Miss Seeton Goes to Bat (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 14)

by Hamilton Crane

  “Foxon!” The young man had been so intent on his work that he’d failed to hear the approach along the corridor of Superintendent Brinton, whose voice suggested that today, at least, he proposed living up to his nickname. Old Brimstone stood in the doorway of his office, fulminating. “Foxon, do you have to make that horrible noise—or that ghastly mess on the wall? What the hell d’you think you’re doing?”

  Foxon’s expert eye deduced a slight hangover, which was indeed the case. Brinton’s brother-in-law and his wife had paid an unexpected visit last night, and Mrs. Brinton’s fondness for her family had made her pull out all the stops—and the stoppers. Bottled beer had preceded, then rounded off, a meal at which wine flowed like water at a Holdfast Brethren “Drink: the Demon Destroyer” festival day. Brinton wouldn’t go so far as to say that destruction felt imminent—this feeling had worn off at around three o’clock in the morning—but he was definitely not his usual cheery self.

  He trod wearily round his desk, pulled out the chair, and collapsed upon it with a faint groan. “Foxon, stop hovering behind me like that, laddie—you make me nervous. Come away from that wall, and let me take a proper look at you—and siddown,” he added with a snarl, as Foxon stood in front of his chief, his variegated tie on a level with Brinton’s bloodshot eyes. Foxon sat.

  Brinton leaned his elbows on the desk and glared at his subordinate. “Foxon, who is the boss around here?”

  “You, sir.” Foxon looked puzzled.

  “So far, so good.” Brinton glared again. “Foxon, whose office is this?”

  “Yours, sir.” Foxon looked as if light were beginning to dawn. In his hand, the packet of pins rattled gently as his shoulders began to shake. Brinton glared some more.

  “Foxon, why are you sniggering? And why the hell were you sticking pins in the office—my office—map without permission?”

  “Sorry, sir.” Foxon choked back a full-blown laugh and gesticulated in the direction of Brinton’s in-tray, using the hand that held the pins—which rattled again. “I read the overnight reports, sir, and couldn’t help thinking . . .”

  Brinton winced as he heard the rattle, then glared even harder before a sudden suspicion dawned in his eyes. “More burglaries,” he breathed. “Don’t tell me, Foxon—let me see the ghastly truth for myself. Not one word, laddie!”

  He swung round in his chair to stare at the pin-dotted map behind him on the wall. He stared—sat upright—gave a snort, and swung round again to fix Foxon with the eyes of a man who has seen the scaffold being built, then learned at the last minute it is to be used by someone else.

  “Foxon, I ought to demote you for this! What d’you mean by playing the giddy goat and letting me think there’s been a burglary in . . . in . . . Foxon, I hate you!”

  “In Plummergen?” supplied Foxon brightly. “But surely I didn’t give you that impression, sir! I never meant to do anything of the sort, believe me—”

  “I don’t.” Brinton’s glare would have nailed his insubordinate subordinate to the wall, if that young man’s eyes had met his own; but Foxon was staring thoughtfully at the map, allowing a slight frown to crease his brow.

  “No burglaries in Plummergen last night, sir. Potter’s report says everything’s nice and peaceful—apart from a few complaints about the admiral’s bees. Miss Nuttel wants to do him for daylight robbery, sir—says they fly into her garden and slurp the nectar out of her flowers, and she’ll sue him unless he cuts her in on the deal. Sir.”

  Brinton looked at him. “I’ll buy it, laddie—I won’t know a moment’s peace until I do. Tell me the rest, and let’s get it over with. Then we can carry on with the real business of the day . . .”

  “He’s agreed to build another fence, sir. Bees only fly in straight lines—they’ll go up and over something rather than round it, so Potter says the admiral’s found out. He’ll put a row of wattles on the Lilikot side of his hives, then the bees won’t bother the Nuts any more because they’ll be going somewhere else. Easy once you know the answer, isn’t it, sir?”

  There was an ominous silence, Brinton broke it at last. “And is that, Foxon, why you were so abominably cheerful as I arrived? Because nothing much is happening in . . . places where we’d rather it didn’t? I suppose”—grudgingly—“there could be something in that point of view, but . . .”

