Miss Seeton Flies High (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 23)

by Hamilton Crane

  Visions of back-seat frolics going too far floated before the eyes of all. Would the banns be called on Sunday? Would the bride, in honesty, wear a colour other than white?

  “No harm in that,” said Mrs. Skinner, probing.

  “There can be,” said Mrs. Henderson, darkly.

  “Wayne,” said Emmy, “heard tell the Young Farmers was organising a trip to the Regent in Brettenden, to see a dead funny new film about King Arthur, and he told Maureen they’d go too.” Once more she was assailed by giggles. She passed the feather duster idly along a row of tins, savouring her audience’s attention as she worked.

  “Well?” said Mrs. Stillman at last.

  “Only he got it wrong.” Mrs. Stillman’s tone told Emmy she’d better not spin out her tale too far. “It was the Phoenix in Ashford the Young Farmers was going to, not the Regent. They were showing another film about King Arthur, an old one, Camelot—and they were stuck right in the middle of the back row so they couldn’t get out when they saw it was all acting and scenery and songs—lots of ’em. And,” she was overcome again with mirth, “it was more’n three hours long!”

  Even the Stillmans had to join in the outburst of laughter that filled the post office, and Emmy smirked with pleasure. Her expression then grew thoughtful.

  “All about King Arthur,” she said, “and lovely costumes, Maureen said. Didn’t King Arthur have a queen called Guinevere?”

  The post office remembered that Emmy Putts, whose long blonde wig (in which she had twice been crowned Miss Plummergen) had become sadly scruffy, had recently bought a long, dark, luxurious replacement.

  And Plummergen’s Amateur Dramatic Society had yet to choose this winter’s annual production ...

  On a desk in an office on the umpteenth floor of New Scotland Yard, the telephone rang. The tall, rugged, middle-aged man behind the desk sighed, kept his head resolutely bent over the file he was studying, and murmured only one short word.

  “Bob.”

  Detective Sergeant Ranger had endured the mutterings of his superior officer for over ten minutes now, and knew that an interruption at this stage was the last thing the Oracle—Chief Superintendent Delphick, in a formal way—wanted. The mutters had been at first intense, then calmer. Bob had been waiting for the sigh of triumph as the file’s complexities were finally unravelled, mostly because he had his own copy before him and couldn’t make any sense of it at all. He’d like to know what was meant to be going on.

  He picked up the telephone extension, gave the number, and heard a voice bark:

  “That you, Ranger? Is he in hiding, or is he there with you?”

  Rather than the Oracle, it was now Bob who sighed. “Well, sir, he’s rather tied up at present, but if you could wait I’ll get him to—oh.” The bark at the other end of the line had, apparently, cut the connection. Bob jiggled the cradle up and down a few times, then gently replaced the receiver.

  Still the Oracle did not look up from his studies. “Say nothing,” he warned his loyal sidekick. “If my concentration isn’t broken, I might just make sense of all this before he comes through that door.”

  It was not to be. As the last page but two was turned over, there came a peremptory thump on the door followed at once by a crash as it was thrown open. A small, wiry, black-haired tornado with a handlebar moustache swept into the room, closed the door, and strode over to the Oracle’s desk with barely a nod of acknowledgement for Bob at his own discreet desk in the corner.

  “No time to run away,” remarked the tornado, dropping into the visitor’s chair and giving Delphick a sharp look. “Good. That’s what I hoped.”

  Delphick regarded Detective Superintendent Kebby with mild irritation. “I take it this is not a social visit, but I wish you’d left it another ten minutes.” With a sigh—not of relief for a job concluded, but of resignation that he’d have to start all over again—he slipped his notes and jottings into the file, and firmly closed it. “What can we do for you?”

  Superintendent Kebby twirled his moustache. “I’ll do my best to put you in the picture— and that’s more apposite than it might sound,” he began. Bob in his corner, Delphick at his desk, both felt the emphasis and instinctively braced themselves. Whatever tale it was the superintendent had to tell, they both suspected how it was likely to end.

  “You’ve heard of Garth’s, the building and property firm? Caleb Garth started out as an odd-job man in some middle-of-absolutely-nowhere village.” Jasper Kebby, city born and bred, mistrusted the wide open spaces. “Ended up a tycoon. He was good at his work, able to learn, picked the best people to employ as the business grew. Now he probably couldn’t tell you himself how much he’s worth, and he wouldn’t know which of his accountants to ask because he’s got so many to choose from.”

