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

by Hamilton Crane

  “I see,” said Major Haynes, who (to his increasing surprise) did. He wasted no time in referring back to the sketchbook and Miss Seeton’s hasty doodle of the British prime ministers—it now made perfect sense to him. He was beginning to understand the way—the undoubtedly unorthodox way—her mind worked ...

  But there remained one more sketch to be explained away, the most frightening of them all. What she seemed to have known-without-knowing in that undoubtedly unorthodox way of hers was another secret belonging to Britain’s most secret history, a history that had perforce repeated itself—that had been perhaps an even more desperate secret the second time around than the first ...

  The first time, it had been during the Great War—the so-called War to End Wars, that war whose hope of everlasting peace had been betrayed within twenty years of its ending by the eruption of another war. A war that could well be even more great, more terrible, before it was won.

  Or lost.

  He would not think of that. He would, rather, try to find out from Miss Seeton just what she had known about the time history had repeated itself, only a few weeks ago.

  Operation Fish, it had been called this second time around. It had worked once before: it had at all costs to work again ...

  The collapse of Europe, crushed beneath the Nazi jackboot, and the sudden, final fall of France, had left Britain and her Empire standing alone against the foe. Invasion of the defiant little nation so close to the mainland—at its narrowest point the Channel was only twenty-two miles wide—looked easy, temptingly easy, to the eyes of the triumphant, land-hungry Germans. In those first dark days—days whose darkness even yet continued—Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill had become the voice of freedom. His bulldog roar, reverberating in broadcasts around the world, had dared the enemy to do his worst ...

  A worst that in secret—most secret—conclave even Churchill had to fear might come about at any moment ...

  Invasion.

  Invasion, successful invasion, would mean that Britain—that proudly royal throne of kings, that scepter’d isle, that precious stone set in the silver sea—had found the silver sea no longer “a moat defensive” and had been, for the first time in almost a thousand years, defeated.

  And, as Churchill feared, the chances were high that the moat would be crossed and the British Isles would indeed be defeated—yet geography was unimportant, for the British spirit would never admit defeat. The fight would continue overseas. The war would be fought from Canada, where money for the fight already waited in the vaults of certain banks in Ottawa and Montreal—two and a half billion dollars’ worth of gold as ingots and coin; five billion dollars’ worth of shares and securities, stocks and bonds, tied in bundles by Canadian clerks who, sworn to secrecy, had used more than seventy miles of tape to keep the priceless papers in order.

  Operation Fish. The gold, transported across the U-boat-infested Atlantic by the fastest of His Majesty’s warships, was reckoned to be worth more than all that Cortés had from Mexico—than Pizarro had from Peru—than had been mined in the rushes of the Klondike and California, Australia and New Zealand together ...

  Operation Fish. Securities and gold, whose first highspeed transport, the cruiser HMS Emerald, had sailed from beleaguered Britain on the 24th of June ...

  Miss Seeton’s sketch was dated June the nineteenth.

  Major Haynes turned the book around so that his visitor could take a closer look at her handiwork.

  “This is an unusual composition, Miss Seeton,” he said, as he had said before. “Almost surreal, one might say.”

  Miss Seeton smiled. “The zoo,” she said again. “It was such a very hot day ...”

  The sketch seemed at first sight to depict a sturdy cage in which a prowling lion, shaggy of mane and fierce of eye, lashed its tail and bared its pointed teeth at the world. (The British lion, defiant to the last, mused Major Haynes.) Closer inspection showed that the bars of the cage were bent inwards, as if by the application of some huge external force. (The enemy outside, trying to attack the embattled lion? So great was the weight of gold in the Emerald’s magazines that her angle irons had buckled under the strain.) Beneath the lion’s raised—protective?—paw stood a glass bowl—but it was not a bowl of drinking water. Through the curved sides could be seen a fish—a fish that, despite the lenslike distortion afforded by the curve, was unmistakably a goldfish, swimming with gaping mouth ...

