Sweet Miss Seeton (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 20)

by Hamilton Crane

  “Or a wig,” someone said sharply. It was never forgotten in certain quarters (meaning those households with female inhabitants of qualifying age) that Emmy had not once (which was bad enough) but twice been crowned Miss Plummergen as an artificially long-haired blonde when her everyday appearance was that of a short-haired brunette.

  “Not natural, anyway,” said someone else pacifically.

  Although people could have argued with this, nobody did: the redhead in the overcoat was collecting her belongings with the air of one about to leave the bus, and it was more than likely she would be in their midst within half a minute. Any stranger who visited Plummergen seemed to find the post office irresistible, and no worthwhile debate about the business of said stranger could take place in a mere thirty seconds. They would wait until she’d gone and enjoy themselves all the more with the luxury of unlimited time.

  “Might be from the films,” said Emmy, more envious than ever as she hopped off the aluminium steps and folded them away. She and the George’s Maureen shared a rapturous daydream of Discovery by some passing producer who, instantly recognising their talent, would whisk them from humdrum Plummergen to Hollywood of a thousand thrills. “A star,” mused Emmy as she twirled the handle of the bacon slicer, “like Greta Garbo, come on holiday in secret and wanting someone to—to be a double ...”

  Nobody managed to do more than snigger at her before the redhead was, as they had anticipated, off the bus ... and, rather than entering the post office, with an elegant swaying motion was walking southwards down The Street.

  “Well!” said Mrs. Skinner as the tawny mane vanished from sight. “Well, I never!”

  “Poor soul,” said Mrs. Henderson, seizing the chance to out-comment her rival, who had seemed lost for words. “Poor soul,” she said again in doom-laden tones. “Ah, they were right, young Emmy, to give you that garlic, for you see it’s worked, hasn’t it?”

  “But—” began Emmy. Her protest was ignored.

  “They’ve had to leave you alone, and all thanks to the Nuts for it, that’s what I say.” Mrs. Henderson looked round in triumph at her audience, nodding in sympathy with sentiments as yet unspoken but understood by all.

  “Left her alone,” said Mrs. Skinner, recovering quickly, “but there’s young Maureen to be thought of, too, remember. With working at the George, she’ll be in need of a warning once that one,” she said with a jerk of her head towards the vanished tawny, “starts trying to—to draw her into her toils, which is what she’s sure to do seeing as she’s baggage in her hand and no other place to stay. You ought to be on the phone to her right now, young Emmy, before it’s too late.”

  “Maureen’s safe enough now,” said Mrs. Henderson as everyone nodded in sympathy with this point of view. “Why should they want her when there’s her friends to protect her and make it more difficult? Always want the easy way of it, they do.”

  This argument on the side of practicality gained a second round of approving nods. Mrs. Henderson smirked. She lowered her voice to a thrilling whisper. “Easy for them,” she said, “to draw poor innocents into their toils, like it’s plain they’ve already done with that one”—she jerked her head in imitation of Mrs. Skinner—“because she’s a stranger and don’t know any better. But you and Maureen, Emmy—you already know, don’t you? About keeping well away from that Dracula man and from Miss Seeton ...”

  The George and Dragon’s busiest times were generally spring and summer, when Charley Mountfitchet played host to a steady stream of honeymoon couples, sightseers, and bird-watchers. The stream slowed in autumn and winter to a trickle—unless, that is, one of Miss Seeton’s innocent exploits had been making off-season headlines. Even hard-bitten journalists had as great a need for their creature comforts as more sensitive souls, these comforts to include bed, board, booze, and access to the telephone.

  While some of the post office shoppers still held to the theory that the girl with red hair had been lured (in some manner as yet unspecified) to Plummergen by Miss Seeton for the ultimate bloodthirsty benefit of Antony Scarlett, others were coming round to the notion that she could be a reporter on the trail of a Big Story before it broke: said story to be centred, inevitably, upon Miss Seeton (although again in a manner unspecified, even if some had their suspicions). While the two schools of thought differed in their basic approach, on one point they agreed. A meeting between the two women was inevitable and would be contrived before many hours had passed—and should not be missed. Curtains twitched at the southern end of The Street; enough flowers were carried to ancestral graves in the churchyard beside the pub to denude most of the front gardens to the north.

