Sold to Miss Seeton (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 19)

by Hamilton Crane

  “The Quendon killing, for one.” Brinton drained the last drops of coffee, and risked a gloomy nod. Since his head neither fell off nor exploded, he took a further risk and leaned in the direction of his own paperwork mountain, beginning a hunt for the file he knew wasn’t so very far from the top. “No leads at all—and it happened over a month ago. The poor bloke’s dead and buried and forgotten by everyone except us, and we still don’t even know why he died, let alone who killed him.”

  “A burglary gone wrong,” said Foxon, whose theory this had been from the start. He was leafing through his own notes on the Quendon case, refreshing a memory that had no real need of refreshment: Professor Eldred Quendon had, in his eccentric way, been a neighbourhood celebrity, whose death did not pass unnoticed in the local newspapers, even warranting a few paragraphs in the national press. Brettenden Boffin Battered to Death by Burglars had been one of the most offensive headlines. Since few of the general populace had much idea where Brettenden might be, however, and since the police, when pressed, were forced to admit that they had no clues, the story had soon given way to others more exciting, or more seasonal.

  Nobody seemed to know what Professor Quendon’s special subject had been. Nobody knew at which university he had studied, or even whether “Professor” was an earned honorific as opposed to one merely adopted by himself to impress. The postman reported that it might from time to time be observed on some of his—admittedly rare—letters, but that meant nothing: more than one generation had known Eldred Quendon as the Professor, and the name had certainly stuck. It was, it seemed, perhaps not undeserved. The police, on breaking into his house after the alarm was raised, reported in their turn that there wasn’t a room without several shelves of technical and scientific books along at least one wall, and what must have started as the dining room had been turned into a laboratory full of cryptic notes and complicated equipment concerning whose purpose no constabulary expert cared to hazard a guess.

  “So what,” mused Brinton aloud, as he studied the Quendon file for the umpteenth time, “were the blighters looking for? I can’t believe any of those bottles and jars and bits of tube and coils of wire were really worth pinching. There’s got to have been something more to it than that.”

  “An awful lot of those tubes were copper, sir, and scrap copper’s worth a few bob, I gather. They might have seen the Prof, as an easy target—it’s not as if he had any burglar alarms, or anything—and you know how people talk about even the most ordinary people, which you can’t say he was, can you? Why, my gran’s heard rumours that he was trying to find a way of turning iron into gold, for goodness’ sake. Sir,” added Foxon quickly, as the wrathful eye of the superintendent withered him where he sat.

  Or tried to wither him: but Foxon was not so easily suppressed. “Well, she has, sir. Not that she believes it, of course, but there must be plenty of others who do—who did, I mean, and that’s what they were hoping to pinch when they broke in, and he disturbed them, sir, and they hit him a bit harder than they needed just to shut him up. Sir.”

  Brinton sighed. “I wish you’d shut up, laddie, and get on with your tidying. The sooner you finish, the sooner you can start on mine, because I’m not doing a stroke to help you—I want to think.” He tapped the cardboard folder with a daring finger; the sound did not make him wince. “Poor old Quendon. No clues, no idea what’s going on, and nobody but us to care one way or the other. What a miserable end to a bloke’s life, when legal types have to put notices in the papers asking for the heirs, and nobody turns up—not even to nag us about why we haven’t caught up with the devils who did for the poor bugger.” He shook his head, and winced only slightly. “You can’t help thinking about it, with Christmas just gone. Makes it that much worse, somehow—no family, and no friends ...”

  He had opened the file as he spoke, and was scanning the most recent additions. “The solicitors’ve been keeping an eye on the post, in case the long-lost heir, whoever he is, turned up, but he didn’t, and neither did she. A couple of duty cards from tradesmen, and that was it. So much for the festive spirit.”

  “Could be,” ventured Foxon, “they’d all heard what happened to him and saved themselves the stamp, sir.”

  Brinton grunted. “Could be—but I doubt it. If they knew he was dead, I’d have thought anyone with even half a claim would’ve been camped on the doorstep to stake it—but there hasn’t been a sausage. Poor bugger ... It all seems so pointless. Like his death. If only we knew ...”

