Sweet Miss Seeton (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 20)

by Hamilton Crane

  “Fair enough. Mind you, if she hasn’t eaten for months, I’ll bet the moggy has. Milk? If that poor old girl’s been short of the ready, it won’t have been the cat who starves—they can catch their own. Free. You could be right, Foxon. This is probably another for the files. It’s a pity the banking rules on privacy are so strict ...”

  “From what Gran says, Miss Addison didn’t much hold with banks. Seems her dad fell out with his manager in eighteen ninety-something and never trusted another of ’em to the day he died. Daughter’s the same, honouring her dear papa’s memory by being a real money-under-the-mattress type. But she hasn’t been burgled—I’d swear to that, sir. Even if she hadn’t reported it—and from what Gran says she’s the sort who’d be on the blower at once—the neighbours would have known. Which means Gran would know. And she’s never breathed a word to me, sir, any more than she did just now.”

  “It’s a pattern.” Brinton, who as Foxon spoke had been delving into the heaps of documentation on his desk, pulled out the cardboard folder in which he had shoved his random ruminations on the Pauper Pensioner problem. He opened the folder and leafed through its contents. “We’ve almost a dozen cases here, Foxon, and my instincts tell me it’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s some devilry going on we know nothing about, and the victims, poor old souls, are keeping their lips well and truly buttoned. If this Miss Addison of yours is any different, I’ll be surprised.”

  “My gran’s a ... persuasive woman, sir.”

  “To quote you, Foxon, she’s a tough old bird. It won’t be easy to stand up to her—for this Addie to keep her secret—but I’ll bet you a tidy sum she manages it somehow. That whole generation ... well, you said it yourself.”

  Foxon nodded. He scratched the tip of his nose with his ballpoint pen, leaving a smear of blue ink. “There could be hundreds of them, sir. I mean, statistically—if we only get to hear about the more, uh, obvious ones ...”

  Brinton scowled. “They’ve survived two world wars and a depression. And now, when if anyone’s earned the right to take things easy they have, they end up on the breadline. Below the blasted thing, if they can’t afford to eat and’re dropping in the streets from starvation.” His jaw set in a grim line. “I’d love to get my hands on whoever’s to blame ... but how? We haven’t a clue where to start looking for the blighter. I can’t see anything any of the—the victims have got in common beside the fact they’re old. More women than men, but that’s another statistic: in the natural way of things, you get more widows than widowers.” A lifetime’s experience of human nature made him add, “Except when the odds’ve been helped along a bit by people who can’t be bothered to get divorced. Many a good woman’s realised too late the soup didn’t quite taste the way she made it ... But that’s not the problem here.”

  “No, sir.” Foxon had been thinking. “How about if we sort of put the word round discreetly for doctors and so on to keep an eye open for old folk who aren’t as chipper as they used to be? For no obvious reason, I mean. And to let us know, and we could try a bit of—of friendly persuasion, sir.” He straightened his fluorescent tie and smirked. “I couldn’t guarantee getting much out of the old gentlemen, of course, but ...”

  “But the ladies like you—heaven knows why.” Brinton rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “I suppose it might work.” He favoured his subordinate with an appraising glare. “If we picked the ones with the strongest nerves and the darkest sunglasses—unless you want to tone yourself down a bit, that is.” He was sidetracked down a mental path he had often, though never out loud, travelled before. “What do you do if you have to go to a funeral? Cover yourself with a long black cape or hire something more in keeping?”

  “Scrounge off my brother, sir. We’re about the same size, apart from the shoes, and he works in a bank.”

  “Your brother’s a suit-and-tie merchant? Must be a changeling. Hey!” Brinton’s eyes grew bright. “A bank? Not—”

  “No, sir, sorry. He’s in Southampton, anyway. He’d be no use to us, or I’d’ve suggested it before.”

  “I suppose you would. Even someone with your horrible taste in clothes can’t be entirely lacking in common sense.” Brinton reflected for a while, then began to muse aloud. “You know, it could just work, at that. I doubt if they’d tell me, because that would make it too official. If they haven’t complained so far about whatever-it-is, they’re not likely to if a superintendent asks ’em about it. But a youngster like you ...”

