Miss Seeton's Finest Hour (A Miss Seeton Mystery)

by Hamilton Crane

  The clamour that greeted this remark was confused, but its meaning was clear. With invasion expected at any moment it was hardly overreaction to be worried about the activities of suspected traitors ...

  “I entirely agree,” said Haynes as drifts of ceiling plaster set his colleagues coughing. His seat was closest to the open window, and the draught was in his favour. “All I am trying to point out is that if, as has been suggested, Miss Seeton uses her sketches as a means of passing information, what need would she have for a wireless as well?”

  Captain Grange was the first to come up with an answer. “Belt and braces, man,” he growled.

  Chandler interposed before Major Haynes could protest. “Anything is possible, yes—but as Haynes knows, Captain Grange, Steptoe can tell us the watch he’s been keeping on the girl has given no indication of any transmitter in the house,” he said firmly. “Steptoe, would you confirm?”

  “Confirmed,” said Steptoe, as if he regretted the fact. “And ... our friend hasn’t shown any signs of wireless activity either.”

  “Ah, yes.” Major Haynes sat up. “Our friend in Hampstead, the fifth columnist. Refresh our memories, if you would be so good, as to how the ... supposed link with Miss Seeton first came to our attention.”

  “Damn the girl,” muttered Captain Grange.

  “She seems a pleasant enough young woman,” said Steptoe with some reluctance. “I should rather like to believe in her, I think, now that we’ve met and talked, but ... there’s still that blackout shutter to explain.”

  “You didn’t ask her about it, I assume.” This from the major, who was frowning in thought.

  “I was there on behalf of the Ministry of Information, looking for pictures of sandbags,” Steptoe reminded him. “I suppose I could have said we’d first spotted her talents on the damned shutter, but if she is a wrong ’un we don’t want to alert her to the fact she’s given herself away, even subconsciously, by plastering this chap’s likeness where everyone can see it.”

  “Girl must be a fool,” said Captain Grange. “Why didn’t she go back and paint over the thing when she realised what she’d done? I would, in her shoes.”

  “If,” said Major Haynes patiently, “they are in truth the innocent shoes they may yet prove to be, she would have no reason to think the shutter needed repainting—even if the grocer could find the paint, which these days I doubt.”

  “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” said Aylwin, and even Captain Grange had to grin at the well-worn phrase before demanding, in his turn, to be reminded of the details of the infamous episode that first alerted the security forces to the possible threat posed to the nation’s very existence by Miss Emily Dorothea Seeton.

  chapter

  ~ 5 ~

  “IT STARTED WITH the grocer,” said Steptoe. “My landlady, bless her, is a busy little body with the fastest-wagging tongue in Hampstead—very useful, in this line of work.”

  “Being a grocer?” asked Aylwin, but he was ignored.

  “She came home one day just after Christmas,” continued Steptoe, “full of the state poor, dear Mr. Robin was getting himself into with worrying about when the rationing scheme would start, and exactly how it would work, and how soon it would be before everything was in dangerously short supply the way it was last time—”

  “Blasted U-boat blockade damn near starved us into surrender,” growled Captain Grange, whose memories of submarine warfare were not pleasant.

  “But this time we were—we are—rather better prepared,” Chandler soothed him before nodding to Steptoe to go on with his story.

  “We hope,” muttered Cox darkly. Major Haynes, at the far end of the table, shook his head and frowned.

  “The grocer,” Steptoe said loudly, “was working himself into a state. I knew the man, not well, but I knew him—and I know my landlady. She gossips, but she doesn’t exaggerate; and Robin always struck me as having his head screwed on the right way when he brought the weekly order round. So I thought it might be worth finding out just why he was suddenly getting hot and bothered about a government scheme that had been in preparation for some time, and that we’d all been expecting any day. Everyone knew we didn’t plan to be caught with our trousers down by Hitler the way we were by Kaiser Bill—and Robin ought to have known it, too.”

  “Some people are born pessimists,” said Cox, who after his experience with the widow was himself inclined towards a gloomy view of life.

