Blotto, Twinks and Riddle of the Sphinx Read online

  The speaker, blessed with a very round body and a very round head, bore an uncanny resemblance to a cottage loaf to which small arms and legs had been appended. A pelmet of ginger hair ran around the back of his cranium, and on his upper lip a moustache of the same shade erupted like weeds from an untended pavement. Watery blue eyes bulged under ginger brows and his face was of a combustible redness yet to be attained by any boiled lobster. To compound his unattractiveness to Blotto and Twinks, Alfred Sprockett’s accent derived from the North of England, immediately excluding him from the list of people whom it might be appropriate for them to meet.

  The redness of his countenance might well have been explained by the vehemence of his oratory. People have frequently been described as tub-thumpers, but the manner of Alfred Sprockett’s rhetoric threatened to smash to smithereens any tub incautious enough to get in his way.

  ‘Brothers and sisters . . .’ he was saying as Blotto and Twinks squeezed their way into the odiferous crowd at the back of the hall.

  ‘Toad-in-the-hole!’ whispered Blotto to his sister as he looked around the throng. ‘He’s got a big family if they’re all his brothers and sisters. I suppose that class do breed like rabbits, don’t they?’

  ‘No, Blotters, I don’t think—’

  ‘Brothers and sisters . . .’ Alfred Sprockett repeated, ‘for too long the workers of this country have been downtrodden by the iron heel of the privileged classes. For too long the sweat of our brows has paid for their extravagances.’

  ‘I didn’t know sweat was legal tender,’ murmured a bemused Blotto.

  ‘Ssh,’ said Twinks.

  ‘For too long the common man has had no say in the government of this great country of ours. For too long we have been excluded from the decisions of state. Well . . .’ Alfred Sprockett’s face turned ever pucer as he approached a minor climax ‘. . . it is time for that to change!’

  The level of vociferous enthusiasm with which this sentence was greeted surprised both Blotto and Twinks. The previous encounters they had shared with common people had been considerably quieter. Those who had visited Tawcester Towers knew the appropriate demeanour in the presence of their betters. ‘Only speak when spoken to’ was the invariable rule. It was rather bizarre – and maybe a little unsettling – to hear such volume of sound from the common populace.

  ‘So let’s just go into a little detail,’ bellowed Alfred Sprockett, ‘about what we want to change. Shall we do that?’ The crowd roared their approval of the suggestion. ‘So let me ask you a few questions . . .’

  Blotto felt uneasy. Those words ‘So let me ask you a few questions . . .’ had ominous associations for him. They took him straight back to the schoolrooms of Eton where the beady eyes of the beaks regularly singled him out to see how much attention he had been paying to their lessons. And the answer to that was invariably: very little. Blotto’s mind was just not very good at assimilating facts. He had always had great difficulty dragging it away from dreams of the cricket pitch and the hunting field. Nor could he ever quite be convinced of the essential importance of mental arithmetic, Latin declensions and French irregular verbs.

  So some atavistic fear within him made him very nervous about the questions Alfred Sprockett threatened to ask. There was a silence before the first one was posed. Then it came. ‘Do we want to continue with a tiny percentage of this country’s population owning a huge percentage of its land?’

  Relief flooded through Blotto. Toad-in-the-hole, he cheered himself, if all of the questions are going to be this easy . . . ‘Yes!’ he cried in reply.

  ‘Do we want,’ Alfred Sprockett asked, ‘people who have inherited their money to have more power than those who have earned it by the sweat of their brows?’

  Again Blotto had no difficulty in replying with a resounding ‘Yes!’ (though he did wonder why the man kept going on about sweat so much).

  ‘Do we want,’ came the next cry from Alfred Sprockett, ‘the poor and the infirm to be ignored while the rich enjoy their lives of banquets, hunting, shooting and fishing?’

