Miss Seeton Paints the Town (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 10)
Page 2
Miss Seeton smiled, turned her head carefully to one side to blow out the match, and turned it back again to fix her steady gaze, as instructed, upon the fiery gleam. With her legs—how thankful she was that her knees no longer bothered her as they had done—neatly crossed in the Lotus posture, she began her rhythmic breathing.
She must concentrate on the flame—must empty her mind of all distraction—focus her gaze and regulate her breathing in time with her slowing pulse—must allow nothing from inside or outside herself to interrupt her . . .
And then, through the open bedroom window, wafted on the delicate summer breeze, floated a burst of loud, resonant barking. It sounded as if two large and determined dogs had sighted a quarry they disliked and were making their dislike all too plainly known.
“Bother,” said Miss Seeton, realising that trataka and pratyahara were not to be hers; realising, too, with a hidden sense of relief, that she was rather glad of the fact. She blew out the candle and unfolded herself from the Lotus posture without a click or a creak from her knees, and to celebrate what she saw as her liberation immediately coiled herself into the Dancing Serpent, such a picturesque name—such a pleasant, stretching sensation along one’s spine . . .
It had sounded as if two large and determined dogs, sighting a quarry they disliked, had been making their dislike all too plainly known.
“Those animals,” sniffed Mrs. Norah Blaine, “are simply too dangerous, I’ve said so more than once. If people can’t control them, they shouldn’t be allowed to keep them.” With her angular friend Miss Erica Nuttel, whose knees were still shaking from shock, she warily crossed The Street and made once more for the Plummergen post-office-cum-general-store. On the same side of the road, but heading well away from The Nuts (as these ladies are popularly known) strode a tall, distinguished-looking man holding the leads of two elegant and muscular dogs with thick, silky coats. The man did not once look back; the dogs, their long, lean heads alert, kept staring over their shoulders, watching The Nuts every bit as closely as Miss Nuttel and Mrs. Blaine watched them.
Mr. Stillman’s well-stocked establishment is patronised by the entire village and is normally the first port of call on any shopping expedition: it is also considered the hub of village life, for it is here that most of the gossip upon which Plummergen thrives is exchanged, exaggerated, and enjoyed by almost everyone. Foremost of the fermenters on Plummergen’s grapevine are Miss Nuttel and Mrs. Blaine, who can be safely relied upon to worry away at even the smallest item of vague interest until it has become a full-blown saga destined to linger in local folklore long after the truth—often mundane and lacklustre—is forgotten.
No village comings or goings are safe from the keen eyes of The Nuts. Their house, with its acres of plate glass, stands directly opposite Crabbe’s Garage in the centre of The Street—and Crabbe runs a twice-weekly bus service to Brettenden, the nearest town. Lilikot’s windows are the best-cleaned in Kent, and the house has perhaps the best-weeded front garden in the county: The Nuts cannot bear to have anything escape their notice. And very little does, for the location of Lilikot is doubly convenient, being diagonally opposite the post office . . .
The bell pinged merrily as Mrs. Blaine pushed open the post office door. Her blackcurrant eyes glittered as she spied her audience within, although she was far too wise in the ways of the world to commit herself to any direct statement. Norah Blaine, in another life, would have made a good—that is to say, skillful—politician.
“Good morning, Mr. Stillman. Carefully now, Eric, and do ask Mr. Stillman to find you a chair. After the shock you’ve just had, I think you should sit down.”
“Could be worse, Bunny,” murmured Miss Nuttel bravely, a faint echo of her normal gruff self. “Don’t like to fuss.”
“Too like you, Eric, but there’s a time and a place for being stoic, and this isn’t it. Or them,” added Mrs. Blaine, in an anxiously grammatical moment. She hurried on: “Such a very hot day, too—we don’t want you fainting, do we?” And she turned to glare at Mr. Stillman, who had not yet responded as planned.
“Oh,” remarked Mr. Stillman, who disliked hearing remarks directed at him in the third person, and decided to reply in kind. “Miss Nuttel feeling faint, is she?”
