Miss Seeton Rules (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 18)

by Hamilton Crane

  Which intelligence had come as a surprise to Emmy Putts, a regular and appreciative recipient of much bluff naval gallantry whenever the admiral entered the post office, or encountered her outside it. Emmy had been sworn to secrecy by her mother about this aspect of the story.

  The admiral had been delighted to offer Mrs. Putts—he hastily begged her pardon, to offer on her daughter’s behalf—not one, but two jars of honey, along with the chance to watch his bees at their work. A quiet time, October, but interesting, he was sure she’d agree, if she cared to accompany him; which Mrs. Putts, prepared to sell her honour dear, was happy to do. Around the side of the admiral’s house went Mrs. Putts in the admiral’s wake, hearing him talk with eloquence of brood chambers, and queens, and sugar syrup; and hearing also, as the pair neared the far end of the garden where the four hives were set on their brick-and-wood stands, the unmistakable and energetic sound of digging from over the fence.

  The admiral heard it, too, and paused. Was not one of the traditional naval toasts “Sweethearts and wives”? The ladies, God bless ’em, shouldn’t really be burdened with the heavy work—though he’d always understood his neighbours to have tended their topsoil so well that it as good as looked after itself.

  But the rhythmic chink of spade on stone, the thud of falling soil, still floated over the fence separating Ararat Cottage, home of the Buzzard, from the little house next door. It sounded like very hard work indeed; and—with Mrs. Putts by his side—the admiral popped his head over the top of the fence to enquire:

  “Need any help there, Miss Nuttel?”

  Erica Nuttel, knee-deep in orange subsoil, and breathing hard, shook her head without speaking. The admiral regarded her with kindly interest.

  Mrs. Putts stared with blatant curiosity, and proved the weaker of the two. “My goodness, Miss Nuttel, whatever d’you want with such a great big hole? You’ll not be planting a tree so deep, all clay and stones as it is.”

  “No,” agreed Miss Nuttel, and dug on.

  Mrs. Putts suffered in silence for a while, then coughed.

  “We’re on the main drainage, so it can’t surely be a new septic tank,” she said, in a pleading tone.

  “No,” said Miss Nuttel, digging yet deeper.

  “Another well, maybe?” The Nuts, when they had first arrived in Plummergen, had employed the services of a water-diviner to find them a spring, and had sunk their own well, insisting that tap water was full of who-knew-what unhealthy chemicals.

  “No,” said Miss Nuttel, by now almost invisible behind an upthrown pile of sticky clay.

  “Then what,” demanded Mrs. Putts, who could bear this no longer, “do you want that hole for, Miss Nuttel?”

  And Miss Nuttel’s reply had sent—Clarissa Putts reported later to an enthralled Emmy—ice-cold shivers down her spine, as if she knew what dreadful fate had been foretold and yet could do nothing about it. Miss Nuttel had paused at last in her digging, and wiped an earthy hand across her brow, and uttered those three terrible words that had turned the heart of Clarrie Putts to water ...

  “For the body,” said Erica Nuttel.

  chapter

  ~ 3 ~

  ALTHOUGH CIRCULATION OF the Brettenden Beacon was not high in the Plummergen area, there were still those who read the newspaper every week in great detail, down to the Notices of Bankruptcy, Auctions, and Planning Applications. One of these was Martin Jessyp, efficient headmaster of the little village school; and, on the afternoon of the day on which the visit of Princess Georgina had been announced, he had gone into lengthy consultation with his deputy, Miss Alice Maynard, on the subject of Nuclear Power.

  It was not, of course, that they wished to encourage the spirit of feuding which any mention of Murreystone was sure to inflame. If, on the other hand, there was a competition open to all local children, neither he nor Alice saw any good reason why a Plummergen child should not win it, fair and square, given sufficient encouragement and help. Early on Saturday morning, therefore, he gave Miss Maynard a lift into Brettenden. The two entered the public lending library with enthusiasm and stout canvas bags, and borrowed as many books on Energy as they could find.

