Sweet Miss Seeton (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 20)

by Hamilton Crane

  Brinton flicked through the book, sharing Miss Seeton’s feeling for the lively talent that had formed the pictures in front of him and pausing as something he had spotted on his first study again caught his eye.

  And tugged again at that elusive memory ...

  “Yes, she was especially pleased with that one.” Miss Seeton moved awkwardly on her chair. “I teased her a little about it, you know, though of course in the nicest possible way, for she sketched it yesterday afternoon in Murreystone, of all places, before she came here. I told her she must on no account let Nigel or anyone else know where she had been for her little adventure ...”

  She blinked once or twice before continuing. “Raised voices, I understand, and some argument, although she had no idea why, and as soon as they noticed her, she moved away, as anyone would.” Brinton thought privately that most people would stand with their ears flapping to find out what the fuss was about: Tina, it seemed, had been another like Miss Seeton. Or had let the old lady think she was, at any rate. A nice girl, as Charley Mountfitchet had said.

  Miss Seeton smiled. “She’d forgotten, I think, about the feud, and indeed when I ventured to tease her, she expressed some surprise that the men in question, who were presumably Murreystone men, appeared to have forgotten it likewise, for she was sure she saw them again in Plummergen. Or at least driving through in their lorry, for if she hadn’t been quick on her feet, she said, there might have been an accident as she crossed from the George to my house. It can be a tricky corner if taken at speed, which if they did was no doubt because they realised that they were, as one might say, on enemy territory.” Miss Seeton shook her head for the folly of local rivalries. “Tina found it amusing, rather than a trifle absurd, after so many years. I am glad that her last hours were so much happier than ...”

  Miss Seeton, with a discreet sniff, fell silent. Brinton was frowning. What had she just said? An argument? An accident? MissEss had just chattered on without thinking them important—but why had that sketch in particular made such an impression? Not just on the art teacher, but on himself and on Foxon, too?

  There was no doubt that it was a good sketch. The man leaning on the garden roller couldn’t have been more clearly portrayed, and his colleague in the background pushing the decorated wheelbarrow was a model of muscular strength, with his sinews taut and his arms bulging, his forehead spangled with sweat.

  Wait. Miss Seeton had mentioned a lorry. Gardeners didn’t need lorries in the normal run of things. Leaves weren’t heavy enough to demand the obvious effort required of the barrow man; and who rolls their lawn in January?

  And what about that design on the side of the barrow—where had he seen that before? A sort of letter H made up from little squares, just like cobble stones or paving ...

  Memory returned with a blinding flash of mental light. Miss Seeton’s sketch after her visit to Adelaide Addison—no wonder she’d been wriggling as her subconscious realised the girl had produced something not a million miles from what she’d drawn herself ...

  “Asphalt!” roared Brinton, making Foxon leap from his chair and Miss Seeton, sitting on the other side of the table, squeak with alarm. He turned Tina’s sketchbook round to show the others, muttering as he did so. “I should’ve spotted it at once!” He flattened the book with a satisfied hand. “Garden roller, right?”

  “Right, sir,” said Foxon. Miss Seeton acquiesced with a silent nod. Brinton shook his head. “Wrong,” he said triumphantly. “Well—right, technically,” he conceded. “But wrong in the practical sense, because the blighters weren’t using it to roll a lawn nice and level—they were laying an asphalt drive for some poor mug without using proper equipment, and Tina caught ’em at it and sketched them so’s you’d know them again if you saw them—and they found out where the poor kid was staying—”

  “Oh, no,” whispered Miss Seeton. “Oh, Superintendent—then it was all my fault!”

  chapter

  ~ 19 ~

  “DON’T WORRY, I TOLD her it wasn’t,” said Superintendent Brinton the following day to his friend Chief Superintendent Delphick as the two discussed the latest of Miss Seeton’s triumphs. The Oracle sat enthralled in his office at Scotland Yard, while Brinton sat in Ashford with the telephone in his hand and Tina Holloway’s sketchbook on his desk, with Miss Seeton’s original sketch beside it. “Well, in a way I suppose you could argue it was, though you’d have to be pretty desperate. She felt guilty as hell, of course, until I pointed out that if the girl hadn’t been going out with Nigel and expecting to come back after midnight, she would never have asked for a late key—or taken her own with her. If she’d joined the supper party at Rytham Hall she would’ve expected to be back at a reasonable hour and left the key in the usual way. Then they would have grabbed it from reception, sneaked into her room to pinch the sketchbook, and vamoosed without anyone being any the wiser.”

