Hands Up, Miss Seeton (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 11)

by Hamilton Crane

  “I want my solicitor,” said Owen Barkway and clamped his lips together.

  Bob stood guard over him as Delphick and Potter strove to extricate the body from the briars. “Reckon he’s knocked himself out, sir?” asked Potter as the long-haired figure lay still and silent among the thorns, despite all attempts to rouse it. “Concussion, d’you think? He packed a fair old wallop when he come down—mind you, he’d’ve been splattered to kingdom come if he’d fell on the flagstones, so it could’ve been worse,” he added, sounding more cheerful.

  “Oh, I believe he’ll live,” Delphick said dryly as he spotted the unconscious man wince at Potter’s mention of the flagstones. “I have no doubt he’ll astonish us all by the speed of his recovery—won’t you, Mr. Collier?”

  But the long-haired man was too canny to respond this time, not realising he’d already given himself away. Bob, a keen observer nearby, called out:

  “Is it really Collier, sir? What does Potter say?”

  “There can be absolutely no doubt, Sergeant Ranger, even without Potter’s identification. This man is the image of Miss Seeton’s two drawings—” Delphick broke off as, on hearing Miss Seeton’s name, the face of Mentley Collier was convulsed by another spasm. “And I’m quite sure,” remarked the chief superintendent as he motioned Potter to one side, “that he’ll live—but don’t take my word for it, Sergeant Ranger. After all, I’m no doctor . . .”

  Whereupon he suddenly released the prickly tangle which he and Potter had laboured to remove from Mentley’s flowing locks, to let it fall again on the folds of his purple caftan.

  “Hey, man—what’s the big deal!” Mentley Collier tried to leap to his feet, failed, cursed, and collapsed, with a groan. Delphick looked grimly at Potter.

  “I told you he’d live, Constable. I suppose we’d better set him loose—but have your handcuffs ready.”

  “Don’t give me that handcuffs hassle, man,” said Mentley at once. “I’ve done nothing—”

  “And neither have I,” broke in Owen Barkway at once, and at volume. “This is unwarranted police brutality! I demand to speak to my solicitor! And that man there”—as Delphick and Potter at last freed Mentley from the thorny toils—“is injured. He ought to be in hospital—because,” he said, in a meaningful voice, “with head injuries you can never be too careful. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’d hurt himself badly—and developed amnesia . . .”

  Superintendent Brinton soon had Barkway cooling his heels in an Ashford interview room while the police doctor examined Mentley Collier for signs of shock. Barkway had demanded the presence of his solicitor; Mentley had demanded to be taken to hospital, claiming concussion. However, once Owen Barkway’s encouraging presence had been removed, he quickly wilted beneath the brisk, knowing treatment of one who’d seen it all a hundred times—and seen it far better acted, Dr. Wyddial pointed out as she packed her instruments away.

  “Nothing much wrong with this chap here except bumps and bruises,” she said to Delphick, who had come in to hear her official verdict. “Quite a few scratches, of course, but I assure you he’ll live.”

  Mentley glowered at her. “What do you mean, man, a few scratches? I could die of blood poisoning—lockjaw!”

  “I’ll give you a tetanus jab with pleasure,” replied the doctor promptly. Her eyes glittered. “Drop your trousers and bend over—man,” she commanded. Delphick hid a grin.

  Mentley turned pale. “No way,” he spluttered as with a gleeful relish she selected the largest syringe in her bag and fitted an enormous needle. “Keep her off, man!” And he backed into a corner of the room. “I’ll talk—though I don’t have any idea what you want me to say—I’m just an artist, doing my own thing, right? Never hurt anybody, not my style—don’t you let her hurt me, okay?”

  Dr. Wyddial glanced across at Delphick, nodded, and began to dismantle the syringe. “A great pity,” she said with a sigh and a lingering look in Mentley’s direction. The artist’s forehead was beaded with sweat. Dr. Wyddial smiled, snapped her bag shut, and left without another word.

  Mentley sank down on a chair with a shudder. “Man, that is one tough lady,” he murmured, wiping the back of his hand across his brow. “Nerves of solid steel.”

  “Unlike yours, evidently,” Delphick said as he took the opposite chair. Bob stationed himself in a corner and began to make notes. “If your conscience is as clear as you would have us believe, why did you bolt out of Owen Barkway’s window and climb up the trellis?”