  “Garth’s,” Delphick said as Kebby drew breath. “Yes. There’s a playboy son who’s always in the news for misbehaving, and another who joined the firm at the bottom to work his way up, presumably to the very top in years to come. I believe there’s a sister, too.”

  “It’s the playboy I’m interested in. Christy. He’s been kidnapped.”

  “That,” said Delphick after a pause, “has not been in the news. How long ago?”

  “Start of last week. A ransom note was sent to the family, but Ma and Pa Garth are off cruising somewhere on one of their yachts and Letty, that’s the daughter, didn’t like to open what looked like their private correspondence until a follow-up note arrived addressed to her, telling her to check in the other envelope. So she did.”

  “And?”

  “And she consulted with brother Ben, who authorised the payment. Routine stuff—used notes, anonymous bag left somewhere quiet—and they waited for Christy to come home. But he didn’t. And when a follow-up demand for more cash arrived, they decided to ignore the don’t-contact-the-cops advice and got in touch with the Yard.”

  “And?”

  “And it all went wrong—and that did get in the papers. Remember the Traffic Jam?”

  Delphick frowned. “Evesham way, wasn’t it? Fruit-growing country, certainly. A lorry-load of squashed plums thoroughly blocked a minor road when the driver came into contact with a wayward wasp, to be pulled from his overturned cab by—ah. Hmm. I see.”

  Kebby nodded. “Oh yes, it’s only to be expected that a police patrol car should just happen to be passing by on an unclassified road right out in the depths of the country, isn’t it? But we can’t blame our two lads for acting as they did. If that lorry had caught fire there might have been far worse injuries for the driver than concussion—and of course they had to let the traffic people know what had happened—but the resultant kerfuffle scared chummy away, and we’ve not heard a dicky-bird since.”

  “And?” prompted the Oracle, who guessed what was coming. So, from the muted choking that emerged from his corner, did Detective Sergeant Bob Ranger.

  “And the only clue to the poor chap’s whereabouts is some vague idea the brother and sister have that he was heading west. Which sort of ties in with the Evesham area, but could be a complete red herring. We’ve no idea what to try next.”

  “You could start,” Delphick said, “by handing me the envelope of photographs from your inside pocket.”

  Kebby looked at him. “Oh yes, you’re the Oracle all right. Ten out of ten.” He reached into his jacket and withdrew a stout brown envelope. “But if your Miss Seeton can come up with the goods, it’ll be twenty out of ten for her!”

  Picture Miss Seeton. Five foot nothing in her sensible shoes, seven stone fully clothed and wringing wet. An English spinster-of-a-certain-age with greying hair, a capacious handbag, skirts below the knee, lisle stockings because nylon ladders so easily and silk is expensive. Apart from her somewhat outré taste in hats Miss Seeton, the casual observer would say, is a typical product of her class and generation, backbone of England’s green and pleasant land throughout which her sisters can be numbered in their hundreds, thousands, millions.

  The casual
observer would be wrong. No other spinster gentlewoman, homeward bound from the opera, would interrupt a vicious killer mid-murder by poking him in the back with her umbrella as a rebuke for his bad manners. Miss Seeton afterwards conceded that his female companion had indeed addressed him in words that sounded, well, rude, though fortunately she herself spoke very little French—yet even foreigners ought to know how to behave. To hit (as she at the time supposed he had) anyone, particularly a member of the opposite sex, was undoubtedly an even greater discourtesy.

  Scotland Yard, in the persons of the then-Detective Superintendent Delphick and his sergeant, had begun investigation of the murder by asking Miss Seeton, whose official statement identified her as a teacher of art, if she could produce a likeness of the rude young man who had run away after knocking her down—not because, as Miss Seeton believed, he had been startled by the prod of her umbrella, but because his French associate now lay with his knife thrust firmly into her heart, and he had no time to dispose of the only witness to his crime before further help and witnesses arrived. Miss Seeton, unable to imagine that anyone could wish her harm, sketched an immediately identifiable likeness of a wild-eyed tearaway behind bars—bars behind which, after escapades that in the following weeks included murder, suicide, drowning, gas, shooting, car crashes, abduction and embezzlement, César Lebel was firmly and finally imprisoned.

