Miss Seeton Rocks the Cradle (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 13)

by Hamilton Crane

  Mel suddenly realised Miss Seeton had stopped speaking, and roused herself from this reverie. “Well, okay, Miss S., I know about all that, but I’m not asking you to take notes in shorthand or yell ‘Hold the front page’—what I want’s one of the good old Seeton Specials. Easy as falling off a log, for you.” Miss Seeton looked doubtful. Her services as an art consultant were, after all, retained by the police—her first consideration was surely to Scotland Yard; might they not be annoyed with her if she produced one of her little IdentiKit drawings—which was plainly the burden of dear Mel’s request—for one who could not, in all honesty, be regarded as an official? Might it be thought a breach of confidence—a lapse (and Miss Seeton blushed) in common courtesy? One had one’s professional obligations . . .

  “What was that, honey?” Miss Seeton had, blushing once more, murmured a name. The ears of a good reporter are ever acute. Mel said: “You’re worried about Mr. Delphick? Don’t be. Why, I told him only this morning I was coming to talk to you, and he practically wished me good luck. He sends you his best wishes, by the way.” It was near enough true as made no difference, and it would serve to stop Miss S.’s conscience going into overdrive.

  By a judicious mix of coaxing, cunning, and a résumé of the facts of the kidnap, Mel persuaded Miss Seeton to study the photographs she had brought with her: the MacSporrans’ Town residence, Lady Marguerite at her christening (culled from the Society Page files, a loss Mel hoped to be able to make good before the editor found out), and—the reporter’s longest shot—a panoramic view of the London park in which the attack upon the stolen heiress’s nanny had taken place. Mel displayed this selection with some pride, and waited for Miss Seeton’s reaction.

  And waited. Miss Seeton, shocked and dismayed by the sad story, was not responding as Mel had hoped. No nervous dance of the fingers, no sign that one of the famous Seeton sketches was on its way; she seemed bewildered by the whole affair, unable, for once, to work her normal magic. “Guess the Oracle was right, after all,” muttered Mel; then, at the expression on Miss Seeton’s face, she was stricken with remorse.

  “Don’t take it to heart, Miss S.; you can’t pull a rabbit out of the hat every time.” Perhaps she was just too upset, on this particular occasion, for her inspired artistic skill to begin flowing. Not that Miss Seeton could really be considered the maternal type, but anyone was bound to be distressed by the abduction of a helpless infant. She looked so worried and tense—perhaps a complete change of scene, to take her mind off things for a while . . .

  “You’re bothered about being late for all your feathered friends, aren’t you, Miss S.?” Amelita Forby, Sherlock of Fleet Street. “Well, how about if I come along too? Always provided you don’t mind, of course. Maybe I could write a piece for the Negative about this Mrs. Ongar. Animals always make good copy,” said Mel, with a knowledgeable air; and she was surprised to observe that even this suggestion did not meet with Miss Seeton’s approval, for she looked (if anything) rather more anxious than she had before, and murmured again, so that Mel strained to catch the words.

  “Your bicycle? Have a heart, Miss S.! Do I really look like the ‘Daisy, Daisy’ type, even at the best of times?”

  At the vision of Mel on a tandem, Miss Seeton couldn’t help smiling. “I regret,” she said, “that mine is not ‘a bicycle made for two’—nor, unfortunately, does it have a step, even if I felt confident”—now she frowned—“of my ability to ride so far with a passenger, though they have made truly remarkable progress, over the years. My knees, I mean, with the yoga—not, of course, that I am suggesting for one minute that your weight—that is, I hope you do not think my remarks impertinent, but—”

  “Never even crossed my mind,” Mel assured her, grinning. “But I’ll tell you what did. Amelita Forby, Fleet Street Genius! How about I ring for a taxi, and charge it to the good old Negative? Professional expenses,” she added, when Miss Seeton looked like protesting. “I’ll be working on my story, don’t forget. And in a taxi, there’d be plenty of room for us both . . .” Miss Seeton still looked doubtful. “Room for us both,” repeated Mel firmly. “Which is more than I could say for Nigel Colveden’s car,” and she giggled, remembering her last sight of the little MG as it chugged up Marsh Road towards Rytham Hall.