  The advent of the middle-aged Mrs. Ogden two nights before had caused only a little less comment than that of the George’s younger and more glamorous guest. She had seemed at first so ordinary: so lacking in speculative potential. The car parked on Charley’s grey asphalt forecourt was a respectable family saloon. Its tax disc was up-to-date; its number-plate was rusted in position and thus not false. Its owner had paid her hotel deposit in cash and had taken a stroll up one side of The Street and down the other before ambling over the bridge to gaze into the quiet waters drawn into their canalised path by the design of Prime Minister Pitt against the threat of Napoleon. She had been observed studying the concrete pillbox built against a more recent and terrible threat ...

  The pillbox was visible from the back windows of Sweetbriars, which fact was all that was needed to overcome the initially poor potential. Speculation was now rife. Mrs. Ogden’s ordinariness was a blind. She and Miss Seeton were in cahoots. Young women were at risk (if unmarried) of perversion; if married, they were at risk of corruption into that same perversion as active, rather than passive, participants. To which group did the girl with red hair belong? Was she a virgin or not? Her signature on the hotel register gave (according to Maureen) no title, merely her name. Reporter or victim? Without further evidence it was impossible to tell. Doris and Charley were famously disinclined to gossip about the George’s guests. Given time, Maureen might have found out much, but after polishing a few half-hearted saucepans she had been sent home and told to pull herself together before she returned to work. Maureen had imparted to Emmy Putts by telephone the paltry intelligence already gleaned, then had dragged herself to an early bed, complaining of headaches. If Plummergen wanted to know what was going on, it must find out for itself ...

  The girl with red hair had asked for tea and—as an afterthought—toast to be served in her room. Maureen had known this much, but no more. Doris could have told of muffled sobs heard through oak panels, of reddened eyes, and cheeks blotched with tears: but Doris, as ever, kept her own counsel. Left alone, the girl sipped tea, nibbled toast, and set the tray outside her door before casting herself in despair upon comfortable feather pillows in search of sleep.

  The chink of crockery as Doris removed the tray woke the girl some hours later. She looked at herself in the mirror and shivered. She dragged a thick sweater from her bag and put it on. She washed her face in cold water; ran a brush through her tousled locks; pulled on coat, hat, and gloves; and with another shiver emerged cautiously from her room to descend the stairs to the main door.

  Doris, on her knees beside the reception desk with a milk-soaked cloth in her hand, was busy bathing the leaves of Charley Mountfitchet’s cherished cheese plant. She looked up at the sound of footfalls. “Popping out for a bit, are you, dear? You’re wise not to leave it too long. Once the sun’s gone down, there’s a regular nip in the air.”

  The girl gazed at her from under still-swollen eyelids. “I ... don’t like the cold,” she said. Doris hid a smile. From the look of the poor young thing, this admission came as no surprise.

  “Your room’s all right, isn’t it?” she enquired hastily. “If you haven’t got enough blankets, you just let me know. And the radiator’s nice and warm—or it ought to be.”

  “It is ... thank you.” The girl managed a weak smile. “Everything’s ... ver
y nice, really.”

  “Then a good brisk walk before supper,” said Doris, “will give you an appetite as well as get your blood going, though you don’t want to go too far. Why not pop down to the bridge to watch the sunset across the marsh? A lovely view, that is.” She hesitated. There was something in the graceful way the girl moved, in the bones of her cheeks and the rich tumult of her hair, that made her add: “Artists come to paint it, you know.”

  “I ... didn’t know.” The girl turned to look back up the stairs. “I’ve a small sketchbook in my bag, but ...”

  Doris remembered how little of the toast had been eaten. She had no wish for a second fainting fit on her hands so soon after Maureen’s efforts in that direction. “Oh, you don’t want to keep running up and down when you’ve only just come,” she advised. “Time enough for all that tomorrow once you’ve had a good night’s sleep after a good hot supper and a proper breakfast to set you up for the day.”

