Sweet Miss Seeton (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 20)

by Hamilton Crane

  And the eyes of Antony Scarlett’s one-time model opened wide in her pale, beautiful face.

  “Yes,” whispered the girl as she warmed her chilled hands around one of Miss Seeton’s best bone china cups. “I’m—I was—Kristeena.” She took a deep breath. “Tina Holloway. But ... how did you know? I thought—he said—I’d changed so much, and ...”

  Miss Seeton blinked. “If you will forgive the impertinence of a personal remark, I could explain, although really I would have thought it obvious.”

  Tina’s answering smile was shaky, as if she had almost forgotten how to express any feeling except grief. “Not to me,” she said sadly. “Besides, I’ve heard personal remarks for most of my working life ...” She gulped. Miss Seeton, fearing another bout of hysteria, uttered a gently warning cough. Tina shivered; stifled a sob; tried to speak calmly. “More—personals—personal than ever—in ... the past few months.” She drew a deep breath, looked up to meet Miss Seeton’s approving eye, and essayed another smile, which came more easily than the first. “But I ... can’t imagine you would say anything ... unforgivable, Miss Seeton.”

  Miss Seeton chose to ignore the bitter note creeping into the young woman’s voice and replied to her original question. “Well, my dear, you may be slimmer, if you will excuse me, in the face and body than when you were modelling for Mr. Scarlett, but the basic structure and shape of bones does not change. The skull, feet, and hands in particular—your eye sockets, the set of your ears and nose, your jaw—and most of all your hair. Quite unmistakable, even from seeing only reproductions in the art pages. And so much press coverage last summer ...”

  With a horrified blush, she realised what she had been about to say, what unhappy memories she had been on the point of reviving. She saw tears well up, despite a clear effort to suppress them, in Tina’s anguished eyes. “Have some more tea,” she offered to cover her embarrassment. “Or a biscuit—some cake—”

  “Oh!” The offer was too much for her guest. Tina’s cup, which she had barely tasted, was pushed to one side so that she could once more bury her face in her hands.

  “You mustn’t start crying again,” said Miss Seeton, more embarrassed than ever and amazed at her own severity. Of course, one had never been able to view self-indulgence with approval, even in children so young they could not reasonably be expected to understand the importance of willpower and, well, moderation. One simply hoped to teach by example, or hope that others would already have done so. Parents, for instance. And Kristeena Holloway was no child—in years, that was to say, although in her behaviour ... Yet she was clearly very distressed, and to scold her for something over which she might indeed have no control might be ...

  “Now, don’t cry,” urged Miss Seeton, gently scolding. “It serves little purpose—on the whole,” honesty made her add, whereupon practicality appended: “Besides, your tea will grow cold. Let me top it up for you before it does.” She suited the action to the word, wisely ignoring the glint of Tina’s tearful eyes peeping in astonishment from between her fingers. So great was the astonishment that she had, indeed, almost stopped crying.

  Miss Seeton nodded as she replaced the tea-cosy on the pot, the pot on its stand. Then she sighed. Advice, no matter how well-intentioned, could so often be seen by the one to whom it was offered as interference that one did one’s best not to volunteer it. There were, however, times ... “Perhaps,” she ventured, “you might feel better about whatever distresses you if you could only ... think about it.” Oh, dear. Did that sound too blunt? Discourteous? Opinionated? “I think.” She coughed. “Calmly and quietly.” She coughed again. “Face up to the problem, I mean, instead of ...”

  “Running away?” Tina Holloway’s hands dropped from her face into her lap. That porcelain skin covering those finely moulded cheekbones was stained with tears, yet even tears could not detract from her beauty. “You’re ... right,” said Tina with a sigh. “I’m a miserable coward, though you were kind enough not to spell it out.” Miss Seeton attempted a shocked apology and was waved down. “I’m not—I haven’t been—calm,” Tina said, straightening her bowed shoulders and looking Miss Seeton squarely in the eye. “Or quiet.” Her lips twisted in a grimace of wry self-knowledge. “I’ve been ... making a fuss. Running all the time these past few months—only this time I was ... trying to fool myself that I was running to. Not away,” she enlarged as she saw Miss Seeton’s puzzled frown. “I thought,” she said, “that I was ... making a choice. Being decisive in coming here—and now I see that I—that it—wasn’t.”