  Mentley stared and gulped. His legs squirmed under the table, and he breathed in deeply. He muttered something the chief superintendent didn’t quite catch.

  “Did I hear you say ‘spies,’ Mr. Collier?” Surely that weak joke he’d made about the Third Man couldn’t be starting to bear genuine fruit.

  Mentley squirmed again. Delphick could see his brain going into overdrive. At last: “There’s like altogether too much hassle, man,” he said. “I get nervous—my artistic temperament, not that I’d expect the fuzz to understand, of course—but they arrive out of the blue, they follow me around. Friends I’ve not seen in years, old women making like they don’t know the time of day, doing the fuzz’s dirty work for them—so that’s who I thought it was, and I didn’t want any more of it,” he concluded in a rush. It seemed unlikely that he expected them to believe his story for long.

  Delphick didn’t believe it at all. The reference to the visit by Dickie Nash, Juliana Popjoy, and Miss Seeton to Filkins Farm tied in with the pictures MissEss had produced: he wasn’t sure exactly how, but she’d hinted at a connection between Collier and drugs—and they’d found one.

  “We have reason to believe that Owen Barkway is a drug dealer,” he said. “If he is the friend you haven’t seen for years, you picked an unfortunate time to visit him.”

  “Not him, not Owen—no way! Juliana Popjoy, that’s who I mean, keeping on with questions about my pictures, letting that old woman snoop about—” He snapped his mouth tightly shut.

  Delphick said: “Then, if Barkway is not a friend, from what you say I must infer that he must be an associate—in a filthy business, in which I suspect that you have a part to play: the supplying of drugs, Mr. Collier. Am I right”—loudly, over Mentley’s splutter of protest—“to infer that you walked to his house this morning, in the heat, to warn him that you suspected the game might be up—or was it”—as Mentley squirmed again—“to ask him for another fix?”

  chapter

  ~25~

  “AND NOW,” SAID Delphick as once more Bob drove back to the George and Dragon, “we consult with Miss Seeton. I should very much like her second opinion of these sketches . . .”

  But, though they knocked and rang at both the front and back doors of Sweetbriars, Miss Seeton was not to be found. “Gone shopping, I expect, sir,” said Bob. Delphick glanced across the road to the hotel.

  “Then we won’t hang around waiting for her, when there are, if we’re in luck, two more people who might be able to help us not a minute’s walk away. Failing Miss Seeton, Mr. Nash or Miss Popjoy could well come up with something—they seem to be peripherally involved in the case anyway, and if they are friends of Collier’s, I can’t see either of them sympathising with drugs.” He recalled the splendour of Miss Popjoy’s eyes and her melodious voice. “We don’t want to upset them more than necessary, though. I won’t go into too much detail—just show them the sketches and wait for them to comment. They’re both art experts, one way or another.”

  “Barkway’s an old hand at this game, stands out a mile, doesn’t it, sir,” muttered Bob as they shut Miss Seeton’s gate and made for the hotel. “The way all he does is yell for Proctor . . . if that man manages to get him off the way he’s done with so many other villains . . .”

  “Quite apart from the fact that Collier was talking more than he should have done, there was far too much evidence at Barkway’s house for him to get off, no matter how good his defending counsel. The one argument I can see him trying is that t
he stuff was planted on him—if Collier turns Queen’s Evidence, he’ll suggest by him—but it won’t work. There’s the business of the ginger cat, and the pigeon loft, and the excessive amounts of baking powder—fly in the pure stuff by pigeon post, cut it by twenty or fifty or eighty times, and bingo! Barkway is on to a winner, just so long as he doesn’t get caught. Only this time he did . . .

  “And we’re going to sew up half the network, Bob, thanks to Miss Seeton. Before they’re much older, we’ll have the distributors behind bars where they belong—but I’d dearly like to collar the lot. The big boys, the money end of the chain, that’s what we’re after now. If Collier hadn’t gone silent on us in the end, we might have had something to go on, rather than leaving him and Barkway to Superintendent Brinton’s tender care . . .”

  They found Dickie and Juliana chatting over coffee with Charley Mountfitchet, who had been much smitten by the ripe charms of Miss Popjoy. After the episode of the wallpaper—to the cost of replacing which Dickie, at Juliana’s urging, had insisted on contributing—the landlord had taken to joining his erstwhile suspects at mutually convenient moments for a chat, or a drink, or both.