  The answer to this was obviously another ‘Yes’, though Blotto did wish he had the opportunity to point out that the residents of Tawcester Towers did in fact do a lot for the poor and infirm on their estate. Stale bread and soup made from the bones and internal organs of game birds were distributed to their humble cottages with some frequency, and they were all invited to join the Lyminster family for a single glass of sherry on Christmas Eve. But the noisy rally in Tawsford Town Hall didn’t seem to be a suitable forum in which he could make these points. The charitable work of the owners of Tawcester Towers would have to go unacknowledged.

  The manner in which Alfred Sprockett posed his questions had been building in intensity. His face was now so empurpled that he looked close to spontaneous combustion. ‘Do we want,’ he demanded with a dramatic flourish, ‘to return to the feudal system?’

  Blotto’s ‘Yes!’ in response to this was so loud that for the first time the aspiring politician became aware of his presence.

  He pointed a stubby red finger towards the aristocratic pair. ‘So look who we have here,’ he cried. ‘Spies in our midst! You have a nerve to come in here.’

  ‘We have as much right,’ shouted Twinks indignantly, ‘to be here as anyone else in the hall. Doesn’t the banner outside say: “EVERYONE WELCOME”? So does “EVERYONE” not include us?’

  ‘No!’ bellowed Alfred Sprockett. ‘“EVERYONE” means everyone who does an honest day’s work for their living – except of course for those unfortunate brothers and sisters who are unable to find jobs due to the greed and exploitative practices of people like you.’

  ‘Are you saying,’ asked a glacial Twinks, ‘that my brother and I are not welcome here?’

  ‘I am saying,’ roared Alfred Sprockett in response, ‘that your type aren’t welcome anywhere! And what’s more, your type won’t be around much longer! This country’s changing, and soon the filthy rich like you will no longer be living in places like Tawcester Towers, battening off the sweat of the working classes.’ (Sweat again, thought Blotto.)

  ‘There’s a revolution already under way in this country and when it finally comes to fruition, you two will be first up against the wall.’

  ‘He’s a bit of a voidbrain,’ said Blotto, as they walked away from the baying multitude in Tawsford Town Hall.

  ‘Sorry?’ Twinks was preoccupied.

  ‘That Alfred Sprockett – he said it again, didn’t he? About the wall. And he included you, being up against the wall. What a clip-clop! He ought to know that girls don’t play the Eton Wall Game.’

  But his sister didn’t seem to be listening. ‘You know, Blotto me old fish-gutter,’ she said gloomily, ‘this whole country is going to hell in a hansom cab.’

  5

  Adventures in the Attic

  Blotto’s and Twinks’s childhood had lacked some of the things voguish psychologists deem to be necessary for the developing young – like parental affection. The Dowager Duchess was much more interested in her dogs and horses than she ever was in her progeny, and it was a moot point whether her husband, the late Duke, was even aware that he had further children after the continuity of the title had been secured by the birth of Loofah. The only human contact the siblings had experienced had been with nurses, nannies and maids.

  Nor had their nursery been free of corporal punishment – their nanny had more than one way of using a hairbrush and possessed a mean skill with her ear twisting, arm pinching and knuckle rapping. Hazards of their young lives had also included regular sendings to bed without supper and frequent washings out of their mouths with soap and water.

  But the one advantage Blotto and Twinks had had over most other children in the entire world was the Tawcester Towers estate as their personal playground. The extensive woods and parklands had opened up infinite possibilities for adventures on their ponies – and allowed Blotto to develop his skills in cricket, running and other athletic pursuits.
/>   But even more exciting for two spirited youngsters had been the possibilities offered by the ancestral pile of Tawcester Towers itself. At some point someone may have counted how many rooms the house contained but that total had long since been lost in the mists of history. The two youngsters could spend whole days gambolling from vaulted chamber to vaulted chamber without ever seeing another human being.

  As a result they had devised many private games – or, to be strictly accurate, Twinks had devised many private games and Blotto had been happy to play his part in them. Most of the scenarios involved daring rescues from situations of unspeakable jeopardy. Generally Twinks took on the damsel-in-distress role (though there had never in the annals of history been a damsel more capable of looking after herself) and then described to her brother the devious plan by which he would have to save her life, honour or both. Blotto could rarely work out the logic of what he was meant to be doing, but he was good at blindly following instructions, particularly if those instructions involved biffing people. Since most of the games Twinks invented required his overcoming dauntingly unfair odds and poleaxing plenty of imaginary stenchers, he was as happy as a cat in a fishmonger’s.

