Sweet Miss Seeton (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 20)

by Hamilton Crane

  What would Cousin Flora have said to Antony Scarlett when he told her he wanted to knock down her house? Miss Seeton, seated in Cousin Flora’s own cottage, with so many heirloom ornaments, pictures, and pieces of furniture about her, felt her courage starting to return. She knew what Cousin Flora would have said.

  “Ridiculous,” she said, as Antony swooped in one final symbolic circle and turned again in triumph to face her. “Ridiculous,” repeated Miss Seeton, rising to her feet on legs that hardly trembled and not caring if he thought her discourteous. “I have no intention, Mr. Scarlett, of selling my house. Absolutely none. And especially since all you wish to do is—is demolish it. You will have to find somewhere else to—to build your ... chocolate paradox.” She bit back another “ridiculous” just in time.

  She cleared her throat and drew herself up to her full five-foot-nothing in her slippered toes. “And now, if you will excuse me, I have things to do.”

  As Antony had been oblivious to Miss Seeton’s earlier perturbation, so now was he oblivious to her hints that he should depart. All he had heard was her refusal—which he did not think discourteous, but ignorant. Philistine. He had been deceived in his opinion of her: those who said she was an artist had been wrong.

  “I do not see,” said Miss Seeton rather sharply, “that I can be held to blame for what other people tell you. And,” she added more gently, “perhaps you misunderstood. Or didn’t listen properly.” Oh, dear. Did that sound rude? “As, of course, would be understandable, if, that is to say, you were ... overexcited at having found what you believed to be a suitable location for your work.”

  “But it is!” cried Antony, latching on to the one phrase that might indicate a weakening on her part. “This house—this site—is perfect, Miss Seeton! I must have it. There is nowhere else that will do!”

  “There will have to be,” Miss Seeton told him. It was so much easier to be brave when standing up: and his eyes, when one faced them squarely, did not gleam with quite such unnerving fervour. “There are other canals in England,” she said as Antony began to pace the floor and tear his hair in the authentic Thwarted Genius manner. She held her breath as he flounced past certain china ornaments on the radiator shelf, but she uttered no reproach beyond:

  “In the eighteenth century, before the railways ...” No, one should not allow oneself to be sidetracked, fascinating though one’s leisure reading always was. “Might I suggest,” said Miss Seeton, who really didn’t want to appear disobliging, “that you purchase a good atlas—I believe the Ordnance Survey is excellent—and search through it for a similar configuration of roads and waterways to the one you believe you require?”

  She did not add her suspicion that he would find it as hard to persuade the owners of whatever house he eventually chose to sell it as he had found the persuasion of herself. If not more so. “And now,” she said again, “you must excuse me. I have things to do.”

  “No!” cried Antony Scarlett in a voice of thunder. His reluctant hostess winced, but stood her ground. “I will not—cannot—be cast into the howling desert darkness when I have found here the one and only oasis!”

  “It is broad daylight,” said Miss Seeton, that most literal of souls. “And still raining.” Through years of teaching she had learned that it was inadvisable to allow children’s tantrums to get out of hand.

  Children? Why ... yes. No wonder she had ceased to feel any great alarm. Antony Scarlett, ranting and raving about the place in that exaggerated fashion, had suddenly seemed no more than an overgrown child, about to indulge in a sulking fit because he couldn’t have what he wanted.

  Well, he couldn’t. “Well, you can’t,” said Miss Seeton. “Buy my house, I mean. And if you don’t run away—that is, if you don’t leave now, I ...” Antony had settled on the hearthrug, and Miss Seeton’s eye was caught by the watercolour hanging on the wall above the fireplace. It was one of her own: a bleak, windswept moorland under stormy skies, powdered with snow she had pastelled later at the request of dear Superintendent Delphick, of whom it had been a fanciful likeness. The Grey Day.

