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

by Hamilton Crane

  Miss Seeton sighed. These thoughts, like her previous idle musings, were far from comfortable. She frowned at her clasped hands. She would—she must—think of happier matters—of her mother’s pleasure that her daughter had found, or rather had been given, war work that made good and proper use of her abilities and experience. Young women en masse could not, Miss Seeton supposed, be so very different from schoolgirls. And of course her information leaflet sketches were such a tactful justification for her presence at the aircraft factory. She had no wish to cause distress to the current workers’ welfare officer, who might reasonably feel it insulting on the part of outsiders to impose on her an assistant for whom she had not asked.

  Except that she felt sure, even from their few meetings, that Major Haynes would never insult a lady.

  Major Haynes ...

  “Now, remember,” he had said as he issued his final instructions. “You’re to keep your eyes open for anything out of the ordinary and sketch it when you see it, and let us know when you’ve done so. Phone this number”—he handed her a slip of paper—“and, er, someone will be in touch.” There was a note in the major’s voice that made Miss Seeton suspect she would easily recognise that someone when he presented himself.

  “But if,” he went on, “there’s anything in the nature of an emergency—we know we can trust your common sense and initiative to judge what’s important and what isn’t—you’re to phone this number”—he handed her a second slip—“and give the password.” His eyes twinkled in response to her own quizzical smile. “Yes, it sounds on the melodramatic side,” he said cheerfully, “but in wartime you can’t be too careful about the smallest detail. Think of it as along the lines of taking care of the pennies, and the pounds will take care of themselves.”

  Miss Seeton’s smile approved the analogy, and the major smiled back at her.

  “All you do,” he said, “is ask the operator, ‘What goes up a chimney down, but can’t go down a chimney up?’ and she’ll put you through to me—wherever I am, whatever I’m doing, whatever time of day or night it is.”

  “What goes up a chimney down,” echoed Miss Seeton with a pucker between her brows, “but can’t go down a chimney up?”

  “That’s right.” Major Haynes seemed amused by her failure to solve the riddle—but it was kindly amusement, and at his smile Miss Seeton smiled again. “Memorise both numbers,” he went on without explaining, “and then, please, burn the pieces of paper—yes, I know, more melodrama. I would apologise, but I’m sure you understand.”

  “Of course I understand,” said Emily Dorothea, daughter of the late Major Hugo Monk Seeton, VC.

  And, of course, she had.

  Miss Seeton blinked, then stretched herself. The elderly man lifted his head from her shoulder, where it must have rested for some time without her noticing. He was rubbing his neck and smiling apologetically at her. She smiled as apologetically back. Had she been asleep? Dreaming? Well, at least—if she had—they had been pleasant dreams ...

  The train began to slow. Others woke, stretched, checked their watches, and either closed their eyes again or looked about them, wondering what had happened to their luggage. Miss Seeton glanced upwards at the overhead rack to which her neighbour, despite his years a good foot taller than she, had kindly lifted her two small cases to rest beside the battered carpetbag he had thrown up into the net just as she appeared at the compartment door. He had not, then or later, told her where he was going: Careless Talk Costs Lives, as government posters and leaflets reminded everyone all the time. Now he had stopped rubbing his stiff neck and settled back to sleep. He was not, it seemed, about to help her lift her cases down if the station into which the train was slowing proved to be the one she wanted.

  Miss Seeton stifled a sigh for the easy days of peace. How much they had taken for granted! Now, for fear of helping the invader, no railway station could by emergency law—by Order in Council—reveal its identity to the puzzled traveller except in letters no more than three inches high; and only then if the station was more than a certain number of miles from the coast. As no lights were permitted to shine where enemy eyes might see them, the letters, for all the good they did in the dark, could have been three feet high, or thirty: and they would have been just as much use as three inches. Or as little. Especially when one took into consideration the tiny diamond-shaped hole in the mesh through which they had to be viewed ...