  It was through these games that Blotto and Twinks developed their skills in weapon-play, climbing and escapology. Vaulted ceilings and giant staircases offered wonderful opportunities for swinging from ropes and the aristocratic siblings developed routines that would have made the average circus trapeze artist look to his laurels. The Tawcester Towers roofs, a higgledy-piggledy assemblage of turrets, spires and crenellations, also provided a wonderful training ground for feats of derring-do. Indeed, by the time the pair reached their teens, they were better versed in fieldcraft than the elite troops of His Majesty’s army.

  Some of their manoeuvres would be given private names – by Twinks, of course, Blotto wasn’t so good on the verbal stuff. And some had proved really useful in the hair-raising adventures of their adult lives. For example, a move called a ‘Double Drumski’, much rehearsed on the battlements of Tawcester Towers, had recently saved Blotto and Twinks from being liquidised in a meat grinder in a Chicago meat-packing plant. Nor was that the only occasion when exercising some well-remembered routine had extracted them from the depths of a particularly viscous gluepot.

  This familiarity with every cornice and gargoyle of their ancestral home did prompt an idea in Twinks. It wasn’t a real buzzbanger of an idea, just a squiblet really, but better than nothing. And in her current state of diminished imagination, she was happy to grab at any straw which wafted her way.

  She had rationalised the basic problem with the Tawcester Towers’s financial situation, and indeed reduced it to one very basic conclusion. They didn’t have any money.

  And Twinks knew that there were only a few ways to get money. You could inherit it – which was always the best way, but the trouble with that was you could only inherit it once. You could earn it – but obviously getting jobs was out of the question for people of the Lyminsters’ breeding. You could steal it – but, though that was how the first robber barons had founded the family fortunes, attitudes to crime had changed over the years and stealing was no longer quite the thing.

  And if none of the above methods of getting money was available, then you could possibly sell something.

  Twinks knew that the obvious Lyminster treasures, the family silver and the portraits in the Long Gallery were, as Mr Crouptickle had so gleefully told them, all in hock. She knew too that Mr Snidely was making lists of the contents of Tawcester Towers, but she didn’t have much confidence in the possibility of his unearthing anything of value. Anyway, he was starting his note-taking in the main downstairs rooms of the house. Twinks was convinced that, if there were any other objects of value hidden away, then the place to look for them would be the attics.

  These dusty repositories contained the junk of many centuries. Generations of Lyminsters had accumulated incredible amounts of stuff. Some of it had had artistic merit, some of it had been entirely worthless. But most had in time met the same fate, being replaced by more new stuff and being unceremoniously manhandled by sweating servants up to the attics. These were irregularly shaped rooms, even higher up than the poky hutches in which the house’s domestic staff slept. Nobody visited their musty interiors. Even Blotto and Twinks hadn’t been up there since they were children, when they had played unending games of hide-and-seek.

  But desperate times called for desperate measures, and nothing could have been more desperate than the current financial outlook for Tawcester Towers and its residents. So the Monday morning after their visit to Mr Crouptickle, the aristocratic siblings dug out their oldest clothes (still managing to look impossibly glamorous in them) and set out to search for treasure in the attics. They did not tell the Dowager Duchess of their plans. In fact the only person they mentioned what they were doing to was Corky Froggett, one of the Tawcester Towers chauffeurs. An ex-military man, not carrying an extra ounce of weight though well into his fifties, Froggett might be needed if there were any heavy lifting involved.

  The Tawcester Towers attics could have proved a fascinating research field for a social historian. The arrival and passing of many technologies and fads were chronicled by their contents. Rusty weapons from wars lost years before were piled up, now offering more danger from tetanus than from the sharpness of their blades. Dented armour, ripped chain mail and battered shields scattered over the floor, the bodies who had felt the dents, rips and battering long dead and gone to dust. Superannuated bits and other items of horse tack hung from hooks.

