Sweet Miss Seeton (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 20)

by Hamilton Crane

  Sighing, Foxon skipped out of the path of the approaching mop and headed for the sitting room. On the threshold he paused. Ten out of ten. MissEss had fished her sketchbook out of her bag, and Miss Addison was squinting across at the hideous clock on the table next to a bunch of ratty dried flowers and scribbling with a borrowed pencil on a nice blank page.

  Foxon coughed. “Excuse me, Miss Addison.” She looked up, wide-eyed, from her scribble. “We thought we’d do a spot of work outside while we were here—tidy the garden, you know the sort of thing. Weeds,” Foxon said, gesturing with as much confidence as he could muster. He wouldn’t pull up a sausage unless Gran gave her Bible oath it wasn’t supposed to be growing where it was, which he’d always understood to be how you defined a weed. The Foxons could work just as hard as the Biddles-by-marriage—even if they needed supervision in certain areas.

  “Outside?” faltered Miss Addison. In her thin fingers, the pencil began to shake. “Work? Oh, dear—no, really, I would so much prefer it if you didn’t. That is,” she continued, rallying, “it’s very kind of you, but I don’t want to put you to any trouble, and in any case there’s nothing outside that needs doing. Not really.”

  “Adelaide Addison!” Mrs. Biddle, her floor finished, had arrived to lend force to Foxon’s argument. “How you can sit there saying that, I don’t know.”

  Adelaide gulped. She glanced from Foxon to Mrs. Biddle and back. She lowered her eyes to the sketch she’d had so much fun drawing and looked up to meet Miss Seeton’s sympathetic gaze. “Oh,” said Miss Addison after a moment. “Oh, yes. Yes—thank you. I’m sure it will be all right.”

  “All right?” Brinton glared at his junior colleague as the verbal report, over which Foxon had puzzled for most of the previous evening, reached its conclusion. “I’d say some people are easily satisfied.” He jabbed with an irritable finger at the page from Miss Seeton’s sketchbook where it lay on his blotter. “D’you think this looks as if everything’s all right?”

  Foxon contrived a hurt appearance, then caught Brinton’s eye and decided he’d better come clean. “That’s the reason I showed it to you, sir. The only reason, really. I, uh, wasn’t going to tell you I’d taken MissEss along with me unless she came up with the goods—you know what she’s like about, uh, not being able to perform to order—but, well, she did. Once I’d got her safely home and she asked me in for a cup of tea, that is.”

  “More tea?” Despite the gravity of the moment, Brinton had to chuckle. “You must have been drowning in the stuff.”

  Foxon applied a rueful hand to the small of his back. “Gran had me mucking about in that garden for what felt like hours, sir. Believe me, I needed all the fluid replenishment I could get—besides, I thought it’d give Miss Seeton another chance, seeing as she hadn’t come up with anything while we were at Miss Addison’s. And she did,” he repeated, indicating the apparently innocuous white page on its bright pink background. “Didn’t she?”

  “She did.” Brinton sighed. “Of course, we can’t tell just what she’s come up with. I’ve always said you need a translator when Miss Seeton starts her infernal Drawing ...”

  Frowning, he stared again at the picture. “Infernal” wasn’t such a bad word, come to think of it. There was a hint of something—something devilish about all this. It wasn’t so much that the place seemed ... out of proportion, but ... “I suppose this is Miss Addison’s house?” he demanded, wondering whether he wished it to be so or not.

  Foxon hesitated. “I wasn’t sure either to begin with, sir. Sort of House of Usher when you first look at it, isn’t it? But the—the basics are there—right number of windows and doors, and the garden and so forth—only she’s made them so ... distorted. And there’s an atmosphere ... much gloomier than a few rain clouds, only I can’t for the life of me tell you why ... but in any case, it’s not so much the house that strikes you, is it, sir?”

  Brinton grunted. It wasn’t. While the gables were more steeply arched, the beams more darkly black, the pitch of the roof sharper, the windows blanker and more staring—the phrase “hollow-eyed” sprang unbidden to his mind ... while the doorway was more narrow and unwelcoming—almost repellant—than in a normal house, it was on the driveway leading up to that abnormal house and on the bare-branched tree—a tall, cruel-spiked thorn—beside it on which the artist had expended her most detailed skill.