  “I shall be forced,” concluded Miss Seeton, inspired, “to call the police.”

  chapter

  ~ 6 ~

  IN ASHFORD, SUPERINTENDENT Brinton was feeling pardonably pleased with himself and his team. After a tip-off, a dawn raid had successfully netted the already suspect, but as yet unproven, gang behind a whole series of armed robberies in high street shops: a father, his two sons, and his youngest daughter’s boyfriend. All four men, plus the daughter (who had beaned Detective Constable Foxon with her bedside lamp as he tried to apply handcuffs to her sleeping companion) were currently in police cells, trying to fabricate—that is, to recollect—their numerous and complicated alibis for the benefit of their exhausted lawyers.

  “That shirt doesn’t help. You still look horrible.” Brinton looked up from his desk to grin ferociously at Foxon as that young man made his entrance after a quick trip home to rectify at least part of the damage done at dawn. “But the tie could be worse ...” Then he remembered. He sat up straight. “Foxon, what the hell are you doing here?”

  “Horrible, sir?” Foxon contrived to look wounded in the spiritual as well as the physical sense. “I’d call it on the tasteful side, myself.” He did not respond to the hint that he was technically on a day’s sick leave suffering from concussion, but dropped into the chair opposite his superior and returned the latter’s grin, though—in deference to his burgeoning black eye—with less ferocity.

  Brinton sighed. “So much for sending you round to charm the old ladies. One look at your tasteful gear and your ugly mug and they’ll be talking to the police, all right—but it’ll be on the other end of a three-nines call. We don’t want you scaring the witnesses into fits; we want them spilling the beans nice and easy. Well, they won’t, not until you and that shirt’ve ... faded a bit. You look horrible,” he reiterated, “and you’ll look more horrible still before you’re done.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  Brinton grunted.

  “She moved a bit faster than I was expecting.”

  Brinton rolled his eyes.

  His subordinate brushed a feeble hand across his brow. “Here’s me,” he lamented, “struggling back to work when by rights I ought to be in bed with an ice-pack on my head—”

  “Shuttup, Foxon.” The command was automatic. Even as the younger man launched into his lament, the superintendent was fishing in the “in” tray for his Pauper Pensioners folder. “If it’s ice you want, shove your head out of the window. It’s cold enough out there to freeze—”

  He stopped, conscious that the comparison he had been about to make might not be appropriate for a senior to use in front of a junior officer. His junior grinned. “Do you know, sir, I found out the other day what it really means? And it isn’t rude at all. It’s all to do with the old-time Navy and cannon balls. Apparently they used to stack ’em on deck to be ready for action, in a pyramid held together by a brass frame called a monkey. And when the temperature went too low, the monkey would shrink and make all the balls roll out. They were made of iron, you see, sir, and iron and brass have different ... uh, they expand at different rates. And, uh, shrink,” he finished as the inevitable objection could be seen on Brinton’s lips.

  “Amazing.” The superintendent rolled his eyes. “Useless, but amazing. Children’s television, was it?”

  “Admiral Leighton, sir. I bumped into him when I was over in Brettenden checking that jeweller’s statement, and you know how cold it was the day I was there. We got chatting, and—well, he told me.”

  “He didn’t look as if he was starving to death, did he?” Brinton had retrieved his Pensioner file and was poised to open it. “Hale and hearty, I hope? Still got the twinkle in his eye?”

  “And the ginger in his beard,” Foxon readily confirmed. “Whatever’s been going on with the old folk, it hasn’t reached Plummergen yet—sorry, sir,” he said as Brinton winced at this light-hearte
d reference to Miss Seeton’s village. “And I don’t suppose the Admiral’d thank me for counting him among the pensioners, even if he is retired. He’s all there and a bit more, I’d say.”

  “So would I.” Brinton opened the file. “Unlike some poor wretches—this Miss Addison, now. She’s out of hospital, they tell me, and the district nurse’ll be popping in every day to make sure the old girl gets at least one decent meal. A close friend of your gran’s, is she?”

  Foxon knew who he meant. “I’d say close enough for our purposes, sir.”

  “Yes, but they aren’t really ours.” Brinton glared at him across the open folder. “They can’t be, because there’s been no official complaint. This is ... a spot of private work. A hunch of a case when there isn’t a case, if you know what I mean.”

  “Got you, sir.”

