“I’m afraid the packet’s gone for a burton, sir. Burst its sides and fit for nothing—I’ll bin it, shall I? But a bit of a dust-off and the mints should be okay.”
“Throw away the lot,” growled Brinton. “Then throw your own damfool self after ’em! It’s time I traded you in for something easier on the eye, laddie—high time,” as Foxon, risking a discreet grin, rose to his feet. “Why I’ve put up with you all these years, I’ll never know ...”
Foxon carefully readjusted the knees of his trousers to their former knife-edged elegance before folding down the flap of the envelope, crumpling the torn packet, and heading for the waste-paper basket. Its grey metal mouth yawned greedily as he held his booty directly above. “Could be the the contrast, sir,” he ventured. The basket clanged. “Opposites attract, and all that. Me with my dress-sense, and you ... well, yours is very different, sir, you’ve said so yourself. And there’s you with all your experience of police work, sir, compared to me hardly off the bottom rung of the ladder—”
“If that’s a reminder you’ve had thoughts about putting in for sergeant, you’ve picked a bad time for it.” Brinton sighed, then absently pulled open the drawer of his desk to grope within. Somewhere, he knew, was his emergency packet: not that triple strength was anything like strong enough, though. Nowhere near it, when a man with his worries had worries like his ...
“Oh, sit down and stop hovering!” His fingers had found cellophane at last, and he relaxed as he drew the packet out and tore the top open. “It’s bad enough waiting for news, without having you prance about the place like some blasted grasshopper in that godawful outfit ...”
Foxon’s choice of shirt that day had been a rich emerald paisley, adorned by a burnt-orange tie striped with gold. His trousers were not only flared, but pale green; and there had been a Gala Dinner the previous night which the hapless superintendent had been obliged, in the course of his professional duties, to attend. The early-morning combination of a hangover and Foxon’s spritely sense of colour had been altogether too much for the choleric Chris Brinton, though he had managed to suppress the full majesty of his wrath until the young constable had dared to tempt fate by speaking the unmentionable name ...
But now, with peppermint soothing his savage breast, it was Brinton himself who mentioned Miss Seeton. “I should think,” he said, replying to Foxon’s not-so-innocent remark of ten minutes earlier, “she’s having a whale of a time, if I know women. Hobnobbing with the bluest blood, best bib and tucker ...” Then he grimaced. “With a swanky titfer to top the lot, of course. I’ve no idea why females will have a new hat whenever there’s anything special going on, but they always do—and it doesn’t come cheap, Foxon, believe me.” Mrs Brinton, like many of the local ladies, was a frequent—their loving husbands would say far too frequent—customer of Monica Mary Brown, Brettenden’s renowned, and expensive, milliner. “Thank heavens Maggie Laver’s gone in uniform. I shudder to think what the bill’d’ve been for her to do the plainclothes bit ...”
The words reminded him of his first sight of Detective Constable Foxon’s plain clothes. For the second time he closed his eyes, groaned softly, and shuddered.
Foxon grinned. “Fetch you some coffee, sir, if you like.” His voice was that of one wise in the ways of alcohol and its after-effects. “Black with two sugars’d do you best. Tone up your system for you nicely, that would. Give you, um, pep, sir—”
He broke off, looked at Brinton, and grinned even more broadly. “Well, it’d keep you going for an hour or so, anyway. Want some?”
“I don’t want toning.” Brinton’s eyes were still shut. “I don’t want pepping. The only going I want to do is home to bed, and the only want I have apart from that is for a nice, peaceful existence—”
The telephone’s sudden jangle drowned out the rest of his wants as it woke him from his daydream. He opened his eyes, uttered a curse, and grabbed for the receiver with one hand while his other reached automatically for a pencil.
“Brinton.” The telephone squawked in his ear. After no more than half-a-dozen words, the superintendent went rigid. “Dungeness? What’s wrong? Don’t tell me the blasted roads are snarled up and her precious Royal Highness is stuck in a jam somewhere, because—” Further, frantic squawking.
“Worse? You mean the girl’s been in an accident?” His eyes darted to the large-scale map on the opposite wall, then narrowed with irritation. “Either it is, or it isn’t. For heaven’s sake stop babbling, girl, and answer a straight question. Is the princess all right?”
