7. Tea and Torte

St Peterburg – walked along Nevsky Prospekt to the Palace Square to gaze at the Winter Palace. Mama went to sumptuous balls there before. She made a friend of the Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna and they corresponded for a while until. So sad. My darling boy, Mater.

P.S. Daddy says ask Foggy about the Camino Real.

(6g12t6dgp Jūrmala)

Dunstable Downes had long since ceased to wonder how his mother and father knew anything. Their private intelligence network was global and rapid in the extreme. So he had a new lead. Dr Foggensteiner FRS, a.k.a. Foggy, the renowned physicist and escapologist.

DD took a lengthy call from Inspector Frankley the following morning. Had he had any thoughts on the case so far?

DD admitted that though he had read the file he had been too distracted by visitors and the Duchess’s little difficulty to give it much consideration.

There had been a little development at Frankley’s end. Another truck had been hijacked in the Bristol area, near to Avonmouth Docks. The vehicle was found early the next morning by Yorkshire police, dumped, minus cargo, in the countryside to the south east of Sheffield. What was so exasperating Frankley was how the thieves had managed to move the vehicle so far so quickly and without being spotted by any hawkeyed patrol officers en route. This was a particularly large pantechnicon – with a particularly large and valuable payload – so the alarm was raised particularly quickly when it did not turn up at the docks on time. It was stolen late in the evening and an APB was out within 30 minutes of its disappearance. Had they disguised it somehow? There is not that much traffic during the night. It should have stuck out like a sore thumb rumbling across the built up areas it must have passed through.

They chatted on about other things. Frankley updating DD on the fate of criminals with whom he had crossed swords. DD enjoyed the banter with Frankley but eventually made his excuses, promised he would think about the case, and rang off.

He went out to the old coach house where Toddington and Clackett were engrossed in their chores. 

Toddington was waxing one of the cars, a ’38 Humber Snipe, while Clackett filled a wooden barrow with tools before heading for the kitchen garden to carry out some routine maintenance.

“Clackett. I saw a boy’s bike here the other day?” DD enquired.

Clackett cleared his throat and coloured a little. “Ah yes, that would be the boy Slipper’s bike. He had found it in a ditch and he asked me to help him weld some of the joints on the frame which were coming apart.”

“No problem. Just wondered.” DD smiled. Clackett relaxed. DD had been right in his surmise as to the identity of their mysterious sharp shooting saviour.

“Toddington. I’m going down to see Foggy. Come with me?”

Toddington grinned. “Pleasure. We’ll take this one – soon as I finish.”

He set to with renewed vigour. A trip to Foggy’s invariably meant lunch near Hinksey, on the river, one of Toddington’s favourite watering holes – and the meat and potato pie.

Foggy lived in a substantial grey-yellow brick Victorian villa residence in a suburb of Oxford. There was no need to make an appointment. He had never left the house since an experiment into defences against chemical warfare went horribly wrong. The effect on Foggy’s skin was such that he had to remain in a controlled environment with constant temperature and humidity levels. Two floors of the house where he lived and worked were specially adapted for this purpose. He was attended by his devoted sister, Elisabeth, who kept house and helped with his ongoing research.

Foggy did not need to leave the house. The whole world – that is the world of science and academia – came to his door. Research fellows, dons and professors; industrial chemists and physicists; ministers and secretaries of state; from home and abroad the glitterati, the dreamers, the eccentrics and the scientific boundary poppers all sought him out.

They arrived mid morning and were welcomed at the door with beams of joy by Elisabeth, pastel pink and dainty as an angel cake. She shook hands formally with Toddington bowing stiffly and slightly like one of her Austro Hungarian forbears. But for DD there was a warm hug and kisses on both cheeks and a mock reprimand with wagging finger and severe frownings for leaving it so long since his last visit. Though she had spent most of her adult life in the UK there remained a strong accent. All her wuhs were vuhs and her suhs were zuhs.

Toddington and DD were ushered by Elisabeth into the airlock, a massive vertical plexiglass tube. The side swivelled open to let them in and shut with a fizzing sound behind them. For 20 seconds DD and Toddington were cacooned. A violent updraft shook them and with a whooshing sound the air was sucked out and immediately replaced with conditioned and filtered air before the facing wall moved aside to let them through to Foggy’s apartment.

They found themselves in a vast room  - white, modern and sterile, a bit like an elongated squash court. The few items of furniture were odd and anachronistic - a marble wash stand; an Edwardian writing table in mahogany; a Récamier chaise longue – among other things, all pushed back against the wall. Across the floor were scattered cardboard boxes and old tea chests regurgitating packing materials – foam and tissue paper. Clustered at one end of the room were huge blue and green bottles from Russia that had once held chemicals, each standing maybe 4 feet high, and filled with what looked like a variety of grades of sand and gravel.

In the middle of the floor on his hands and knees was a small rotund man with rimless glasses, curly whisps of white hair like a slipped and damaged halo beneath a bald and unnaturally large pate. He was wearing a tight fitting white boiler suit. His feet were incongruously shod with a pair of very well worn sandals and odd brightly coloured socks.

He grinned up at them. White mice were running in every direction watched imperiously from a high shelf by a blue Persian cat. Several of the pockets of Foggy’s boiler suit appeared to have live contents as he stood up more mice cascaded onto the floor and shot away. He thrust out hands to welcome them both tripping lightly across the floor oblivious the scattering mice and the crush potential.

“My dear friendz! How long?! Too long! How lovely toozee you both.”

DD and Toddington did not ask what he was doing with the mice. They knew better. Explanations could be as lengthy as they were unintelligible to mere mortals. Such was his track record that it was normally a case of what he was trying to do as opposed to what he actually achieved. But Foggy always explained that we learn from our mistakes and that was why he was such a learned man. He had a point. Despite the lack of success with his many and varied experiments he was much sought after for his perspicacity and his encyclopaedic knowledge of scientific endeavour worldwide.

DD did not beat about the bush.

“Pop told me to ask you about the Camino Real.”

“Ahh ... ze Camino Real....” he savoured the words, “ .... best eaten viz single cream and dipped in caster sugar .... but you have to eat zem when zey are just ripe. Ze Camino Real has such a delicate lemony flavour but zey are like pears ... zere is such a narrow window of opportunity, just as zay are about to turn, to enjoy zem at zeir best.”

He seemed transported with delight eyes half closed he stood on tip toes as he recalled the fruit. Then bump. His heels hit the floor and in a serious tone , “very popular with amateur growers for zis reazon – but definitely not zootable for commercial growrz. But you probably know all zis already from your friend the Duchess? How is she by the way?”

DD ignored the question. “That’s just it.” 

Then he proceeded to tell Foggy of the Duchess’s distress, his visit to the MOT, the involvement of DICS and the Parks brothers and finally of the words Camino Real in manuscript on the cover of the MOT file and Baldock’s momentary reaction when he had asked him the question.

Foggy’s playfulness dropped away. He frowned and scratching his chin said “Zo, it eeze not strawbreeze we are talking about zen.”