  “Theoretically possible,” agreed Delphick, “if only the sketchbook had been in the room in the first place. Which we know it wasn’t.”

  “Which is why MissEss blamed herself. Said if she hadn’t wasted so much time getting ready for her date with the Colvedens she could’ve popped across to the pub with the sketchbook. Doris could’ve slipped it into the girl’s room using the master key, and Tina would’ve been safe. Then I pointed out that unless they’d managed to pinch the master key, which knowing Doris I doubt if they could, they would still’ve had the problem of getting into Tina’s room. That sort of crook can’t pick a decent lock, and they wouldn’t want to leave traces. They would still have had to lurk about the place waiting for her to return from seeing Nigel—and take her by surprise—and try to scare her into letting them take the book away ...”

  “And not succeeding,” the Oracle finished for him as he fell silent. “Miss Seeton’s encouragement, as we’ll call it, had doubtless made the girl far less likely to give in to intimidation as she might have done in what we could call her Scarlett period—for which encouragement the poor woman presumably also holds herself to blame.”

  “She started to say something of the sort,” said Brinton, “but I shut her up sharpish by reminding her that if it hadn’t been for the fact she’d hung on to the book in the first place, we’d never have caught the one who killed Tina, because they would most likely have killed her anyway.”

  “Which,” remarked Delphick, “given their track record, is not far from the truth. They’re a vicious bunch.”

  “They are, and I told her so. Not that I mentioned poor old Sergeant Major Scott, because for one thing we didn’t know about him then, but there were the others ... So I said we were grateful to her in more ways than one—and it worked, I think. She seemed a lot happier when she realised she’d helped us lay the asphalt crooks by the heels. She’d felt pretty sorry for Miss Addison and the others.”

  “Whose confrères, at least, may rest easy in their beds, their savings and pensions intact. An argument to appeal to Miss Seeton, of course.” Delphick’s voice held a smile. “Not everyone over retirement age has an additional income in the manner of the force’s favourite Art Consultant.”

  “No.” Brinton coughed. “It was true, what I told her. If she and Tina hadn’t doodled the way they did—well, her doodling made us pay attention to Tina’s sketch—Buckland would’ve driven past that lorry in Ashford without giving it a second look. But as soon as he saw the logo on the door, he recognised it from her sketch—I made damn sure everyone had a photocopy as soon as we got back to the station—and he was smart enough to make the connection. There’s money in paving paths—that’s what the pair of ’em were telling us in their different ways. Once we understood them, we’d got the blighters on toast. The whole blasted bunch of them are cooling their heels in the cells this minute, and the local briefs are licking their lips with all the fees they’re going to get once the case reaches court.”

  Both men sighed for the vagaries of the English legal system. It could be a year or more before the Asphalt Gang rece
ived the penalties due them.

  “They had luck on their side,” Delphick observed with another sigh. “The George has no dragon on the desk. Once they were sure it was where she was staying, it must have been enough for Chummie to have a casual drink or two in the bar, then make his way upstairs when the coast was clear. With business so quiet, there was only a small risk that anyone would spot him.”

  “Probably just think he was a pal of Scarlett’s,” Brinton said. “A bloke like him—he’s totally bonkers, Oracle—must know some pretty weird people.” He signed. “It’s a great shame he didn’t do it: I can’t stand the chap. I’d love to have been able to throw the book at him, the play-acting little creep. Talk about any publicity’s good so long as they spell your name right! I booted him back to London with a king-sized flea in his ear, but I know it won’t be long before it hops away—the Watson female who owns the blasted gallery will see to that.”