  “I could sketch the sunrise,” suggested the girl, her smile a little stronger now. “If I ... stood on the bridge and looked the other way ...”

  “So you could,” agreed Doris cheerfully. If it had been meant as sarcasm, she’d save her breath for better targets. Too many of these London types tried to get clever with folk and were slapped down as they deserved, but there was something about this poor young creature, looking half-starved—and so pale, despite the red eyes—that made her, well, feel sorry for her. “But that’s for tomorrow,” she said briskly. “You get along now and enjoy your walk, and when you come back, there’s a nice fire in the lounge and the television, where folk often take their tea and biscuits, though you don’t want to spoil your appetite so close to supper, do you?”

  The girl agreed that she didn’t. She would take Doris’s advice and walk to the bridge: she would admire the sunset; she might visit the church. She would be back before dark.

  She went out of the door into the first faint hint of twilight and turned left to walk past church and vicarage to the narrow lane leading to the canal bridge.

  “Good evening,” said Miss Emily Dorothea Seeton.

  • • •

  Brinton and Buckland were back in the former’s office, with steaming mugs of tea in front of them on Brinton’s desk and pensive expressions on their faces. To the simmering disapproval of Desk Sergeant Mutford, the uniformed constable had been temporarily signed off patrol duty by his plainclothes superior, who hadn’t realised quite how much he would miss the presence of Detective Constable Foxon when he wanted to try out his wild hypotheses on the recent history of the half-dozen houses hitherto only tentatively linked in the Pauper Pensioner Puzzle.

  Hitherto. But now ...

  “Maybe I’ll let you off that tenner you owe me, lad.” Brinton grinned across his blotter at the startled Buckland. “Just as well we went into Sussex after all, wasn’t it?”

  “If you say so, sir.” Buckland’s was not a nature that enjoyed the taking of unnecessary risks. He had the nasty suspicion that his head, being the most junior, would be the first to roll when the authoritarian axe was wielded. While Inspector “Fiery Furnace” Furneux might just about view with equanimity a passing visit from the car of a neighbouring force, Sergeant Mutford would simmer beyond boiling point were he to learn (as sooner or later he was bound to do) of the recent cross-border foray on official time when (until now) there wasn’t really any justification for such a trip.

  “Because now,” said Brinton, echoing Buckland’s unspoken thought, “we know what’s been going on, don’t we?”

  “We can guess, sir,” said the cautious Buckland.

  Brinton snorted. “Seems a fair enough bet to me—and I don’t mean ten quid’s worth. There’s something big behind all this, if my instincts are right. Think about it, lad.”

  Buckland did so.

  Admittedly, he’d had his suspicions, but it had taken the sight of the last house on the super’s list to convince him that there was, in the super’s words, something big behind it all. Once more, this time across the county border, they had arrived outside a property of slightly run-down appearance, more than overdue for the renovations a spell of fine weather would no doubt initiate. Overdue for all renovations—except one.

  “Always makes me want to grab a broom and start sweeping,” growled Brinton with a jerk of his head towards the maroon asphalt drive artistically speckled with white. “It looks as if someone’s emptied confetti all over the place and it needs tidying up.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” came an unexpected voice. The two policemen jumped as a bright-faced little woman popped up on the other side of the dividing hedge and nodded to them. “Gravel is so much less demanding, don’t you think? Whereas next door simply cries out to me, as it obviously does to you, litter.” She shuddered and gestured towards the hedge. “Wild cherry,” she said expressively. “Can you imagine how I feel when this is in bloom? Oh, it may be a clever method of softening the harsh effect of so much asphalt at once, but it’s incredibly irritating to anyone with the least inclination to tidiness. And after what happened the first time around, I would have supposed they would have learned their lesson—but there, you can’t tell people who don’t want to listen, can you?”

  “You certainly can’t,” said Brinton, thinking of some notable closed ears of his professional acquaintance.

  His new acquaintance took this heartfelt agreement as an invitation to continue, which she did with a decided twinkle in her eye. “Mind you, if they had listened to me, I would have had to admit they’d have been wrong—in one respect, that is. You won’t convince me it looks neat, but at least it ... it’s lasted, which I never thought it would, and I told them so. But it hasn’t run, despite all the rain we’ve had this year, and if it hasn’t by now, I suppose it never will. But oh, my goodness, you should have been here when it did before!”