  “You’d be a youngster, too, sir. Comparatively speaking. If you don’t mind my saying so.”

  Brinton grunted. He jabbed with the tip of his pencil at his blotter, brooding. He sat up. “We can have a word with Doc Wyddial,” he decided. “That woman keeps her ear to the ground, and being a police doctor she’d be more inclined to be ... a bit less confidential than some of the others if we tell her what’s worrying us. She won’t mind bending her Hippocratic oath in a good cause—and old-age pensioners being blackmailed or whatever into starvation’s one of the best causes I can think of. I hate bullies, Foxon,” said the man who could hurl peppermints faster—and harder—than anyone else in the young constable’s experience. “And if the old folk can’t stand up to the bullies by themselves, then us coppers’ve got to do it on their behalf!”

  The superintendent would have been very much surprised to learn that, even as he uttered his battle cry, one elderly lady of his acquaintance was being bullied in a way she had never, in all her sixty-something years, known before.

  • • •

  Miss Seeton had planned to work in the garden. Her invaluable handbook, Greenfinger Points the Way, had recommended for the first half of January that a little light pruning would do the apple trees and roses no harm. She could take cuttings from carnations and pinks or could think about begonias. It would help (advised Greenfinger) if she pricked over the bulb beds or started forcing her rhubarb using upturned buckets with the bottoms cut off. Miss Seeton, who had serious doubts about her ability to wield metal-cutting implements with any skill, had resolved to leave the technical niceties to Stan: but she would have been happy enough to potter away at other outside jobs, if only the weather had been kind.

  It had not. The forecast had predicted rain; the wireless announcer had not misrepresented the situation. Miss Seeton gazed through her sitting-room window at the sodden green mass of her lawn and beyond it to bushes and trees whose bare branches, spangled with raindrops, seemed decked in necklaces and tiaras of exotic, liquid diamonds. The diamonds swelled—merged—broke into a thousand shimmering shards and fell to earth, there to dance in merry puddles that, spilling over, formed rivulets running in sinuous slow motion down the gentle slope to the canal at the bottom of Miss Seeton’s back garden.

  Miss Seeton felt sorry for the chickens, who so disliked the damp. Stan, of course, had ensured that the roof of the hen-house was thoroughly waterproof, but it might be several hours before the rain stopped and they would wish to venture out into the open wire run. This weather was really better suited to ducks. Which, as she recalled from her reading, gave larger eggs. But which would perhaps confuse all her recipe books, and which, she believed, had a much stronger flavour. But which would be ... interesting, especially living so close to the canal.

  Miss Seeton considered ducks. Wild waterfowl, such as wigeon and golden-eye, scoter and shoveller and gadwall, were no strangers to one who, since her retirement, had become a keen bird watcher. The domesticated duck was, however, a different matter, though, like their undomesticated cousins, they had such pleasing names: Khaki Campbell (which inspired visions of a Scotsman wearing a kilt of cavalry twill) and Aylesbury (a town she had never visited); Buff Orpington (which reminded her of Kipling’s celebrated remark about standing steady) and Muscovy (how fortunate that here it was only sleeting, not snowing).

  “Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow,” murmured Miss Seeton with a shiver. It had been Russia’s weather, not her military, that had defeated the Corsican egomaniac. M
iss Seeton recalled other, more recent, maniacs with delusions of world domination and shivered again before scolding herself. So dismal, when ducks were such ... comical birds: quite unlike geese, which could be so fierce and whose eggs were even larger. But which made excellent watchdogs, if that was the word. “Ancient Rome,” mused Miss Seeton, recalling long-ago lessons about the night attack on the Capitol by the Gauls, thwarted by the cackling of the sacred geese. “Goths,” said Miss Seeton, “and Huns and Vandals ...”

  She had no idea that a genuine twentieth-century vandal was even now preparing to knock on her door.

  The unexpected thumping made her start. Most people, after all, used the bell. She supposed that in the gloom of the rain-filled day the bell-push must be in shadow. Which meant it could not be a friend or acquaintance who knocked, as they would have known where the bell-push was. And it would be discourteous to be tardy in responding to the call of a stranger ...