  “Dear Nigel.” Miss Seeton was smiling again. “He was teasing his poor parents the other day, about painting the windows of the hall with gold leaf—my umbrella, you know, is so very much more practical than wood, as he pointed out. But Sir George, I fear, deplored the expense—just as, dear Mel, I feel sure your editor may. About the taxi . . .”

  It took Mel longer than she might have expected to calm Miss Seeton’s doubts, but in the end she succeeded, and took it upon herself to look up the number of Crabbe’s Garage in Miss Seeton’s telephone directory, ignoring the protests of her anxious hostess and dialling to ask whether Jack Crabbe, or one of his family, could drive them both to the Wounded Wings Bird Sanctuary, just outside Rye. Jack said he’d be delighted to oblige; Mel asked him to pick them up in about ten minutes, and she sent Miss Seeton off to put on her hat and collect her umbrella.

  And she silently resolved to return with the taxi, once the visit was over, to Plummergen; she would take a room in the George and Dragon, if necessary, but Amelita Forby did not intend to lose touch with Miss Seeton just yet.

  There was still that drawing to wait for . . .

  Barbara Ongar welcomed Miss Seeton and her unexpected companion with obvious pleasure, and accepted the bottle of gin gratefully. “The best pick-me-up I know,” she told Mel, “though your paper will probably get letters arguing about it—but I don’t care. As far as I’m concerned, it works.”

  Since there were no other visitors, Mel and Miss Seeton enjoyed Babs Ongar’s undivided attention on their tour of Wounded Wings. Mel, who had never been to a bird sanctuary before, scribbled furiously in her notebook, wishing she had brought a camera.

  “Striking looks, haven’t they?” Barbara surveyed a convalescent gannet with pride. The bird was white, apart from its black wing tips and, set in a yellow head, greyish-blue eyes, which surveyed its audience with great interest. “Oil, poor thing,” Babs explained. “Some damned ship passing by—but I shouldn’t say too much, I suppose, with my husband in the Merchant Navy. If I thought he’d ever be this careless I’d have his guts for garters. The state this poor chap was in when he was found—but he’s well on the mend now, thank goodness.”

  “How on earth do you treat something that size?” asked Mel, as the gannet opened a powerful bill and yawned. Daft though the idea was, she couldn’t help feeling that, if it had teeth, that bird would have bitten her.

  “With extreme caution and woolly pullovers,” Mrs. Ongar replied, then laughed at the look on Mel’s face. “Seriously. They’re the most comfortable and least distressing method of soaking off surplus oil. We clean the head and wings with detergent, then wrap the birds in knitted woollen tubes with wing holes—ribbed knitting, so they can move and breathe—and pop them in a nice quiet basket, somewhere warm. It all helps to relax them; shock and stress can be bigger killers for a sick animal than anything else, you know. And they’re beautiful creatures—such strength. You should see them after fish. When something with a six-foot wingspan folds itself up like an arrow and dives from one hundred feet, you certainly know about it.”

  “I bet you do.” Mel viewed the gannet with increased respect. Miss Seeton sighed.

  “I fear I must apologise yet again for my repeated lack of success with the pullovers, Mrs. Ongar. Knitting appears to be another of the skills for which I have no aptitude—yet I know how useful it would be, given the sad numbers of oiled seabirds you have in your care . . .”

  “Not just seabirds, unfortunately. Just take a look at this swan, will you?” Barbara led the way to another cage, which held a bedraggled bird with weary black eyes. “It was touch and go with him for a while, though he’s well on the mend now—I don’t think I need to touch wood. It�
��s seabirds who try to fool you by picking up nicely and then keeling over just when you think they’re ready to leave. But swans don’t seem to suffer from wet-feather the way seabirds do—oh, they can catch pneumonia from the chilling just as easily, but there’s something in their makeup which means they don’t lose their buoyancy and drown . . .”

  They moved from cage to cage, surrounded by the sounds of recuperating birdlife: whistles, coos, yarps, piercing shrieks, trills. Babs checked drinking water, scratched the tamest heads, spoke of the idiosyncrasies of her charges. Here was a widgeon who refused to eat anything but cheddar cheese grated into bread-and-milk; this song thrush was even more nervous than the rest of its kind; the tawny owl over in that corner had lost its way down someone’s chimney, laid an egg and broken a wing while trying to find her way out.

