Her umbrella—loosely furled and, though briskly shaken outside, still dripping—she hooked over the seat arm to drip tidily on the floor: such a rich purple shade of plush, she hoped it would not be spoiled. The seat cover, that was to say, not the floor. People must, after all, have walked on it with wet feet before—the floor, that was, although if there had been a rack at the entrance one would naturally have placed it there, out of the way. Her umbrella, that was to say. Not that there had been, or otherwise the holdall, so awkward, could have been placed in it instead of pressing against one’s stockings with such an unpleasantly damp sensation . . .
“Oh, bother,” muttered Miss Seeton, peering down at her holdall and brushing raindrops off her legs. So preoccupied was she with her discomfort that she did not notice the Nuts as they staggered past her; nor did she, the first time of asking, hear her neighbour as he enquired:
“Would you like me to put that up on the rack for you?” And, as there came no reply from the little grey-haired lady at his side, he asked again, speaking slowly and clearly for the benefit of one who was obviously deaf.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Your bag—would you like me to put it out of the way for you?” And he pointed emphatically first at the holdall, then up at the rack.
Miss Seeton wondered why the poor young man had to speak with such gestures, and such a very mobile mouth: some form of speech impediment, one supposed, and no doubt it was not kind, although inevitable, that one should for a moment have a mental picture of a goldfish with human features. A smile flickered in Miss Seeton’s eyes, but faded as she reproached herself for lack of sympathy towards one less fortunate than she knew herself to be. “You—are—very—kind,” Miss Seeton mouthed back, enunciating clearly. “Thank—you.”
The young man grinned the fatuous grin of the self-conscious do-gooder and wordlessly held out his hand for the holdall: no point in trying to talk properly to the poor old biddy, it was clear she must be as deaf as a post, and he was blowed if he was going to practise sign language all the way to France. Although, come to think of it, sign language might be a handy way of getting through to the Frogs, if the ones he met didn’t speak English. He wondered if the old girl could say “As many ciggies as I’m allowed on the Duty Free, please,” and whether they’d understand her.
“Blimey,” he muttered, as he hoisted Miss Seeton’s bag to the sagging string rack above. “Brought everything bar the kitchen sink, I should say! She’ll never cart this lot round with her the whole time,” and he resolved, after all, to lose Miss Seeton at the first opportunity. He had no wish to end up carrying her purchases as well as his own.
Miss Seeton had caught the words kitchen sink, and made haste to explain: such haste that she failed to hear the cry of distressed horror emanating from the rear of the coach as the Nuts learned of their mistake. “Oh dear, no,” said Miss Seeton. “Not a kitchen sink, a vacuum cleaner. They are to deliver it,” she added with pride, “next week. Martha will be so pleased.”
So she wasn’t as deaf as he’d thought. Lucky he hadn’t said something stronger than that about the weight of her bag. “Good for Martha,” he said, with a grin, speaking in his normal voice. “Your daughter, is she?”
Miss Seeton blushed. “A close family friend, so very kind and helpful,” she corrected him gently. “And you, too, have been so kind, putting my holdall away for me. They always seem so high, don’t they?” She gazed up at the rack; thus missing the horrified rush of the Nuts back down the aisle of the bus towards the driver, and the way Mrs. Blaine slipped on the spread of water from the tip of the dripping umbrella, and bumped against the seat on the other side of the aisle. Miss Nuttel, ignoring her stricken friend, went hurrying on to bid the driver stop, stop at once, because there had been a dreadful mistake.
“Who says so?” enquired the driver, as Mrs. Blaine, rubbing her bruised hip, blundered up to stand at Eric’s side and add her protesting bleat to those barked commands. The bus lurched with unnecessary force around a corner, and both the Nuts clutched at each other for support. “What do you mean, mistake?” The driver grinned, and spoke in a calmer tone. “What are you talking about? One at a time, girls, please,” he added, as they both began to explain in unison.
Miss Seeton had by now settled herself in reasonable comfort, and was smiling out of the window at the passing and familiar scenery of what, in Brettenden, was known as the Plummergen Road. By the time it reached her much-loved home it was the Brettenden Road; and when it left Plummergen, it was heading for Lydd, and the airport.