  “A bit of a sight, was it?” prompted Brinton, daring Buckland to breathe and interrupt the flow.

  The bright-eyed neighbour of the asphalt drive threw up her hands with glee. “Sight? Smell, you mean! Peppermint from one end of the road to the other!”

  Brinton’s ears pricked at this. Buckland smothered a chuckle. “P-peppermint?” enquired the superintendent, his voice almost steady.

  “That’s what they’d used for the decoration or whatever you call it.” Bright eyes twinkled all the more as another gesture indicated the property next door. “The contractors didn’t use the chips of white stone they’d promised, but peppermints—the hard sort, not creams—broken into pieces and squashed in by hand with a roller. I was on holiday at the time, or of course I would have smelled a rat straight away.” She giggled. “Or a peppermint—though not until it rained, of course. Peppermint toffee, that’s what it was once it did!”

  “I believe you,” said Brinton. “I’ll bet the flies and wasps around here had a field day.”

  “Yes, indeed they did, much to everyone’s relief.” She gave her audience no time to register surprise. “So many of the little beasts stuck fast in the stuff—they must have scented it a mile or more away—that for weeks afterwards you couldn’t find a single creepy-crawly on the hoof, as it were, if you tried. It wasn’t until the breeding cycle began again that they came back. It was like an enormous mint-flavoured flypaper for them, you see. Basically red, with huge smears of white—going grey, you know, as more and more insects landed and couldn’t escape ...”

  “Ugh,” said Brinton obligingly as she paused. Once more he was rewarded with a twinkle.

  “It was absolutely revolting.” Then, with a sigh and a shake of her head, she became serious. “And simply the last straw for poor old Mrs. Grainger. She’d been finding it hard enough before this mess to keep the place going—she was a pensioner, you know—and if only I’d been here I could have warned her to have nothing to do with them, no matter how plausible they sounded, which I gather they did. But they wouldn’t have fooled me!” Brinton was prepared to believe this, too. “I’ve watc
hed men repairing roads,” she went on with a decisive nod and a frown. “Keep your wits about you, that’s my motto. Always be interested in things, and you won’t go to seed. Well now, nobody uses an ordinary garden roller to lay asphalt, do they? Or even to squash fancy patterns into it?”

  “They don’t,” said Brinton. “Full-blown bulldozers and steamrollers, that’s what they use.”

  “Mrs. Grainger was ninety-two and her eyesight wasn’t terribly good.” Mrs. Grainger’s former neighbour sighed. “The poor soul wouldn’t have known one piece of machinery from another if it made enough noise to sound like the genuine article, as I gather it did. They were here and gone within the day—and nobody’s seen them since, of course. Charged her the earth and vamoosed, the devils. Oh, if I could only get my hands on them I’d teach them to swindle half-blind old ladies out of their savings!”

  Brinton believed that, as well.

  He looked now at PC Buckland. “There’s something big behind all this,” he said slowly. “Every single house we visited has had recent problems with a stretch of asphalt, and all the houses were owned at the time the asphalt was laid by an elderly person living alone. Some of ’em, like Miss Addison, are still there, and so’s the asphalt, with grass growing through it and potholes from the frost.” He paused invitingly.

  “And some of them ...” ventured Buckland.

  Brinton nodded.

  Buckland coughed. “Well, most of them ... have either died or sold up. Either way, other people own the houses now and they’ve inherited the problems. Sir.”

  “And had a go at solving them,” prompted Brinton. If the lad wanted to join his pal Foxon in CID, which he’d made a few noises from time to time he’d like to try, a spot of on-the-job training wouldn’t hurt his chances.

  “They’ve had the cheap, low-grade stuff ripped up, sir, and replaced with proper new. Or with gravel or stone—or they’re in the process of doing it, anyway. Sir.”

  “Let’s hope they have better luck second time around,” said Brinton. His hand moved towards the telephone, then pulled back. “So what d’you reckon, lad?”