“Our Miss Seeton,” the amused voice of Chief Superintendent Delphick corrected him all the way from Scotland Yard. “She’s as good as on the strength, remember—attached to the force by being paid an annual retainer for her sketches. She’s a professional colleague, Chris, and—what’s that strange noise? Interference on the line, no doubt.”
“That was me,” Brinton corrected him unnecessarily. “Me uttering a hollow groan. You know as well as I do—but what’s the use? I should have guessed this was coming, what with Harry Furneux this morning going on about her and young Foxon, blast his eyes, saying she was bound to get involved somehow—fated, that’s what she is. And what can anyone do except resign themselves to fate? Or,” he added, brightening, “resign, full stop. It’d be a pity about such a shortfall in my pension, but believe me, Oracle, there are times when I’d say the sacrifice was worth it.”
“How about telling me what the problem seems to be? You know what they say about a trouble shared—”
“The trouble,” broke in Brinton, “is arson.”
Which drove the laugh from Delphick’s voice at once. He said, “Arson? Miss Seeton?” and then, not for the first time in his association with MissEss, could think of nothing further to say.
“Oh, she isn’t going round setting fire to things—but somebody is, and she seems to have known about it almost as soon as I did. It makes me nervous, Oracle. I can’t help wondering what she’s going to come up with next.”
“She knew about it as soon as you did . . . because it was in Plummergen, you mean?”
“No, I don’t. That,” pointed out Brinton, “wouldn’t be so, well, spooky—at least if someone had burned down Plummergen village hall, or the church, you’d expect Miss Seeton to know about it.”
“Then has she drawn you one of her pictures?”
Brinton shuddered. “Not yet, no, thank heavens. When she gets going along those lines, it makes me really jumpy—how you manage to interpret ’em, I’ll never know, but between the pair of you it strikes me as downright creepy . . . Which, I suppose,” he reflected, “is what this yoga business is, in any case, so . . .”
Delphick gave him ten seconds to explain, then prompted his old friend with: “What’s so creepy about Miss Seeton standing on her head? She’s done it for years.”
“She wasn’t standing on her head,” Brinton said. “From what I gather, anyway. She was sitting staring at a candle flame—that’s what made her decide to call me, she said, I think, though you can never be sure, with Miss Seeton.” He clutched at his hair again. “Listen to me, will you? She’s got me as confused and woolly as she is! I might as well write out my resignation letter this minute.”
Delphick ignored all but the basic facts. “Why should Miss Seeton’s staring at a candle flame worry you?” Never mind why it made her think of telephoning the Ashford police—minor matters could wait. “Did she, er, see a vision?”
Brinton took a deep breath. Then he released it and took another. “Well, I feel such a fool now. But it was too much of a coincidence. I was reading a report from the fire brigade just as Miss Seeton rang—we’ve been having a spot of trouble with the Ashford Choppers, or rather their younger brothers—vandalism, stealing cars, you know the sort of thing. But last night two haystacks went up in flames, and, now there’s been time to check, the brigade doesn’t believe it was spontaneous combustion.”
“Krook,” interjected Delphick with delight.
“Or crooks,” said Brinton, who hadn’t read Bleak House. “Your average arsonist usually does it for kicks, or for the insurance—but a bunch of yobboes, egging each other on for the sheer hell of it, that’s vandalism in a big way, and in hot weather like we’ve been having . . . Haystacks can catch fire spontaneously, you see, which is why they weren’t too worried at first. The hay has to be perfectly dry, for a start, and then the middle of the stack has to be built properly—the right proportions of hay and air, or it overheats—you sometimes see farmers who’re a bit bothered shoving wooden poles into the heart of the stack to see if they come out charred. If they do, then it means dismantling the whole thing before it bursts into flames . . . But these two last night apparently began burning from the outside in, they found out once it was daylight.”
“Not spontaneous combustion,” Delphick agreed. “And you feel that somehow or other Miss Seeton’s got hold of this, almost before it happened?”