Which gave Mrs. Blaine the opening she wanted. “Surely you must have heard the commotion a few minutes ago? Those huge dogs growling at us and showing their teeth, too grim and scary for words, and poor Eric terrified to cross the road, with them tied up outside on the pavement.”
“Ah,” said Mr. Stillman, and nodded. “So the dogs didn’t, as you might say, bite either of you, then?”
“They would have done, if we’d gone near them,” replied Mrs. Blaine smartly. Mr. Stillman smiled a faint smile.
“So you didn’t get near them, either? Ah, well, no harm done, is there, and no need to fuss,” Mr. Stillman said in a mischievous echo of Miss Nuttel’s own words earlier. He pointedly turned his back on the aluminium steps which he kept behind the counter and which, with their folding top, sometimes did service as a stool. “Was there anything in particular you wanted, or shall I serve Mrs. Spice while you have a look around?”
“Well,” bristled Mrs. Blaine, “I must say, I wouldn’t wish to be thought to jump the queue, but if Mrs. Spice isn’t in a hurry . . .”
Mrs. Spice had been edging nearer during the exchange, as had her fellow shoppers. “Not too much of a hurry,” said Mrs. Spice. “So Miss Nuttel feels poorly, does she? Those dogs, I’m not surprised, great savage-looking brutes, and tying ’em up outside like he does, it’s enough to put anyone off shopping till he’s gone.”
The postmaster was content to ignore the remark, but his wife, whose feet were aching even at this early hour, sprang at once to the defence of the departed dog walker. “To my mind, Mr. Alexander is a very thoughtful gentleman. There are some people will bring their dogs in the shop no matter how many notices we put on the door that it’s not allowed, but he’s never once done so since that first time, and very apologetic he was about it, too, when we explained the health regulations to him.”
“He shouldn’t have needed it explained,” Mrs. Spice said firmly. Since none of the notice-flouting dog owners was to be seen in the post office, she could say this without fear of hurting anyone’s feelings—Plummergen generally reckons not to care tuppence for what it says behind anyone’s back, but face to face is another matter altogether. “There’s the notice, plain as you please, No Dogs Allowed.”
“Plain enough, to the likes of you and me,” pointed out Mrs. Henderson, “but then he isn’t, is he? Like us?”
“Foreign,” breathed Mrs. Flax, in doom-laden tones, and a murmur of agreement rippled round the post office interior as everyone settled down to the discussion that promised so very much in the way of speculation.
“Not a thing do we know about him,” Mrs. Henderson said, “or his employer, if that’s really what she is.”
“Bold as brass I heard him come out with it!” exclaimed Mrs. Spice, “and so did Mr. Stillman, didn’t you, that first time when he came in to buy stamps—‘My mistress and I have just come to live in your charming village,’ that’s what he said, and could anything be more brazen that that?”
“Proper scandalous,” opined Mrs. Bulman.
Emmy Putts, who brooded daily on the dullness of her life behind the grocery counter, added that he certainly was a good-looking man, if you liked the more mature type, and that funny foreign way he spoke made him sound, well, interesting.
“Shame on you, Emmeline Putts, for saying such things,” chided Mrs. Stillman, who had frequent cause to worry about her young employee’s flights of fancy. “And as for—that word he used, well—he’s foreign, anyone can tell, and he just got the translation a bit wrong, I’m sure that’s all there is to it. And even if it isn’t,” she added firmly, “it’s nothing to do with you, Emmy.” Or with anybody else hovered on her lips, but she restrained herself. With luck, they would take the hint.
“Surely it must be of concern to everyone in Plummergen, too mysterious, nobody ever seeing her at all, and guarded by those Bolshoi dogs of hers as the house is—”
“Borzoi, Bunny,” corrected Miss Nuttel, who had regained strength and animation as the discussion progressed. Norah blinked at her friend, surprised at the interruption.
“What was that, Eric?”
“Borzoi, those dogs. Russian wolfhounds—”
“Guard dogs,” insisted Mrs. Blaine, and everyone nodded.
