Delphick studied the air-raid portrait of the helmeted young woman blowing her warden’s whistle to direct everyone to shelter, and frowned. “Not yet, I can’t, no. But when I can, I’ll tell you. And I’m prepared to bet that the bunker we still haven’t got to see is somehow involved. I think I shall ask for a warrant if the Manudens aren’t there when we call on them again . . .”
Dennis Manuden made his stealthy way back over Miss Seeton’s lower garden wall, leaving her neatly parcelled on her own bed, with a pillowcase gag in her mouth as well as another pillowcase, patterned with rosebuds, over her head. There was no chance she’d escape, tied up like that, he knew, and was proud to tell Betsy so once he was safely home again.
But his wife wasn’t as keen to make a fuss of him as he had expected. Normally, knowing Den’s limitations as well as he did himself, she was quick to praise him when he tried something out of the ordinary and succeeded. But now, as he recounted his triumph, he sensed her attention was wandering—which it undoubtedly was.
“I’m not so sure, Den, not now. Maybe we oughter have a talk to Mum about it after all. I mean, that bunker—maybe someone’ll hear her yelling for help, or something.”
“We could keep her gagged, like now,” Dennis said, sure he could manage that task again. Surprised by his assault, Miss Seeton had hardly struggled: and she’d caught the side of her head on the leg of the hall table as she fell, and was stunned, though not seriously, as he proceeded to tie her up. Otherwise she would have been a far more awkward customer for him to deal with. Her yoga-imparted ability to wriggle and contort herself would have given Dennis a few uncomfortable moments, and she would not have submitted so tamely to being parcelled upstairs in her bedroom.
But Dennis did not know all this, and was certain of his ability to take, and keep, a prisoner. “We’ll gag her, and tie her up, course we will,” he told Betsy. “Easy, I’d call it. An old woman like her, no trouble.”
But as his confidence grew, so Betsy’s diminished. “She might have to stay down there a while,” she said, shuddering at the thought. “That’d be cruel, underground, in the dark. Killing her straight out’d be fine, but not to linger like that. I’ve heard things from Mum, about people buried alive in them air-raids and not found in time. Horrible, it was. She’d say the same, I reckon. Mum didn’t like the war.”
“Don’t suppose anybody did. Your Mum’s not the only one to’ve had a hard time of it.” Dennis scowled as he thought things through yet again. “I’m not killing her, Betsy, and that’s final. Leave her tied up, we oughter stick to what we said first, keep her in the bunker till we go.”
“I’d like to ask Mum.” Betsy jumped from her chair and hurried to collect the car keys from their place in one of the mugs on the sideboard. In another mug, the key to the air-raid shelter glittered accusingly at her . . . “I didn’t think it all out properly, before,” she said. “But I have now, and I’m not so sure it’s what Mum would want. But come on, and we’ll go and ask her now.”
And Dennis, always so used to doing what she told him, hurried after her as she climbed into the car and headed out of the gate towards Brettenden.
chapter
~25~
THE RADIO BEEPED in the police car. Superintendent Brinton grabbed it and pressed the switch. “Yes?”
“Suspect van spotted in a side road off the B2080,” came the welcome news. “It’s empty, sir. Should I take a look?”
“The Plummergen road, what did I tell you?” demanded the superintendent of Delphick, before telling the radio to go nowhere near the van, but to keep it under surveillance. He and his Scotland Yard colleagues would be along to take a look for themselves, and only if the driver appeared and was about to vanish in a whiff of petroleum spirit was he to be intercepted.
“We’re on our way,” he concluded and banged the handset back in its holder. It uttered a protesting little beep as it signed off, but everyone in the car was too excited to notice. Brinton tried to introduce a note of caution.
“They might not be on a job,” he said, as he gunned the engine and the car leaped into life. “It might be where the bloke lives, and he’s parked outside because it’s such a hot day he doesn’t see the need to use the garage. Can’t say I blame him if that’s what it is—”
“But you don’t think so.” Delphick sounded sure of his diagnosis. “You think, like me, that they’re emptying a house right now, and that if we’re lucky we’ll catch them in the act. We’re on to the Sherry Gang at last,” and he spoke a silent word of thanks to Roger, the reluctant publican who was a great reader and an observant citizen; and to Miss Seeton, who’d directed police attention to him. “How fast does this thing go?” he demanded as Brinton, despite his enthusiasm, stuck strictly to the thirty-mile speed limit. “How far is it to the house?”