  “Two years ago,” Mrs. Ongar said, laughing. “Try telling her she’s better, though—she won’t listen. She refuses to leave: she stays in her corner during the day, and if I omit to feed her every night the way I did when she was ill, she bombs me with her wings. And it’s difficult to ignore something which insists on roosting in your back garden.”

  “What happened to the egg?” enquired Mel, remembering her professional curiosity. But Babs, still chuckling over the tawny owl’s flattering attachment, misheard.

  “Oh, scrambled is much better than hard-boiled. Fledglings don’t have robust digestions, you know. But when they get bigger, some species . . .” She opened a biscuit tin as she spoke, and held it out. Mel peered inside.

  “Brown porridge,” she said, bending for a closer look. “Ugh! Wriggling brown porridge—what on earth is it?”

  Babs and Miss Seeton smiled. “Mealworms layered in bran,” Mrs. Ongar said, closing the lid with a shake. “Tasty and tempting to the growing bird—and to some adults, too. Now, what do you make of this chap here?”

  “A blackbird,” said Mel at once, eager to redeem herself after the show of weakness. Babs looked at Miss Seeton, and waited. Miss Seeton studied the dark plumage with its hint of blue, the curved beak—the curved red beak . . .

  “Surely—a chough?” she ventured.

  “It doesn’t looked particularly chuffed to me,” said Mel, daughter of Liverpool. “Downright miserable, in fact.”

  Barbara chuckled. “Chough, not chuff, Miss Forby. They may sound the same, but they’re entirely different words. The chough is our only black bird with red beak and wings—unmistakable. There’s an old Cornish superstition that King Arthur will return as a chough, and it’s bad luck to harm one. I’m taking particular care of Lancelot here—plenty of wood lice and earwigs, lots of sunshine—but, talking of blackbirds . . .”

  Once she could compare them, Mel admitted the difference was obvious. The blackbird’s bill was orange-yellow, not red, its legs were dark brown, and it was smaller than the chough, as well as far less striking in appearance.

  “But a lovely bird, once he’s in full health again,” Mrs. Ongar said, regarding the blackbird with sympathy. “They’re nothing like as nervous, you know, as other members of the thrush family, blackbirds—but there’s a funny thing about this one, talking of nervous. The young couple who brought him in the other day were far from happy, believe me. They were arguing right the way up the path, and I think that if the husband, or whatever he was, had won the argument they’d never have come in at all. It was obvious, from the way she kept looking at him, something wasn’t quite right.” A shake of the head, and a sigh. “I couldn’t help wondering whether he’d been the one who hurt the bird in the first place. It might have been a cat—but it could as easily have been a man who did it. Those tail feathers will take a month to grow back, and until they do he’ll be a sitting target for any cat, with no proper sense of balance. The wife might well have threatened to report him to the authorities if he didn’t let her bring the poor creature here to me . . .”

  And that poor creature the blackbird blinked at them all from its cage with a sad, glittering eye.

  chapter

  ~5~

  JACK CRABBE, EXPLAINING that he had a deadline to meet, did not accompany Mel and Miss Seeton on their tour of Wounded Wings, though he expressed an intention to visit at another time. He stayed outside in the taxi with his pencil, paper, and reference books—a dictionary and a well-worn copy of Roget’s Thesaurus—compiling another of the cryptic crosswords for which his name was a byword in cruciverbalist circles. By the time his passengers reappeared, he had not only completed his current grid, but was working on the next; he was delighted to have made such progress and, though happy to accept the fare when Mel offered it, firmly refused any tip. “You’ve brought me good luck,” he told her, with a wink. “Good luck to my blackbird, eh?”

  “I thought it was the chough you were so interested in,” said Mel. On the journey back to Plummergen Jack had questioned his friends about what they’d seen, offering to fit a chough into his next puzzle in their honour. Bird’s cough sounds rough despite inhalation of hydrogen had been his off-the-cuff attempt at a clue, which had deeply impressed Miss Seeton; Mel had asked if she might write one of her “pieces” on him one day.

  “Th’old chough?” he said now. “Well, so I was, but it’s a blackbird for luck, Miss Forby—leastways, so they used to sing in Jacobite times. Reckon it must have stuck in my mind, being as it’s one of my clues today. Patriarchal patriot, 45, follows it to the east, see?”

