Advantage Miss Seeton (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 7)

by Hampton Charles

  Advantage Miss Seeton

  A Miss Seeton Mystery

  Hampton Charles

  Series creator Heron Carvic

  FARRAGO

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Note from the Publisher

  Preview

  Also Available

  About the Miss Seeton series

  About Heron Carvic and Hampton Charles

  Copyright

  Dedication

  For Melinda Metz,

  and with a respectful nod and wink

  to the shade of Heron Carvic

  chapter

  ~1~

  “DON’T do THAT!” Thrudd Banner yelped as his companion dug her elbow into his ribs. “If you make me drop this lens I swear I’ll send you the bill for a new one. I’m a freelancer, remember? Have to pay for my own gear?” In his agitation he had to make two attempts before succeeding in getting the telephoto lens to click into place.

  Far from apologizing, Amelita Forby of the Daily Negative slowly and deliberately repeated the offense. “Pay attention when I poke you, buster,” she said. “Or I may go poke somebody more receptive. Look over there. See what I see?”

  The gesture she made with her right index finger was hardly perceptible, but it was clear enough to Thrudd, who glanced in the direction indicated. His eyes flickered from side to side for a second or two. Then he sat very still, and a smile gradually replaced his look of irritation. “Well, I’ll go to the foot of our stairs!” he murmured eventually. “Miss Emily D. Seeton, as I live and breathe. Now what in the world is she doing here, d’you reckon? And the others? Some kind of a parish outing? That’s the vicar, I can tell by his dog collar.”

  Mel favored him with a parody of an adoring smile and fluttered her eyelashes. “Gosh, you’re so brilliant. It’s the way you seize on these practically imperceptible clues that gets me. By crikey, you have to get up early in the morning to hoodwink Scoop Banner, the journo with the X-ray eyes!”

  “Shut up,” Thrudd suggested genially. “Don’t think they’ve spotted us yet, too many other rubberneckers milling about. Do we go over and say hello, or what?”

  “Not yet.” Grasping him firmly by one forearm, Mel towed him out of sight behind a convenient tree. “I’ve got a better idea. They’re heading for the temporary seating. In a minute we’ll nip round the back and get into the scaffolding frame underneath them. Because what we’re going to do is eavesdrop. I feel a delightful little vignette for the Saturday edition coming on. Along the lines of a much-praised piece I did last month about minor country gentry up for the Chelsea Flower Show. This way I’ll be able to lace it with authentic dialogue.”

  Thrudd pulled a face. “Not sure that’s quite fair, Mel. They’re by way of being friends of ours, and, well, it might be a private conversation—”

  “Private codswallop! People don’t come and sit in a crowd to watch two top women tennis players and then get involved in a private conversation. Politely goofy nonsense is what I’m after, and take it from me, that’s all there’ll be on offer.”

  Nigel Colveden was the effective shepherd of the little flock from Plummergen in Kent, and he was taking his responsibilities as seriously as his enraptured state permitted. In practice this meant that from time to time he turned, beaming fatuously, to make sure that the Reverend Arthur Treeves, Miss Molly Treeves, and Miss Emily Seeton were following him into the extra banks of seating which had been squeezed into the confines of the principal tennis court to accommodate as many spectators as possible. It was a lovely afternoon, and though the streets of London were hot, dusty, and smelled of exhaust fumes, the spacious grounds of the Hurlingham Club were, as the vicar had just aptly put it, a veritable rus in urbe.

  The prospect of watching some world-class tennis had drawn a considerable crowd, but was nevertheless far from dominating the consciousness of any one of the Plummergen quartet. Nigel himself had little interest in the game for its own sake, but was deeply in love with the rising young English star Trish Thumper, who was due to begin a singles match against the formidable American Nancy Wiesendonck at two-thirty.

  Nigel had recognized the truth about his feelings at four fifty-three in the afternoon of the Thursday of the previous week, about an hour and twenty minutes after meeting Trish for the first time. Being young, chivalrous, and naive, he attributed his present euphoria simply to the delightful awareness that he would in a few minutes be able to feast his eyes on his beloved again. The less ethereal thought that she would on this occasion be wearing a tennis dress so short that it would permit frequent glimpses of what could well turn out to be frilly panties underneath was buried deep in his subconscious mind.

  Miss Molly Treeves was recapitulating in her mind the arguments Mrs. Skinner had deployed that morning in support of her contention that it was Mrs. Henderson’s turn to see to the flowers in church three Sundays hence and not hers, and her own brisk demolition of Mrs. Skinner’s case. Her satisfaction was marred only by a nagging uncertainty as to whether she had remembered to switch off the electric iron before leaving the vicarage.

  Her brother, having contributed his thoughts on the subject of the attractions of the lawns and pleasances provided for the delectation of members of the Hurlingham Club and their guests, had retreated into a reverie about the Pelagian heresy, his favorite. Mr. Treeves thought he could very probably come to some sort of conscientious arrangement with Pelagianism, but doubted if his own circumstances were such that it was technically possible for him to become a heretic.