Brinton muttered something about people keeping their hair on, but otherwise did not answer. He was too busy threading his way through the Brettenden streets, avoiding other vehicles and the unwary pedestrians who stepped off pavements in front of any car but a police car—and this, unmarked, did not look at all like a police car. He didn’t want to be stopped by some over-zealous beat bobby and made to lose time, and possibly the villains, too . . .
“There it is!” His shout of triumph as he brought the car round the last corner had Delphick almost leaping from his seat before they’d braked to a halt. “No, Oracle, hang on a moment. Let’s have a word with my lad over there.”
The driver of the lurking Panda car came over to greet them as they emerged from the unmarked car. “No sign of life, sir, but I didn’t want to get too close, like you said. Besides, I don’t reckon I’d know who was meant to be here and who wasn’t. These houses are mostly rented property, the owners live away and change the tenants every few months or so. But whoever they are, they’re not moving now.”
“Then we’ll move instead,” said Brinton. “I reckon we should take a look inside the house this van’s parked outside, for a start, and find out if anything’s going on. Four of us—three of them. Is there a back alley? You and Sergeant Ranger here can guard it while we tackle them from the front. We’ll start,” said the superintendent, “by ringing the doorbell, to see what, or who, gets stirred up. Shall we go?”
They stood for a moment by the car, which Brinton had brought to a stop just in front of the black van to block, if it became necessary, any speedy escape. Bob Ranger looked about him for any indication of the back entrance he should be guarding. From his height of six foot seven, he could see over hedges easily; by normal standards, the other men were fairly tall, and they, too, easily scanned the scenery for any sign of a rear alleyway.
A small car, driven quite fast, turned the corner; and at the sight of four large men, obviously policemen from the size of their boots, braked sharply, hesitated and blocked the road briefly, then reversed with a screech of brakes and vanished in the direction whence it had come.
“Didn’t fancy the look of them—guilty conscience, I’d say,” Brinton said, adding, in a roar: “So just get after them, lad!” The young Panda constable rushed across to his waiting vehicle, leaped into the driver’s seat, and switched on the engine.
The car stalled. The driver cursed and tried again. Meanwhile, Brinton had charged back to his own car, and was leaning over the radio. “Hello, hello—attention, all cars. Did anybody see the number plate?”
“Dark red Mini, sir, but I didn’t get the number,” said Bob Ranger.
“Two people inside, man and woman,” said Delphick. “She was driving.”
Brinton was relaying this information to all patrol cars as the Panda, with a frantic gunning of the accelerator, burst into life and sped off down the road with a further screech of tyres. Then there came a scurry of feet from the nearby house, and three people—two women, one man—rushed down the path to see what had caused the recent commotion. Over the high hedge, only Bob could see them, and he shouted a warning to his superiors. Everything happened very fast after that. The thr
ee heard his voice, looked at one another, then plunged on together towards the black Ford van, with such a turn of speed that they almost reached it before Bob leaped upon the man, Delphick and Brinton upon the women. Firmly but warily these two held their suspects; Bob was able to exert rather more restraint upon his captive. He shook his collar gently—the man collapsed, a near-dead weight; this brought Bob off-balance, and as he stumbled the man jerked himself upright, yelled: “Come on!” to the women, and they, as the attention of their captors was drawn to the tumbling Bob, wrenched themselves free, stabbing with elbows and feet in vulnerable places. While Delphick and Brinton gasped and Bob was still picking himself up off the ground, the black Ford van screeched off up the road in the same direction as the dark red Mini, and was gone.
Without waiting to ask, Bob grabbed the radio and broadcast a call, in Brinton’s name, for all patrols to watch out for a small black Ford van with three people in it, driven by a man. Then he turned to assist Delphick and Brinton, who were rubbing their eyes and swearing, to their feet.