  “But you are,” said Miss Seeton, still puzzled, grasping at the one coherent thought in all this. “Here, I mean. In Plummergen.” Rapidly she considered England’s geography and place names. “Unless ... did you make a mistake and wish to be somewhere else? Plumstead, perhaps, in Norfolk?” The girl’s lovely grey eyes opened wide as she stared. Miss Seeton rebuked herself for so foolish a suggestion. The far side of London did seem unlikely. “Plumpton?” she offered. “In Sussex, you know—our neighbouring county. It’s near Brighton, I believe. Or—”

  She broke off. Tina had leaned forward to lift her despised cup from the table, and she now raised it high in a toast. “B-Brighton? Miss Seeton, you’re wonderful!” Her voice barely quavered; her hands did not flutter as those lovely grey eyes glowed at her elderly hostess across the teacup, and she drank to the celebrated home of the naughty weekend. “Wonderful!” she repeated, setting down the cup and, arching her delicate brows to ask Miss Seeton’s permission, reaching—with only a little hesitation—for a thick slice of rich fruitcake. “Thank you.” She took a deep breath, then laughed. “Brighton ... Oh, you’ve done me more good in just a few minutes than”—the quaver was slight and soon suppressed—“than anyone else in ages,” she finished and took a mouthful of cake. Slowly she smiled as she began to eat.

  Miss Seeton smiled, too. Such impassioned thanks—for what, she wasn’t entirely sure; an invitation to tea had been the least, in the circumstances, she could do—seemed somewhat excessive. The young, of course. But it was a pleasure—she smiled again—to see how quickly the child had recovered from her little upset; gentle firmness and a dose of common sense had, thank goodness, worked as they usually did. And it was such a relief that she was now behaving like a sensible, rational adult that her hostess had no cause to believe that she, well, wasn’t. Apart, that was to say, from such a fulsome tribute to oneself—due, no doubt, to the artistic temperament, which after the years of modelling was probably, well, inevitable. “Catching,” murmured Miss Seeton as she helped herself to a chocolate biscuit and pushed the plate closer to her guest.

  With a convulsive gulp, Tina swallowed her last bite of cake. She stared at the biscuit plate. Her voice was low, with no hint of laughter, as after a moment she responded to Miss Seeton’s remark. “Yes ... you’re right. I’m afraid I—I did come to Plummergen hoping to ... catch him.” She looked up and met Miss Seeton’s kindly, if perplexed, gaze. “I suppose you’d say it was ... wrong to come chasing after him like that, but—I’ve—been—so ... miserable ...”

  “Now, don’t cry again,” begged Miss Seeton, once more dreading the worst. Tina shuddered, swallowing with the effort of keeping back the tears that were never far away. She reached out blindly for her empty cup, which clattered on its saucer and almost fell off.

  “Oh,” cried Miss Seeton instinctively, “do be careful! Cousin Flora’s very best bone china!”

  Tina froze. She stared at Miss Seeton. “That’s what he said,” she exclaimed. “Nothing but—but skin and bone!” Within the anguished depths of the grey eyes a black fire smouldered as she suddenly unburdened herself to this sympathetic audience. “Skin and bone, he told me, and I was no—no use to him anymore if I couldn’t get my appetite back and put on all the weight I lost, because whoever heard of Rubens painting anyone—anyone thin?”

  Her voice broke on the final word. Miss Seeton, hoping to deflect the threatened bout of hysteria, began: “As I recall, Ru
bens—”

  Tina ignored her. “Skin and bone, he said, as if it was all my fault—and it’s not fair, Miss Seeton, because it wasn’t! And I never blamed him, no matter what anyone else might have said—those wretched newspapers—it was the gallery; they should have maintained the air conditioning properly—but of course he wasn’t going to start arguing with people who ... mattered to his career, was he? People who could help him, people with influence—but I understood, I kept telling him I did—I knew he was angry, that he needed to let off steam, and I didn’t blame him, truly, when he was so—so difficult to live with, but it was cruel of him to keep on and on at me about calories when he knew how—how ill I’d been, how I simply couldn’t face the idea of food, never mind eating it ...”

