Miss Seeton by Moonlight (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 12)

by Crane,Hamilton

  “And he fancied the statue of Hiberna?” Lord Edgar broke in once more. “But why, Chief Superintendent?”

  “Because he read the newspapers with rather more care than any of us. We supposed—not unsurprisingly, I feel—that the temple was in honour of the goddess of Ireland, or Hibernia. A understandable misreading for Hiberna—or,” he spoke with slow emphasis, “the goddess of Winter . . .”

  “Good gracious,” said Miss Seeton again, as the others sat back on their chairs in amazement. It was so obvious, once it had been pointed out, but . . .

  “But,” said Lord Edgar, “they didn’t get away with her, did they? Whoever they were. Surely the chap isn’t so mad that he employs two separate groups of people to acquire the loot on his behalf? If he does, he must have money to burn, as well as being barmy.”

  “If the little we have managed to learn of him so far is correct,” Delphick said slowly, “then he does, indeed, have an ample financial basis to support his mania—but you will understand that it is legally impossible for me to supply details, Lord Edgar. Suffice it to say that there is a suggestion, no more, that the man who has been responsible for a great many art thefts over recent months is a multimillionaire with an international reputation for being a recluse. He lives in a part of the world noted for its low temperatures and almost permanent snowfields, and is in the process of building himself a massive underground palace which he intends to furnish in accordance with his, er, particular requirements—”

  “Chrysander Bullian!” exclaimed Lord Edgar. “Nutty as a fruitcake, by all accounts—the American Armenian nobody ever sees. It must be him. He’s forever waiting for World War III, from what I’ve heard: it’s not so much a palace he’s building in Alaska as a nuclear shelter, Mr. Delphick. He’s mad, all right. But can he really be mad enough to pay double the going rate, whatever that might be, for two lots of people to pinch Arabella?”

  “He,” said Delphick, “whoever he might be—and I name no names, Lord Edgar—has only employed one, er, gang of thieves throughout his entire European operation. There was a degree of madness in his method, to that extent: but it was madder still to make it plain that money was no object. The three men he employed grew greedy. They also began to regard themselves as invincible—with the almost inevitable result that they grew careless. Not so careless that they didn’t realise a lorry or truck would make too much noise so close to the house, but careless enough that instead of hiring the pony and trap from the gypsies, they elected to, er, cut corners and steal it. A course of action to which the gypsies, not unnaturally, took exception.”

  “The other four men, of course.” Lord Edgar nodded. The expression on Faulkbourne’s face was still unreadable. Miss Seeton looked shocked, and mildly disapproving. Delphick continued:

  “Don’t ask me how, but they managed to track the pony’s progress from their camp to the Abbey grounds, and realised, once they arrived, that they had the advantage of the Croesus Gang in physical size and fitness as well as in number. In righteous wrath also, of course—which, I gather, added some, er, zest to their chastisement of those they assumed to be the entire band of pony thieves—until it came to their attention that the pony was being, er, removed by yet another player in the drama . . .”

  Miss Seeton said, “Oh, dear,” and blushed. She looked both embarrassed and agitated. Delphick chuckled.

  “Cheer up, Miss Seeton. Believe me, you need have no fear of being charged under any Road Traffic Act with driving an unlicenced vehicle on Her Majesty’s highway without due care and attention and without lights . . . We’re all much too grateful to you. There’s a good chance we’ll retrieve most of the gang’s latest acquisitions—they hadn’t got round to shipping them out just yet—and, even if we can’t bring a prosecution directly against their employer, because he’s in another country and a hearsay link is insufficient—we can definitely fire a warning shot across his bows, with a little cooperation from our American colleagues. Another success notched up to your credit, Miss Seeton, and I congratulate you . . .”

  As she blushed again, and looked slightly bemused, Delphick noticed the expression on Faulkbourne’s face, which displayed mingled admiration and disappointment. He had at last observed the renowned MissEss in action—but it hadn’t been the action he’d expected. Lord Edgar’s face, however, wore an expression of great relief.