  Six months later, not only did Miss Seeton’s attempts to draw a neighbour’s young daughter suggest that the girl was likely to be the next victim of a serial child killer, but (after the girl’s death) she produced further drawings identifying the killer beyond all doubt. By the time of the third occasion on which her quick, inspired drawings had helped the police to thwart the worst machinations of a pair of villains working a huge swindle on the credulous populace through the skilful exploitation of witchcraft, Satanism, and bogus philosophy, Miss Emily Dorothea Seeton had been recruited into the force as a special art consultant, and paid an annual retainer for her services by Scotland Yard. Grateful though MissEss (as the Yard’s erratic computer insists on addressing her) might be for that generous retainer, she has never really understood why the police believe what she calls her scribbles to be of such importance. She is always a little ashamed of her scribbles, which come upon her without warning and therefore suggest a sad lack of self-discipline. As a teacher she always taught her pupils to restrict themselves to drawing only what they could see, which meant only what was there. She is uneasy at the idea that it is because of what she can sometimes see that is not there—but, if the ultimate truth could only be shown, would be there—that the police find her work invaluable. She has managed to persuade herself that all she does for them is supply Identikit drawings when, for reasons she feels she has no need to understand, photographs would be unsuitable.

  The police officer who best understands Miss Seeton is the now Chief Superintendent Delphick. From the start there was an empathy between them that even Bob Ranger (who later adopted her as an honorary aunt, and recruited her as godmother to his firstborn, Gideon) could never entirely grasp. Miss Seeton had first seen the enormous Bob himself as a footballer (which in his spare time he was) and Delphick as a grey day on heathland—not bleak, but a little chilly; detached and impersonal, to a lesser degree echoing that detachment and otherness Miss Seeton had for most of her life felt towards the rest of the world. Miss Seeton might sometimes be rendered uneasy by her sense of detachment; Delphick cared little for his, and relished hers for the invaluable insights she could so often provide.

  And now it seemed she was to be asked for her views on a kidnap.

  Chief Superintendent Delphick, contemplating in thoughtful silence the glass box on his office wall that displayed Miss Seeton’s celebrated, but fatally damaged, umbrella from their first professional encounter, contemplated also the phenomenon that was Miss Seeton. He knew her fairly well; understood her a little.

  Superintendent Kebby did not know her at all.

  The Oracle wondered ...

  Chapter Three

  It was one of Martha Bloomer’s days when she “did” at Sweetbriars, the Plummergen cottage formerly owned by Miss Seeton’s godmother and first cousin once removed, Flora Bannet. Old Mrs. Bannet, achieving the grand age of ninety-eight before dying, had by just two years missed her telegram of congratulation from the Queen. Miss Seeton had never seen one, and regretted that probably now she never would, but was deeply touched when her elderly cousin bequeathed to her only close relative her cottage, her cleaning lady, and the services of her cleaning lady’s husband Stan.

  Mrs. Bloomer had come to regard the elderly widow and her goddaughter as almost part of her own large family, a lively Cockney hubbub whose first acquaintance with Kent had been coming down from London each pre-war autumn to pick hops. Martha met, over the years befriended, and eventually married village-born farmhand Stan, settling not far from Sweetbriars in a one-storey cottage with a correspondingly small garden. An arrangement was before long reached whereby Mrs. Bannet supplied the funds, Stan the expertise and energy, for (at first) the building of a fowl-house and the keeping of hens, the surplus of whose eggs could be sold in village shops to the Bloomers’ profit, in lieu of wages. Very soon vegetables, fruit and flowers from the cottage garden joined the hens beneath Stan’s knowledgeable sway. When Miss Seeton came into her inheritance she was more than willing to continue the arrangement.

  Martha, her habitual apron swapped for a voluminous pinafore, had arrived early for work and was trying to chivvy her employer out of the house so that she could make a good start on shifting furniture. “You’ll only be under my feet if you stay, dear, and when I need help with rolling up the rugs I’ll let you know, but help carry them you will not, fit as your yoga keeps you, because it’s for tying yourself in knots, isn’t it, not for giving you muscles like a freak in a fairground. Besides, Stan said he’d pop in at dinner-time to help me take them all out the back for a good beating, and again before supper to help me bring them all in again so as to have everything nicely settled before winter, with the ground so damp as it always gets this close to the canal.” The large garden to the rear of Sweetbriars slopes down to the Royal Military Canal, originally constructed to thwart a Napoleonic invasion and now one hundred and seventy years old.