  “If only,” said Chief Superintendent Delphick, “we knew, for certain, our lives would be a great deal easier—but then, what copper in his right mind ever expected an easy life? Anyone in the least desirous of having things handed to him on a plate should refrain from the slightest contemplation of the very idea of the notion of joining the police in the first place.”

  From the window of his office on the umpteenth floor of New Scotland Yard, the Oracle gazed out with a thoughtful frown upon the spreading streets of London, which hummed with the busy traffic of the post-holiday return to work. From the reinforced chair at his own desk, the massive Detective Sergeant Ranger—six foot seven in his socks, seventeen stone (and, since Christmas, a few suspect pounds more) on the scales—uttered a quiet sigh of agreement as he turned to the next page in the Pentonwood Escape file.

  “Why?” he murmured, half to himself, half in response to the Oracle’s remark. “Why does a bloke so near the end of his sentence risk the lot by suddenly making a run for it? Like you say, sir, if we knew for certain, instead of guessing, we could do something about it—but we don’t. So we can’t. And even if we did know it was all tied up with the Rickling business, the villains won’t be too happy if we start locking ’em up as soon as look at them ... and they’d never believe it was just out of the kindness of our hearts, to stop the blighters slaughtering each other. If,” he added conscientiously, “that’s what they really want to do.”

  “Their suspicions could even be justified. Would our motives, Bob, be entirely altruistic?” Delphick addressed his enormous sidekick with a faint smile in his grey eyes. “Would it be such a great kindness for us to prevent our homicidally inclined criminal acquaintances from despatching one another in an outbreak of gang warfare? A cynic might argue that it must surely be to the benefit of all law-abiding citizens, should membership of the opposite fraternity be, by whatever means, reduced ... while, on the other hand, one must accept that there would, in such circumstances, be a corresponding increase in the work of the street maintenance department, which could prove unpopular in certain quarters.

  “Waste disposal,” he enlarged, as Bob stared, “costs money. Corpses littered about the capital would give a decidedly untidy appearance. There would undoubtedly be pressure applied on the City and Council cleaners to rectify the situation. And the cost of such rectification is bound to be reflected in a subsequent rate increase, which the honest citizenry might well resent ...”

  At the look on Bob’s face, he laughed. “I’m talking nonsense, Sergeant Ranger.”

  “If you say so, sir.”

  “I am not alone. You say so, too—by your tone, if not by your words. Yet nonsense can sometimes help to distract the mind sufficiently to allow the subconscious inspiration to begin work ...”

  “And has it, sir? This time, I mean.”

  Delphick drifted away from the window and sat himself down on the visitors’ chair at Bob’s desk. He stretched his long legs and sighed. “No. Inspiration, I fear, has failed. It must be that my mental processes are still suffering from a surfeit of Christmas pudding and New Year scotch.” He sighed again. “As, it appears, are those of our friendly neighbourhood snouts. Not a single sighting has been reported—which, of course, does not unduly surprise me: Cutler is an intelligent man. But none of the strangely few hints we have received has merited any close investigation. Which suggests either that the festive spirit has indeed addled our informers’ wits, or that Cutler has put the frighteners on ...” He sa
t up. “Or ...”

  “If we’d posted a reward,” said Bob after a courteous pause that remained unbroken, “they’d have risked the frighteners and come crawling out of the woodwork with the answer fast enough.”

  The oracular eyebrows arched in a look of astonishment. “Now who’s being cynical? Cutler, I would remind you, is a surprisingly popular man, as well as an influential one ... but he is not, we should also remember, the only criminal with influence around Town. To my two earlier hypotheses, we should add a third: that someone else other than Cutler has put the frighteners on ...”

  “You mean Rickling, sir?”

  “He is a distinct possibility, yes.”

  Bob nodded, turning back to the file. “There have been rumours, all right ... about Rickling trying to muscle in on Cutler’s lot while their boss was in jug, and hotting things up before his parole board met ... According to Artie Chishall, though, Rickling missed out, once they heard it wouldn’t be long before Cutler was released. So why,” he asked again, “should Cutler go over the fence the way he did, if he knew Wimbish was taking care of everything back home?”