  “But that’s not the reason, sir. Not really. Only, if you look at the map—the different colours of the pins—it does seem, sir, as if they’re working to a pattern, aren’t they?” All frivolity had vanished from Foxon’s expression. “There’s method in these burglaries, sir—last night’s crop just bears out my theory—and I have to admit”—with a wry grin—“that I’ve a feeling it won’t be long before they hit Plummergen, sir. There aren’t too many places left they’ve not had a go at—places of the right sort, I mean. It’s a well-organised operation; we’ve already seen that. And if—when—they turn up on Miss Seeton’s home ground, with her back from Scotland and her batteries sort of recharged after her holiday—well, I reckon our chances of nobbling the lot are going up by leaps and bounds, sir. Don’t you? It’ll be just a matter of waiting for ’em, and then, well, pouncing, sir. Because the good old Battling Brolly—”

  “Shuttup, Foxon!” Brinton turned to study the map with a jaundiced eye. He squinted at the coloured pins, making the distribution of burglaries blur and swim in out-of-focus sight—and was forced to admit that Foxon might just have a point. Whoever was behind this current outbreak of skilful crime—so skilful that frequently householders did not even suspect they’d been burgled until their neighbours mentioned it could be worth checking their belongings—was good at his job.

  “There’s a pattern there, all right,” murmured Brinton. “Someone’s gone to a lot of trouble to organise this little caper . . . but I wonder if it isn’t just a bit too pat, now. To be able to predict the Plummergen connection so easily . . . could be they’re trying to lull us, laddie. Making us think all we need to do is hang around eating fruitcake with Miss Seeton and the whole boiling lot of ’em will fall into our hands—while all the time they’re getting up to their tricks somewhere else, and we’re left with egg on our faces.” Then he brightened. “Could be they’ve grown over-confident, of course. Careless. They know it’s worked in the past, so they aren’t so bothered about the future—and if that’s the case, Foxon, we’ll bag the blighters pdq. But if you don’t stop smirking, laddie, I’ll send you out into the danger zone, and pretty damn quickly, too. Being seconded to Wild Country with PC Potter should wipe that horrible grin from your face.”

  “A watching brief, you mean, sir?” Foxon frowned. Essentially a man of action, he didn’t much enjoy sitting about doing nothing. On the other hand, he not only had a great deal of faith in Miss Seeton’s abilities, he was also very fond of her. They had once, as she herself had cheerfully told a pair of startled newspaper reporters, spent the night together—in church, she’d added, on observing the reaction to this innocent remark. Which had made it seem rather peculiar, she’d enlarged. The reporters—Thrudd Banner, star of World Wide Press, and Amelita Forby of the Daily Negative—had evidently known MissEss of old, since neither, after the first few second’s goggling, had turned a hair. Just as Miss Seeton herself had never turned a hair when, single-handed, she’d uncovered a phony religious sect and a gaggle of local witches . . .

  Witches. Foxon frowned. He hadn’t got round to telling Old Brimstone about that part of Potter’s report just yet. Perhaps this wasn’t the time—

  “Stop scowling, Foxon—in fact, stop pulling horrible faces altogether, can’t you?” Brinton didn’t even bother to glare, this time. “What’s wrong with you now?”

  Foxon thought furiously. He coughed. “Well, sir, I was just wondering—if maybe they’re not as bright as we’re giving them credit for being. I mean, it might not be over confidence or double bluff that’s made Plummergen look a likely bet for a future outbreak—maybe they’re just, well, stupid, sir. With good basic o
rganisation, but no real idea of how easy they’re making it for us the longer they carry on working to the same plan. Sir.”

  Brinton grunted. “Could be, could be. I don’t see why you needed to pull faces, though—and I’d rather not find out,” he added hastily. “Something tells me I wouldn’t like the answer if I asked the question, Foxon—and you know as well as I do what that something is. Or rather, that someone. Now we’ve brought her into all this, heaven alone can say where it’ll end—and don’t ask who I mean, laddie! You shouldn’t have to be a detective to work it out . . .”

  And Foxon nodded, his eyes on the pin-patterned map: the map with coloured points clustered about various villages and small towns, showing where the burglars had struck, and where it was probable they might strike next. At the current rate of progress, it wouldn’t be long before they favoured Plummergen with their attentions: and everyone in the police force knew who lived in Plummergen.