  The chocolate biscuit she had picked up without noticing now dropped from her tortured fingers back to the plate. It landed with a rattle Miss Seeton thought it wiser, in the face of so much raw emotion, to ignore. “I hate chocolate,” whispered Tina. “I never did ... before. I used to eat it by the ton ... He encouraged me, you see. He’d buy those jumbo slabs, and the biggest boxes ... Now he uses chocolate all the time, twisting the knife in the wound ...”

  A queer little groan escaped her pale lips, almost as if a macabre laugh were being stifled. Miss Seeton shot her a quick, startled glance. She had recalled that sad saucer of white melted manhood next to the moulding of Antony Scarlett’s nude body at the Galerie Genèvre. Surely—the poor child was upset, anyone could see that, but surely she could never have been so—so bitterly destructive?

  Or could she? She was blushing now under Miss Seeton’s shrewd gaze, her hands writhing together on her lap ...

  “Twisting the knife,” poor Tina said in a trembling voice. She gulped. She licked her lips and took a deep breath. Miss Seeton thought it best to say nothing.

  So, it seemed, did Tina. “Reminding me,” she at last went on, “that I’m no use. No good. I can’t bring myself even to try working for anyone else—I still need him the way I thought—thought he needed me, Miss Seeton—and he doesn’t! He ... he’s changed—and so have I—but he ... can live with himself now. And I ... can’t.”

  Miss Seeton regarded her gravely. Guilty conscience or not—the damage (whoever had done it) had disturbed Antony Scarlett far less than this child’s wretchedness evidently disturbed herself—was Tina threatening to do away with herself if Scarlett refused to take her back? That booming, bullying presence: so unsuitable for a sensitive young woman, one would have supposed, although there was no accounting for taste. And she was ... well, young. Older than Juliet, of course, but obviously just as susceptible as the Italian teenager to extravagant behaviour when her feelings were involved. “I don’t see why not,” said Miss Seeton.

  Tina, the risk of confession passed, preparing for further flight into the emotional stratosphere, felt the sudden reverse-thrusting slam of common sense. “Why ... not?” was all she could say as Miss Seeton’s grave regard was tinged with a hint of impatience.

  “You are,” Miss Seeton told her crisply, “a young woman of striking good looks in, as far as I can tell, the best of health. While there is nothing whatsoever wrong in being large if that is what nature intended,” said Miss Seeton, seven-stone-nothing and five feet tall in her stockinged feet, “clearly, in your case, it did not. Your bones,” she explained, as Tina could only stare. “Puppy-fat may be one thing, but for a grown woman to—to gorge herself on chocolate just because it would suit the convenience of someone else to have her weigh more than she sensibly should is, if you will excuse my saying so, ridiculous.” She drew a deep, indignant breath. “As artists can ... outgrow their models, my dear, and move on, so can a model move on to another artist more congenial, as it were, to herself. Her true self,” stressed Miss Seeton, mistress of the truthful vision. “Not the self somebody else thinks she ought to be.” She paused. Tina continued to stare. Miss Seeton blushed. Had she, yet again, been too ... opinionated? “I think,” she concluded. “If you don’t mind my saying so.”

  There was a longer pause.

  “No,” said Tina slowly. The grey eyes gleamed for a moment longer with that bleak, black fire, then dulled into a sudden serenity. “No, I don’t mind.” She drew herself up, and when she spoke her voice hardly trembled. “I don’t mind. I ... think so, too, Miss Seeton.”

  She reached out a second time for the chocolate biscuit and took a large, defiant bite.

  chapter

  ~ 12 ~

  BRINTON, YAWNING, WAS studying a pile of reports on last night’s break-in at the biscuit factory when his telephone rang. “Brettenden,” he said into the receiver, stifling another yawn.

  “Ah.” The voice on the other end of the line hesitated. “Do I gather,” came the well-known accents of Chief Superintendent Delphick, “that there has been nocturnal skulduggery in the wider regions of your empire?”

  “Oracle.” Brinton rubbed his eyes. “Sorry, I was half asleep. Yes, you’re right—but I take it you aren’t ringing to commiserate with me and my troubles. What’s up?”

  Delphick’s voice became grave. “You, too, are right. I’m not—in fact, I may be adding to them. After we spoke about your pauper pensioners and the asphalt fraud, I passed the word around the various divisions to find out how many similar cases might have occurred without necessarily being correlated, as it were, by our basement computer.”