  The go-ahead Suffragan Bishop of Greenwich had quite recently stressed, not for the first time, that whatever an ordained priest’s state of mind he remained a bona fide clerk in Holy Orders, but Mr. Treeves remained unconvinced. For he had woken up one morning some years earlier to the realization that his trouble wasn’t so much a matter of problems with a few of the Thirty-Nine Articles as of not believing a single word of the whole kit and caboodle of Christianity. It was confusing therefore that nobody except himself seemed to care. The bishop seemed quite unconcerned, none of the parishioners in Plummergen appeared to have noticed anything amiss, and Molly, in whom he had on one occasion timidly confided, had simply snorted and told him to pull himself together and fetch a jar of bottled greengages from the larder.

  Compared with those of her companions, Miss Seeton’s thoughts were on a lower plane altogether. She was certainly not in love. In her young days there had been times when Cupid had taken aim at her heart, and she cherished a few tender and very private memories which just now and then she retrieved and, as it were, lovingly dusted off and polished. So she could understand and sympathize with the personal problems of others, but it had been many years since she had last experienced emotional perturbation on her own account.

  Nor was she troubled by religious doubts. Her occasional participation in the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England was for Miss Seeton a matter of good manners, involving neither intellectual conundrums nor crises of conscience. Unlike Mrs. Skinner, she neither knew nor cared when it was her turn to
do the flowers in the church, but simply buckled to whenever so instructed by Miss Treeves.

  Finally, and thanks to Mrs. Martha Bloomer who did for her so splendidly, Miss Seeton never had to ask herself whether she had inadvertently left the oven or the electric iron on. What Miss Seeton was in fact wondering, as she made her way to the seat indicated by Nigel Colveden, was why her valued friends and resourceful allies Miss Forby and Mr. Banner had crept away and concealed themselves behind a tree, in what could only be thought of as a surreptitious manner. A serene little smile on her face, she pondered possible explanations for their odd behavior.

  Mr. Banner and Miss Forby were, of course, important and busy people who each no doubt had professional reasons to be at the Hurlingham Club: Mr. Banner to concern himself with the foreigners, and Miss Forby perhaps to interview one or another of the famous women players involved in exhibition matches that day. It might well be that their time was at such a premium that they could not afford to stand and chat, and that they had therefore decided it would be the courteous thing to pretend not to have seen her.

  Yes, that was the most likely thing. Nigel had explained on the train from Brettenden—so kind of Lady Colveden to have driven them all to the station from Plummergen—that both Nancy Wiesendonck and her English rival were currently the object of a great deal of press interest. As presumably were others of the contenders due to participate in the Wimbledon championship matches later in the month.

  Dear Nigel, such a susceptible boy, had spoken almost exclusively about Trish Thumper, and had no idea whether or not her opponent owed her unusual surname to some family connection with the Mathilde Wesendonk who had been Richard Wagner’s . . . well, friend. And Miss Thumper was undoubtedly a fine, healthy young woman, in spite of the fact that neither of her parents seemed to be blessed with robust constitutions. But then the atmosphere in the Old Bailey was probably far from salubrious, and Sir Wilfred very likely picked up all manner of mild infections there and passed them on to his wife.

  Mr. Justice Thumper. What an unfortunate name . . . and oh dear, how silly one had been as a child, imagining that senior judges just happened all to have been given the uplifting Christian name “Justice” when they were babies, rather as girls of earlier generations had been called Mercy, or Charity. And that if a little boy’s name was Justice he might well grow up with the idea of studying the law rather than wishing to become an engine driver or a fireman. But then one had been confused by so many things at that age, innocently wondering for example why so many journalists became involved in divorce cases, because all the men who behaved badly seemed to be described in the newspapers as “corespondents”.

  “I’m so sorry, Vicar. I was daydreaming and didn’t quite catch what you said.”

  Seated on Miss Seeton’s right, Mr. Treeves smiled at her with pleasure. He was so often in a similar position vis-a-vis his sister Molly, and it was comforting to encounter a kindred spirit.

  “It is I who should apologize, for having disturbed you. I merely wished to point out that Sir Wilfred and Lady Thumper have just arrived. They are seated two, no, three rows below us, and some distance away to our left. How kind it was of the Colvedens to invite us to tea to meet them last week. And, of course, their gifted and charming daughter Patricia who so generously provided our tickets for today. We should on this occasion refer to her by her professional name, I suppose, though I take leave to doubt whether Sir Wilfred would think it desirable.” The vicar sighed enviously. “It is rare to encounter a man of such, er, firm principles.”

  “Indeed it is. One feels confident that he enjoys his work.”

  “And he and Sir George have been friends since boyhood, it seems. Former schoolmates who have both achieved distinction in their respective walks of life. In fact, I gathered from their conversation that the judge is the younger of the two. By three or four years, and that he had to perform various menial tasks for his senior. Making his toast, cleaning his shoes, and so on.”

  “Fag!” Miss Seeton announced unexpectedly and in a clear, carrying voice just as Mel Forby and Thrudd Banner arrived underneath her. “That is the word I have been searching for. Imagine the dignified and unbending Mr. Justice Thumper being a fag, Vicar. Can you credit it?”