  “Not Robin,” said Steptoe firmly. “He told me just a few days after war was declared that he went right through the first lot without a scratch, and he wasn’t going to let some jumped-up corporal who should have stuck to painting houses get him down when regular blue blood hadn’t managed it twenty years before. But three months later, according to my landlady, down wasn’t the word for him. So I got to wondering whether someone of a ... of an unfavourable disposition might not have been working on the little man—”

  “Alarm and despondency,” snarled Captain Grange. “Damned fifth column!”

  “That’s how it seemed to me,” agreed Steptoe cheerfully. “Once I’d had a friendly chat with Mr. Robin and commiserated with him about the shortages—this was still before rationing had officially started, you understand—”

  “On the eighth of January,” the irrepressible Aylwin reminded his fellow intelligence officers, in case they had forgotten.

  Captain Grange snorted. Chandler rolled his eyes but said nothing. Major Haynes shook his head again, and Cox let out a sigh. Aylwin subsided.

  “So I jollied the chap along,” persisted Steptoe, “and tipped him the wink I was in the know—showed him my ID as a high-up in the Ministry of Supply, and reassured him the best way I knew how. He was a different man by the time I left the shop—of course, I was careful to wait until there was nobody else in the place to overhear—and because we were alone I was able to do a bit of judicious pumping. And he let slip enough to confirm my original idea that someone had been working on him, and on some of the other shopkeepers—about how this was a war for the benefit of the bosses and the rich greedy profiteering Jews who raked in the money earned by the sweat of honest men’s brows, hiding behind the skirts of the fighting men—”

  Captain Grange uttered a salty oath that brought more plaster from the ceiling. The others echoed his sentiments, though in less immoderate language.

  “Exactly,” said Steptoe. “He let slip that someone’s name, as well, though it took a bit of questioning on my part, and I kept out of Robin’s way for a while after. He’s a shrewd little devil, for all his fusspot ways. I didn’t want him to start thinking about me and ... getting ideas.”

  “Nobody’s reported you as a fifth columnist yet, you’ll be pleased to know,” Chandler told him with a grin, before prompting: “You kept out of his way for a while—and then?”

  “Then one day my landlady came back burbling about some clever little artist called Seeton who’d been asked by Mr. Robin to paint his blackout shutters to show that, even if there was a rationing scheme, his shop was still plentifully stocked with groceries in spirit, as it were, if not in fact. So I strolled along one evening at just about the time to help Robin fasten the shutters—and there he was. Our friend Collins, the fifth-column suspect, slap in the middle of the picture, buying a bunch of grapes.”

  “And the only customer, so far as we have ascertained, not to have passed any comment whatsoever on having his likeness on display for the whole world to see,” Chandler concluded briskly on his subordinate’s behalf. Steptoe was a good man, but long-winded on occasion.

  “Suspicious,” said Cox, “when everyone else she painted has, according to you, at least said something about it.”

  “Unusual,” amended Major Haynes. “It might be no more than a case along the lines of a person’s failing to recognise his own voice when it is heard on a broadcast recording—a well-known phenomenon, I believe.”

  “Bearded bloke, this Collins?” enquired Captain Grange, thoughtfully
stroking his own regulation “full set” of whiskers. The Royal Navy does not allow half measures in anything, and a moustache by itself is as unacceptable as a moustacheless beard.

  “Clean-shaven,” said Steptoe. He looked at Major Haynes and forestalled him rather neatly with: “And, no, he doesn’t go to the local cutthroat man, he shaves himself. There’s no excuse for his not knowing what he looks like, even in reverse in a mirror.”

  “Miss Seeton showed him the right way round, did she?” asked the major with another of his frowns.

  “The right way round?” cried Captain Grange. “Good God, man—are you trying to tell us the blasted female might be psychic? The right way, the wrong way—the man’s a wrong ’un, and Seeton’s fingered him—pah!”

