‘“Meta-four”!’ he announced triumphantly. ‘And basically, what it means is that . . . all right, there isn’t actually a cloud over the sun, but it feels like there’s a cloud over the sun.’

  Ponky looked puzzled. This wasn’t difficult for
him. His fall-back expression had always been one of puzzlement. But he was feeling even more puzzled than usual. Blotto’s words were leading him into deep and unmapped waters of speculation.

  ‘And we’re still not talking about a real sun or a real cloud?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So, you’re saying’, Ponky suggested tentatively, ‘that, though it’s a lovely day, you’re tasting a bit of crud in the crumpet . . . ?’

  ‘You’re bong on the nose there, Ponky me old trouserpress! And for me the crud in this particular crumpet is knowing that this is the last cricket match of the season. All right, fair biddles, soon it’ll be the hunting season, and there’s nothing I like better than sitting astride my hunter Mephistopheles and blowing the wind up a fox . . . but I still . . .’ he concluded wistfully, ‘I still miss my cricket in the winter.’

  ‘Yes, with you all the way up the avenue,’ Ponky agreed. ‘But you know, Blotto me old sock-suspender, there are other parts of the world where cricket matches happen all year round.’

  ‘Oh, I know that,’ said Blotto dismissively, ‘but they’re all spoffing foreign places where they don’t speak English. India . . . Australia . . .’

  ‘I think they do speak English in Australia.’

  ‘Not proper English.’

  ‘No,’ Ponky agreed. ‘Not proper English. On the other hand,’ he went on, ‘they do play cricket in America.’

  ‘No, they don’t. They play baseball, which is a game where nothing happens and the whole rombooley goes on for hours and hours. Totally unlike cricket.’

  Ponky Larreighffriebollaux held up a hand to stem his friend’s flow. ‘There is a place in the United States where they play proper cricket.’

  ‘Oh yes? And I’m the Emperor of Japan,’ said a sceptical Blotto. ‘So where is this imaginary place?’

  ‘Hollywood,’ Ponky replied. ‘There’s a community of English actors out there who play proper cricket.’

  ‘Do they, by Wilberforce?’

  ‘And what is more, I’ve just received an invitation to make up a scratch team of Peripherals to participate in a few matches out there next month.’

  ‘Really?’ asked Blotto, his voice thick with excitement. ‘In the winter?’

  ‘You’ve potted the black there. So,’ Ponky took pity on the yearning expression on his friend’s face, ‘Blotto me old boot-scraper, how do you fancy joining the Peripherals for a short winter tour of Hollywood?’

  Devereux Lyminster looked as though all his birthdays had come at once. And it wasn’t only the thought of continuing to play cricket through the winter that boosted his emotional barometer. He liked the movies, particularly ones involving cowboys. And of those his favourites featured a hero called Chaps Chapple, played by a big hunk of an actor called Hank Urchief.

  Whatever gluepot his dastardly enemies forced him into, Chaps could always find a way out of it. He would defy horrendous odds in battles with the local Apaches and always somehow come out on top. He wore a leather waistcoat and the leather chaps that provided his nickname, and his handsome face was shaded by a broad-brimmed leather hat. He rode a horse called Lightning, who was completely white (the choice of horse colours in black and white movies being naturally limited). Chaps had a sidekick called Tubby, who was a deaf-mute. (This was actually a difficult concept to get across in a silent movie, so there were many captions reminding the audience of Tubby’s deaf-muteness.)

  Blotto, far too diffident and English to recognise any heroic qualities in himself, worshipped Chaps Chapple as a hero from a distance.

  A particular favourite movie was one called Chaps’ Lonesome Stand, which he must have watched a dozen times.

  In it a beautiful innocent young woman has been kidnapped by the notorious O’Connor Gang and taken away to their mountain hideout. (There was always a beautiful innocent young woman in a Chaps Chapple movie. She loved him and he had feelings for her too, but he could never settle down because he was too busy being a hero. Besides, their parting at the end meant that another beautiful innocent young actress could be cast in the next movie.) Chaps sets out to rescue her with his trusty sidekick Tubby.

  Unfortunately, as soon as they arrive at the O’Connors’ hideout, there’s a shoot-out, during which the firing mechanism of Chaps Chapple’s rifle is shot away by one bullet, while another immobilises Tubby by hitting him in the shoulder (always the favoured destination for a nonfatal wound in the land of cinema).

  So Chaps Chapple has to complete the rescue on his own, armed with a rifle, which is now only of use as a club, and facing the firepower of a dozen heavily armed O’Connor desperados.

  Which of course he does by a variety of daring stratagems. One of the last is releasing a pile of barrels to knock down most of the O’Connor gang. Then Chaps Chapple leaps up to the beam, which supports lifting gear on the side of a building, grabs hold of the rope and, holding his useless rifle in front of him, swings down in an arc, sending the remaining villains scattering in disarray.