“So no need to panic, girls,” the driver was saying, as the bus approached the Gibbet Oak bend. “There’s some might call it an unofficial stop, but who’s to care? Once we get near your house just give us a shout and I’ll stop the bus and you can hop out home and no questions asked, okay? That is, if you’re sure you don’t want to come with this lot to France,” with a jerk of his head to indicate the passengers behind him. “You don’t? Oh well, back to your seats, then, and next stop Plummergen!”
But the Nuts, and Miss Seeton, were not the only ones to be mistaken that day. Even as the driver concluded his kind reassurance that the Plummergen contingent had no cause for concern, he found himself making an unscheduled stop much sooner than even he had anticipated. The bus had passed the Gibbet Oak bend and was heading along the straighter stretch of the Brettenden-Plummergen Road, picking up speed now that they were out in the country. The road was empty of other vehicles, and the driver whistled to himself . . .
Until a saloon car suddenly pulled out of a field just in front of the coach and stopped. Dead. Blocking the way ahead . . . just as the way back was blocked by a small dark car which had apparently been hiding in another gateway, its outline half-hidden by vegetation grown summer high.
The driver braked and swore. The passengers were flung forward in their seats, and there came cries of outrage and alarm. There was a clatter as Miss Seeton’s umbrella jerked from the arm of her seat and fell to the floor, although she was too busy catching her breath to notice it.
The saloon car completed a deft manoeuvre to block the coach completely while now facing an easy escape route . . .
And out of the saloon stepped two figures, dressed in the style favoured by motorcyclists: jeans, and leathers, and helmets . . . although normal bikers surely did not wear black masks across their faces.
Or carry shotguns.
The driver knew what was happening: the Dick Turpins had been talked about on television and radio and in the papers for long enough for him to be fairly confident that, if he did as the gesticulating figure outside was clearly ordering him to do and opened the door of the coach, no great harm would come to him. Or to his passengers—if they, too, did just as they were told.
The robbery began by following the same pattern as all the others. Shotgun aimed at the bus driver’s head, the taller of the two masked and helmeted figures easily menaced the passengers into opening handbags and wallets, into stripping off necklaces, watches, and rings; into unpinning brooches, unclipping earrings, emptying purses and trouser pockets, as the smaller masked figure walked slowly down the aisle, carrying a wide-mouthed and greedy duffle bag into which the booty was sadly placed by its former owners.
Halfway down the aisle, the figure stumbled, and at once the pattern changed. The shotgun aimed at the driver’s head wavered as a finger grew tight upon the trigger. “Forget it—or he gets it,” said the man behind the shotgun. Everyone forgot it.
“Oh dear,” said Miss Seeton, apologetically, as the smaller Turpin figure rubbed a bruised and bejeaned knee. As the umbrella had fallen, it had twisted, bouncing off the back of the seat in front to end up with its handle under Miss Seeton’s startled feet, and its elegant ferruled point pointing out into the aisle, a rounded, rolling trap for the unwary. The Turpineer had been too intent upon collecting the swag to think of looking for obstacles along the way. Miss Seeton, responding with the automatic courtesy of the gentlewoman, might have gon
e on to apologise in more detail, only the glaring grey eyes above the mask subdued her into speechlessness. Silently, she withdrew from her handbag her gold fountain pen, and passed it over with a sigh, meanwhile shuffling her feet to drag the offending umbrella back from the aisle out of harm’s way.
The collector of the swag pointedly rubbed again at the battered knee, then jangled the contents of the duffle bag viciously and slapped Miss Seeton’s wrist with a sharp blow. She winced with surprise, and her helpful neighbour uttered a shocked word of protest. The Turpins, so far, had never shown violence towards their victims: it was something else out of the pattern . . .
And in his turn he quailed at the expression in those grey eyes, as Miss Seeton murmured blankly: “Oh, yes, I had quite forgotten. My watch, of course,” and dutifully unbuckled the strap. Her thoughts seemed to have turned elsewhere, and she barely looked at the angry face of the Turpin as the leather-clad figure leaned across her to collect the belongings of her neighbour. Once she had yielded up her watch, her empty hands began to dance and fidget together on her lap, and her gaze drifted upwards to the luggage rack in which her bag of drawing materials was stowed . . .