  “Aardvark! Aardvark!” The station porter’s informative roar was accompanied by the hiss of steam and the squeal of brakes as the train drew alongside the platform. “Aardvark! Change here for Broccoli, Starfish, and Plunge! Aardvark!”

  Miss Seeton wondered if she was still dreaming, but as some of her fellow passengers grabbed gas masks, cases, and bags and prepared to leave the compartment, she decided she wasn’t, and rose to her feet with an apologetic smile for her drowsy neighbour. The porter’s accent was, certainly, strong: there was undoubtedly room for misunderstanding; but she recalled a remark of Major Haynes to the effect that the factory where she was to take up her new appointment had been erected, at great speed, in an extremely out-of-the-way spot for reasons of national security. Extremely out of the way, mused Miss Seeton, as in the distance the porter’s bucolic roar continued to warn of the necessity of changing for Broccoli, Starfish, and Plunge—places of which she had never heard, and which she could not hope to interpret. But Aardvark sounded sufficiently like her intended destination for her to take the risk of alighting: she did not dare ask anyone where she really was. Careless talk, as the government posters warned, costs lives ...

  “Let me give you a hand,” offered a burly, clean-shaven man of her own age whose pinstripe suit and solitary black, bulging bag gave him the air of a medical man. “You’ll do yourself an injury if you’re not careful,” he added as Miss Seeton, with a smile and words of breathless gratitude, lowered herself from her tiptoe stance and stopped trying to reach her cases.

  “Don’t worry, the train always waits ten minutes while they take on water,” the doctor reassured her. His bedside manner had its public application, too. “These yours? Well—fair exchange is no robbery. Hold this.” He thrust his own, smaller bag into Miss Seeton’s startled grasp, swung her cases down with minimal effort, and, still carrying them, headed for the door, avoiding as many feet and outstretched legs as he could, and nodding apologetically to the owners of those he couldn’t.

  Miss Seeton pattered gratefully in his wake, her shorter legs more nimble than the burly doctor’s pin-striped limbs. She tripped only once, and recovered herself with barely a squeak when what in the pale blue light’s uncertain shadow she had supposed part of the floor proved to be the skirt of someone’s coat.

  She must be tired. Her eye was usually quicker than her hand—or her feet. Miss Seeton smothered a yawn. It had been a long, long day ...

  “Going far?” asked the doctor genially as he assisted his companion down from the train, warning her that the step was rather high and in the uncertain twilight she should take extra care.

  “I’m ... not sure,” said Miss Seeton, taking quite as much care herself not to cost lives with any idle talk. She must not let it be known, for instance, that there was a map in her handbag and—had the sky not been darkening even in the west, where the blurred silhouettes of trees marched across a ridge of black hills—she had been ready and more than willing to walk ...

  “Being met?” came the next question as the pair began heading for the exit.

  Miss Seeton replied that she thought not. There had been that delay when they pulled into the siding to let the troop trains past, and even the most kindhearted landlady could not be expected, when there had been no possibility of a telephone call ...

  “Ah, a landlady.” Miss Seeton’s new friend held out his ticket as they reached the barrier. The collector shone a perfunctory torch on it with a cheery “Evening, Doctor”—or so Miss Seeton believed him to say—before studying the young woman’s travel warrant with far gre
ater care, holding it close to the gap in the torch’s paper mask and squinting at the smudged ink, repeatedly peering, shaking his head, and muttering to himself what sounded to Miss Seeton grave suspicions of her bona fides.

  The doctor had already made his diagnosis. “You must work at the factory,” he told Miss Seeton, who saw no easy way of (and little point in) denying this. Only those on official business would travel with official documents, and as far as she knew, there was no official establishment other than the aircraft factory anywhere in the neighbourhood.

  The ticket collector stopped his peering and muttering to favour Miss Seeton with a long, thoughtful stare.