  Delphick made sympathetic noises for a while, then began to muse aloud. “I know we dislike coincidence in our business, Chris, but we can’t deny it exists. The coincidence that it should be Miss Seeton’s village to which Antony Scarlett persisted in coming—to which Tina Holloway likewise came, to be cured by Miss Seeton of her obsession with Scarlett and inspired by her to draw a series of sketches that included the very criminals Miss Seeton’s own sketch had failed to identify, though they were working in the same area ... How I look forward to reading your full report, Superintendent Brinton.”

  Brinton was heard to snort on the other end of the wire. Delphick laughed. “Copy to the computer, of course. The Yard’s Unsolved files will enjoy a substantial reduction in number, I fancy. Oh, yes,” he added as Brinton snorted once more. “The query you raised the other day about Patrick Abinger. Did you say his wife’s name was Lucy?”

  “Foxon would know. I can’t lay my hands on the right piece of paper at the moment. I think it is, though. Why?”

  “Abinger is a fairly unusual surname, and coupled with the banking connection it wasn’t too hard to trace in the end, though not through our own computer: he’s clean from that point of view, Chris.”

  “But?” From the sound of it, this was going to be good.

  “But,” said the Oracle, “an off-the-record conversation with a financial bigwig or two, passed along the unofficial grapevine, produces the intelligence that the only known Patrick Abinger is married to one Joanna. I should like to be a fly on the wall, Chris, when you tell young Foxon that the reason for his brush with friend Patrick was that the man thought him a private detective set upon him either by Lucy’s husband, who wants a divorce, or by his estranged wife, who doesn’t. She doesn’t even want a legal separation. She wants him back and is willing to go to almost any lengths to get him.”

  “He’ll be the one with the money, of course,” observed Brinton once he’d finished chuckling at the thought of his subordinate’s face when he heard the anticlimactic nature of the revelation. “Paying out on two mortgages, though. No wonder he bought the Pontefract place: with the work that needed doing there, he’ll’ve got it cheaper than most other houses that size. Buckland tells me Lucy’s looking for a job in Brettenden. Well, that’s no great surprise.”

  Delphick volunteered the remark that it was not. Brinton, after a pause, chuckled again. “A private detective! His idea of plainclothes isn’t mine, but I’ve yet to see Foxon in a trench coat and trilby hat ...”

  “You could always ask Miss Seeton to oblige,” Delphick said. “With her artistic ability—”

  “I’ll live in ignorance, thanks. Ask that woman to draw, and the next thing you know she’s Drawing.” Brinton invested the final word with an ominous significance not lost on Delphick. “And then,” lamented Brinton, “we’ll be in it up to our eyeballs again—which is more than flesh and blood can bear when we haven’t sorted out this last lot yet—which, more thanks to Tina than to MissEss this time, has been a nice neat job without any of her usual antics to make a man tear his hair out by the handful or send his blood pressure rising ...”

  Miss Seeton’s yoga ensured that her own blood pressure level remained excellent. She thought herself fortunate in enjoying good health and good spirits: the artistic temperament, she was thankful to say, was not hers.

  How—alas—unlike others. She uttered a sigh as the black-clad figure swirled into sudden view at the end of her front path. “Miss Seeton!” boomed Antony Scarlett, temperament personified. “Good day!”

  “Mr. Scarlett.” Miss Seeton, interrupted on her way to the shops, drew herself up to her full height and prepared to utter her umpteenth refusal to sell.

  Before she could speak: “Miss Seeton, I salute you!” With a final swirl he was upon her, seizing her hand in his and raising it to his lips. The umbrella slid down her arm: he pushed it back and boomed: “You have saved me from false accusation, from incarceration—you have my deepest gratitude—I am yours to command, Miss Seeton!”

  “Thank you,” said Miss Seeton, considerably startled: so startled, indeed, that she had no thought of taking advantage of this assurance to petition for a return to her former privacy, with the claims on her house retracted.