  “It was such a very hot day,” Miss Seeton reminisced. “The children were thirsty and so good, on the whole, about not spilling their orange squash, but one felt so sorry for the poor creatures that remained in town, although of course most of the larger beasts had been evacuated to other zoos—and lions, coming from Africa, have less cause to dislike the heat than other animals, as long as they have enough water to drink. Which made me think of the aquarium, you know, and how it had been drained in case it was hit by a bomb and flooded everywhere ...”

  The authorities, on the outbreak of war the previous September, had thought it advisable for London Zoo to dispose of the two hundred thousand gallons of water that might otherwise do untold damage to Regent’s Park and surrounding areas if suddenly released. Some fish were rehomed in other zoos; the rest were, like the prized collection of poisonous spiders and snakes, humanely killed, to be either eaten or preserved in bottles and jars for future reference. Many animals, such as pandas and elephants, were sent to Whipsnade Zoo in Bedfordshire; the lions and tigers remained in London, although marksmen with rifles were always on hand in case a dropped bomb should release the carnivores from their enclosures to add to the public’s danger.

  “Gold,” murmured Major Haynes as Miss Seeton sighed for the folly of it all. “Fish,” he added with barely a pause.

  She looked at him and smiled. “It was the girl in the kiosk,” she said again, “who sold the children their drinks. She reminded me so much of little Miss Brown at college—not a great, though undoubtedly a gifted, artist ...” Miss Seeton, who saw little merit in her own artistic gifts, stifled another sigh and hurried on:

  “Miss Brown was an excellent mimic, you see, and one of her favourite turns was Sandy Powell—”

  “Can you hear me, Mother?” cried Major Haynes before he could stop himself.

  Miss Seeton chuckled at his imitation of the wireless comedian’s catchphrase, and nodded. “Exactly so,” she said. “And his poem about the goldfish in winter always used to make us laugh, for she recited it in such a very lugubrious way.” Miss Seeton chuckled again at the memory of Sandy Powell’s unfortunate goldfish “swimming round, and round, and round” with a “tail full of chilblains and chaps on his fins” and wondering what he could have to live for in his bowl, forever going round, and round, and round with no hope or prospect of ever going anywhere, or doing anything, else.

  Haynes found himself laughing in sympathy. Even the hidden watchers had to suppress their mirth, and a snigger from the irrepressible Aylwin would have betrayed their presence had not the major’s right foot kicked the side of his desk as he tilted his chair backwards.

  With a thump Major Haynes returned four airborne feet—two of his own, and two belonging to the chair—briskly to the ground. He had made up his mind. He glanced at the clock on the office wall, and checked it against his watch.

  “Miss Seeton,” he said, “I wonder if you would care to have lunch with me?”

  The goldfish-inspired smile in Miss Seeton’s eyes turned into one of surprised delight. “It would be a pleasure,” she replied without hesitation. “If, that is, you are sure you can spare the time.” Now surprised delight turned to a mischievous twinkle. “Of course, as my dear father used to say, time spent on reconnaissance is never wasted. Is it?”

  “Er—well—no,” was the major’s response. Once again the girl had wrong-footed him. “I mean ...” He found that he wanted to loosen his collar, which felt suddenly tight. “I assure you, Miss Seeton, the pleasure will be all mine,” he said firmly, and rose to his feet.

/>   As Miss Seeton gathered her belongings together, her glance fell on the major’s desk, and the three sketchbooks he had made no move to return to her.

  From her tone it was hard to tell whether or not she was laughing at him. “You will let me know, won’t you,” she said gently, “when the sandbag information-sheet idea is—forgive me—somewhat more concrete than it appears to be just now?”

  Major Haynes cheerfully groaned as expected and rendered silent thanks to the gods of military intelligence that she had given him so adroit an escape route. “Sandbags and concrete—Miss Seeton, that was awful. If you promise not to come out with any more puns like that, I might make it dinner as well as lunch.”

  Miss Seeton smiled as he took his umbrella—a sturdy black, crook-handled, neatly furled gamp with a well-polished ferrule—from the mahogany stand in the corner of the room. “Thank you,” she said, “but perhaps it is a little short notice for an evening engagement, wouldn’t you say? When there is my work at the canteen—although after your letter arrived I did tell them that I could not say when I should be able to return to duty ...”