  When Delphick and Bob joined the little group, Charley reluctantly dragged himself away to supervise the decorating of the Blue Riband Suite which an assortment of his family and friends had arrived to undertake. Delphick excused himself for having interrupted, declined coffee, and produced Miss Seeton’s sketches from their folder.

  “I’d be interested in your views on these,” he said, “if you’d study them for a while—don’t worry if you can’t make proper sense of them”—hiding a smile—“but if anything at all comes to mind, please tell me.” And he waited.

  Dickie glanced at the first sketch and said at once: “What powers of persuasion the police have! I’m impressed. Here’s poor Juliana, known the chap for years, yet would he accept her kind offer of payment for knocking off a few Old Master copies for the shop? From the way he responded, you’d have said the last thing in the world he wanted to do was work at anything ever again. Then you drop in to see him, and bingo! He runs up a self portrait for you, and I bet—that is, I’m pretty sure he won’t even have charged you.”

  “I wouldn’t want that—that nightmare hanging on the walls anyway, Dickie,” Juliana said, pulling a face. “What a horrid imagination he must have, and for all those years I never suspected it—and now it’s finally broken out. Maybe that’s why he refused the commission. How tragic—he knows he can’t do it any more, and he doesn’t want to admit it.”

  “Especially to an old friend,” agreed Dickie. “I’m only going by what you said about him, but if he’s lost his gifts to this extent, then I agree, even though I didn’t think much of the chap to begin with—it’s a tragedy. I wonder what happened?”

  “Goodness knows,” said Juliana sadly. “Poor Mentley . . . Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Delphick. I don’t know if he—if Mentley told you I’m a friend of his from years back—when we were all young and enthusiastic and bursting with ideas . . .”

  As she shook her head and sighed, Delphick said: “You’re sure this is a picture of Mr. Collier, Miss Popjoy? Not some imaginary portrait?”

  She frowned. “Certainly, at first sight I was sure, but now I look again, I suppose—”

  “I’m still sure,” Dickie broke in. “It’s not just the long hair and that weird dead-eyed way he has of looking at you, it’s—well, the flora and fauna are pretty weird, too, though I suppose that’ll just be a bad dream or something—but the face . . . it—it really is him.” He blinked. “I’m surprised, because when you look closely at it . . . but even if I can’t tell you why, I simply know it is.”

  Delphick nodded. Not a bad dream, he suspected, not the nightmare Miss Popjoy had referred to—not literally. But the nightmare of drugs, the distortion and horror they could impart to the mind: that was why Mentley Collier must have lost the skill and talent she remembered . . .

  “The other drawing,” he said and slipped the nightmare head to one side, leaving the interior scene which had so puzzled Chris Brinton clearly in view. Dickie and Juliana leaned over to look.

  “Why, isn’t that us?” Miss Popjoy turned to Mr. Nash and smiled. “Even if all we can see of you is the back of your head—but it looks just like you, Dickie . . . though I’m not sure I could say why, any more than you could with the other . . . perhaps it’s the way you’re standing beside me. You look so very protective and possessive! And I love,” she added as he turned red, “the long dress he’s given me, and my hair—a bun’s so unusual, and the little ringlets and the ribbon—how nice to know that he sees me as being unusual. After all these years when I never suspected that he saw me as an exotic—as a femme fatale . . .”

  “You said yourself,” Dickie remarked with a halfhearted scowl, “the chap’s developed a warped imagination since you knew him . . .” He was concentrating on the sketch and did not notice the darkling look Juliana cast at him. Frowning, he scratched his head.

  “Foreign,” he corrected her, “not exotic—and it’s old-fashioned foreign, as well as mad, with all those birds fluttering about the place. But even if it is mad, for some reason this reminds me of something—some painting . . . the tiled floor, and the Persian carpet or whatever it is used as a tablecloth, and the pictures on the walls . . .”

  “Now you mention it,” said Juliana, “it reminds me, too. The leaded lights on the window, and the way the shadows are dark without being black—which is ridiculous, because he’s drawn it in pencil, but I’m sure you know what I mean—it’s not black black, there’s still light in the darkness . . . And he’s put himself in,” she added, “gazing at me—in admiration, probably.” She chuckled. “But don’t start brooding, Dickie. After all, he has drawn you protecting me from his wicked wiles—you needn’t be jealous.”