  They spent an industrious and productive weekend in their respective cottages, making notes, planning lessons. And on Monday morning, after Assembly, the fifty-odd pupils of Plummergen School gathered, Bigguns and Tiddlers amongst themselves but Junior Mixed Infants to the authorities, in their appointed classrooms for initiation into the mysteries which their forthcoming trip to Dungeness D would reveal in even greater depth.

  “What is Energy?” chalked Miss Maynard, at the top of the blackboard; and, underneath, wrote as she spoke that it was the ability of matter to move, to change. It was the power of something—anything—to work, to perform. Without the energy they had that breakfast-time consumed in the form of food, none of them would have been able to walk to school afterwards, especially on such a blustery day.

  “Pity we had breakfast, then,” muttered someone with a sideways elbow-dig into the ribs of his neighbour. “Fancy a day off school, I do.”

  His neighbour sniggered, and Miss Maynard, whose hearing was acute, smiled in sympathy while she shook her head. She herself, she pointed out, liked Monday mornings no better than anyone else: unfortunately, just as there was little that could be done about the weather, there was little that could be done about Monday mornings.

  “Except,” she added, “to make them more interesting, perhaps. I thought we would start today’s lesson with some experiments to blow away any weekend cobwebs that the wind hasn’t already blown away. Now, who’s going to volunteer to bring some water from the cloakroom?”

  Every hand shot up as Miss Maynard took a white enamel jug from behind the desk, and held it aloft. She studied the twenty eager faces turned towards her. “Thank you, Paul. As full as you can comfortably carry it, please—you aren’t to go straining yourself.”

  Young Paul jumped to his feet, hurried to take the jug from Alice’s hands, and trotted away to the cloakroom while Miss Maynard produced three matchboxes, some rubber bands, a stout pair of scissors, and an empty plastic bottle of the squeezy sort which holds dish-washing detergent.

  Three children were chosen to wield the scissors turn and turn about. Christopher cut the top off the detergent bottle, Rachel removed the base, and Laura sliced it down the middle. Sally opened it out and tried to flatten it, so that it lay, a curving rectangle, rocking to and fro on Miss Maynard’s desk as Paul reappeared, bright-eyed and slightly out of breath, with water splashing over the blue rim of the jug, assuring Alice that it hadn’t been a bit too heavy, Miss, honest.

  “Thank you. And now,” said Miss Maynard, with a quiver in her voice, “I believe that Miss Seeton left a large bowl here after the Conker Contest, didn’t she? Gemma, could you fetch it for me, please?”

  Tactfully, Alice ignored the ripple of laughter which ran around the twenty Tiddlers, and Lizzie’s ritual moaning for the playground loss of her twenty-oncer in the bout with Rachel’s seventeener, the memory of which contest made her friends snigger all the more ...

  Unless, reflected Alice Maynard, they were giggling—and who could, in honesty, blame them?—at the memory of cheating Murreystone’s defeat in the official inter-village Conker Contest. Even Miss Seeton’s patent soaking mixture, disclosed to the village through the courtesy of her friend Miss Wicks, had not been proof against perfidious Murreystone’s use of, not honestly-hardened horse chestnuts, but the more devious painted pebble which only the quick eye of Nigel Colveden had observed. The resulting fracas, of which young Plummergen had been an enthusiastic audience, would live long in village legend ...

  “Thank you, Gemma. Paul, would you fill the bowl with water? Thank you. Now, children, you are too young to use matches, and so ...”

  The Tiddlers of Plummergen range in age from Under Five to Over Seven. Miss Maynard was taking no chances, although she imagined that Mr. Jessyp, teaching the Bigguns (Between Eight and Eleven), wo
uld allow his class to carry out this part of the energy experiment, supervised, themselves.

  Alice emptied out all the matches, then struck six into flame, and allowed six different children to extinguish them with hearty puffs. More children, following her instructions, inserted the dead matches into the ends of the boxes, one on either side; others ruled and measured on the white curved plastic for still more to cut three small rectangles, while rubber bands were fastened between the protruding matches, followed by the insertion of one white rectangle and its repeated twisting until each rubber band was taut.

  The tiny motors thus primed, Miss Maynard took upon herself the honour of launching the first paddle-boat on young Paul’s mixing-bowl pond, with Christopher and Rachel next, the envy of their friends: but all, they knew, would have their fair turn—as they did.