  The thumping was repeated before Miss Seeton had jumped to her feet and begun hurrying down the hall. She clicked her tongue. One did not care to make premature judgements, particularly when the weather was so gloomy, but it was a little brusque, if not discourteous, of whomever was outside to have allowed her such a short time to leave the sitting room before knocking again ...

  And again—or almost. Miss Seeton, slightly out of breath, snatched open the front door just as a fisted hand was preparing to deliver its third impatient salvo.

  “Oh!” said Miss Seeton, moving hurriedly back as the fist quivered in front of her. “I do beg your pardon.”

  “Ugh,” said the man—yes, a stranger—on the doorstep. Or—perhaps—not a stranger. There was something about him that was vaguely familiar: something about the stance, about the eyes in their deep, wide sockets above that nose with the high arch and flaring nostrils ...

  “I,” announced the stranger, “am Antony Scarlett.” Miss Seeton blinked. Of course! But before she could speak, the Rubens of Refreshment hurried on:

  “You are something of an artist yourself, they tell me.” The tone in which he repeated this tale implied that he did not hold the opinion of others in very high regard.

  Blushing, Miss Seeton replied that, while she had heard of Mr. Scarlett—had, indeed, visited his exhibition only the other day—she would not care to place herself in the same category. (This, she felt, committed her to nothing while being absolutely truthful.) She wondered who had done so, for she feared that person had misled him. “A teacher, that is all, and retired—evening classes, some private pupils; and I occasionally help out when Miss Maynard or her mother is unwell—the local school, you know.”

  “I don’t,” said Antony Scarlett. “I have never heard of an art school in Plummergen—but it is of no importance,” he said as Miss Seeton attempted to explain her relationship to the village’s deputy head and its junior mixed infants. “You say you have visited my exhibition?”

  Miss Seeton nodded without speaking. If only he didn’t ask her what she thought. She could still hear the caustic comments of Ferencz Szabo as they lunched together at the Savoy (light omelettes, fruit salad, and black coffee); she hoped Mr. Scarlett wouldn’t connect her with the withering—and, one had to admit, for the most part justified—observations written by Mr. Szabo in the Visitors’ Book before they had left the Galerie Genèvre.

  “Then you know my work,” said Antony Scarlett. “You are aware of its importance—of its relevance to modern life.” He flung out his arms in a gesture that sent drops of rain pearling from the black folds of his cloak—not velvet, in such weather, but a surprisingly sensible gaberdine with, of course, the inevitable scarlet lining. He did not wait for a reply. “And,” he hurried on, “since you are aware of my credentials, you cannot, of course, refuse to let me enter to put my proposition to you, Miss Seeton.”

  Miss Seeton blinked again. They had not been formally introduced. How ...?

  “They told me in the bakery.” Scarlett had caught her puzzled look and interpreted it correctly. “Most helpful,” he added. “A delightful lady; delightful.” Mrs. Wyght, who ran the bakery and tea room diagonally opposite Sweetbriars, was indeed a friendly and helpful soul, though Miss Seeton couldn’t help musing that a Mrs. Pink, a Mrs. Black, or a Mrs. Greene would have been regarded with equal favour.

  She was becoming whimsical; Antony Scarlett was growing wet. And impatient. “A proposition?” enquired Miss Seeton, politely stepping aside to usher her visitor into the house. “I fear you may have been misled over my ... small talent, Mr. Scarlett. As I thought I explained, I retired several years ago, and—”

  “No, no, nothing like that!” The hall was too narrow for the full-blooded flourish, so Antony waited until they were safely in the sitting room before flinging out his arms and filling the air with a warm red-silk glow. “I ask for your help, Miss Seeton—for your cooperation. No, for your sacrifice in the cause of art as a memorial to the spirit of a truly remarkable man!”

  A faint bell chimed in the recesses of Miss Seeton’s memory. As yet, it did not sound a warning, though perhaps it should have done; but Miss Seeton seldom thought the worst of anyone, even when there was cast-iron evidence that worse than the worst had been done—or was about to be done.

  As now.

  “Miss Seeton, I want you to sell me your cottage,” said Antony Scarlett.