The telephone was slow to respond, then squawked in a manner that was almost hesitant. Brinton let out an exasperated snort. “What the hell d’you mean, you don’t know? Call yourself a police officer when you can’t make a proper statement? Once and for all, what the blue blistering blazes has happened?”
The telephone seemed to take a very deep breath. Then it told him.
“Princess?” Brinton blinked. “Disappeared?” He glared at Foxon, who had been a fascinated eavesdropper of the one-sided conversation, and clapped a furious hand to his forehead. His fury was so great that he forgot to wince. “This is no time for jokes, Laver. How the hell can the princess have disappeared?”
In his ear, Woman Police Constable Maggie Laver’s voice rose to a wail. “I’m sorry, sir, I just don’t know. But—but she has, sir. Gone, I mean. She just ... vanished. Sir, she’s c-completely disappeared ...”
Now that Brinton had heard the worst for the second time, he was prepared to believe it. He became the epitome of professional calm to anyone who could not see him, though Foxon observed, with some alarm, that his face had already begun to turn purple. “Stop keening like that, Constable, and take a deep breath, and start again from the beginning. How long ago did this—this disappearance take place? And how”—the calm was starting to fray around the edges—“the hell did it happen?”
As Maggie Laver told him, Foxon—who’d been frozen into immobility at his chiefs first words—shook himself out of his stupor and headed for the extension on his own desk. He had just reached for the receiver when he dropped it back on the cradle at Brinton’s startled bellow.
“What?” roared the superintendent. The walls of the office thrummed. The central light began dancing on its flex. “Miss Seeton?”
And then, through gritted teeth, he added grimly:
“I might have known ...”
“I don’t care where he’s gone, or who he’s with, or how big the blasted building is.” Brinton’s tone left no room for argument. “Find him—and find him fast. Tell him if he’s ever had an emergency to deal with, this is an emergency with bells on—and no,” as the switchboard at Scotland Yard tried a little discreet pumping, “I’m not telling you what this is all about. Just you get me Chief Superintendent Delphick on the line, pronto—and you needn’t bother,” bitterly, “listening in, my lad. You’ll find out soon enough, believe me.”
The switchboard recognised the voice of a superior under considerable stress, and permitted itself only the briefest mutter of wounded feelings before asking Brinton if he’d mind hanging on again while various extensions were tried—
“Can’t you put out something over the public address system? You must have one, for heaven’s sake. Or send out a search party—a dozen search parties!” Brinton knew how many floors there were in New Scotland Yard. He could guess how many offices there must be, hidden behind so many windows; and he hadn’t realised, until he’d been put through and had to suffer the long, hollow ring of an unanswered telephone, just how much he’d counted on Delphick’s being there when needed. “Take a look in the canteen, for a start. Ask if anybody’s ceiling’s buckling under the weight of young Ranger on the floor above—the lad’s with the Oracle more often than not. At a pinch, he’ll do instead of Delphick—but it’s Delphick I really want. Now!”
“I’ll do the best I can, sir, but it may take some time. Would you like to give me your station number, and I’ll get him to call you bac
k when we’ve found him?”
Brinton spoke through gritted teeth. “No, I wouldn’t.” Even in this moment of crisis, he had sense enough to know that the very mention of the word Ashford would prompt the question “Middlesex, Derbyshire, Devon, or Kent?” And the “Kent” reply, coupled with the urgency of his request to speak with Delphick, would immediately alert the most dull-witted detective—and those were pretty thin on the ground at the Yard—that the crisis had something to do with the Oracle’s personal discovery, Miss Emily Dorothea Seeton ...
“Chris?” It seemed an eternity later that the welcome voice appeared on the other end of the line. Brinton was moved to groan aloud in sheer relief. “Delphick here, as if you didn’t know. You’ve been hunting for me high and low, after all: but why such heartfelt thanks to almighty powers? What’s up?”
Brinton groaned again, but even now did not fully abandon caution. “Anyone with you?”
“Detective Sergeant Ranger, of course; and the assistant commissioner. We’re in his office. Sir Hubert had summoned not a few of us to a meeting on the subject of terrorism, but everyone else”—did the oracular voice here quiver with faint amusement?—“has, ah, made his excuses, and run for cover. They—we—guessed that your cry for help was not unconnected with a certain, ah, lady of our acquaintance—and it seems,” as for the third time Brinton groaned, “that our guess was correct. It must be pretty serious, for you to have browbeaten the switchboard into interrupting a top-flight terrorism briefing—so tell me, Chris. What’s Miss Seeton done to upset you?”