  “And that,” said Miss Maynard, as Paul’s matchbox craft beat Lizzie’s in the final race, “is only one sort of energy—one sort of power. There are, as you will see, a great many others even before we come to nuclear power.”

  From egg-boxes cut into segments, fastened between two circles of cardboard spinning around a central nail, they made a tiny water-wheel, suspended on string beneath Paul’s pouring jug, varying its speed with the speed of his pouring. Wrapping a length of coated flex around a pocket compass, fixing the ends to steel nails stuck in a potato, they made a flicker of electricity. Christopher, trying not to laugh, with much heavy breathing blew up a balloon, then rubbed it repeatedly against his shirt-front before sticking it in triumph to the wall, indisputable proof of the power of static electricity ...

  “And this will be for when we go outside at break time.” Miss Maynard, with a smile, produced from her canvas bag two lengths of balsa wood, a long metal knitting-needle, another washing-up bottle, a collection of small stones for weight, and four disposable paper cups.

  “Very suitable,” said Miss Maynard, “on such a blustery day. We couldn’t have asked for anything better. We are going to make a turbine to show how wind power works ...”

  The wind, reflected Miss Seeton, was certainly powerful. It was as well that there was no sign of rain, for the risk of having one’s umbrella blown inside out must be very great—so great, indeed, that there had been no question of taking one’s best umbrella, in case it should be damaged.

  Miss Seeton’s best umbrella was one of her proudest possessions. Of fine black silk, it had a sensible crook handle rather than a knob, or a strap: and that handle, with part of the shaft, was indeed—the proud owner would tell the astonished enquirer—made of gold.

  “Not solid gold, of course,” she would add, fearing to be thought ostentatious, and blushing for the very idea that anyone might suppose her to have caused any added expense to the courteous gentleman who had given her so generous and rare a gift all those years ago. Detective Superintendent—as he had then been—Delphick, one assumed, although of course one would never have been so impertinent as to ask the question direct, had at that time surely not been paid the sort of salary which would allow him to distribute gold-handled umbrellas to anyone he chose, even if perhaps, since his most gratifying promotion, he now might be. Not—Miss Seeton would further explain, paying tribute—that the handle was gold plated, either. One would not wish to give the impression that dear Mr. Delphick might have been, well, deceitful, or stingy. The handle was of real gold—though admittedly hollow—but it had been hallmarked for proof by the Royal Mint, or by whoever it was who had stamped those tiny official numbers and symbols in an unobtrusive place.

  “A—a token, that is to say a reminder, of a—a little adventure we shared,” the explanation would continue, if the enquiry was pursued; and Miss Seeton would blush once more. “The superintendent was kind enough to say that I had been of—of some assistance to him, and ...”

  And Miss Seeton’s voice would tail modestly away as she smiled, sighed, and gently changed the subject.

  Miss Seeton has no call to be so modest. Chief Superintendent Delphick would be the first to admit that, without her help, Scotland Yard could never have solved the vicious Covent Garden knifing of a prostitute by her drug-dealing colleague, the infamous Cesar Lebel. The breaking of even part of a drugs ring by the forces of law and order has to be a cause for some celebration; the capture of a murderer, effected mainly through the innocent offices of a retired schoolteacher, has to be a triumph.

  In Miss Seeton’s case, the triumph is regarded by everyone else as miraculous, while by Miss Seeton herself—and not entirely through the little spinster’s innate humility—it is, to say the least, misunderstood. Gentlewomen, Miss Seeton knows full well, do not have adventures: therefore she, Emily Dorothea Seeton, does not have them. No matter that, by poking one or other of her many brollies into whatever criminal hornets’ nest she might encounter as she goes on her unconscious way, she not only stirs the hornets into confusion, leading to their ultimate capture, but somehow also contrives to blunt their stings before such capture is effected, thereby making the job of the police a good deal easier than they would otherwise expect it to be; no matter that the police have in the past found such poking and stirring to be of so incomparable a kind that Miss Seeton has been co-opted as a consultant into the force ... Miss Seeton hardly ever realises that she has poked, stirred, and blunted, and certainly never appreciates that her actions have been so productive for good, pleasing though the intelligence would be should anyone ever induce her to accept it. Though she was trained, and for many years practised, as a teacher of art, Miss Seeton cannot—does not allow herself to—see what others see ...