  Mel, once he’d explained it, saw, and Miss Seeton was as impressed as before. Their praise made Jack mutter with embarrassment, and he drove off with the tips of his ears turning red. Mel waved after him, then turned eagerly to Miss Seeton. “Well, Miss S.? How about it? Suppose we go on in and have another cup of tea, and sit in that garden of yours—and wait for inspiration . . .”

  Miss Seeton, having settled Mel in the reporter’s favourite garden chair, sat watching the flicker of the apple tree’s shade dance across the sketching pad she had rested on the table. Peeping over the edge of the pad, she could see the photographs Mel had laid out neatly in a row, sure they would be of help; but nothing, Miss Seeton sighed to herself, seemed to prompt her to draw even the quickest of doodles. She put down her pencil, sighed again, caught Mel’s eye, and glanced away guiltily.

  “You thirsty, Miss S.?” Mel thought her friend’s glance had fallen on her empty cup. “The pot’s almost dry—I’ll make us both another, if you like. No, I can manage, honest—and if I don’t know where everything is, by now . . .”

  As she loaded the tray and prepared to leave Miss Seeton alone with her sketch pad, Mel hid a smile. Good thinking, Forby—could be all Miss S. needs to get her going is a spot of privacy. That weird drawing ability of hers always makes her uncomfortable, goodness knows why. The Oracle generally has to coax her, and what’s good enough for Delphick is good enough for me . . . And she resolved to spend twice as long making a fresh pot of tea as anyone could rightly require.

  She risked one quick look back as she headed for the kitchen door, but Miss Seeton was sitting just as she had left her, motionless, staring, thoughtful . . .

  And when Mel could keep herself away no longer, and came out into the garden with Earl Grey she feared would stew if it wasn’t drunk soon, Miss Seeton was still sitting staring at her sketch pad, unmoving. Mel’s heart sank. The Oracle had been right—they’d have to wait for the nanny to regain consciousness. If only she’d been able to find a picture of the girl, instead of trusting to one of the park . . .

  Then she arrived at the table. The chink of china woke Miss Seeton from her apparent trance—and Mel gave a little cry of delight. Crumpled sheets of white paper were a clear indication that Miss Seeton had indeed drawn something—the sort of quick-fire, instinctive, clue-bearing something for which the police valued her services, and of which she was so unaccountably ashamed, assuring everybody they were the merest scribbles, impressions, worth nothing to anyone save herself.

  But she was wrong. “Attagirl, Miss S.!” Mel dumped the tray on the ta
ble without ceremony, and seized the crumpled sheets before Miss Seeton could voice a protest. “Great!” enthused Mel, spreading out her treasure trove and ignoring Miss Seeton’s muted offer to pour the tea. Amelita Forby was going to gloat: Miss S. had come up trumps once more . . .

  Except that, as usual—how many times had she heard the Oracle moan about it?—the drawings didn’t make sense. Oh, they were bound to, once the case was solved and the entire picture was before her—whenever it was, they always did. But if you wanted to be one jump ahead of Miss S. and her inspiration, you had to interpret what her subconscious tried to tell you, which you were always just that little bit slow in working out . . .

  The first picture was almost a still life. On a lump of rock, granite-grey, perched a stately bird with bright eyes: a bird with gleaming black feathers and its head held high. Beneath one claw, draped down and coiled about the base of the rock, was a necklace, formed of smooth, round stones set in an ornate arrangement of fine metalwork; equally fine was the working of the coronet which rested to one side of the rock’s base, balancing the coils of the necklace. “Um,” said Mel, and passed on to the other sketch.

  She looked at it, looked at Miss Seeton, sitting in all innocence with her teacup in her hand, and looked back at the sketch. A slow smile of dawning enlightenment curved her lips, and she nodded to herself. Eat your heart out, Banner! Move over, Oracle. Amelita Forby wouldn’t let the men think they knew it all, by any means.

  “Miss Seeton,” said Mel, very gently, “you know, I think it would be rather a good idea if you’d let me take these drawings up to London . . .”

  In an office at New Scotland Yard that evening, two tall men faced each other across an enormous desk. From the depths of his maroon-leather stud-backed captain’s chair, Sir Hubert Everleigh, Assistant Commissioner (Crime), glared in turn at Detective Chief Superintendent Delphick and at the document he had set before his superior on the blotter.