  “But I haven’t got you. You’re off sick today, laddie. And of course I can’t tell you the best way to recuperate—I’m no medical expert—but if you felt well enough to pop round to see your old grannie—take her out for a drive on such a nice sunny day ...”

  Both men glanced through the window at the pouring rain and glanced away again quickly. They kept careful custody of their eyes and suppressed their separate smiles. “Yes,” said Brinton, “a nice drive in the country—the fresh air’s bound to be good for your headache ...”

  “Right, sir.”

  “Right.” Brinton slammed the folder shut and scowled at its closed cover. “I haven’t a clue what to tell you to look out for. Anything wrong’s about the best I can manage. Use your initiative, laddie—and don’t put the wind up the old girl if you can avoid it. She’ll be feeling bad enough to start with, having that shiner of yours staring her in the face. Proper rogue and vagabond, you look. If your gran doesn’t vouch for your good character, heaven help us; she probably won’t even let you in the house.”

  “I’ll do my best, sir.” Foxon eased himself out of the visitors’ chair, adjusted his jacket, and straightened his distinctive kipper tie. “See you tomorrow, sir?” he said and was gone.

  Use his initiative. Well, he was a copper. That’s what coppers did in the general run of things, and if they were detectives they used even more. Foxon thought he didn’t do too badly, on the whole—though he wasn’t sure what Old Brimstone would say when he found out how much initiative his junior meant to use. Even if he’d more or less put the idea in his head in the first place by jabbering on about Rear Admiral Leighton. Still, by the time he presented his report, it’d be too late to do anything about it ...

  About her.

  Whistling only once he was well out of earshot, Foxon bounded from Brinton’s office down the corridor to the car park at the rear of the station. Not being officially on duty, he took an unmarked vehicle and didn’t bother letting Desk Sergeant Mutford, letter of the law or not, know he’d taken it. Old Brimmers could sort everything out if questions were asked.

  One of the many questions the superintendent had not asked was whether Foxon was going to his grandmother’s by the direct or by the scenic route ...

  The young detective constable threaded the car through the complexities of Ashford’s traffic system until the thinning houses of the residential area gave way to fields and farmland and the signpost informed him that he was travelling along the B2070. He passed through Bromley Green and negotiated the crossroads at Hamstreet; he went under the swinging cables of the electricity pylons and gave way to a vehicle coming in the opposite direction on the narrow bridge over the Royal Military Canal. He took the fork for Snargate—turned left and north on the B2080—crossed the railway line and the canal for a second time ...

  By this roundabout route, Foxon accomplished his arrival at the southern end of Plummergen without anyone in any of the shops to the north noticing that he had arrived.

  He was taking a risk, of course. Miss Seeton might be out, and if he went looking for her he was bound to be spotted. And that wasn’t the only risk. He knew as well as Old Brimmers, or the Oracle, that once MissEss and her brolly were on the case, you could never be sure what would happen next. But it wasn’t her brolly he wanted so much as her ... presence. She was good with people: and not just children, either. Maybe it was because it was hard to take her seriously in those awful hats she always wore. They made you smile; they put you at your ease.

  And who better to put a sick, elderly lady at her ease with an unknown, villainous-looking young man than another elderly lady? He and Miss Seeton weren’t exactly strangers. They’d once spent the night together, in the most innocent way, in a deserted church. And she’d ended up saving his life by dropping things—that umbrella again—on the head of the thug who was pursuing her up a ladder, after having coshed her companion senseless, with intent to return and finish the job properly once he’d finished Miss Seeton. And she’d, well, finished him. For which Foxon, once he’d come round, had been more than grateful.

  He pulled the car up to the kerb; switched off wipers, lights, and engine; and prepared to be grateful again.

  With his head bowed against the rain, he scurried up the short, paved front path to Miss Seeton’s door and rang the bell. He waited. She did not answer. After what he judged to have been two tactful minutes, he rang once more.

  Still no answer. She must be out—yet surely not shopping, brolly or not, in such weather? He rang a third time and, when there was still no reply, was struck by an idea.