  “I’m saying no such thing,” returned Major Haynes, for the first time roused from his habitual calm. “What I am saying is that, while of course there are such things as photographs in which a man might recognise his likeness, some people don’t care for photographs and never have them taken. And some have a ... a blind spot about themselves—and Collins may be one of them. You’ve reported, Steptoe, that since Miss Seeton’s picture first appeared in the Hampstead street for passersby to admire, any fifth-column activities in which the man might have been engaged appear to have stopped.”

  “We haven’t caught him out in anything,” Steptoe acknowledged. “No wireless activity, as I said—but of course we don’t know if that’s what he was doing before he ...” He shot a quick look at Captain Grange. “Before he was fingered by Miss Seeton,” he said.

  The captain muttered into his beard, but it was the major who replied.

  “Why,” he asked gently, “should she do that if she’s in league with him?”

  “She’s in love with him,” said Cox. “Women are damned funny creatures. The subconscious mind ...”

  Captain Grange muttered wrathfully once more against Miss Seeton’s psychic tendencies.

  “It’s hardly my idea of a valentine,” said Aylwin quickly. “To have my face in poster paint on a blackout shutter in the High Street, that is. I’d say if she’s trying to get him to propose, she’s out of luck.”

  “Pretty, is she?” Chandler asked Steptoe, whose startled look implied that courtship—by whatever means—and Miss Seeton had not before been brought together in his mind.

  “Oh, pleasant enough,” Steptoe said after a pause. It seemed that Emily Dorothea Seeton, whatever other impression she might have made on him during their brief encounter, had not slain him with one of Cupid’s darts. “She’ll be a regular little old lady if she lives so long—”

  “If any of us live so long,” interposed Cox.

  “—because if she’s half an inch above five foot,” said Steptoe, “I’ll be surprised, and sopping wet she can’t weigh more than seven stone ... but nice, neat features, though she doesn’t wear more than a dab of lipstick, and not even clear polish on her nails ... A lady, of course—and a born spinster, I’d say.” He looked across at Cox. “You could be right, but somehow—”

  “Suppose we all stop bothering about the blasted woman’s love life,” said Captain Grange, “and start asking ourselves just what the devil she meant by doing this when she did?” He’d had only half an ear on the discussion around him as he leafed once again through those damning sketchbooks. “Look at the date, for pity’s sake! Look!”

  They all looked. The page now open for scrutiny showed little in the way of detailed drawing: there was rather a series of swift, swooping pencilled lines depicting a row of men, imperiously posed, on plinths, with their names jotted underneath.

  “Pitt,” read Chandler aloud. “Palmerston, Peel, Walpole—and ‘Walpole’ has been underlined, you note, gentlemen.”

  “And with a question mark,” added Captain Grange in case they couldn’t see this for themselves.

  “Gladstone,” said Major Haynes, continuing to read aloud the names under the plinths. “Disraeli, Asquith—the girl simply has a bee in her genteel bonnet about British prime ministers, that’s all.”

  “Then why,” asked Captain Grange darkly, “has she put so much emphasis on Walpole, damn her? Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In a blasted forest, that’s where!” With an effort he controlled himself. “And why,” he went on, even more darkly, “did she write this?”

  He stabbed a furious finger at one word that floated, as it were, to one side and slightly above the swiftly sketched prime-ministerial statues. “Diamond,” he read in his darkest tones yet. “And the date, man—the date!”

  The date was there for all to see in Miss Seeton’s neat hand: 11th May, 1940.

  “Whitsun weekend,” said Major Haynes at last. “Evidently she didn’t take the government’s cancellation of the bank holiday too much to heart, if she could find the time to go doodling history lessons around town—but I agree,” he went on quickly as Captain Grange again began to simmer audibly. “The coincidence is ... remarkable.”

  The others considered this statement in silence. Other words than remarkable might well be applied to Miss Seeton’s apparent foreknowledge of the stirring events of that Order in Council cancelled Whit Monday, 13th May 1940—events graded Most Secret, and with very good cause. The German invasion on 10th May of neutral Belgium and Holland had sent Britain on full alert. Forces leave, like the bank holiday due on Monday, was cancelled as the nation geared up to face the ever-nearing Nazi hordes. There was fighting in Norway, there were landings in Iceland, there were supply convoys to be escorted against the U-boat menace that lurked unseen under every wave ... and yet, amid so much busyness and alarm, with every other ship of the Royal Navy preparing to sell herself and her crew dearly, the elderly destroyer HMS Walpole received strict instructions to stay away at all costs from the action. Her commanding officer was told on Whit Sunday that he must carry three anonymous male passengers at full speed across the Channel to the Dutch port of Ymuiden, and bring them—together with whatever luggage they might have acquired during their brief stay abroad—back alive the following day.