  “It does require a considerable effort of the imagination, certainly. But I assure you that I have it on Sir George Colveden’s own authority . . .”

  The rest of whatever Mr. Treeves had to say was lost in a great surge of applause as the players entered the court. Mel and Thrudd gaped at each other in silent stupefaction for several seconds, and then picked their way out of the forest of scaffolding. Thrudd was the first to recover the power of speech. “You did hear what I heard? Miss S. and the vicar agreeing that Trish Thumper’s old man’s a fag?”

  “That’s what I heard all right.” Amelita (née Amelia) Forby was a native of Liverpool, and a child of the people. She had learned a great deal about the ways of the upper classes since becoming first a fashion writer and in more recent years the Daily Negative’s star woman columnist, but was too young to have heard of the defunct fagging system which formerly prevailed in most of England’s great boarding schools.

  So was Thrudd Banner, to whom also the word “fag” meant only one thing. Well, two actually, because he remembered his father using it to mean a cheap cigarette. “Good grief. What was that you said about politely goofy nonsense? You sure as hell won’t be able to use that fragment of dialogue in your column, sweetheart. Old Thumper’s the most notorious old brute in the business.”

  This was true. Mr. Justice Thumper was what until the abolition—which he deplored—of capital punishment had been called a hanging judge. His homilies from the bench were of a moral severity that might have been thought extreme even by a congregation listening in the kirk to a sermon by an unusually dour Scottish preacher. His Lordship did not when passing sentence on those found guilty refer explicitly to hell and damnation, but sensitive persons present in court tended to sniff the air uneasily as if to catch the odor of brimstone.

  It occasionally happened that in spite of the judge’s frequent acid interventions, defense counsel managed to persuade a jury that the accused was innocent. In such cases Mr. Justice Thumper had no option but to discharge the prisoner from the dock, but in doing so he generally contrived to imply that there was no smoke without fire, and that whatever the jurors had decided, the person before him was a pretty miserable specimen anyway who ought to pull himself together.

  For these reasons, Sir Wilfred Thumper was a man the popular newspapers loved to hate, and they reported his more colorful remarks with zest. “Thumper Rays Do-Gooders,” a headline might shriek, or “Jail These Welfare Fiddlers, Says Judge.” So long as his talented daughter Patricia was just one among dozens of young tennis hopefuls, she escaped the attentions of the press, but by the time she was fifteen she had emerged from the ruck as a junior champion. Her wicked backhand was her particular strength, and she was being admiringly referred to in the sports pages as “Trish The Tigress” or simply “The Young Thumper.” Now that she was at nineteen being tipped as the girl who might within a few years upset the likes of Ann Jones or even Billie Jean King, sports writers and subeditors were vying with each other in making bad puns on her name and the notorious reputation of her eminent father.

  Mel Forby and Thrudd Banner stayed where they were and went on discussing the overheard exchange between Miss Seeton and the vicar for some minutes. Other people were coming and going behind the bank of temporary seating, because Trish Thumper and Nancy Wiesendonck were warming up and the match proper had yet to begin. They had therefore no reason to suppose that they were making themselves conspicuous, or objects of interest. Neither of them noticed the wiry, ferret-faced man nearby who seemed to be having trouble with one of his shoelaces.

  chapter

  ~2~

  “OH, THE usual I should imagine, sir. All the works that are done under the sun, as Ecclesiastes so neatly put it. And th
e sun does have a habit of reporting for duty during Wimbledon fortnight. Ticket touts, pickpockets, dirty old men touching up young girls in the crowd. Vanity and vexation of spirit enough, but nothing the local divisional chaps haven’t had plenty of practice in handling over the years.”

  As he spoke, Chief Superintendent Delphick studied his superior’s expression with care. It wasn’t like the Assistant Commissioner (Crime) to concern himself personally with the grubby froth of petty villainy that washed about the edges of the sea of serious illegality they normally spent their time charting.

  “Quite,” Sir Hubert Everleigh said, a little testily because he envied The Oracle his apparently effortless skill in producing apt quotations. “What about the VIPs, though? How much thought’s given to their security?”

  “With respect, sir, you’re almost certainly better informed than I am about that. The duke of Kent’ll no doubt attend several times, being the new president, and presumably he’ll have the usual protection. As will the duchess and any other royals or top politicians who decide to go.”

  “Yes, yes, of course, that goes without saying. Wasn’t thinking about them, though. The players, Delphick. Since they let the professionals in and started offering prize money a couple of years back, the whole thing has become—”

  “A different ball game, sir?”

  “Don’t try me too far, Chief Superintendent.” Everleigh harrumphed to disguise a chuckle. “But as a matter of fact, that’s literally true. Some of the participants are now very valuable in the strict financial sense. Like racehorses. And people do gamble on the results. Might occur to somebody to try to nobble a fancied contender. Or kidnap one.”

  Delphick was impressed. The thought had not previously entered his head, and he had to admit that old Sir Heavily had a point. “That’s a solemn thought, sir. Though I’m bound to say that any misguided kidnapper who tried to snatch Rod Laver or Ken Rosewall would probably get more than he bargained for. The women on the other hand . . .”