  “Miss Seeton, of course, sir,” said Foxon, cheerfully twisting the knife in the wound.

  And Brinton, cursing him, closed his eyes, and groaned.

  chapter

  ∼ 13 ∼

  SUPERINTENDENT BRINTON’S GROANS would have been even more heartfelt had he known that PC Potter’s report was not as thorough as in normal circumstances it would have been. But these were not normal circumstances. The coming Saturday would see the annual cricket match between Plummergen and Murreystone; and Potter, a keen member of the home team, was spending rather longer practising at the nets, and rather less time policing the area, than would have met with Brinton’s approval—had he known.

  But he did not know. What the eye didn’t see, Potter’s comfortable philosophy maintained, the blood pressure didn’t rocket over. He could, if asked, justify his apparent dereliction of duty during the few days’ run-up to the match by pointing out that if he—not just a keen, but a key member of the team—played badly, then Plummergen might lose; and, if they did, trouble would undoubtedly ensue. Murreystone, victorious, would go on the rampage: to which Plummergen was sure to take exception. Potter could still recall the fight which had filled The Street when the Ashford Choppers decided to liven the place up a little—and the skirmish with the Murreystone saboteurs at the time of the Best Kept Village Competition—but these incidents would be mere horseplay when compared to the slaughter that must follow a defeat for the larger of the rival communities in the matter of the cricket cup. Potter had done his best to drum up unofficial support—dropping hints to Bob Ranger, mentioning his anxieties to Sir George Colveden, hinting in previous reports to his Ashford superior that a spare man—Foxon, he knew, was a good scrapper—might come in handy if the burglars struck closer to home than they had until now—Foxon, after all, was CID, whereas he was uniform branch . . .

  So PC Potter felt a glow of virtue as he composed his latest weekly report with due care and attention. It went without saying that, had anything too untoward occurred, he would have obeyed Brinton’s standing orders and informed him at once: but he hadn’t, because it hadn’t. Not really. You couldn’t count the rumours that were going round about Admiral Leighton, who seemed a decent sort of bloke: half the village was naturally going to suspect a newcomer—and especially if he wore a beard—of being Up To Something. And of course they’d bring Miss Seeton into it somehow, though anyone with any sense could tell she was nothing to do with the man—why, she’d been in Scotland when he moved into the old Dawkin place, for a start. As for signalling to spies, or witches, or whatever—well, he’d had to tip Sir George a warning wink that he’d better not try to drive the station wagon, when he’d happened to pass the place as the party was breaking up, and learned about the gin pennant, and ended up offering Major Howett a lift back to the nursing home. But it’d been, from what little he’d heard of its final stages, a perfectly ordinary—if a bit tipsy—housewarming, and as far as he, PC Potter, was concerned, Admiral Leighton was out of the same mould as Sir George—and you couldn’t say much better than that about anyone.

  The two former serving officers had indeed found themselves to be kindred spirits. Their careers had run on similar lines, given that one had been at sea, one on land; the paths of the two had not directly crossed, but it turned out that they had one or two acquaintances in common. The admiral’s former first lieutenant—from the days when the Buzzard had been an up-and-coming captain—had skippered the troop ship which carried Sir George and his battalion to Italy for the invasion—a voyage about which the major-general preferred, even more than thirty years later, not to reminisce unless so fortified with alcohol that his descriptions of the wartime weather, and its effect on his men, didn’t make him feel as ill as everyone else had felt in 1943. The admiral, a member of several London clubs—including the In and Out (more formally the Naval and Military Club) in Piccadilly—claimed to have met several of Sir George’s fellow Welsh Guards officers in that popular establishment, and to have swapped stories with them on more than one occasion.

  “Seems a decent sort, Leighton,” said Sir George, as the breakfast Times was finally folded away. “Sound head on him—Naval training, of course. Good organisation. Those bees—got all the building work done before having ’em brought from his old home. Very sensible.” He buttered toast and spooned jam. “Promised us a pot or two, once he’s settled. Vibration,” he added, before crunching.