“You,” bristled Brinton, the countryman, “may not think a couple of haystacks worth worrying about—”
“I didn’t say so, Chris. In fact, I—”
“—but how do we know where it’s all going to end?” the superintendent went on, ignoring his friend’s attempts to soothe him. “The Choppers’ll get a taste for it, the same way the kinky ones do, and they’ll be burning places down left, right, and centre—which’ll bring the regular kinky ones out of the woodwork, and Lord knows what sort of bother we’ll have with sex crimes as a result—you know it always seems to get worse in summer anyway, girls in short skirts and panties hanging on the line overnight to dry . . .”
Brinton’s predictions of gloom might, to one unused to Miss Seeton, have appeared more than farfetched. Delphick did not think so, however; and this time, as the superintendent drew breath, managed to say so. He expressed his concern and only wished there might be something more he could do. Short of gagging Miss Seeton, or taking away her pencil and sketchpad, however, he could think off-hand of nothing.
“You can be ready,” growled Brinton, “to drop everything else and come down here when I shout for help, you and that young giant of yours who calls her, heaven help him, his own dear Aunt Em. The pair of you seem to be able to understand her—I don’t. The only thing I understand right now is, to go by her previous form, she knows we’re in for a long, hot summer—and I’m in the firing line . . .”
“Firing line,” repeated Delphick thoughtfully. “Fire—oh, yes, I do see.”
chapter
~5~
THE SUN SHONE bright in a cloudless sky as Miss Seeton rose on Monday morning, prepared to do her duty by the youth of Plummergen. Reassured by Superintendent Brinton during the brief conversation they’d had last week, she had telephoned Mr. Jessyp and said that, unless the police required her to sketch for them, she would be at the disposal of the Education Authority from now until the end of term, and Miss Maynard need now worry about nothing more than her poor dear mother’s health. Mr. Jessyp had expressed his delight and gratitude, and Miss Maynard, before she left the village on her errand of mercy, had brought round to Sweetbriars, with tears in her eyes, the biggest box of chocolates Miss Seeton had ever seen.
“Come, come, I love you only, tum, tum ti tum,” hummed Miss Seeton as she performed her toilet. She was sorry for the Maynards, of course, yet it was pleasant to be in harness once more, to know that one was still needed and that one’s former skills were not forgotten. “Come, come, tum ti tum, tum ti tum . . .” The song from The Chocolate Soldier—Oscar Straus, not Johann, but the music was just as delightful as those charming waltzes—somehow seemed expressive of her mood today—and such lovely chocolates, although quite unnecessary, when one was only too pleased to be able to help in such an emergency.
Having performed her yoga exercises—without even an attempt at trataka: so far as that was concerned, the flame of the candle would remain forever unlit—and breakfasted, Miss Seeton said a cheerful goodbye to Martha Bloomer, who had popped across from her cottage to ensure that her Miss Emily went off to work in good time.
“Now, don’t forget your umbrella,” Martha reminded Miss Seeton, mischievously. But Miss Seeton had already stopped at the stand in the hall and was unclipping her second-best brolly even as Mrs. Bloomer teased her. No matter that the sun was blazing down, and the songbirds, their beaks aboil, were thinking about staying silent for the rest of the day: Miss Seeton had never, since she’d been of an age to think ahead, gone anywhere without her umbrella; and she didn’t plan to begin now.
“After all,” said Miss Seeton as Martha gazed up at the cloudless sky, “it is a very hot day. And parasols, more’s the pity, are no longer fashionable—waxed paper, with such splendid floral patterns, as I recall, and so cooling, to be in the shade—I once made my class draw a still life, with an open parasol behind, and summer fruit, and a Chinese jar in willow-pattern, for contrast, although during recreation some of the naughtier children crept back in, so greedy, and ate it before the drawings were complete. The display of fruit, I mean. And it taught me,” said Miss Seeton with a smile, “only to use flowers in future. I might try to ask the children to draw summer flowers in one lesson, although there is the timetable to consider, of course. Mr. Jessyp has said that so near the end of term a certain amount of flexibility is in order, and especially when the weather is so hot—their concentration, you see, and only natural, for a child, to wish to be outside playing instead of indoors at one’s lessons. There are to be,” said Miss Seeton, pleased, “a number of school excursions, which will be interesting as well as educational, I feel sure. A nature study ramble in Ashford Forest, I understand, and there will be plenty of wild flowers there. Perhaps we could have a little contest, to see which child could find the greatest variety . . .”