  “I never was.” The audacity of this remark made Juliana catch her breath, and while she was still struggling to find some cutting remark, he added: “It’s obvious the chap is off his head. Look at this picture: talk about a split personality. Those huge birds swooping in through the window, and flying round the room—despite which, the room itself and the people in it seem so very quiet, somehow, very peaceful—even Collier, oddly enough. With his long hair he looks like a cavalier—or rather no, he doesn’t. There’s that foreign look again . . .”

  “Vermeer,” Juliana said after a pause. “Which of them does it remind me of? The Music Lesson or The Concert? One or other, I’m sure, but I always muddle them. Dutch paintings aren’t my speciality.”

  Dickie slapped his forehead. “You’re right—Vermeer,” he said as Delphick asked:

  “Vermeer? I beg your pardon, Mr. Nash, but—I recognise the name, of course, but my knowledge of the artist is not extensive. If you could enlarge, Miss Popjoy, please?”

  “Johannes Vermeer,” she obliged. “Familiarly, Jan. Born in Holland in the seventeenth century, twenty years or so after Rembrandt. Noted for capturing light on canvas better than anyone ever did before—modern authorities say he probably made use of something like a camera obscura to help him with perspective and the use of colour, because his eye was remarkable, even by today’s standards. Almost like a photograph, only, well, more real, somehow. But as I told you, I’m no expert.”

  Dickie grinned. “Experts aren’t always right, remember. Wasn’t it Abraham Bredius who said Vermeer conquered reality as a bird conquers gravity? Which is a high-falutin’ but marvellous simile for the way the chap, well, makes one particular moment more real than reality, just as Juliana said—a sort of super-photograph, as it were. But even Bredius was fooled by Van Meegeren, so you shouldn’t—”

  “What!” yelped Bob, who had been sitting so quietly that they’d almost forgotten him. He turned red, then looked at Delphick in apology. “I’m sorry, sir, but—Van Meegeren—I couldn’t help thinking . . .”

  “Yes,” Delphick said thoughtfully. “Van Meegeren. How do you happen to know about that business, M
r. Nash?” Then, before Dickie had time to reply, he added: “Of course, Miss Seeton will have told you when you had lunch together. Daft of us not to remember. My apologies.”

  Dickie and Juliana regarded each other doubtfully. Miss Popjoy motioned for Mr. Nash to speak. He said, puzzled:

  “The topic never came up, Mr. Delphick—no real reason why it should. Is Miss Seeton interested in forgery? When Juliana mentioned she was going to ask—”

  “Forgery!” Now it was Delphick who was startled into interrupting a witness, although Bob’s yelp didn’t come far behind. The chief superintendent drew a deep breath. “We’d better take this more slowly, Mr. Nash. Did Miss Seeton tell you of her, ah, little adventure in Town the other day, when she was coming out of an art gallery and spotted someone, as she thought, who’d been stabbed in the back ? Or do you mean the chap who faked some paintings during the last war, or whenever it was?”

  Their looks and little exclamations had convinced him, before he finished, that they’d heard nothing of what had happened in London. In which case he knew he had to make sense of it all, and quickly. The connection was loose, in places, but it was there: drugs, Mentley Collier, his copying skills . . . was his reaction to the thought of Miss Seeton due, perhaps, to an interest she’d shown in some work he would rather not let anyone see?

  “I don’t know anything about Miss Seeton,” Dickie said as Delphick looked to him for a reply. “About Van Meegeren, though, I suppose I know as much as the average art historian, even if my speciality’s the Byzantine era—but don’t ask me, ask Juliana. Remember, she’s a dealer.”

  “Goodness, yes,” said Juliana as Delphick turned an enquiring face towards her. “Every dealer in the world must keep the Van Meegeren story carved on tablets of stone as a ghastly warning, though I doubt if anyone could manage fraud on such a scale nowadays. Imagine if somebody tried it with—oh, I don’t know—say Samuel Palmer.” She chuckled. “Is anyone going to risk it, with all the expertise the critics have accumulated over the past few years? And Van Meegeren, you could say, really started them off . . .”