  “When she gets Seeing in that cockeyed way of hers ...” muttered Brinton, shaking his head. “Is she telling us the old girl’s on the breadline? Money doesn’t grown on trees—perhaps that’s what she’s saying. There’s been a—a wicked wind blown those bank notes off the branches and splashed them all over the path in ...” An uneasy note entered his voice. “In—funny patterns ...”

  “A regular blizzard,” agreed Foxon with a shudder that had nothing whatever to do with memories of gardening in the January cold.

  Brinton did not hear him as he peered more closely at the path in question. “Yes, those’re bank notes all right—and that damned block pattern rings a faint bell, though I can’t ...” He looked up to see Foxon miming similar bewilderment. He returned to his study of the picture. “You can see the Queen’s head in every one, can’t you? And—and all laid out, dammit, in nice neat aitches as regular as you please ...” He shook his head once more. “H. H. H.... it doesn’t make sense, Foxon. A for Addison I could’ve understood, but ...”

  “Search me, sir.”

  Brinton hardly noticed the reply. “And as for the old dear herself on the step ... Was she really as skinny as that? She’s practically a skeleton—her face is a skull, for heaven’s sake! That’s not a ... happy face, Foxon. And I don’t suppose for a minute it’s because of the busted leg. Talk about—about empty expressions and hollow eyes ...” The superintendent wouldn’t have called himself a fanciful man, but for a moment, looking at Miss Addison as portrayed by Miss Seeton, he felt that he was following her tragic gaze into the bitter bleakness of infinity. He shuddered, sighed again, and scratched his head as he became brisk.

  “Yes—well. You’ve had longer than me to think about this, laddie. What d’you make of it?”

  Foxon frowned. “The house is just ... wrong, sir, and I don’t know why. And I can’t make anything of Miss Addison except that she’s ... wrong, too, sir. Creepy—and again I don’t know why, except that money must come into it somehow. MissEss has taken so much care with the bank notes ... And I’m seriously puzzled by the block paving drive. I mean—Miss Addison didn’t have blocks at all, just a cheap coat of asphalt cracked up by the frost. When MissEss, uh, dropped her brolly, it went into the stuff like a knife through butter. It would have bounced off those blocks like a—like I don’t know what, sir.”

  Brinton tore vaguely at his hair. “You don’t know and I don’t know. Neither of us knows how to make sense of Miss Seeton the way the Oracle does—but there’s such a thing as professional pride, Foxon. We can’t keep running to Scotland Yard every time there’s an odd bit of scribble we don’t like the look of ...”

  Foxon thought this a masterly understatement, but was too conscious of the difference in rank to do more than murmur that the sketch, indeed, was not very nice.

  “Nor’s what’s been going on,” appended Brinton, wagging his finger. “Whatever it was—and still is, laddie. While you were gallivanting among the buttercups yesterday, I had a word with Doc Wyddial.” Thankfully averting his gaze from the sketch, he waved the cardboard folder in the air. “She wouldn’t go into details, but she did admit she’s got more than one elderly patient on her books who’s on the undernourished side. And she thinks it’s the same for other doctors in the area.” He tore at his hair again, observed Foxon’s grin, and subsided. “Shut up and let me think.” Foxon duly shut. He’d tried his own spot of thinking and he hadn’t much liked his thoughts. He wondered whether Old Brimstone would think the same way. He rather suspected he might ...

  “Listen,” came the command at last as Brinton picked up the telephone.
“I’m going to have another talk with Percy Jestin at the bank.” He paused. He put the receiver down. He scowled. “But first,” he said slowly, “I think I might just have a tactful word with the coroner ...”

  He had it. He asked questions and received guarded answers. He made notes and compared them to the contents of the cardboard folder. On the extension telephone, Foxon listened and tried to understand.

  “The scenes of the crime,” said Brinton, brandishing a fresh sheet of paper under his subordinate’s nose. “If,” he added, “there is a crime, which we still don’t know for sure—but we have our suspicions. Right?”

  “Er ... right, sir.” Foxon, whose suspicions had been aroused by more than one circumstance, massaged the small of his back with a thoughtful hand and had little need to contrive the accompanying wince. Brinton glared at him. Foxon coughed. “Strong suspicions, sir. But ...”