  “Diamond,” said Captain Grange, once more stabbing at the word where it floated above the statue labelled Pitt. “The blasted girl gives me the creeps, the way she seems to know what we’re up to even before we know ourselves ...”

  The luggage brought back in HMS Walpole by the three anonymous men had consisted of an ordinary canvas kitbag, such as any sailor might carry, although no sailor’s kit in history had ever been so priceless. A value of two million pounds would be a conservative estimate: two million pounds’ worth of industrial diamonds, without which none of the factories engaged in war work could be tooled. Diamond, the hardest substance in the world, was essential for the drawing of wires to an accuracy of a thousandth of an inch; some wires must be thinner still, for use in certain items of electric, electronic, and radio equipment so vital, yet so secret, that even Cox and his Subsection R boffins understood little of their function. Without industrial diamonds, the very industry of war would come to a halt ...

  “Brave chaps, those merchants,” said Captain Grange, and cleared his throat. For a moment nobody spoke; there were one or two coughs, and then a general murmur of agreement ran around the table. It was a worthy tribute to those quiet Dutchmen who had handed over their diamond stock to Britain’s anonymous representatives in the full knowledge that Nazi intelligence would all too soon discover—if indeed the facts were not already known—what that stock should have been. The German war machine had as great a need for diamonds as anyone else. Punishment for thwarting the invaders would be severe ...

  Yet the merchants had not hesitated. The diamonds had left the country; the handful of craftsmen—perhaps six—who could drill a diamond hole as small as the technically near-impossible triple-O-five required by radar and electronics had gone into hiding, and there were plans to effect a rescue once their whereabouts were known.

  “Doubt if we’ll be able to send the Walpole next time,” said Captain Grange, with all the regret of a
naval man whose role has been usurped by a different branch of HM forces. “It’ll be midnight landing strips and airlifting the poor blighters out of occupied territory, just you mark my words.”

  Nobody argued with him. Once more there was a brief pause, broken by murmurs of agreement.

  “She knew about the Walpole operation three days before it happened,” said Chandler at last.

  “Or so it would appear,” put in Major Haynes, who was still weighing the possibilities of coincidence against the likelihood of Miss Seeton’s having, if not psychic, then perhaps prophetic powers.

  “She also appears,” continued Chandler heavily, “to have had some previous knowledge of Operation Dynamo.”

  “Suspicious,” observed the cynical Cox. “Nobody normal could have expected the Belgians to throw in the towel as quickly as they did.” His tone implied that even he had not thought so poorly of King Leopold, who had begged for Allied help and then, it seemed, abandoned the struggle without warning and left the BEF to its fate.

  “Except Miss Seeton,” said Aylwin, who had been struck by a sudden inspiration. “Has it occurred to anyone that if the girl really has allowed Steptoe to requisition every sketchbook she owns, we might—with a spot of judicious study—be able to work out in advance what the hell is going to happen next?”

  “The date of the invasion would be useful,” said Captain Grange, who like his colleagues was more than willing to fight on the beaches, on the landing grounds, in the fields, in the streets, and in the hills, but who unlike the military men would prefer the chance to fight on the seas and oceans first. “We’ve been waiting since May, dammit—since June, anyway, after Dunkirk. And that,” he went on, snatching up a sketchbook and turning to another of the markers Chandler and Steptoe between them had placed at those points they deemed most worthy of consideration, “brings me to this—and all I can say about this is, there must be a security leak somewhere. We can gabble about coincidence and—and psychic powers until we’re blue in the face, but that young woman is a damn sight too psychic and coincidental for her own good. For the good of the country, blast her.