  And yet it is for the peculiar—the unique—character of her Seeing that Miss Seeton is so valued by the police. The very title of her official position—like the lady herself, unique—reveals her true worth and purpose. She is retained, and paid, by the Yard as an Art Consultant, liable to be called on by her constabulary colleagues whenever they encounter a case of an unusual, irregular, or outré nature. As some fight fire with fire, so the police confront the unusual with the unique ...

  Miss Seeton, on the odd occasions when she takes time to consider the matter, thinks of her appointment as that of an IdentiKit artist. She believes that the meticulous, detailed, and—in the eyes of everyone else—dull drawings she makes of witnesses, scenes of the crime, or certain items of evidence, are required only because the IdentiKit system has, for some reason, on that occasion broken down. Perhaps the Kit has been mislaid, or the operating officer—Miss Seeton is hazy as to details—is for some reason absent from work. In such circumstances, why should someone with a little skill in sketching not be called upon to sketch?

  And sketch she does, in painstaking line and shade and hatching, doing no more than a camera could do, and doing it far more slowly: which slow sketches are as much use to the police as a broken umbrella would be to Miss Seeton. But when Miss Seeton’s eye Sees as no other eye can see—when eye signals brain to set hand swooping across the pristine page in swift and instinctive movement—when the resulting doodle, cartoon, call it what you will, makes Miss Seeton blush for having Seen beyond what is there, for having taken the type of imaginative liberties only permitted to genius, which she sadly knows herself not to possess ... it is then that those who can interpret her work—which she has always to be coaxed into showing, blushing for what she regards as her frivolity as well as for her lack of talent—it is then that those who interpret her work use their interpretation, reluctant though it at first may be to reveal itself, to clear a welcome path through the perplexing tangle of nefarious branches to the final resolution of the crime.

  It was in gratitude for having presented him with Cesar Lebel, and his associates, gift-wrapped on toast that Superintendent Delphick had in turn presented Miss Seeton with her gold-handled, black silk umbrella. It was after the umbrella had been damaged during a contretemps with a member of an unorthodox and sinister cult—who, pursuing its owner up a ladder with homicidal intent, had in innocent retaliation been bombarded
to a well-deserved demise by brolly and handbag and borrowed coat together—it was after this that the suggestion was made by Ashford’s Superintendent Brinton, friend to Delphick of the Yard, that Miss Seeton should keep her gold umbrella for comparatively safe occasions, such as afternoon tea with friends; which suggestion Miss Seeton, fearing to risk further damage to her treasured trophy, followed as closely as she could.

  On such a blustery day, therefore, it was one of her second-best brollies that Miss Seeton took with her as she hurried up The Street to catch the post. The wind seemed to have died down a little as she clicked shut her gate and headed north from her cottage to the red letter-box in Mr. Stillman’s wall. Clouds, grey and gust-ripped into shreds, were moving across the sky with rather more decorum than before; when a glimmer of autumn sunlight eventually peeped through, it managed to gleam for several minutes before being smothered again from sight. Stepping out more briskly than the wind was now blowing, Miss Seeton made for the post office, with her letters in the bag over one arm, her brolly over the other ...

  And with both hands, of necessity, in just the wrong position to make an upward grab when a sudden, sneaky gust of wind snatched her black felt hat from her head, and sent it bowling, skipping, curvetting up The Street ...

  With Miss Seeton, after one little cry of startled vexation, in hot pursuit not very far behind.

  chapter

  ~ 4 ~

  MRS. BLAINE FORGOT that she was barely on speaking terms with Miss Nuttel.

  “Oh, Eric, do come quick! Just look,” commanded Norah Blaine, “out of the window. It’s really too ridiculous, at her age, making a spectacle of herself in front of the whole village.”

  Miss Nuttel peered out through the white net curtains to the world beyond. “Undignified,” she agreed, at the sight of Miss Seeton sprinting, bag and brolly bouncing as she ran, after her errant headpiece. “Sets a bad example.”