  “Very well, Martha dear, if you are sure I can be of no assistance.” Miss Seeton, ever obedient to her domestic mentor’s advice, retreated hurriedly from her own sitting-room as Martha seized a wing chair by its high back and began tipping it to and fro in a meaningful manner. “It is a little early,” ventured Miss Seeton from the hall, “but is there anything you would like from the shops? I had planned to buy stamps from the post office a little later—but of course,” she added, for Martha’s feelings must not be hurt, “it will be pleasant on so fine a day to stroll about the village enjoying the fresh air until Mr. Stillman opens.”

  “Stay here much longer,” retorted Mrs. Bloomer, “and what you’ll enjoy is dust, not fresh air. Hoover and sweep these rugs as I may, there’s no denying a good go outside in spring and autumn with a carpet-beater’s best of all, though I sometimes think we could do with one of them shampooers too, except I’ve never understood how you can be sure of it drying properly indoors.” She paused. “’Specially when tea leaves work almost as well.” Miss Seeton, in an unwonted hurry, had recently come home from the shops with tea bags, by mistake. Her house-proud henchwoman now seized every opportunity to remind her charge that Mrs. Bannet’s tea caddy had served the house well for years, loose leaves being far better than any nasty paper, and if Miss Emily didn’t believe her she had only to try nibbling on a paper hankie and she’d soon know what she meant.

  Miss Seeton had been quick to apologise, and Martha as quickly appropriated the tea bags for Stan to use as mulch on some experimental cuttings being nurtured under glass. Stan, except in the depths of winter when it was too dark, too cold, or too wet for working out of doors, was no great television watcher. He left Martha to
tell him of anything that might interest him, and when she mentioned pink laburnum—there was a tree in Cambridge, they’d grafted Golden Rain on to purple broom, or maybe the other way round, she couldn’t remember—he thought the matter over and decided this was a challenge to which his reputation as Plummergen’s best gardener really ought to rise. The word “chimera” was unknown to Stan Bloomer, who wasn’t that much of a reader, either; he might otherwise years before have learned of the Victorian passion for the pink laburnum hybrid developed by Monsieur Adam in 1825 to produce separate racemes of yellow, purple, and pink-with-yellow blooms on separate stems, and proudly known as Laburnum Adamii.

  “My duster’s a little bald,” conceded Martha after a few moments of unseen furniture-bumping, “and I dare say after today it’ll probably have had it, so a new one would be nice—only not one of the fancy sort with nylon bristles, dear, proper feathers or nothing and I know Emmy Putts uses them so try the post office first, if you’re going there anyway—and talking of the post, here’s Bert,” as a clatter outside heralded the arrival of Plummergen’s genial postman at the southern end of The Street. “Hang on a minute, dear, in case he’s brought anything for you.”

  Miss Seeton gave the loyal retainer no time to brush her hands free of grime and remove her housecoat, but opened the front door herself, as she heard the tread of official feet coming up the path.

  “Good morning, Bert,” she greeted the cheerful redhead, like Martha a Cockney but, unlike Mrs. Bloomer, resident six miles away in Brettenden. “And such a beautiful morning!”

  “True enough, ducks, and we’ll hope it stays that way. Here’s your letters—one from Scotland Yard, still calling you MissEss on the envelope. Wouldn’t you think that computer of theirs oughter know by now who you are?”

  Miss Seeton, with a smile accepting a small bundle of correspondence, thanked Bert and explained that no doubt it was to avoid confusion, everything these days apparently needing initials like OHMS for anything sent On Her Majesty’s Service, such as the income tax, or GPO for the General Post Office, and while MP always meant Member of Parliament, MS could mean manuscript as well as Mine Sweeper, so Admiral Leighton had once told her, although it seemed most unlikely that anyone would suppose she, who led so quiet a life—Miss Seeton honestly believes this—would know how to sweep mines and, indeed, if any sweeping of the other sort was to be done then dear Martha must know more about it than anyone else in the village.