  “What the parents would have said if they’d come home to find Arabella gone, I tremble to think,” he told Miss Seeton with his most charming smile. “I wish I could find more to offer than the freedom of the Abbey grounds—you already have that, haven’t you? Faulkbourne, we must put our heads together and think of something.”

  “Very good, your lordship.” The steward’s head inclined at a very slight angle. It might have been in acquiescence: it might have been to hide a yawn.

  “It’s very late,” Delphick said at once. “Or, rather, it’s very early. Either way, I feel that the rest of this discussion should be postponed to a more hospitable hour,” and in his turn he yawned. “No doubt we will see you later, Lord Edgar . . .”

  When everyone had surfaced from their slumbers and had something to eat, Delphick assembled his little band for what he was pleased to call the Great Exhibition.

  “Of your pictures. Some of them, anyway,” he told Miss Seeton: who clutched the sketchbook she’d feared lost until the cook found it, and murmured that of course, Chief Superintendent, one knew one’s obligation to the police, but—

  “But Anne tells me you’ve come up with a couple of small masterpieces since we’ve been gone,” he said firmly. “Which I should very much like to compare with those you did before—if you wouldn’t mind?”

  Miss Seeton, remembering the retainer, murmured that she didn’t mind. Not really. But she so much hoped he wasn’t expecting too much, because one recognised all too clearly that one’s talent was, well, very ordinary . . .

  Delphick took as much notice of her protestations as he ever did, and was soon sitting with all her drawings, including those brought back from London, spread on a low table in front of him. Anne prepared to give a running commentary as necessary, and Bob looked merely bewildered. He’d never got the hang of Aunt Em’s scribbles—the Oracle seemed to make sense of ’em, and Anne didn’t do too badly, but he’d rather detect crime in the normal manner, any day. Nobody could call Miss Seeton normal . . .

  He peered over Delphick’s shoulder at the pony-and-trap sketch of the near-nude woman with Greenland’s icy mountains in the background, and grinned. She’d been spot on, same as always. Once you knew what she was—not exactly talking about, but Drawing, with a capital D—you could make sense of it. Only, making sense of it meant you had to do everything, well, backwards. Lucky the Oracle was pretty agile, mentally, though it didn’t take a genius to make the connection between the snow and ice and Croesus—the muffled, lonely figure heading for the hidden ravine—there was symbolism there, even Bob could see that . . .

  But what did the other sketches symbolise? Not much to do with Croesus, surely. True enough, MissEss had nobbled his gang—as they’d hoped she would, even if it hadn’t been in the way they’d all expected—yet the unexpected was what you always seemed to get, with MissEss. They ought to be used to it by now. These other drawings, though, didn’t seem to have any connection at all with the mad millionaire recluse from Alaska. Why had MissEss drawn the Abbey as a partial ruin, the receptionist at the Belton Arms as a harpy? Did she feel that nothing was ever as it seemed to the outward eye? Why had she shown Beverley for a second time in Regency costume, escorted by one of the Bremeridges? And the portrait gallery—more Bremeridges—and what on earth was the significance of the pile of little bricks which the steward Faulkbourne was shown carrying on a tray? Faulkbourne. Bob suddenly sat up straight. It had been the steward who first requested Miss Seeton’s presence at Belton because of—

  “Raffles,” remarked Delphick, completing his sergeant’s unspoken thought as he studied the drawings
one by one once more. “I can’t believe there’s no hint—the coincidence—I refuse to believe she hasn’t . . .”

  Miss Seeton was pink as she said, twisting her fingers: “I assure you, I know very little of this Raffles person, Mr. Delphick, always excepting what dear Martha tells me she has read in the popular press. I understand that he has, well, considerable athletic ability, and a sense of humour—but apart from that . . .”

  He regarded her dancing fingers with a whimsical smile. “Very little, Miss Seeton? I think perhaps you know more than you realise. Over the past few days, you must have heard people talking—you must have gained an impression, of sorts. Would you care to rough it out for me on paper? I’d be most interested to see it. Suppose I were to let you have your sketching block, for just so long as you need to produce your impression of Raffles—your impression which,” and he looked again at her dancing fingers, “I feel sure is going to be of great interest to us all . . .”