The Turpins never troubled with items in luggage racks: too easy for a victim to tumble a bag accidentally and cause a diversion. The smaller figure passed on its way down the aisle collecting only what the unfortunate passengers had kept by them—the passengers who all sat stunned and silent as they were robbed.
At the far end of the coach cowered the Nuts, so stunned and silent that they might have been statues. Mrs. Blaine was so terrified that she could not have worked herself into a fit of hysterics to save her life; Miss Nuttel, as the Turpin swag-bag was presented for her donation, rolled up her eyes, turned greyish green, and fainted. And as Eric collapsed across her friend, Mrs. Blaine, in her anguish, found speech.
“Twice in one week!” she cried, her voice shaking with emotion. “It’s too much—poor Eric! Twice, two times, do you hear me? We’ve nothing left for you. Everything’s gone and you’ve already got it!” And she burst into tears, her plump cheeks creased with woe. “Eric, oh, Eric! Look what you’ve done to her. You should be ashamed of yourself!”
Careless of the risk she might be running, Mrs. Blaine glared at the masked Turpin figure in front of her; and, to her astonishment, the eyes above the mask dropped, for one moment, almost as if in shame. But not for long. A leather glove shot out and seized Bunny’s left wrist: which proved to be watchless. Eric’s sleeve had dragged up her arm as she fell, and her lack of a timepiece was evident. Neither of the Nuts was wearing any visible jewellery: but they both had handbags, and Mrs. Blaine was forced to empty both Eric’s and her own, for the second time in a week as, voiceless now after her brief spurt of bravado, she found herself quite unable to point out.
A car horn sounded at the rear of the bus, and the man with the shotgun called out a warning to his companion, who snatched the purses Mrs. Blaine’s trembling hand held out and turned to rush back down the aisle. Not a passenger stirred as the masked and helmeted figure hurried towards the door of the coach, although Miss Seeton’s gaze, which had been for a time abstracted, followed the two Turpins as they made their escape with great concentration; and once again on her lap her hands danced and fidgeted their bewilderment . . .
chapter
~16~
BETWEEN ASHFORD, IN Kent, and Scotland Yard in London, the telephone wires were frantic.
“This,” lamented Superintendent Brinton, “is a judgement on me for looking forward to saying I told you so to young Harry Furneux over at Hastings. I tried to do him a good turn by warning him to be prepared, but it was pretty clear he didn’t believe me. Well, who would, if they haven’t been exposed to the Miss Seeton phenomenon before. You have to get acclimatised to it. You have to learn to operate on an altogether different plane, because she’s in a league of her own, that’s what she is. And now this has happened—and I can’t cope with her, Oracle, I simply can’t. Do you know,” he snarled, “when I woke up this morning, I had a fine head of dark brown hair—well, all right,” as Delphick cleared his throat with force, “dark brown with a few distinguished highlights, if you insist—but I swear to you, there’s more highlights than colour now. I’ve turned snow white, and it’s your loopy lady friend who’s to blame.”
“You’re not suggesting, surely, that Miss Seeton was in league with the Turpin crowd.” The voice of Chief Superintendent Delphick did not even trouble to sound incredulous: he understood perfectly well how his old friend needed to let off steam. Maybe he could lighten the mood by making the suffering superintendent laugh. “You told me that when young Furneux told you what the Nuts told him, you bit his head off. You said it was ridiculous.”
A hollow groan was all that greeted this. Delphick, who was partly speaking for the fascinated benefit of Sergeant Ranger, tried again. “Suppose you take a deep breath, Chris—take two, if it’ll help—and tell me again exactly what happened.” He sounded more official now, more impersonal, a detective taking a statement. “Why,” he wanted first of all to know, “was Miss Seeton on that bus, anyway?”
“Her umbrella,” muttered Brinton, still not entirely believing it himself.
“Did you say—?” Delphick broke off to answer his own question with a sigh. “Her umbrella—yes, that figures.”