  As he tucked the crook handle over his arm and prepared to open the door for his luncheon guest, Major Haynes paused to give her a slow, appraising look. Miss Seeton, who had been admiring the neatness of the bulky brolly’s black silk furls, raised her eyes to meet that look with one quite as thoughtful before lowering her gaze with a smile and a blush that might have been modest ... and might not.

  Mopping his brow, Major Haynes opened the door. “After you, Miss Seeton,” he said, and the pair left the room.

  chapter

  ~ 9 ~

  MAJOR HAYNES RETURNED, alone, from an extended luncheon to find his office full of impatient colleagues, their voices clamouring to know where he had been, what he’d been doing, and why it had taken him so long.

  “Gentlemen—please, gentlemen!” He silenced the clamour with a swift flourish of his umbrella, which he hung with his usual care on its mahogany hook. “One at a time, please,” he begged as he made for the chair behind his desk, which was being smartly vacated by young Aylwin, who had established squatter’s rights only until its lawful owner should arrive, and had no wish to trespass further.

  “Now, then,” said Major Haynes, seating himself and directing a courteous nod towards Chandler, his nominal superior. “If you’ll let me explain—”

  “You’d better,” said Chandler.

  “If you can,” muttered Cox.

  “We thought you’d eloped,” offered Aylwin with a grin.

  “Never in a million years,” said Steptoe as the misogynist Cox snorted at his side. “Though she’s a pleasant enough young woman,” he added.

  “Indeed she is,” said Major Haynes, taking advantage of the momentary lull before they all got their second wind. “And with more common sense than any of us had realised,” he continued. “I tried her out with some of the best rumours going round at the moment, and she squashed the lot of them without a second’s thought. We could do with a few like her in Duff Cooper’s crowd—no, seriously,” he went on as the startled jaw of Steptoe, who had used that Ministry of Information cover to make the initial contact with Miss Seeton, dropped. “It must be teaching that does it,” went on the major as Steptoe retrieved his jaw and could only blink at him in silence.

  “If,” enlarged Haynes, “you spend your time having to cope with hundreds of somebody else’s youngsters frolicking and larking about and trying it on every blessed minute of the day—and you manage to keep ’em under control, whether it’s in the classroom or on a trip to the zoo, or Hyde Park, or Hampton Court ...”

  “We take the point,” said Chandler as Haynes paused for effect. “Common sense, coupled with imagination—thinking up myriad ways of keeping the little dears interested so that they don’t run out of control ...”

  “Exactly so,” said Major Haynes.

  “It’s her imagination,” Steptoe reminded them, “that’s the whole trouble with Miss Seeton. Those sketches ...”

  “Exactly so,” said Cox in triumph, looking sideways at the major he had mimicked so viciously. “If you ask me,” he went on, though nobody had, “Haynes has fallen for the girl, and it’s warped his judgement. Great heavens, the future of the whole country’s in the balance, and here he is, seeing everything out of focus through rose-tinted spectacles!”

  Major Haynes tried to restrain his wince at the awkwardly mixed metaphor—and at the unfair accusation—and homed in on the one part of that accusation that was of particular interest to him.

  “Miss Seeton doesn’t wear spectacles,” he said. “But if,” he added with emphasis, “you ask me”—and here he looked sideways at Cox—“she does have a—a remarkable, if not unique, way of seeing things.”

  “Seeing things,” echoed Chandler grimly while the other men began to mutter, and Aylwin, who had perched himself on the corner of the major’s desk, opened the topmost of the three sketchbooks still lying on the blotter.

  “Seeing to the heart of things, if you prefer,” amended Major Haynes.

  “The heart of things,” scoffed Cox, irritated by even so feeble a hint of romance.

  “It wouldn’t be easy to pull the wool over her eyes, is what I mean,” said Major Haynes. “I ... think,” he found himself adding. Apart from the occasional shrewd remarks that made him feel uneasy, as they had during the interview in the Tower, it had been an enjoyable lunch. He’d been impressed by much of Miss Seeton’s conversation, convoluted though some of it had been. But the overall impression had been of a young woman with, yes, common sense, as well as unshakable patriotism ...