In Ashford, Brinton could only gulp. He groaned; he gasped. He ran a hand around the collar of his shirt, took a deep breath—and gave up. He cast a pleading eye in the direction of Detective Constable Foxon, listening—at his chief’s command—on the extension; and even the normally ebullient Foxon could only respond in the most hesitant of tones.
“It—she—it’s not so much what MissEss has done to upset us, sir—well, I suppose she started it, so you could say she has—but it’s got to be some mistake, sir,” said Foxon, warming to his role as Miss Seeton’s champion. He’d had a soft spot for MissEss ever since the night (as she herself was wont to say, with a twinkle in her eye) they had spent together, in a disused church, looking for atmosphere and ending up in the middle of a full-blown Black Mass, with a witches’ coven thrown in for good (though he supposed he ought to say bad) measure. “It’s got to be! I mean, she’s not the sort to complain, never has been, but it’s bound to have upset her, being arrested like that—not that they had any choice, because—”
“Arrested? Miss Seeton?”
There came a series of clicks on the line as Sir Hubert Everleigh, Assistant Commissioner (Crime), followed at once—permission be damned—by Detective Sergeant Bob Ranger, snatched up telephone extensions and began to fire a volley of questions which deafened Delphick quite as much as those listening at the Ashford end.
The babble seemed to bring Brinton to his senses. “For the dear Lord’s sake, shut up!” In his wildest dreams he’d never imagined himself telling an ass. comm. from the Yard to shut up, but what’d happened now was one hell of a lot wilder than that, and if his pension suffered it was just too bad. “All right, Foxon, thanks,” as everyone subsided. “Yes, Oracle, arrested. Miss Seeton. And Foxon’s right, there was nothing else they could do, in the circumstances, but I agree with the lad, there’s got to be some mistake. That’s why I want you to come and sort it out, because I’m only a humble copper, and in a case like this—when I’m damned if I can understand the way she works, though she might even be of some use, because God only knows what other leads we’ve got to go on—”
“Chris!” Delphick’s desperate cry broke into Brinton’s torrent of explanation. “Take a deep breath,” he instructed, in an unconscious echo of Brinton’s earlier instructions to Woman Police Constable Laver. “Let’s start right at the beginning. You say Miss Seeton’s been arrested, and that the arresting officers had no choice. Why not? What’s the charge?”
“You aren’t going to believe this, Oracle. I can still hardly believe it myself.” Brinton drew in one of the deepest breaths of his life. “The charge ... the charge is ... treason.”
chapter
~ 12 ~
THE DISTANCE BETWEEN Scotland Yard, in London, and Ashford, in Kent, is—as the crow flies—about fifty miles. The distance between Ashford and Dungeness is just under twenty: but the roads are not as good. In such circumstances, it should have come as no great surprise to Superintendent Brinton that the vehicle bearing Chief Superintendent Delphick and his sergeant should arrive in the Ashford police station car park at almost exactly the same time as that bearing the bewildered, and unhappily handcuffed, form of Miss Emily Dorothea Seeton.
The cars might have parked around the back, but—since this was November—their passengers had to come in through the front door. The rear entrance only stood open during very hot weather, when even Desk Sergeant Mutford, a staunch member of Brettenden’s Holdfast Brethren, was prepared to yield Security to Comfort: open doors, although technically a potential risk, gave a through-draught which no number of electric fans could supply. Although Mutford was but seldom known to smile, a chilly day always gave him a slightly more cheerful aspect than one of scorching heat.
As the first arrivals pushed open the double doors, the sergeant looked up from the Occurrence Book, which he had been studying with the glum thoroughness of a man who always suspects the worst of his fellows, and has never yet been proved wrong.
“Ugh.” Mutford nodded his recognition of the newcomers, and raised a hand in slow salute. “A good day to you, Chief Superintendent.” Mere sergeants, being of equal rank with himself, did not deserve the honour of the greeting direct. Mutford simply nodded again as Bob passed by in Delphick’s wake, then turned back to the Occurrence Book and resumed his pessimistic perusal of its pages.