  “According to Chishall,” Delphick echoed, with emphasis. “Hardly one of our most reliable sources, friend Artie. One would hesitate to entrust him with any task or message of importance: he has an unparalleled capacity for being economical with the truth, when it suits him. Compared to Artie Chishall, a corkscrew is a model of rectitude.”

  “He’s come up with some useful gen, in his time, sir.”

  “But not this time. No hint of Cutler’s whereabouts since he vanished: no idea of what reprisals Rickling might have in mind after the apparent failure of his bid for power; no inkling of Cutler’s purpose in making his escape, or of the identity of those who helped him. Nothing from Artie Chishall—and nothing from anyone else.” Delphick’s tone was bleak, his eyes dark with anxiety. “Bob, I’m not given to wild prophesy. But I’ll take a gamble and predict that if we don’t find Cutler soon, certain areas of London are about to become places where nobody with a healthy wish for self-preservation would care to be, not if he was in his right mind. Not even an innocent bystander ...”

  chapter

  ~ 4 ~

  OF THE MYRIAD innocent bystanders to whom Delphick might, or might not, have been referring, none could be considered more innocent than Miss Emily Dorothea Seeton. Formerly of Hampstead, for the past seven years, since her retirement, she has lived in the Kentish village of Plummergen; and the little art teacher is innocence personified ...

  In certain senses of the word, that is.

  The dictionaries define “innocent” in various ways. Free from moral wrong, blameless: well, this is undoubtedly true. Miss Seeton has been described—described by Delphick, no less—as everybody’s conscience, humanity’s backbone; and Delphick is an excellent judge of character. Ignorant of evil: this ignorance should be qualified, since Miss Seeton, unutterably honest herself, cannot in honesty deny that evil exists. The eyes of an artist see only the truth, and in Miss Seeton’s case even more of the truth than most. The existence of evil is, all too sadly, true—yet Miss Seeton somehow always contrives to think that it was a mistake, and firmly believes that good is sure, in the end, to prevail. Not legally guilty of crimes: this, of course, goes without saying, although Miss Seeton’s absence of guilt is not quite as straightforward as at first it might appear. She is not only honest, she might almost be called painfully honest, in that her wish for complete honesty at all times frequently involves her in such convoluted explanations that considerable mental pain may be caused to those hearing the explanations. Harmless ...

  Harmless? Miss Seeton stands five foot nothing in her unshod size four feet. She weighs, at most, seven stone. She does not rage about the countryside with a machine gun, an axe, or a set of carving knives; she does not drive under the influence of drink, peddle drugs, or administer still more exotic poisons to helpless and unwitting victims. Miss Seeton has never deliberately done any injury or moral wrong to a fellow human being in her life ...

  Yet there are those who would claim—and rightly—that unintentional damage can be far more devastating than any deliberate attack; and among such claimants must be counted a growing number of criminals now behind bars, together with several members of Her Majesty’s Constabulary, whose paths have been crossed by Plummergen’s perhaps most celebrated resident in the course of one or other of her frequent, and remarkable, adventures—adventures which, in her innocent (guileless, simple, naive) fashion she can never quite appreciate that she has undergone. Miss Seeton’s life, in Miss Seeton’s opinion, is quiet, calm, uneventful: the life—no more, no less—of an ordinary English gentlewoman. It remains forever peaceful, well regulated, and devoid of any untoward incident ...