  Having settled her by the window, Delphick then appeared to ignore Miss Seeton utterly as he ran through the Raffles case for the benefit of his enthralled audience. He stole covert glances at her from time to time, however, and seemed pleased with what he could see. At first, Miss Seeton had sat and looked, as she so often did when faced with similar requests, rather uncertain; she kept trying to still her restless fingers, without much success; she closed her eyes, shook her head as if to clear her thoughts, then suddenly reached for her pencil, sighed, and with swooping strokes sent it back and forth across the paper, filling it with the picture which would be, Delphick hoped, the final clue in the Raffles mystery.

  “We know,” he said, as he waited for Miss Seeton to make her first marks on the blank sheet before her, “that Raffles must be a superbly fit individual: agile, athletic, and with an excellent head for heights. Incidentally”—with a nod in Anne’s direction—“we’ve no particular reason to assume Raffles is male: none of the robberies we know of has needed particular physical strength, though some of the methods employed suggested that the thief would be unusually tall for a woman, if only slightly above average for a man.” Lord Edgar shifted on his chair, his long legs stretched in front of him. Had he, wondered Bob, inherited his height from his father’s side of the family—or his mother’s?

  Delphick’s gaze drifted past Lord Edgar towards the window where Miss Seeton sat with her eyes closed in thought. He coughed. “However, I believe I’ll refer to Raffles as ‘he’ in deference to Hornung’s original. Whether or not he plays cricket, of course, is one of the many things we don’t know about him. What we do know, apart from the physical aspects, is that he possesses, as Miss Seeton has pointed out, a sense of humour—and a remarkable sense of the value of what he steals to hold to ransom.”

  Miss Seeton, oblivious now to the mention of her name, was engrossed in her drawing, driving her pencil across the paper as if inspired. The chief superintendent had a gleam in his eye as he went on:

  “I don’t just mean monetary value, although we have to suppose that Raffles knows a fair amount about antiques and objets d’art—but he also knows the sentimental value the victims of his crimes have in certain instances attached to what he has taken. He is a good psychologist, in short, if a psychologist with a sense of humour is not a contradiction in terms.” Anne, remembering some of the people she’d met during her nursing career, hid a smile. Delphick winked at her before continuing:

  “He understands his victims—because, it seems to me, he knows them, and knows them well. But not, I suspect, as an outsider, calculating profit and loss and risk—Raffles knows them as one who moves in their world—not necessarily of it, but certainly in it.” Lord Edgar shifted again, long legs nervous; Faulkbourne, steward to his father—to the Duke of Belton—cleared his throat with what seemed to Bob unnecessary force.

  There came a sudden harsh squeak from over by the window as Miss Seeton pushed back her chair and rose to her feet. The eyes of everyone except the chief superintendent turned towards her as she hesitated, the finished drawing in her hand. Delphick raised his voice above the stirring in the little room, to remark quite calmly:

  “And, because he is in that world, he needs money, more than most of us, in order to maintain his position. Raffles has turned to a life of crime rather than lose face among those he regards as his equals—his peers . . .

  “Isn’t that so, your lordship?”

  And, reaching for Miss Seeton’s sketch, Delphick fixed Lord Edgar Bremeridge with a sharp, accusing stare.

  chapter

  ~26~

  “MASTER EDDIE!” A man of normal height would have covered the distance in five, perhaps six paces: but it took Faulkbourne only three swift strides before he was standing close by the chair of Lord Edgar Bremeridge. He dropped a warning hand on the young man’s startled shoulder. “Don’t you say a word, lad, not one word! Do you understand?”

  Delphick, himself taller than average, judged that even he would have needed four steps to move from the steward’s chair to that on which the son of his master sat. The chief superintendent had wondered whether his words might surprise anyone into acting out of character: yet he had hardly supposed it would be Faulkbourne who was so obviously shaken from his habitual professional composure. Indeed, the man seemed more than shaken: he was positively alarmed. Beneath his grip, Lord Edgar winced, and writhed again.