  “Her imagination ... doesn’t work that way,” he pressed on. “I asked her what she made of the idea that enemy parachutists were likely to use transparent parachutes and wear blue uniforms so that they’d be invisible against the sky until it was too late.”

  “And?” barked Cox as Chandler and the others were happy to wait for the rest of it.

  “And she said the current run of fine weather was hardly the norm for an English July, and that not even the Germans, efficient though they are, could arrange for the sky to remain completely free of cloud for the length of time needed to invade.” The major chuckled before appending Miss Seeton’s remark that the only way round the problem would be to have a change of uniforms (sky blue and rain-cloud grey) and equipment (parachutes either transparent or cumulus white) in each invading plane, which would be costly in both time and money and would take up twice the space.

  “And she said,” he concluded, “that the Nazis seem to be so—so attached to their jackboots, the black was bound to stand out against whatever colour background they might have on the way down.”

  “Good thinking,” said Chandler with approval. “And she could well be right, at that.”

  “Let’s hope she is,” said Steptoe.

  “I asked her next,” said the major, ignoring another snort from Cox, “what she thought of the idea that the Nazis were about to tow huge submersible tanks of compressed poison gas across the Channel to render the populace of the coastal regions helpless in the face of a seaborne force.”

  At this, Chandler had to arch his eyebrows. “Tactless,” he observed.

  “Catch her off balance,” said Cox, prepared at last to regard the major with some approval.

  Haynes shifted on his chair at the memory of how he had inadvertently reminded his lunch companion of the long-drawn-out sufferings that had ended in merciful death, but had deprived the young Emily of her father.

  He saw no need to mention that at the gleam of sudden tears in her eyes, he had ventured to pat her hand—and that she had not withdrawn it at once. “She said,” he said hurriedly, “that the Germans had no more control over the wind than they had over the rain, and given the way the Channel behaves, they were quite as likely to gas themselves as us, if we didn’t finish the tanks off with bombs as soon as they came to the surface.”

  “She’s right again,” said
Chandler. “Miracles of calm weather like Dunkirk happen once in a lifetime.”

  “And those nine days used up several lifetimes at one go,” said Aylwin. “If you ask me,” he added, looking from Cox, silently scowling, to the major, hiding a smile.

  “Then,” said Haynes, “I asked her opinion of the ban on church bells, and she said the trouble with only allowing them to be rung in the event of invasion was that there was no guarantee those with sufficient authority to allow the ringing would be able to find at short notice anyone able to ring them. She also pointed out that very few churches were likely to be connected to the telephone service, which would mean an inevitable delay while whoever took the message hopped on a bicycle and pedalled off, looking for someone who wasn’t going to break his neck tugging on a damn great rope with a lump of metal clanging on the end of it.”

  “She never said that,” protested Steptoe.

  “Not in so many words,” admitted Major Haynes, “but the sentiment was exactly as I’ve reported it—and, really, she has a point.”

  “The LDV are too busy patrolling to keep men on permanent ready alert on bikes,” agreed Chandler. “You know, I’m starting to like the sound of your Miss Seeton, Haynes. Common sense, indeed. What else?”

  “She thinks taking down the signposts and removing the milestones and so forth is fine in theory, though she said seeing the war memorials defaced was a shame, but it was a small sacrifice compared to the sacrifice made by those with their names on the memorials ...”

  Major Haynes coughed. “She said some might see this war as a betrayal of that sacrifice, but that bullies had to be stopped ...”

  “Consistent, at any rate,” said Chandler, who, like the others, could recall eavesdropping on the first time Miss Seeton had voiced this opinion.

  “And she thought,” said the major, “that anyone taking the trouble to invade and who really had no idea where he was—which, in view of the proverbial German efficiency, she thinks improbable—would have enough sense to get into the nearest bank or post office and check the address headings printed on the forms and writing paper and so forth.”