“She’d put it up, because it was raining so hard—quite a storm we had down here, everyone in a hurry to get in the warm and dry, and Miss Seeton with the collar of her raincoat turned up, too. So she wasn’t seeing so well, with the wind driving the rain right in her face, and her brolly sheltering her and blocking her view, of course—and the coach wasn’t the usual Plummergen shuttle. They’d hired another because theirs was out of action, so naturally Miss Seeton didn’t recognise it.”
“Naturally,” said Delphick, with a sigh, “she wouldn’t, armed with her umbrella and all set to stir up trouble . . . But didn’t the, let’s call them regular passengers notice that they didn’t know her when she got on? Why didn’t somebody tell her she’d made a mistake?”
Brinton sighed. “It could only happen to her, couldn’t it. Nobody told her, because nobody knew—because they were as much strangers to each other, by and large, as she was to them. One of those charter coaches doing a private cross-Channel trip, buy your ticket at the travel agent’s and have a lovely twenty-four hours stocking up with duty free. So they’d got their holdalls ready, hadn’t they, and so had Miss Seeton—full of artist’s clobber she’d bought in Brettenden, but of course they weren’t to know that. So when she comes blundering along with her brolly in the rain, and her carrier bag at the ready, naturally they think she’s one of them. A whole gaggle of ’em had been plundering the Brettenden shops earlier that day, anyway, stocking up on bits and bobs to take with ’em—sandwiches, paper hankies, extra nappies for the baby, pills for Great-Aunt Ethel who gets travel sick, you can imagine the last-minute sort of thing—and your Miss Seeton simply tagged along in the crowd, and everyone said Glad you could make it okay and practically patted her on the back before they set off. For France,” he concluded, in an incredulous tone, “instead of Plummergen.”
Delphick smiled as he imagined the scene. How typical of Miss Seeton—and how embarrassed she must have been once her error had been pointed out to her. But she wasn’t, it seemed, the only one . . . “And the Nuts simply tagged along behind Miss Seeton, did they?” he enquired, trying to suppress the laughter in his voice. Bob Ranger’s eyes widened as he listened.
“They did,” said Brinton, simmering sulphur in his tone as he thought of Erica Nuttel and Norah Blaine. Inspector Furneux believed he’d had a bad time of it with them, did he? Well, just let him try telling Superintendent Chris Brinton, gone grey overnight, and asking for sympathy, and then he’d know what needing sympathy was really all about. “The pair of them—nutty as fruitcakes, they are, and how I’ve put up with their nonsense for as long as I have before ringing you, don’t ask me.”
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Delphick was startled. “You mean the Nuts—I do beg their pardons, Miss Nuttel and Mrs. Blaine—they suggested that you ought to telephone me? Why?”
The laughter had left his voice, which sounded almost as grim now as Brinton’s. With a noticeable degree of control, the superintendent replied:
“Not exactly, no, they didn’t. In fact—don’t take this the wrong way, Oracle, I’m only reporting what they said—but they sort of suggested that you were in league with her for a share of the profits, and that’s why nobody has caught these Turpins yet.”
There was a pause. “Not the first time,” said Delphick mildly, “that someone’s made a similar suggestion, though not recently, I hope. And I also hope you aren’t going to take it seriously—even if this whole series of robberies does seem to be succeeding remarkably well.”
“Remarkably,” echoed Brinton. “As I told Harry when we first spoke about it, this damned Dick Turpinning is here to stay for a bit, because it works, doesn’t it? Chummy and his friends have found themselves a nice little formula that isn’t messy or slow or particularly dangerous. And they’ll try again, I feel it in my bones. It’s quick, and effective, and I wish to goodness they’d stayed over in Sussex, instead of coming into my patch. Dick Turpins I suppose I can just about cope with, but when you add Miss Seeton . . . !”
As words failed his suffering friend, Delphick enquired: “What’s she done to upset you, Chris, and make you telephone me? I refuse to believe that she has suggested I’m in league with anyone.”
Bob Ranger’s eyes were out on stalks as he listened to this part of the conversation. “Sir,” he began to protest, at the very idea of his and Anne’s Aunt Em accusing anybody of anything, especially the policeman from Scotland Yard who was, in a manner of speaking, her boss. Or who at least was responsible for her having been attached to the force as the IdentiKit artist she remained convinced that she was. “Sir, there must be—”
Miss Seeton Cracks the Case (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 9) Page 13