  And so each century was defined by its detritus. Even the most recent leavings had been in the attics long enough to be under layers of dust. From the Victorian era broken ‘boneshaker’ bicycles were piled up on the hoops of crinolines. Corsets tangled with birdcages. Oil lamps, upstaged and relegated by electricity, lay about in shattered profusion.

  The attics also bore witness to the interests of the various dukes who had in their time presided over Tawcester Towers. All of them were called ‘Rupert’, though most had a nickname as well. Evidence of the fifth duke, Black Rupert’s, libidinous doings lay in the attic in the form of dresses he had ripped off peasant girls. His son Rupert the Fiend’s predilections were represented by a collection of opium pipes, laudanum bottles and other impedimenta for drug use. In another attic there were piles of cracking leather ledgers in which Rupert the Dull had justified the accounts and brought Tawcester Towers back from the brink of insolvency.

  And it wasn’t just Rupert the Libertine who had built up the massive collection of manacles and whips which filled so many rooms. Those had accumulated over many generations. There was a strong family tradition amongst the Lyminsters – as in most English aristocratic families – of shackling and flogging serfs. And that tradition had not been allowed to go into desuetude with the ending of the feudal system.

  Blotto and Twinks found sifting through their family history in the attics a dispiriting business. Not because the activity reminded them of human mortality. Twinks was far too positive a person to allow such morbid thoughts into her head, and inside her brother’s head there was rarely room for more than one thought at a time. And that thought was never about mortality. What was dispiriting about their search, though, was the fact that it didn’t reveal anything of value.

  Twinks had hoped that they might get lucky in the room containing the artefacts brought back from his Grand Tour by Rupert the Tasteless. But sadly he’d lived up to his name. While other young men of the time had filled their family homes with priceless Greek and Roman sculptures or Old Masters, Rupert the Tasteless had bought the most terrible tourist tat – bas-reliefs of winking shepherdesses, statues of dogs urinating against lamp posts and paintings of winsome kittens on gondolas. His father, Rupert the Exasperated, had had all this rubbish put straight into the attics on his son’s return home. And there it had remained ever since, not even appreciating in curiosity value.

  Blotto and Twinks had
had a long day with very few breaks. Lunch had just been sandwiches brought up by a housemaid. Now the light outside was fading and they were conducting their search with the aid of those modern electric torches. Only one of the attic rooms remained unbreached and breaching it was proving a difficult task. Though the picklocks Twinks always kept in her sequinned reticule acted as easily as a key, the solid oak door refused to shift when unlocked, even with the full weight of Blotto’s magnificent shoulders applied to it. There seemed to be some obstruction on the inside. Corky Froggett was sent for with orders to bring a toolbox and crowbars.

  Eventually by the combined efforts of the two men they did manage to gain entrance, though they had to take the hinges off the door to do so. The interior space was dark, but they all got a sense of large objects looming within.

  Twinks directed her torch inside and, flickering across the room, its beam illuminated giant eyes, bright patterns and the occasional glint of gold leaf.

  ‘Great whiffling water rats!’ she said in an awestruck whisper. ‘I think these are the treasures brought back by Rupert the Egyptologist!’

  6

  The Treasure Revealed!

  The three of them crowded into the cramped space, each one’s torch beam probing the darkness, revealing the trophies brought back from Egypt in the early nineteenth century by Blotto’s and Twinks’s ancestor. There were statues, reliefs and ornately carved slabs. But the most striking object, in pride of place against the wall opposite the door, was an elaborately painted stone sarcophagus.

  ‘Blimey O’Reilly!’ said Corky Froggett, in his surprise forgetting to say ‘milord’ or ‘milady’. ‘What on earth does that look like?’

  ‘A spoffing great big jelly baby,’ said Blotto.

  He was right. It did look like a giant jelly baby. The outline was humanoid, but the proportions were wrong for a real person. The head was too large and the feet projected out disproportionately.