  She’d been kidnapped before; she’d been attacked before in the privacy of her own home. He couldn’t think of any current reason for the bad guys to be after her, but with MissEss you could never be sure. He’d better scout around the back for broken windows or other signs of violence so the super could be warned to start looking ...

  It was as he made his way down the passage between Sweetbriars and the high brick wall separating it from the narrowed Street that he saw the oblong of light shining on that wall. It was yellow—electric—barred, as if coming through a window. The kitchen window, he knew.

  On tiptoe, Foxon crept the last few feet and peered into Miss Seeton’s kitchen ...

  He observed Miss Seeton in person, making herself a cup of tea with every appearance of calm. She was alone; she seemed unharmed, though a slight pucker between her brows might hint at some mental perturbation. With raindrops running down the back of his neck, Foxon wisely waited for her to complete her manoeuvres with the kettle of boiling water, then rapped on the glass to attract her attention.

  Miss Seeton looked up. The pucker between her brows was now a frown. She saw Foxon’s waving hand and smiling face, blinked, and suddenly smiled back at him through the speckle of raindrops obscuring her view. She hurried to the back door and let him in.

  “Mr. Foxon! What a delightful surprise—but, oh, dear, you’re soaking wet, and I suppose it’s all my fault.” She gave him no time to reply. “And your poor eye—have you bathed it properly? Would you like some saltwater and cotton wool? It won’t take me long.”

  “No, I’m fine, thanks. Just a bit damp, but you know me, tough as old boots. Honestly, I’m fine,” he insisted as she studied him in silence for a while, then nodded.

  “Let me pour you some tea to warm you: I always make enough for a second cup, and I’ll top up the pot as well. It was very rude of me, I know, but really it seemed the best thing to do, in the circumstances. And a few biscuits? Some cake? Thank you, yes—that cupboard.” Miss Seeton was happy to allow him the pottering privileges of an old acquaintance. “Any of my friends, of course, would know that if I didn’t come to the door they would find me out here or in the sitting room at this time of day. So far, thank goodness, he doesn’t seem to have thought of that, though I fear it may only be a matter of time.” And, as she poured the tea, she sighed.

  It was usual for those associating with Miss Seeton to need to unravel certain complex trains of thought before they could come to any understanding. After seven years, Foxon was as good as most at reading between the lines.

  And espec
ially in the circumstances that had brought him here. “Someone keeps bothering you?” She was elderly; she lived alone; she had money, he knew—her police income, her pension—that might make her a suitable victim. She was on the skinny side to begin with: it wouldn’t show ... but he’d never thought of MissEss as the sort to give in easily, and he’d never doubted her common sense or her courage. Still, there was always a first time.

  “Someone keeps bothering you?”

  Miss Seeton blushed. “I don’t like being rude, but when he won’t take no for an answer—of course, I haven’t let him in the house again, after dear Sir George so kindly explained to me about trespassing—but I find raised voices so disagreeable. He will boom at me. And with that black cloak of his—like Dracula, so foolish and theatrical—he makes me think of Stendhal. Scarlet, you see, and Black. Le Rouge et le Noir. Of course, I don’t speak French,” she added hastily, not wishing to seem pretentious. “And when I saw you I ought to have realised, for you weren’t wearing one, only with your head down against the rain when I looked through the window ...”

  “You were keeping out of his way?” He’d leave asking whose way until later. Whoever he was, Miss Seeton didn’t sound too scared of him.

  Miss Seeton was still musing on Stendhal’s famous novel. “I doubt, you know, if his motives are either religious or genuinely spiritual. Or military,” she added with a twinkle. “But then,” she conceded, “he is young and still making his way in the world. Without much talent, I fear.” She shook her head and twinkled again at her guest as she handed him the biscuit tin. “They say that every little helps, don’t they? Publicity and so on.” She sighed. “Which if one wants it is beneficial, I suppose. But I have no intention, as I keep trying to tell him, of helping the foolish young man by allowing him to buy my house and fill it with chocolate and knock it down—”

  “To do what?” Foxon, poised to bite into a plain digestive biscuit, allowed astonishment to overcome both etiquette and hunger.