  In this way, he saves both the beautiful innocent young girl and his wounded sidekick. Tubby is taken to the local doctor to be patched up, while the girl mimes the caption: ‘I WISH YOU COULD STAY AWHILE, MISTER.’ Chaps Chapple shakes his head and his caption reads: ‘SORRY, MA’AM. I CAN’T STAY AROUND WHILE THERE’S STILL VILLAINS OUT THERE WHOSE EVIL PLANS MUST BE FOILED.’ Then, after touching the brim of his leather hat to the lady, he rides off into the sunset.

  But it wasn’t just the possibility of meeting the human embodiment of Chaps Chapple, Hank Urchief, that made Hollywood attractive to Blotto. The place exercised another, more personal, magnetism for him.

  In the South of France some years earlier, he had met and taken rather a shine to a silent film actress called Mimsy La Pim. She was very beautiful and there was intellectual compatibility between them (in other words, they shared exactly the same level of brainpower).

  There had even been some discussion of marriage, which continued until both became aware of the great gulf between them. It wasn’t a class thing. Even though Devereux Lyminster was the scion of a noble British family who could trace their ancestry back to the Norman Conquest, while Mimsy La Pim had been born Pookie Klunch to dirt-poor (and dirt-covered) farmers in Idaho, Blotto still believed that love could bridge the gap. It was only when Mimsy La Pim told him that she wanted to continue her career in Hollywood that he realised his hopes of marriage were doomed. It wasn’t the thought of her working as an actress that broke the deal, it was the idea of the wife of someone of Blotto’s breeding working at anything that put the kibosh on it. Reluctantly, therefore, they parted company in the South of France, sadly agreeing that they would never meet again.

  But that didn’t mean that Blotto stopped seeing her, though. Every time the Tawcestershire Echo announced a new movie starring Mimsy La Pim, he would be occupying the best seat in Tawsford Picture Palace on its first showing. And while he watched her as the innocent prey of dastardly villains, while he saw her once again being released from the bonds that tied her to the tracks just before the train bisected her, Blotto dreamed of what might have been.

  He remembered her beauty, the helmet of black hair, the lips, grey in the movies but a vivid scarlet in the flesh. Mimsy La Pim . . .

  And now he was actually on his way to join the world in which she lived and worked. He no longer entertained thoughts of marriage, but the more he listened to other boddoes talking, the more he realised that the context of marriage was not the only way in which it was possible to spend time with members of the gentler sex. Rather slowly, Blotto was catching up with the laxness of contemporary standards of morality.

  Was it possible that he might meet Mimsy La Pim again in Hollywood?

  2

  A Meeting With the Mater

  There are ice-covered rocky outcrops in the Himalayas more welcoming than the face of the Dowager Duchess of Tawcester. Blotto and his uncannily beautiful and brilliant sister Twinks had grown up with no expectation of tenderness from
their mother and their lack of hope in that department had proved amply justified.

  Though she had on occasion been known to show affection for puppies or foals, it was not an indulgence she thought should be squandered on her children. It would only weaken them, rendering them unequal to the challenges that life would inevitably throw their way. The ancestral glue that held together families like the Lyminsters had always been duty rather than love.

  This did not cause any resentment. Blotto and Twinks would have found it odd – and rather uncomfortable – had their mother ever expressed any tenderness towards them. There was nothing soft about the British aristocracy. They remained as cranky and unforgiving as the Tawcester Towers plumbing.

  The Dowager Duchess had summoned her two younger offspring to the Blue Morning Room, which was where she always held court, and from where she ran the affairs of Tawcester Towers. While her husband had been alive, she had taken all decisions that concerned the estate, and she did not let his death and the succession of their son to the ducal title change that. Whatever happened at Tawcester Towers was decided by the Dowager Duchess.

  Her older son, the current Duke, was believed to be somewhere on the premises that day. The estates were so large that family members were quite used to not encountering each other for months on end. Indeed, the Dowager Duchess’s late husband always had to be reintroduced to his offspring on the rare occasions when they met.

  So that morning the current Duke (universally known as Loofah) was probably hiding in one of the mansion’s many rooms. When in residence at Tawcester Towers, he spent as much time as possible out shooting and, if he had to be inside the house, trying to avoid his wife (universally known as Sloggo) and their large number of daughters (which were all her busy womb seemed able to produce). The demand for a male heir in a family like the Lyminsters was unremitting, however, and though the Duke of Tawcester didn’t know much in the great scheme of things, he did know where his duty lay. As a result, he stuck to the grim task of trying to impregnate his wife with something that wouldn’t wear dresses when it grew up. So far, though, without success.