“Well done, lad.” Brinton nodded his approval of Bob’s quick thinking as he regained sufficient breath to speak. “We’ll never catch ’em now. Best leave it to the others. They can’t get far.”
“We’d better check inside the house,” Delphick said as he, too, breathed normally again. He led the way through the gate and up the path to the front door, which stood open to show a narrow hall with several cardboard boxes, crammed with an assortment of items, on the floor.
“The swag,” said Delphick. “Ready to load into the van once they’d collected enough. Some of it’s good quality, but perhaps not up to their usual standards.” He examined a glass vase thoughtfully. “Reproduction, not original, one of a pair, I think—but if there’s only one, it’s obviously not worth as much.”
He rose to his feet. “We can worry about that later. See that parcel on the hall table? Brown paper, string, one of those list labels with incomprehensible writing—it’s a load of laundry, and now we can guess how they wormed their way into the house. But the question now is, is the owner of the house all right?”
“Through here, perhaps,” said Brinton, leading the way down the hall and into the room at the end. “Yes—there’s someone asleep in an armchair here . . .”
He dropped his voice as he moved towards the sleeping woman, who did not stir at his approach. On the table beside her was a bottle of Phylloxera Sherry, almost full. “Should we try to wake her, or not? How strong d’you reckon those pills are?”
“Wake her,” said Delphick and took the woman’s wrist to feel her pulse. “Sluggish, but regular. She won’t come to any harm.” And he shook her arm a few times before raising her head to slap her face.
He did not slap her face. He stared at it, instead. So did Brinton, as his friend cried: “I don’t believe it!” And so, too, did Bob Ranger . . .
For the face of the sleeping woman was the face portrayed by Miss Seeton in her sketch of the air-raid.
“I don’t believe it,” breathed Brinton, while Delphick, coming to his senses, began to slap the woman’s face gently, ordering her to wake up. “She—she can’t have known!”
Delphick spoke again to the woman, who emitted a little groan. Her eyelids fluttered, and her lips moved. As she returned slowly to consciousness, her features firmed, and her age became apparent: she no longer seemed as young as she’d at first appeared—as young as Miss Seeton’s sketch.
But the resemblance was still remarkable.
“How could she have known?” Brinton demanded, scowling at the woman. “It’s—it’s uncanny. No wonder some of ’em say she’s a witch,” and he glanced over his shoulder. But all he saw there was Bob Ranger, who in his turn was staring at the woman Delphick was slowly bringing back to life.
The chief superintendent was doing much furious thinking even as he cajoled the unconscious woman in the chair. What had prompted Miss Seeton to draw the sketches she had? What was the connection between the two groups of three, one man and two women, which she had shown? And why her insistence on the World War Two connection? Was it just the Manudens’ air-raid bunker and the raffle prize?
One of these questions, at least, he could answer: maybe inspiration about the others would come as he spoke now. “I think,” he said, standing back to watch the results of his handiwork, “that this is another victim of the Sherry Gang. She’s not very big—probably why she’s taking her time about coming out of the drugged sleep—and I bet she was struggling with her parcel of laundry, and that’s how they picked her up.”
“Makes sense,” said Brinton, “though she’s younger than their normal victims, isn’t she? Fiftyish, I’d say.”
“But hampered by a bulky parcel on a hot day,” Delphick reminded him. “The poor girl in the wheelchair was thirty-something, wasn’t she? Anyway, we can ask her when she wakes up—and we’ve got a few other things to ask her, too. Because I’m betting on Miss Seeton again—and I’m guessing now that what we have here is not only a Sherry Gang victim, but one of the Dick Turpin crowd.”
The exclamations of the other two made the woman in the chair open her eyes briefly and groan again. She breathed in deeply, then blinked, sighed, and closed her eyes once more. Delphick spoke quickly, to forestall her proper awakening.
“Yes, she’s a Turpin type. My guess is that she drives the car that blocks off the back end of the bus, while the other two, and I’ll guess again that they were in that dark red Mini that didn’t like the look of us, prance about at the front with shotguns and masks. Another guess is that she’s the brains behind it all—that it’s her local knowledge of the back lanes that ensures the gang always escapes before road blocks are set up.”