  “Miss Seeton, you inspire me.” Antony dropped her hand (she had to snatch at the umbrella) and flung out his own, palms upwards, as he gazed, Inspired, at the heavens. “I called upon you the other evening—the same night as the dreadful tragedy—and, absent in body though you were, your influence remained about this cottage of yours after which my soul has yearned.”

  Miss Seeton tried to say something here, but he ignored her.

  “You have never wished to sell, Miss Seeton. I have always known, but I have always hoped.”

  She tried to say something else and was again ignored as Antony again flung out his arms.

  “There came to me that night, Miss Seeton, under your benign influence, an Inspiration the like of which the world has not seen for thirty-five years!” Miss Seeton blinked. “Gone With the Wind!” She blinked again. “Greater than the Selznick search for the ideal Scarlett—the Search for the Scarlett Ideal! I told myself: Miss Seeton does not wish to sell. She recommends that I find another such house—but where is such a perfect house to be found? I asked myself: why should I, the genius of the nation, search through maps in secret? Let the nation search on my behalf! Let a truly willing Sacrifice be found—after weeks of dedicated struggle and disappointment—let it be laid upon the Altar of My Art—but only after everyone in the country has heard about it! Television—radio—the newspapers—the possibilities are endless, Miss Seeton ...” He seized her hand again. “And all thanks to you!”

  “Oh,” said Miss Seeton faintly. “I am ... glad to have been of assistance.”

  “Assistance invaluable!” boomed Antony Scarlett as she took a backward step and tried to withdraw her hand from his grasp just as he let it go to fling out his arms once more in the familiar Artistic Gesture. Miss Seeton, losing her balance, stumbled a little but did not fall. Antony, his arms outstretched, staggered in sympathy and turned his ankle on the edge of the paved path. With a curse, he went down. Miss Seeton went down after him, dropping basket and umbrella as she bent to pick him up.

  Awful visions flashed before her eyes as she helped the tall caped figure to his feet. She would have to ask him inside, and once inside he would change his mind about his Scarlett Search and renew his appeals to buy her house; she would refuse, of course, and he would go away—but he would be back again. And again. And again.

  As she automatically brushed the dust from his cape with her free hand, she found herself wondering how long it would take to search the Ordnance Survey maps (which she knew were kept in Brettenden library) for a likely configuration of canal, roads and house. She had the feeling that however long it took her it would be time well spent. When Antony returned, as he was sure to do, she could give him a list of places, preferably at the other end of the country, and he could go away and bother her no more ...

  “And now,” said
Antony, “I must go.” At this welcome echo of her thoughts, Miss Seeton looked up. Had she heard only what she wished to hear?

  Evidently not. “I came but to thank you, Miss Seeton, and to say that I will never forget you—or your cottage—but now I must leave. The bus departs from outside the post office in”—he looked across at the church clock—“ten minutes, and I have a return ticket. Farewell!”

  With a wave of his hand, he swung on his heel.

  He stumbled. He stopped in his tracks. Miss Seeton saw the black folds shudder as he winced: his ricked ankle, of course. Must she accompany him to the bus stop half a mile away? They could never manage the distance in time. If she thrust out her umbrella, would the driver make an unauthorised stop outside her cottage? If he didn’t, did that mean she must after all invite Mr. Scarlett inside while he waited for the next bus—and risk his changing his mind? If—

  “If,” said Antony, “you would be so kind, Miss Seeton, as to ring for a taxi, I should be exceedingly grateful.” The bus stop—Brettenden Station—London—Miss Genefer Watson were all a long way away. Let others make willing sacrifice: genius would not!

  Miss Seeton sighed with relief, smiled, and hurried back up the path in the direction of the telephone.

  Note from the Publisher

  While he was alive, series creator Heron Carvic had tremendous fun imagining Emily Seeton and the supporting cast of characters.

  In an enjoyable 1977 essay Carvic recalled how, after having first used her in a short story, “Miss Seeton upped and demanded a book”—and that if “she wanted to satirize detective novels in general and elderly lady detectives in particular, he would let her have her head ...”