  “And lodging with Mother Beamish,” the doctor went on, directing the remark more towards the suspicious one than at Miss Seeton, who barely had time to confirm the accuracy of his guesses before her self-appointed guardian went on:

  “That’s where several of the girls are billeted. Let me warn you, Tilly’s a fair cook and won’t cheat you on your rations, but she talks the hind leg off a paddock full of donkeys if you give her half a chance. Keep your diary locked in your case—and don’t let the keys out of your sight, if you value your privacy.”

  The ticket collector abandoned his thoughtful staring to emit a lengthy chortle from which Miss Seeton, whose ear was growing accustomed to the local accent, disentangled the words slander and libel and lucky for the doctor he wasn’t no tattletale, Tilly Beamish being the sort of woman she was, ha-ha.

  “Get along with your nonsense, Janner, or I’ll double my bill before I send it,” returned the doctor. “Tilly Beamish is right on my way,” he told Miss Seeton once Janner—his suspicions evidently lulled by the doctor’s acceptance of the stranger—had (though grudgingly) waved her through the barrier and the two were standing on the station forecourt. “Tricky, these shadows,” muttered the doctor. “Hang on a second while I dig out the flashlight ...” Miss Seeton heard the click of an opened bag and sounds of rummaging. “Got it.” There was another click, and a paper-muffled glimmer appeared on the ground at her companion’s feet. “Now,” he said, “you wait here with the luggage, and I’ll fetch the car.”

  Miss Seeton waited, watching the muffled glimmer as it moved away to be swallowed by the gloom. Waiting was, of course, her most sensible course of action. In an unknown place, in deepening twilight—indeed, it was almost dark—with only a pocket torch to guide her and its battery on the wane (there had been a shortage of the essential number-eight size this past few weeks), one was all too likely to stumble. A broken arm or leg, even with a doctor on hand to deal with it—Miss Seeton smiled in the darkness—would not be a good start to her wartime work for Ministry Section G.

  Gideon? Gareth?

  Miss Seeton, yawning, wondered idly what the doctor’s name might be ...

  The rumble of a motor vehicle, its yellow headlamps slitted like the eyes of some enormous beast of prey, drew near and woke Miss Seeton from her weary reverie. Above the rumble the doctor’s voice spoke from the blacked-out gloom.

  “Hop in,” he invited, himself hopping out to throw Miss Seeton’s cases in the car beside the bag he had carried away with him on his torchlit progress across the station yard. Miss Seeton, groping her way to the door handle by using the white blackout paint as a guideline, duly hopped, and had settled herself in the passenger seat before the doctor was back in the driver’s.

  “We ought to introduce ourselves,” said the doctor, “if we’re going to be neighbours, which we are, with you at the factory ...” He cleared his throat. “And me,” he went on, “the medical man who deals with their bumps and bruises as well as with every other ailment suffered by anyone in this benighted village. Er—my name’s Huxter—and in case you were wondering, my parents did indeed have me christened Samuel, though I doubt if either of them ever read a word of Thackeray.”

  “I’m Emily Seeton,” said Miss Seeton, who had. “I fear that Pendennis is not one of my favourite books, Dr. Huxter. Such a selfish young man, and so very foolishly indulged by his mother ...”

  She remembered Alice, alone at home in London, and fell silent.

  “First time away, Miss Seeton?” Dr. Huxter’s guess was not so very remarkable. “During the war, I mean,” he added kindly. “Quite a different perspective from peacetime, eh?”

  Miss Seeton agreed that it was, adding that even when attending college, she had lived at home. Then it dawned on her that revelation of her identity as an artist might come under the heading of Careless Talk, and she quickly changed the subject by asking how many other girls lodged with Mrs. Beamish and whether they all worked at the factory.

  But then it dawned that the doctor’s answers to these questions might also be information helpful to the enemy, and she begged him just as quickly not to tell her. She would (she explained) find out for herself very soon.