“A lot of guesses,” muttered Brinton, although he’d been watching the face of the woman who was no longer as asleep as she’d earlier been; and her expression had been anxious enough, as Delphick spoke, to make the superintendent wonder if his friend’s theory might have some truth in it.
“I’ve even more guesses to make,” said Delphick airily, and looked towards the woman in the chair. “I think that if we were to ask Betsy Manuden—we’ll continue to call her by that name, though I don’t know if it’s correct—if she’d mind standing slap up close to this woman here, we’ll find a remarkable likeness between them—because they’re mother and daughter, and it’s the daughter Miss Seeton has seen out and about in Plummergen, dressed in her wartime fancy dress and reminding everyone about an old scandal so that they’d never dream of a new scandal arising in the same place.
“Oh, yes,” said Delphick, as Brinton and Ranger looked at each other and exclaimed again, “I’m hazarding my final guess on just one fact—courtesy of Miss Seeton, bless her.
“That this woman here,” he said, “lived right through the war and remembers it well, and didn’t die in an air-raid—and was known, to her friends, as Susannah Dawkin . . .”
chapter
~26~
“I DON’T KNOW how she does it,” moaned Brinton, clutching his hair. “Two police cars written off, Brettenden town centre closed to traffic for an hour while everyone sorts out the chaos—it would happen in the middle of the evening rush hour, of course—and PC Potter in hospital with concussion, and Miss Seeton not even near the place!”
“Be fair, Chris.” Delphick grinned at his anguished colleague. “On the credit side, we’ve got six people in custody and cleared up two cases, all thanks to her. We’ve seen the end of both the Sherry Gang and the Dick Turpins.”
“Says you. The Sherry lot were singing like canaries, but we didn’t get much out of your Turpins, did we? Every time I hear someone asking for a solicitor, my heart sinks—shows they know too many of the ropes for my liking.”
“Susannah seems to have taught them well, I agree. But she couldn’t resist boasting a little before we took her in, could she? Which ought to be enough to hold on suspicion, until we can dig out some proper evidence.”
Brinton snorted. “T
hat old swapped-identity-discs story—has anyone ever really known it to work?”
“According to Susannah, it worked for her. Certainly it was believed in Plummergen that she’d died in an air-raid—except the people who thought she was buried in the bunker, of course.” Delphick chuckled. “We’ll have to check it out for evidence now, won’t we, which is going to put paid to the vicar’s plans for a raffle prize. Not so much a time capsule as a robbers’ cave. Maybe we should make a donation to the Church Roof Fund, just to show willing.”
“After what we’ll have to pay out to get that pair of Pandas repaired, we won’t be able to afford it.” Brinton’s eyes closed as he relived the memory of recent traumatic events. The dark red Mini, driven by the Turpin daughter Betsy Manuden, had bolted away from the police car outside her mother’s house back towards Plummergen, with the young Panda driver in hot pursuit. Meeting on the road the patrol car driven by PC Potter, minding his own business, the Mini jammed on its brakes, turned tightly, and, evading the Panda, turned up the side road towards Woodchurch.
Such guilty behaviour, especially with a colleague of his chasing them, caused Potter to make it his business to join in that chase, and he stepped on the accelerator. But the Panda was attempting to turn to follow the Mini, and there is little room to manoeuvre on the Plummergen road. Potter, skidding round the Panda, drove into a ditch and lost his part of the action. The Panda driver radioed for help, then roared off up the side, turning after the Mini . . .
Which had reached the Woodchurch road in safety, only to meet another Panda, driven this time by someone who’d heard the general alert put out by Brinton. The Mini spun round yet again, with Brettenden the one route left, and fled in that direction with both Pandas in pursuit.
Meeting, at the crossroads, the black Ford van driven by the Sherry gang . . .
“Two cars written off,” repeated Brinton, in a stunned, wondering tone. “Potter’ll survive, thank goodness. They want to keep him in for observation, that’s all. But she’s done it again, Oracle, hasn’t she?” He shook his head with a despairing sigh. “What was I told you once? Four things in life you shouldn’t try to buck, and one of ’em’s fate. But Miss Seeton,” he sighed again, “is certainly the other three . . .”
Miss Seeton Cracks the Case (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 9) Page 21