“And what’s there to be guarded against in Plummergen?” demanded someone whose village pride had been hurt.
“Outsiders,” suggested Mrs. Bulman. “If you ask me, that woman’s in hiding, and that’s why we never see her, with those dogs running free about the place behind that great high wall to chase ’em off—whoever,” she appended darkly, “they might be. Or her, come to that.”
“Could be anybody, right enough. Look who used to own the place, after all.” Mrs. Spice led collective memory back several years. “Mrs. Venning . . .”
“She went to Switzerland, so they said at the time.”
“Nothing to stop her coming back once her poorly heart’d been cured, is there? Maybe that’s why we never see her out and about—because she knows we’d recognise her.”
“They said Mrs. Venning wasn’t like to recover.”
“Doctors,” pronounced Mrs. Blaine with authority, “make mistakes more often than they’d care to have it known—and especially when it’s in their best interests.” She looked about her at the throng of eager faces. “After all, wasn’t it drugs that was the cause of all the trouble? Too convenient for any doctor, a supplier right on his doorstep . . .”
There was a moment of speculative silence as everyone considered the relative positions of Dr. Knight’s private nursing home on the outskirts of Plummergen, and, almost directly opposite, up a narrow lane, behind that all-too-mysterious high brick wall—The Meadows, former home of the notorious Mrs. Venning.
“Don’t even know that she sold the place, do we?” Miss Nuttel contributed a further spoonful of surmise to the merrily simmering brew. “Never saw an estate agent’s board go up, after all.”
“It might be rented,” came the hesitant suggestion from someone who lived in the council houses at the northern end of The Street. All the home-owners, with mortgages and tax relief ever in their minds, turned to gaze at the proposer of such a—to them—novel concept.
The speaker was young Mrs. Newport, who had three children under four and another on the way, sister to that Mrs. Scillicough who had taken sibling rivalry to its limits by producing triplets already notorious in village legend for their utter frightfulness, though they were barely past the toddling stage. With such an awesome inheritance, Mrs. Newport was used to standing her ground on the rare occasions when she felt strongly about something.
“It might be rented,” she insisted, gaining courage from the way nobody contradicted her. “To someone Mrs. Venning maybe met out in Switzerland—foreigners, see? Like this Mr. Alexander, if that’s his real name.”
Which left the field open to the development of several rival theories. One school felt that the mystery woman was Mrs. Venning, disguised, in hiding, having escaped the police-watch set on her in Switzerland for some enterprise which was bound to be illegal; another opinion held her to be (her particular identity being still unknown) certainly a foreigner, probably Swiss, and definitely up to no good at Mrs. Venning’s instigation, whatever “no good” might be.
A vociferous minority obstinately clung to the theory, supposedly debunked by P. C. Potter, that the man living in The Meadows had done away with the woman almost as soon as they arrived in Plummergen, burying her body somewhere in the grounds. Even though he continued to buy provisions enough for two, the theorisers maintained that he bought it solely in the cause of verisimilitude; the testimony of P. C. Potter, who (on learning from his wife, Mabel, what was being said) had insisted on speaking directly with the mystery woman, was not considered sufficient proof that the woman still lived. Potter had reported her safely alive, but eccentric in that she had received him in a veil: which only, as the theorisers said, went to show.
The distinguished dog-walker himself was thought to be of slightly less interest (unless, of course, he was indeed a murderer), as the very fact that he permitted himself to be seen in person suggested that he had (possibly) less to conceal. He was variously thought to be the mystery woman’s lover (“Perhaps the vicar ought to have a word with them,” a suggestion vetoed on the grounds that the Reverend Arthur Treeves wouldn’t know what to say, in the first place; and, in the second, they’d never find out what happened anyway, as his sister would certainly not tell them) or manservant, although Emmy Putts was horrified at this. Mrs. Stillman quenched her again even more promptly than before.
“But it’s definitely all too mysterious,” concluded Mrs. Blaine, to the satisfaction of everyone. “I mean—nobody would just turn up in a village out of the blue like that unless there was something strange about them, would they?”