Still happily planning her lessons, Miss Seeton found herself being gently pushed out of the cottage and down the short paved path towards the wooden gate in her neat picket fence. “You may have left plenty of time to start with,” warned Martha Bloomer, “but if you don’t get a move on, you won’t reach the school until every kiddie in Plummergen’s at their desks and waiting. Off you go, and don’t worry about a thing—I’ll dust around and have everything sorted out by the time you come home again.”
Dear Martha, such a treasure, and so concerned for one’s well-being. Miss Seeton’s eyes glistened as she turned on the corner by the bakery opposite to wave to Mrs. Bloomer, who still stood in the doorway, before starting to make her way down The Street towards the school.
The main street in Plummergen—indeed, virtually its only street—runs almost due north and south. It is wide, more or less straight, and a quarter of a mile long; shops and houses of various architectural styles and periods line it on either side. Miss Seeton chose this morning to walk northwards along the westerly side of The Street, to catch the morning sun; the sun whose rays glittered merrily on the panes in the tiny, bow-fronted windows of the bakery: which, now that it has become an outpost of Winesart’s empire, is also a sweetshop and tobacconist, though Miss Seeton seldom uses either of these facilities. But she began to wonder now about a Battenberg cake for afternoon tea, once she saw what a tempting display Mrs. Wyght had set out in the bakery window: peeling off the marzipan, so sickly but in small amounts so tasty, to release the little pink and yellow squares of sponge sandwiched together with apricot jam . . .
The yellow doors of the blacksmith’s forge next caught her eye as she continued on her way: they were propped open, and Miss Seeton, fascinated by the sight of a craftsman busy with his craft, stopped to watch. During the course of the weekend Daniel Eggleden had received more orders than he normally took in a month: all of them rush jobs, and all with the deadline of Judgement Day, as village wags were starting to call the time when the Competition should reach its climax.
The whole of Plummergen had caught Competition Fever. Sir George had bullied Cedric Benbow into meeting him for dinner and a concentrated discourse on the art of photography the very day after his telephone call; Lady Colveden and her committee had held a meeting in the village hall to which everyone had been invited, where a preliminary plan of campaign had been set forth.
“We’ve already won once, but that was some years ago,” said Lady Colveden at the end of an inspiring speech. “Now it’s up to us all to see what we can achieve towards winning again. Major Howett, Miss Treeves, and I—not forgetting Miss Armitage’s invaluable assistance, of course—have been busy drawing up a list of suggestions for improvements that might be worthwhile, but of course we’d appreciate it if any further ideas were to come from you. Then we’ll put everything together, and see if we can’t come up with a joint effort. We really will have to try our best,” concluded Meg Colveden cunningly, “if we’re going to win the trophy when Murreystone are so keen,” and she sat down, delighted with the stir her final words now made.
The village of Murreystone is to be found five miles due east of Plummergen, as the crow flies, in the middle of Romney Marsh; but as, in the windswept marshlands, no crow will fly in a straight line, so is Murreystone more like seven or eight miles from its neighbour and rival by road, depending on which route is taken. Some people feel that the distance between the two could do with being even greater, for something in the nature of all-out hostility had been enjoyed by the villagers for generations.
Murreystone boasts a more skilful darts team; Plummergen, which claims cricket to be the superior sport, never fails to wipe the floor with the smaller village when the needle match is played at the end of each summer. Murreystone’s population has never crept above the three hundred and fifty mark, whereas Plummergen hovers at just on the half-century. The church at Murreystone is larger and far more interesting, historically; Plummergen’s congregation always raises more money at the annual village fete. Both churches have as their vicar the Reverend Arthur Treeves—but his residence is in Plummergen, which Murreystone sees as a calculated affront. The Reverend Arthur regrets the rivalry between his two parochial charges, and in earlier days, before he lost his faith, would try to bring about a reconciliation: an older and wiser man now, he has not attempted such a thing for years. And woe betide any young man from Plummergen who goes courting a Murreystone maiden: it is not her father, but her brothers who will be after him with a shotgun, and that to drive him out of the parish, not force him to the altar.