  “And now you’ve got some answers,” said Brinton.

  “Results rather than answers, perhaps, although there are inferences to be drawn from which answers might reasonably be deduced.” The Oracle sighed. “Inference or not, the facts are that there has been a noticeable increase around the southeast of England—including your area, of course—in the numbers of undernourished old people being admitted to nursing homes and to long-stay hospital care.”

  “And nobody’s saying why,” suggested Brinton as Delphick paused. “Or ... are they?”

  “No, they aren’t, for the same reasons you yourself have found. The entrants, if we may so describe them, are all salt-of-the-earth noncomplainers: decaying gentry, retired professionals, solid artisans and craftsmen. All of them owner-occupiers with depleted savings, although their mortgages are more or less paid off, and their property is—or rather was—their own.”

  “And not a council-house tenant on the list,” offered Brinton at once.

  “Not one.” Delphick sounded pleased that Ashford had evidently reached the same conclusion as had Scotland Yard. “I’m reluctant to call it conclusive, but we have a definite pattern, Chris. Town councils, of course, are responsible for structural repairs to property under their control: and responsible to the ratepayers for the cost of said repairs.”

  “Speaking as a ratepayer,” returned Brinton on cue, “I wouldn’t be too happy if I thought the local mandarins were wasting my hard-earned cash paying a load of cowboys to do shoddy work that needed more repairs five minutes after the blighters had disappeared with a sizeable cheque in their hot little hands.”

  “Councils,” agreed Delphick, “have more clout than the private individual. They can demand greater safeguards and pursue more vigorous enquiries than the man or woman in the street. It must be more trouble than the fraudsters would think worth the effort to achieve collusion on an unimaginable scale with numerous Clerks of the Works and similar public officials.”

  Brinton grunted. “Makes sense. They’re cunning devils, as I think I’ve mentioned before. They’ll go for the easy money every time—and they’ve got to be stopped, Oracle. Easy come, easy go—and they start to feel that way about other things, too.”

  “Such as the sanctity of human life,” said Delphick as his friend fell silent, brooding.

  “I don’t want another Philippa Byng on my patch,” Brinton said. “On anybody’s patch, come to that. I don’t want any more Addie Addisons terrified out of their wits when a bloke with muscles knocks at the front door. What I do want is this asphalt gang, Oracle, though I’m damned if I can
see how to find ’em—and,” he continued as Delphick coughed, “don’t say a word! I know just what you’re thinking, and I won’t say I haven’t thought it, too, on and off. But in a funny kind of way I’m fond of the old girl. I wouldn’t want her on my conscience if anything ... went wrong. I had to get shirty with young Foxon for trying to drag her in even on the edge of all this. They’re a nasty bunch, and she’s not getting any younger.”

  “Miss Seeton bears a charmed life,” Delphick reminded him. “I’m sure she would, in a good cause, be prepared to take the risk—”

  “But I’m not. Having her ... fall into adventures the way she does is one thing, but deliberately setting her up as bait for a crowd like this is something else. Her front garden’s about six inches long. The most desperate crook couldn’t hope to convince her she ought to have asphalt on that path—and if you think I’m borrowing a house and popping her in it for an indefinite period, think again. They all know one another’s business in Plummergen, especially Miss Seeton’s. Put her in a strange place—even if she’d go, which I doubt if she’d be happy about for long, and she’s no actress so she’d probably give the game away the minute the gang arrived—but if she went, how could we possibly keep an eye on her? Potter covers half a dozen villages besides Plummergen, remember. You can bet it’d be when he’s somewhere else they’d turn up, and she’s had too many close shaves in the past for me not to know there’s got to be a time when her luck runs out. We’ve got to think of some other way. Can’t you talk to the computer again?”

  To which plea the Oracle responded with a promise to do what he could when the basement monster would permit.

  Lady Colveden sat brushing her hair before the bedroom looking glass, relishing the slow luxury of pure bristle on her scalp. It was the first time for several days that she had done more than run a quick comb through her thick, wavy brown locks: the Reverend Arthur Treeves was not the sole inhabitant of Plummergen to have succumbed to a nasty cold. Her ladyship had been confined to barracks by her husband and son while she took aspirin and afternoon naps until she thought herself on the mend. One hundred strokes before bedtime had been the nursery routine that only this evening she had felt able to resume.