Within fifteen seconds, the double doors clanked open again. Mutford, the gleam in his eye announcing to the initiated that he was enjoying himself as much as a Holdfast Brother would ever admit to such a thing, glared across at the noise: and froze.
“Constable Laver! What may be the meaning of this, if I might enquire?” He frowned awfully at the wrists of the hapless Miss Seeton, handcuffed in front of her. Maggie Laver had hated having to use them, but without her promise that they would remain fastened until her charge had been handed over to a higher authority, the security forces would have insisted on whisking Miss Seeton away in an armoured van to a destination unknown.
“All wickedness,” said Mutford, in reproving tones, “is but little, Constable, to the wickedness of a woman. Ecclesiasticus Twenty-five, verse nineteen.”
“Oh, dear,” breathed Miss Seeton. “Oh, dear ...”
WPc Laver, with a toss of her head and a muttered “Take no notice of him, dear,” hurried Miss Seeton—she couldn’t think of her as the prisoner—past the desk and down the corridor in the direction of Superintendent Brinton’s room. Having favoured her charge with a sheepish grin, she knocked on the door, hearing at once Brinton’s bellow for her to come in, and quickly, if she was Maggie Laver—and, if she wasn’t, she could—
Constable Laver flung open the door before Brinton could say anything to fluster Miss Seeton any more than she’d already been flustered. “Miss Seeton, sir!” she announced, and ushered her charge gently inside.
Four pairs of masculine eyes fastened upon Miss Seeton and her uniformed escort.
“Oh, dear.” Miss Seeton would have wrung her hands, but the short chain of the cuffs wouldn’t let her. She lowered her gaze, her cheeks unusually pink, her brow furrowed in a look of helpless confusion. Delphick, Brinton, Foxon, and Bob couldn’t think when they’d last seen her look so lost: it must, they each independently decided, be because she was, for once, without her umbrella.
“Miss Seeton.” Delphick was the first to recover his wits; the first to rise from his seat to welcome her. “From what we’ve heard,” he said
, as Bob leaped to his feet to fetch a chair, and Brinton muttered to WPc Laver to take those blasted things off the poor woman’s wrists before the weight of them dragged her arms out of their sockets, “you have been”—he saw her anguished expression, and smoothly changed tack—“well, you have been ... somewhat in the thick of things today, haven’t you?”
Miss Seeton was the only person in the room not to marvel at the enormity of this masterly meiosis. Still blushing, she glanced up at the chief superintendent’s tone of—despite the undeniable gravity of the situation—faint amusement, and found herself relaxing, just a little, as she was coaxed towards the chair. As she sat down, Bob patted her on the shoulder, and gave her a reassuring wink out of the eye Brinton couldn’t see.
Miss Seeton took heart from the encouragement of her adopted nephew, and spoke in tones less trembling than might otherwise have been the case. “I’m—I’m rather afraid I have, Mr. Delphick, and I’m really very sorry, because I’m sure I never meant to. Poor Cousin Flora!” Miss Seeton sighed. “She would have been profoundly shocked, for they were some of her favourite beads and I only wear them for best, which in the circumstances—the princess, you know—I naturally considered ... oh, dear.” She gulped, and looked hastily away, her cheeks reddening, her hands, now free of their fetters, writhing on her lap.
“Oh, dear, indeed.” Yet Delphick—with some effort, admittedly—still contrived that his tone should be one of faint amusement, though from the frantic messages they’d been getting every five minutes from Buckingham Palace via the Yard and the security forces, he didn’t in all honesty see how anyone could find the present circumstances in the least degree amusing.
But seven years’ knowledge of Miss Seeton stood him, he believed, in excellent stead. Fluster her—browbeat and bully the poor woman, as he’d no doubt the MI5 people had done—handcuffs, indeed! If those hadn’t been Security’s daft idea, he’d happily surrender five years of his pension ... worry, confuse, upset her, and goodbye to any chance he or anyone else might have of harnessing her unique abilities to assist in solving this undoubtedly unique case. While the combined constabularies of Kent and neighbouring Sussex searched for clues; while squads of handpicked detectives and Intelligence men rushed down from London to interview known anarchists, communists, and similar subversives, he, the Oracle of Scotland Yard, watched the hands of the chief suspect dancing on her lap, and knew beyond any doubt that those hands held the key to the mystery. A key which could only be turned with great care ...
Miss Seeton Rules (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 18) Page 11