Lady Colveden’s final words, therefore, had been chosen with deliberate cunning, and they did not fail of their purpose. The meeting applauded vigorously, and then everybody began talking at the tops of their voices. People leaped from their chairs to besiege the committee’s table, clamouring to submit their pet suggestions for the beautification of Plummergen, and as Lady Colveden scribbled frantically on her notepad, Matilda Howett was forced to remember her old Army training, barking brisk commands at the villagers until they formed a more or less orderly queue and gave everyone time to think.
Wrought-iron gates, house numbers, and decorations such as flower baskets or lamp brackets were thought likely, if applied to Plummergen homes in prime locations, to catch the favourable eye of the competition judges; blacksmith Daniel Eggleden was known to be a skilled worker with a good aesthetic sense and could be relied upon not to turn out every gate looking exactly like the rest. The items he made would harmonise, but retain their individuality: Dan’s abilities are renowned. Samples of his handiwork are on display in two glass cases outside the forge for customers to ponder when he is not there and the yellow doors are closed.
This morning, however, the yellow doors were wide open and the smith was already hard at work. From the depths of the forge came the roar of the bellows, the clang of hammering, and sudden clouds of dancing scarlet sparks which made Miss Seeton, in a gesture that was instinctive, put up her umbrella for protection.
“Things getting too hot for you, Miss S.?” enquired an unexpected female voice in her ear. Mel Forby, old friend to Miss Seeton and demon reporter of the Daily Negative, had crossed the road from the George and Dragon, where she’d just come to stay, to stand beside the little figure in the neat tweed suit. Miss Seeton, having jumped at being startled out of her concentration, smiled.
“Miss, er, Mel, how delightful to see you. You’ve come back, then, as you said you might?”
“As I said I would,” Mel corrected her. “After all that Turpin business a few weeks back, and me missing out on it, you think I’d run the same risk again? My spies are everywhere, you know. Just as soon as Anne Ranger warned me how her mother’d told her thing
s were starting to hot up for the Best Kept Village Competition, I told that editor of mine I was going to write a series on the Rural Revival—so here I am.” She nodded towards the labouring figure of Daniel Eggleden. “There’s a whole generation growing up that doesn’t know one end of a horseshoe from another, let alone wrought-iron twiddly bits for lamp posts, so I see it as my journalistic duty to enlighten them, before it’s too late.”
Miss Seeton nodded but was too busy studying Dan at his work to reply for a moment. An artist herself, she could appreciate another artist, even in so very different a discipline. “You see,” she remarked, after a moment, “how even when he has no need to hammer the iron he keeps hammering on the anvil? He keeps up the rhythm all the time—saving his muscles, I suppose, for comfort, so like the Anvil Chorus—the strong beat, I mean, keeping time.”
Mel shot her a quick look. “You’re perfectly right, and I’ll make a note of it for my article. You don’t miss much, do you? The artist’s all-seeing eye, I guess it must be.” Miss Seeton blushed. “Say, Miss S., how about a couple of illustrations for my article? You know the sort of thing—The Village Smith at Work—and I promise not to mention the muscles of his brawny arms in the text even if you draw ’em. A nice little fee for you, plus my editor getting the chance to see some genuine Seeton drawings, which he’s said for ages he’d dearly love.”
Miss Seeton went even pinker, but regretfully shook her head. “I fear I would hardly have the time, Mel, dear, even if my contract with the police allowed me to sell my drawings elsewhere, which I’m not sure that it does, and though Mr. Brinton or Chief Superintendent Delphick would doubtless know, I hardly feel I could ask them, when they’re so very busy. Sir George and Lady Colveden have asked me to do some sketches of Plummergen—suggestions, you know, for the Best Kept Village Competition—Before and After, as Nigel calls them, and of course I am delighted to assist, but when Lady Colveden offered to pay me out of parish funds, I would in any case have refused, living here so happily as I have done these past few years—which is why I was so glad to be able to help when poor Miss Maynard’s mother was due to have an operation—and it hardly seems entirely proper, does it,” Miss Seeton concluded, “to be paid twice? Though very flattering, of course, to be asked.”
Miss Seeton Paints the Town (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 10) Page 4