  Life was indeed sadly devoid of incident and activity that morning: or seemed likely to prove so, if the rain didn’t stop. Miss Seeton, standing before her kitchen sink to rinse the last of her breakfast dishes, was moved to sigh as she stared through the window at the same steady downpour that, for goodness knew how many days past, had prevented her from busying herself in the garden as she had planned. True, she had indulged in an orgy of old films on television, had caught up with her Christmas correspondence, and had read several books during the day which in normal circumstances she would have kept for non-television evenings: but she still regretted the external (as it were) opportunities she had lost. There was soil, for instance, to be firmed about the base of plants loosened by the recent bad weather, though one might, perhaps, do better to wait until the bad weather had completely finished. Except that by then (for one had no idea when that would be, since winter was very far from over in January) they could well have become too loose, and uprooted, and dead. Which was hardly, she felt, the intention of the author of that invaluable gardening handbook Greenfinger Points the Way when he pointed out that there was little sense in the keen gardener’s keenness resulting in either pneumonia (for him or her self) or death (for the plants) ...

  “Moderation,” mused Miss Seeton, spreading the tea towel on the rack, “in all things—where moderation is possible, of course. What a pity it is not possible to moderate the weather.” She wandered into the sitting room for a better view of her little kingdom. “And the leaves.” Greenfinger also instructed that the January gardener must (weather permitting) rake up any last fallen leaves from the lawn and add them to the compost heap, with the inference that in an efficient garden there should be few leaves to rake by this stage of the gardening year. Miss Seeton feared that she was a far from efficient gardener. There had been several recent occasions of frosty mornings and windy nights; the very last leaves had been blown from the branches to the lawn in unusual quantity; Miss Seeton now looked out upon their soggy brown blanket and sighed again.

  For Christmas she had treated herself to some rolls of nylon netting, which Greenfinger recommended for tying about small trees and shrubs of particular value, to protect them against heavy snowfalls. There had as yet been no snow, but this did not mean there would be none during the rest of the winter. Miss Seeton quoted to herself the old saw about a stitch in time, and shook her head as she contemplated the grey, cloudy, ill-tempered sky. At least while it still rained there could be no chance of snow: but one had to confess that one was more than a little weary of being cooped up indoors, day after day after day ...

  Not, of course, that one was, in the sense of being a prisoner in one’s own home. And it seemed so very ungrateful, when there were many who didn’t have the good fortune to possess a home of their own, as she now did after so long in rented accommodation. Like the chickens. Miss Seeton’s gaze drifted to the bottom of her garden, and she smiled at the unconscious pun. And prisoners had no choice, whereas she did. Except, of course, that she supposed she should call it a house. To go in or out, when there were always gumboots, and her mackintosh, and of course her umbrella, which she carried even when there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Indeed, she had even heard it called a
cabin, although that did sound rather too ... nautical for birds which were most definitely land-based, even if it was made mainly—she smiled for another pun—of wood. Hen-house, chicken-house, chicken cabin, chicken coop.

  “Cooped up,” remarked Miss Seeton, still smiling. Twice in as many moments, when really one had never thought of oneself as having any particular sense of humour: it must be the influence of those amusing mottoes and riddles in the Christmas crackers. Which nobody could say of today, with all too many clouds pouring down all too much rain, and no sign that they were ever likely to stop for long enough to let her out in the garden again. Perhaps she could make profitable use of this time in further study of the seed catalogues with their bright colours and appealing descriptions, although when dear Stan heard her proposals she suspected he would—and not for the first time—choose to dispute the printed word, even when printed by professional seedsmen. Which might make things rather awkward, since he had far more idea than she of what would be suitable, though this wasn’t saying much, because Stan was an acknowledged expert, and she would never dare to say so of herself. But one did find the catalogues so ... well, enticing. Which was of course the intention. Even after seven years’ close study of Greenfinger’s advice, which sometimes agreed with Stan’s, and sometimes ... well, didn’t. Which—or so she’d gathered during those seven years—was quite common, among gardeners, who each had his or her favourite way of doing things. And really, unless the way was especially unusual (as Stan so often insisted Greenfinger’s was) it had to be admitted that most of the Plummergen gardens—at least those worked by keen gardeners, like dear Lady Colveden, or Miss Treeves—were much of a muchness. Though of course one would never dare say so to Stan ...

  Miss Seeton was musing fondly on Stan Bloomer, the farm worker husband of cockney Martha who cleaned her cottage twice a week, when the telephone’s jangling trill broke into her thoughts. She replaced the seed catalogues in her bureau, and hurried out into the hall.