  Delphick regarded the little tableau with quite as much interest as everyone else in the interview room. Everyone, that is, apart from Miss Seeton. A gentlewoman does not permit herself to indulge in vulgar curiosity. Besides, now that she had completed the sketch for which dear Mr. Delphick had asked, she wished him to have it as soon as possible. It was, she reminded herself, for her sketching abilities that the police paid her such a generous retainer fee . . .

  Ignoring everyone else, Miss Seeton trotted across the room and, with a shy smile, offered her drawing to the chief superintendent. “I fear this may come as something of a disappointment to you, Mr. Delphick, because one should never permit one’s fancy to run away with . . . the foolish reference to numbers and tickets is obvious, of course, but in such a serious matter it seems very wrong to . . . not that I would ever stoop, of course,” she hastened to add, “to the picking of anyone’s pocket, execrable though the pun might be. Only I would not wish, you see, people to think that I undertook my duties in any—any frivolous fashion . . .”

  “Dr. Johnson,” murmured Delphick, returning her smile as he accepted her sketch. “Or, wait—wasn’t it really one of the seventeenth-century critics who was so scathing about the pun? A chap called John Dennis, in conversation with Purcell, if my memory serves me correctly—but please don’t let it worry you, Miss Seeton, whoever he was. Nobody could ever accuse you, even for an instant, of being in the least bit friv— Ah, yes. Yes, indeed.” And he gazed long and hard at the drawing he now added to the collection on the table before him.

  Bob, sitting next to him, leaned across to look; retiring, baffled, almost at once. Yet Delphick appeared delighted with the results of Miss Seeton’s most recent labours: goodness only knew why, mused Detective Sergeant Ranger. He leaned across again, and stared harder: it made little more sense to him, for all the Oracle’s evident gloating, than it had done before.

  Miss Seeton had sketched in a high wall, as of a great house, with windows far above the ground, and storm clouds gathering overhead—clouds from which oblong drops were falling. But not drops of rain—not with numbers written on them like so many . . . raffle tickets, thought Bob, with sudden realisation. Where Dr. Johnson came into it all, he had no idea, even if MissEss and the Oracle both seemed to know what they were talking about—and perhaps now the rest of it made a bit of sense, after all. It didn’t take any great brain to work out that she was probably referring to Raffles the Ransomeer in her sketch; so the figure on the ledge of one of the windows—no, leaning out of the window, on second thoughts—must be her interpretation of what was known of the Raffles method of thieving.
>
  Bob nodded, pleased with himself, and squinted across at the sketch yet again to see if he could beat the Oracle at his own game. Pretty dangerous, the method MissEss had shown: even more risky than usual. That rope hanging from the roof above the window looked as if it could hardly carry a child, let alone the full-sized adult—taller than average?—who appeared to have climbed down it. But what was the significance of the little brick-shaped objects piled in that neat pyramid on the sill of the neighbouring window? MissEss obviously thought they were important, from the way they were so clearly illuminated in the flash of lightning which was directed at one corner of the . . . yes, the Abbey, Bob decided. He glanced anxiously in Miss Seeton’s direction. Did everything she’d drawn go to suggest that, while the rest of his family were enjoying their adventures in the wintry Andes, Lord Edgar ought to prepare for the destruction of his home by fire?

  Delphick broke in gleefully upon his sergeant’s musings. “Miss Seeton, you have done us proud, as ever—as I knew you would. This,” and he tapped the sketch with his finger, “is just the ticket, I assure you. Especially when taken into account with your other drawings.” His smile was all the reassurance she needed that he meant what he said, and that she hadn’t been wasting his time. Pink with pleasure, Miss Seeton retired modestly into the background as the Oracle continued:

  “That neat little structure on the next-door shelf looks to me as if it is made either of very small bricks, exactly like those on the tray carried by Faulkbourne in this other picture. Very small bricks, or—or very small boxes, perhaps.” He paused. “Snuffboxes, at a guess . . .”

  Someone in the room caught their breath. Delphick could not tell who it had been: nor would he waste time trying to find out. Because now, with Miss Seeton’s help, he knew. “Raffles the Ransomeer,” he said, softly but with every syllable weighted. “He stole the Belton collection—as we all know . . . Or did he?”