  “But?” snapped Brinton with another glare.

  Foxon chanced it. “Well, sir, scenes of the crime have to be, uh, visited. I remember how you had me and MissEss stake out the church at Iverhurst in that witchcraft business a few years ago, and—”

  “And somebody coshed you.” Callously, Brinton shrugged. “So this time you’ve got a black eye. Never stay in one piece for more than half a minute, you don’t. What d’you want me to do about it—buy you a tin hat or a personal insurance plan?” Then he frowned and scowled at the sheet of paper. “Ugh. Come to think of it, if Miss Seeton is going to start up her old tricks again—why I told you to use your blasted initiative I’ll never know ...”

  “All she’s done is Draw, sir,” Foxon reminded him gently. “Enough to show us you were right about it being, uh, suspicious. Worth investigating.”

  “Worth investigating a dozen or more times over? That’s how many we’ve got here, if scenes of crime is what they are, which we still don’t know for sure, and I’m damned if I know how we’ll find out. The sad and sorry fact is there aren’t any old dears left, not at these addresses, which is the only reason we’ve got them. Doctors still have their Hippocratic oath to worry about, remember.”

  “Even Doc Wyddial? I thought—a police surgeon ...”

  “Yes, well, since I first asked, she’s done her best to twist a few arms and she’s asked a sight more questions than I’d have got away with, but you can’t blame them for keeping quiet, I suppose, about the ones who’re still with us. Which means every single person whose name’s on here”—another brandish—“is either dead or gone. Two Accidentals that were suspect suicides the coroner was too kind-hearted to upset the friends and relations by recording—not that the relations were close, but it’s the principle of the thing—and one Misadventure who basically starved herself to death, nobody knows why, except that she was broke like the rest when the Social Services people started poking about. One is a long-stay patient in hospital after a fall and nobody in the family willing to look after him, and two more got parked in homes of one sort or another ...”

  As Foxon coughed, Brinton scowled again at the paper he still held. “It’s the same old story. None of these has—or had—what anyone’d call close family, same as the ones Jestin at the bank has got so hot and bothered about ...”

  “And, sir,” prompted Foxon as his chief fell silent. The two words were uttered with such an innocent air that Brinton’s fingers itched for the peppermints.

  “And,” said Brinton, resisting with difficulty the urge to throw things, “one of the places they got parked was—is ...”

  An unholy grin began to materialise on the countenance of Detective Constable Foxon.

  Superintendent Brinton drew a deep breath. “Doctor Knight’s place in Plummergen,” he finished with a shudder. “Yes, I know,” he said as the grin split Foxon’s face from ear to ear. “I know! And I know that if the worst comes to the worst, we can always ask Miss Seeton to go along for a chat and a Draw ...

  “If,” he reiterated heavily, “the worst comes to the worst ... which it hasn’t done yet, not by a long chalk.” He brightened. “Miss Seeton has played her part, laddie, confirming there’s been something ... out of the usual going on. Now it’s up to us to find out what it was—and still is, to judge by your recent jolly hollyhocks experience.”

  Foxon winced, but now it was the turn of Brinton to grin. He surveyed his battered subordinate thoughtfully. “That shiner of yours, laddie, is a really revolting sight.”

  “Honourable wounds of battle, sir.”

  Brinton rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “Anyone might think the local villains had arranged it on purpose to put me off my work—and we can’t have that.” His eyes returned to the young man opposite. “Now, if I didn’t know the canteen better I’d send you along for a pound of steak and a bowl of ice cubes, but as all they’d give you’d be a slice of old boot and an earful, that’s not the answer. Is it?”

  “No, sir?”

  “No,” said Brinton, absently pushing the sheet of paper across his desk. “What is the answer is ... fresh air. New horizons. Take your mind off things and stop giving me a pain just with looking at you.” The paper drifted over the edge of the desk as Foxon’s hands came up to catch it. “Why not,” suggested Brinton, staring at the ceiling again, “have yourself an afternoon off to see the sights?”

  “As well as I can with one black eye,” murmured Foxon, a bare half-decibel above inaudibility. “An afternoon off? Why not indeed, sir?” he said aloud, glancing at the paper, folding it, and thrusting it in his jacket pocket. “I fancy a change—if you’re sure you can spare me, that is.”