  “Yes, of course.” Lady Colveden smiled as, without having been asked, she refilled Nigel’s cup and motioned to him to pass his father’s along for the same treatment. “Don’t you remember Alicia Eykyn telling us about when they tried to keep bees, and Bill had just bought that new mower, and every time he wanted to use it they all came buzzing out and stung him? He was never sure whether it was the petrol they objected to, or the noise.”

  “Both, probably.” Nigel returned his father’s filled cup and appropriated the jam for his own use. “They moved the hives in the end, didn’t they? Jolly sensible, if they wanted to stop Alicia being stung”—young Lady Eykyn had roused Nigel’s Galahad instincts some years ago, and it was obvious to him that her husband the earl would take all possible precautions to protect her—“but I’m blowed if I’d be dictated to by a lot of insects, honey or no honey. Let the blessed things swarm off to somebody else’s garden, that’s my view—unless you’re doing it commercially, of course.” Absently, he buttered a second slice of toast before he’d finished the first. “If there’s no money in it, though, it wouldn’t be my choice for a hobby.”

  “Head screwed on the right way—I told you,” Sir George reminded his son. “The Buzzard, I mean. Talked to friends, read all the books—been sharing one hive since the spring, he said. Sent ’em all off to the Yorkshire moors for the whole summer—heather honey, y’know.” He cocked a thoughtful head in his wife’s direction. “Man needs a hobby. Hens do well enough, but—”

  “No, George.” Meg Colveden, under whose care the Rytham Hall chickens pecked and squawked and laid their contented lives away, was firm. “Absolutely no bees. There’s already more than enough for you to do on the farm with Nigel, and I know what would happen the first time things became hectic—you’d ask me to dress up in gumboots and with a motor veil over my best hat and go squirting smoke all over the place the way Bill Eykyn used to with poor Alicia. And she was so thankful when they swarmed off to somebody else’s land, you have no idea. I’m sorry, I agree with Nigel—it’s not as if we need the money.”

  Sir George, who would normally have snorted at so naive a remark, instead looked downcast. It was left to his son to say, in cheerful tones:

  “Farmers always need money, Mother—why else do we work all the hours God gave? But even if a working man does need a hobby, you’re right—I can’t see Dad possibly having time to run beehives here. Mind you”—for he was fond of his father, and regretted the drooping, even for an instant, of that normally brisk moustache—“there’s a good chance the admiral’d let you go shares, isn’t there? If he’s done it before.” The baronet’
s eyes brightened. His son’s gleamed. “And just think,” he added, “of how it would shut the tabbies up if they knew the pair of you were partners in crime! Because nobody could ever dream of accusing you of being a . . . a burglary mastermind, could they?”

  “Nobody with any sense,” agreed his father, while his mother said quickly:

  “But, George, that’s what they’re saying in the village. Not about you, but about the admiral, since they heard about the latest burglaries. They say it’s getting closer, and it must be being organised by someone who knows what he’s doing—and, well, you know what they’re like,” she concluded, a faint gleam in her own eye. “Seeing burglars under every bush, and that sort of thing. It seems to me it’s a pity we ever gave up the idea of the Village Watch, because—”

  “H’mm,” said her husband. He frowned. Nigel said:

  “Everyone thought things would quieten down now the Best Kept Village competition’s finished, and I suppose they did, for a while. Especially”—a grin for his mother, a wink in his father’s direction—“with Miss Seeton on holiday. But, now she’s back—and with burglars popping in and out of houses all over Kent, so rumour has it . . .”

  “H’mm,” said Sir George again. His wife said:

  “The Night Watch Men did a splendid job before, everyone says so—when all those things were being stolen from their gardens, and, well, everything else . . .”

  “H’mm,” said Sir George, for a third time. “Old Buzzard was asking me about the Watch, y’know. Now, if a chap like that thinks it’s a good idea . . .” Nigel suddenly opened his mouth to speak, but his mother caught his eye, and he subsided. His father went on: “Think I might just have a word with Jessyp—ask his opinion.” Martin Jessyp, Plummergen’s head teacher, had been Sir George’s second-in-command on the last occasion the Village Watch had patrolled the Plummergen streets. “Catch him now, before he buries himself in those timetables again . . .”