  Miss Seeton hadn’t yet asked her guest to sit for fear she must answer to Martha for the effects of wet gaberdine on feather cushions. Out of courtesy she had herself therefore remained standing, but she sat down now with a vengeance. She dropped on the nearest chair and stared, speechless, at the tall caped figure who had made such a monstrous suggestion.

  “I must have this house,” said Antony Scarlett as Miss Seeton continued to struggle for speech. She tried shaking her head, but the movement didn’t communicate itself to the artist, who was waving his arms again as he warmed to his terrible theme.

  “The Stuttaford Prize,” he announced, “will be awarded for an original work of art paying the greatest tribute to the memory of Sir Andrew Stuttaford, the Victorian plutocrat and philanthropist. Now, how did the man make his money, Miss Seeton?” Miss Seeton was still trying—and failing—to croak out her refusal; but Scarlett did not notice her silence as he swept on with his explanation.

  “Stuttaford made his money in the tea, tobacco, and chocolate trades. He set up the foundation when his best clipper sank within sight of land—sank in water, Miss Seeton!” This was said with an air of triumph Miss Seeton failed to appreciate. “This house, your house, the house soon to be mine, stands on a corner where three roads meet—the triad, the triangle, the balance of life—and it stands near water—water once used, I am told, as a means of transporting commercial goods ...”

  “Napoleon,” Miss Seeton managed to gasp as Antony swooped in an expressive circle around the room, gesturing first to the invisible Street and Marsh Road outside, then towards the bottom of Miss Seeton’s garden and the Royal Military Canal. “Hitler!”

  “No!” cried Antony Scarlett, revolted. “Miss Seeton, I am no tyrant, no philistine destroyer who tramples on free thought—my aim is to restore the weary spirit, the jaded palate of the soul! I am an artist—I create, I inspire! The Rubens of Refreshment, who glories in the richness of the liberated life—so they call me, and so I am! You have seen my exhibition—you are an artist. You, of all people, must understand!”

  He gave her no time to reply, but swooped in another circle, his arms outstretched in a universal embrace. Miss Seeton flinched as the cape’s heavy hem swung past her nose. “I,” said Antony Scarlett, “would celebrate the glorious achievements of Sir Andrew Stuttaford by buying your cottage and transforming it into a three-dimensional memorial to the man—yet, even as Sir Andrew is remembered, so will those who remember be forced to remember that, even as he, so must they perish and decay, like this house ...”

  “Glp?” cried Miss Seeton, in a horrified squeak.

  Antony Scarlett, still
oblivious to her mood, perorated onwards. “I shall buy this house. I shall bring huge vats of molten chocolate and pour the contents into every room—rooms around which I will have already, in carefully selected places, set an assortment of smoking paraphernalia: matches, pouches of tobacco, and, above all, pipes. The humble clay, the churchwarden, the meerschaum—and the briar. A multitude of briars. You see the symbolism, Miss Seeton? It is vital—exquisite—perfect! This cottage, Sweetbriars—chocolate, tobacco pipes ...”

  Miss Seeton saw and was aghast. Antony Scarlett was not. “The rooms,” he went on, gloating, “will be entirely filled with chocolate, and once it has set, a trio of workmen will demolish the house with pickaxes, brick by commonplace brick, from roof to cellar! What remains will be a perfect, paradoxical marriage of art and architecture—this house in a reverse, in a negative form—not Sweetbriars, but Briars Sweet! Exposed for a year to the elements, the chocolate will slowly melt and decay, trickling its way towards the canal along which, throughout the centuries, weary cart-horses dragged barges laden with the merchandise that made Sir Andrew rich ...”

  Miss Seeton shrank from the wild fire in his eyes, from the violence of his destructive vision manifested as a dull, red gleam. A maniacal gleam? The border between genius and madness was said to be very thin. From her own knowledge, and with the words of Ferencz Szabo still blistering her ears, she could not in all conscience call Antony Scarlett a genius. Which left—well, the other. What was the correct way to deal with a madman? One was, she believed, if all else failed supposed to humour him. But to humour him she would have to agree to sell her dear cottage, and nothing on earth could induce her to do that. Not yet, at any rate, although once she became unable to live here, perhaps—if, that was, she in fact ever did. Dear Cousin Flora had been ninety-eight when she stopped living in the cottage and had only stopped then because she died.