  “Tricky, isn’t it?” said Dr. Huxter as he leaned over the steering wheel gazing at what he could see of the way ahead. On either side of the road Miss Seeton could just make out the passing ghostly rings of white paint that hovered in midair around the poles of war-blinded streetlamps that would not be lit again until the present conflict was over.

  Whether it was won ...

  Or lost.

  “And what on earth,” went on Dr. Huxter, “we can talk talk about that couldn’t help an invader, were he of sufficiently devious mind, I’ve yet to resolve to my patriotic satisfaction.” The way he uttered this phrase told Miss Seeton it was far from newly minted. “What’s more,” he said, as if it were a personal insult, “with our national standby, the weather, a taboo subject for the duration, how are we inhibited English to make polite small-talk with strangers? Except.” he added before she could reply, “that I doubt if you and I will remain strangers for long, Miss Seeton. This isn’t a big place. I don’t know what you’re going to do at the factory—and you’d better not tell me ...”

  There was a note of constraint in his voice as he hesitated, then went on with more confidence: “But whatever it is, we’re bound to run across each other either there, or in the shops or the street or somewhere.”

  “I look forward to it,” said Miss Seeton politely.

  It was, after all, no more than courteous to respond to the conversational lead of someone who had so kindly given her a lift ...

  In the darkness, Emily Dorothea Seeton blushed.

  chapter

  ~ 12 ~

  DR. HUXTER SLOWED his car towards where Miss Seeton supposed the kerb to be, misjudged the distance of the white painted marks, and cursed as the sound of scraping was followed by a thump and a faint hiss.

  “That’s another puncture, or I’m a Dutchman,” he told Miss Seeton after making hurried apology for his language. “I’m always doing it. Whisper it low, but my night vision’s not so hot, and of course in a job like mine I can’t afford to stop driving.” There was almost a laugh in his voice as he continued, “Our local garage must have made a fortune out of me since this blackout nonsense began—excuse me, that’s always a bit stiff—” He leaned across in front of Miss Seeton as she fumbled with the door handle and clicked it open. “All gas and gaiters, they call it,” he went on with another chuckle as he straightened. “Compressed air in the inner tubes and special patches on the tyres,” he translated as Miss Seeton politely essayed a chuckle in response, but failed because she couldn’t see what Nicholas Nickleby’s Gentleman in Small-clothes had to do with punctured tyres. “Mind you,” the doctor added in a noncommittal voice, “I imagine they think of it more along the lines of making hay while the sun shines ...”

  Miss Seeton peered into the unknown dark. “Certainly there must be fewer accidents in sunlight,” she murmured with some relief. So much, at least, of what the doctor said she could understand, although what concerned her most was not so much the conversational courtesies as general etiquette. A truly nice (in the original sense of the word) problem had presented itself with the scrape, the thump, the hiss, and the doctor’s muttered oa
th. It had been a golden rule of her up-bringing that a gentlewoman never discussed politics, religion, or money ...

  Money. The conscience of Emily Dorothea, true daughter of Alice, would not let her forget that if Dr. Huxter hadn’t so kindly given her a lift to the house of Mrs. Beamish, he wouldn’t have run into the kerb and sustained the damage to his tyre—expensive damage, to judge by the force of what he said when it happened, although of course that might just be the doctor’s way. Miss Seeton had no idea how much it would cost to repair a puncture—nobody would even dream of buying a new tyre or tube (or whatever might be needed) in wartime—but, no matter what it cost, she had a moral obligation to offer to share some part of that cost. A doctor, especially a village doctor with so many new and extra calls upon his services—the workers at the factory, the mothers and children evacuated to the country from the city—could not afford to remain long without his car.

  But—and here Miss Seeton felt her maiden cheeks grow warm with embarrassment—was he likely to take offence at any suggestion that she might defray part of the costs of repair? Would he feel that her offer of recompense held the implication that she saw his original gentlemanly kindness as no more than a routine taxi service? He was, she must remember, a professional man ...