  “I can spare having to look at that ugly mug of yours, believe me, my lad. If I don’t see it again before tomorrow morning, that’ll be quite soon enough. Go on—scram.” And Brinton buried himself in his paperwork without looking up again to bid his subordinate goodbye.

  Had the superintendent done so, it would have been his last chance to see Foxon with his one black eye for some time to come.

  chapter

  ~ 8 ~

  FOXON SLOWED THE car into a bend. Visit the scene of the crime. Get a feel for what’d been going on. Well, it wasn’t the first time Old Brimmers had tried something of the sort, but it promised to be a lot less risky on this particular occasion. And a hell of a lot less spooky, he hoped, even taking into account Miss Seeton’s skeleton sketch of poor Adelaide Addison. But there was spooky and spooky. Like he’d told the super, he hadn’t forgotten how he and MissEss had waited together in the deserted Iverhurst church in the middle of the night until he’d nodded off to sleep, then woken up to find the place lit by candles and full of devil worshippers, some of whom had been a damn sight more devilish than others. If he tried, he could still feel the bump. Miss Seeton, bless her, had saved him from far worse, climbing up that ladder and dropping stuff on chummie’s head until he’d received a much harder, and more lethal, bump than the one he’d handed out.

  He trod on the accelerator. An empty church at midnight was one thing. A dozen or so empty houses in broad daylight would be another kettle of fish altogether. Foxon grinned. Fish. Unofficial, of course. Old Brimmers wasn’t sure, for all he tried to sound it. Without the docs and the bank and the coroner willing to swear, though he supposed they would if anyone came up with a good reason why they should, there was no proof—not unless you counted MissEss’s Drawing, and that was more a hint than hard evidence. What hard evidence he’d get from staring at houses he had no idea, but it was worth a try. Nothing confidential about going down a road and stopping to admire the view, was there?

  Going on foot, not on wheels. You couldn’t admire the view when you were driving a car, even an unmarked one, and you had more chance of seeing ... whatever there was to see if you looked slowly. Better to leave the car somewhere out of sight, just in case there might be anyone to recognise it ... though as the owners of said houses had left them (one way or another) several months ago, whoever had bought them, if they had, probably wouldn’t have enough of a guilty conscience to get the jitters
if anyone stopped to take a quick gander over the garden gate. And if they had ...

  Foxon, flicking the indicator and slowing the car to the kerb, shook his head. Conscience, maybe, in the plural? Conspiracy? He applied the brake in both the physical and the metaphorical sense. No, it did seem a bit far-fetched to suggest the old folk had been hounded into poverty and beyond by a gang of overimpatient homeowners. The market, for heaven’s sake, was buoyant enough if you went by the number of estate agents’ boards with Sale Agreed or Sold adorning front fences up and down every road he’d travelled. He climbed out of the car and locked the door. He’d thought at first the houses on Brimstone’s list would still be empty, but second thoughts showed him they most likely wouldn’t. He began to walk slowly down the road. More of a conspiracy if they were, perhaps. A network of safe houses for crooks on the run? Ditto for an as-yet-unknown charity for retired tramps? Ditto of builders, eager to buy at a cheap price, do up, and sell at enormous profit?

  Foxon scratched his head. This last might not be such a barmy idea. Adelaide Addison’s house, with a lick of paint and some plumbing repairs, wouldn’t be at all a bad place to live if you could find someone—his bones still ached—to sort out the garden. And plenty of people were really keen on gardening ... Foxon’s grin acknowledged Miss Seeton, her umbrella in one hand, a trowel in the other, as she flashed upon his inward eye wearing gumboots and a green felt hat with a jaunty feather.

  Feathers. Foxon jumped as a bird, squawking, flapped out of the hedge when he slowed his walk to a saunter and casually leaned against the gate-post to tie his shoelace. He tipped an imaginary hat in gratitude. Only natural for his gaze to follow the bird as it headed away from the disturbance towards the safety of the house. He nodded to himself. Another nice place. Potential, he believed they’d say it had, his theoretical builders. On the shabby side now, but with gables, dormer windows, quaint patterns of tile overhanging the brickwork, stone steps leading up to the panelled door from the gravel drive curving its way between shrubbery and flower beds bordering a lawn with only a few worm-casts dotted about to look untidy ...