And Erica Nuttel cleared her throat. Every eye focussed upon her. She stared back, nodding wisely. “Not the first, by a long chalk,” she said in portentous accents. “Maybe old Mrs. Bannet’s goddaughter, inheriting her cottage, but—exactly what Miss Seeton did, isn’t it?”
chapter
~3~
ON SUCH A very hot day Lady Colveden had wondered whether her menfolk might prefer a salad, such as she had prepared for herself, to their usual roast beef and vegetables. But working farmers, she knew, required calories with which to work, even if her own appetite had virtually vanished. She watched in amusement as Nigel polished off his second helping of richly gravied potatoes, and when Sir George gave the satisfied little cough which signalled repletion, she shook her head at the empty serving dishes and sighed.
“I don’t know how you manage it,” she said enviously. “You never seem to put on an inch, Nigel, even with all that starch, but in this weather even a lettuce leaf seems to be fattening, as far as I’m concerned.”
“You could come out with us this afternoon,” suggested Nigel, “and help bale the hay: think of the exercise.”
“Think of my aching back,” retorted his mother as she began to collect the dishes together. “You know I haven’t the faintest idea how to use a pitchfork—”
The newspaper behind which her husband lurked twitched in his hands. Nigel coughed. Lady Colveden hurried on:
“Besides, it’s the Best Kept Committee this afternoon, so I couldn’t spare the time even if I wanted the exercise. Which I don’t believe I do—do I?” And she glanced down at her still-trim waistline, frowning.
“Best Kept Committee?” echoed Nigel as he reached round The Times to retrieve his father’s plate. “Do you mean you all have to dress up in your garden party hats and white gloves and posh frocks? I suppose that’ll be the first time since you went with Miss Seeton to Buck House—better make sure the outfit’s had a proper airing. We wouldn’t want the Committee choking on mothball fumes. You know how they can linger, if you’re not careful.”
“Nigel, don’t be irritating. You know perfectly well what I mean. The Best Kept Village Competition Committee, if you want me to say it in full, though it’s rather a lot to keep chanting every time. And anyway, we all know what we mean, which is what counts.”
Lady Colveden vanished into the kitchen while her son began to load plates and dishes ready to hand through the serving hatch. The percolator had been busy during the meal, and soon the tray laden with cups and coffee pot was being carried into the dining room while Sir George turned over a page in his newspaper and his wife settled herself to pour. “As a matter of fact . . .” she began as Nigel took his father’s cup a
nd manoeuvred it into place. Sir George uttered a grunt of thanks and turned another page.
“As a matter of fact,” repeated Lady Colveden, “you may be interested in our committee, George.” An agonised denial erupted from behind the newspaper before she could say more. “I meant,” she corrected herself hastily, “in the work of the committee—I’m not suggesting you should join.”
“Over my dead body,” muttered Sir George Colveden, KCB, DSO, JP. “All those women nattering nineteen to the dozen—enough to make a man’s blood run cold.”
“I,” his wife reminded him, “am on the committee, and if my presence makes your blood run cold, then all I can say is, what a waste of twenty-five years. Nigel, stop sniggering. It’s hard enough to talk to your father at mealtimes when it isn’t anything important.”
Sir George lowered his newspaper. “What’s important?” He glanced at Nigel. “Don’t let her co-opt you,” he advised his son, who was grinning. “Fate worse than death.”
“It isn’t the fete,” Lady Colveden rushed in to reassure her spouse. “It’s the Best Kept Village Competition, and we haven’t won it for years—”
“High time we won again, then. Good luck to you. Plant a few shrubs at the front of the house, if you think it’ll help.” And Sir George resumed his reading, thankful to have escaped so lightly.
“George, come back, please. Of course it would be nice to have some new flowering shrubs, if you could spare the time to put them in for me, but I wasn’t thinking about this house so much as The Street. The judges are far more likely to wander around the main part of the village, rather than turning off up Marsh Road just to look at the Hall.”
“They might try to catch us out,” Nigel said, helping himself to more coffee, his voice grave. “You can’t afford to be too relaxed in your guard at times like these.”