Miss Seeton Rules (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 18)

by Hamilton Crane

  This was a young woman, petite but shapely, her hair a mass of bright curls, crowned with a jewelled tiara. The young woman’s face was instantly recognisable as that of Her Royal Highness Princess Georgina; her body—with one knee bent up, one arm resting to conceal her bosom—was discreetly, but completely, nude.

  Bob stared, blinked, and gulped. He was speechless. He stared again: there could be no doubt. The naked young woman was indeed Georgy Girl, the darling of the nation.

  “Tastefully done,” said Delphick at last. “No artful wisps of gauze or similar abominations—not that she needs them, of course. The pose, in itself, is quite unexceptionable—if somewhat surprising, given the subject.”

  “I’ll say,” muttered Bob. “I know she’s used to nudity—Aunt Em, I mean—life classes and all that—but ...”

  As words seemed to fail his subordinate, Delphick said: “But you appear to have paid rather less attention to the foreground of the picture. The hamper, the tablecloth, the food waiting to be eaten—the wine ...”

  The hamper, tablecloth, and food were more impressions than definite shapes. The bottle of wine, however, elegant and slim, was so sharply drawn that Bob almost felt he could read the letters on the label; and the glasses beside the bottle were diamond-bright crystal, not feeble flickers of light and shade. The wine ...

  Bob looked at Delphick. “That’s twice she’s made a—a feature of the booze, sir, with this, er, chap here holding the other bottle—but surely she can’t be trying to tell us young Georgy’s an alcoholic!”

  “I think not.” Delphick smiled. “I think not, indeed—though she is, of course, trying to tell us something—and I will hazard a guess as to what that something might be. Tell me, do you recognise this picture?”

  “You mean it’s a copy of a—a real picture, sir? Then I can’t say I do. Sorry.”

  “The, ah, real picture is itself, in a way, a copy—of an engraving by Raimondi, after Raphael. The Judgement of Paris—in the Metropolitan in New York, I believe. But the copy, as it were, is, unless I’m very much mistaken, Edouard Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’Herbe.”

  “Oh,” said Bob, who felt he ought to say something, even if he’d forgotten most of the French he ever knew. “Er—breakfast?” he hazarded and Delphick did not smile.

  “That’s petit dejeuner, Bob: literally, ’small luncheon.’ A good guess, though, since some people have large breakfasts, others have small luncheons: people’s appetites, as you should know more than most, vary enormously.”

  He smiled as he said this, and Bob had to grin. Anne often teased him that she cooked for three and ate for half, while he—more than twice her size—had the rest.

  “The original title would translate as Luncheon on the Grass,” said Delphick kindly. “Not that I imagine it’s so much the sylvan setting as the more casual nature of the meal which has caught Miss Seeton’s interest.” He sat up, his eyes bright. “The buffet, Bob—the dining arrangements laid on for the aftermath of Georgina’s visit. That’s where we must start our investigations, I fancy ...”

  Bob frowned. He couldn’t exactly see it himself—but then he wasn’t the Yard’s Seeton expert the way the chief super was. Even the assistant commissioner, who kept trying to sneak Aunt Em’s originals out of the files to add to his private collection, could never make much sense of them while a case was still going on. But once the Oracle had—had ... Bob frowned again, groping for the right word; then thought of breakfast and luncheon, and had to grin. Once the Oracle had translated the Drawings ...

  “You find my theory, I gather, attractive.” Delphick was observing his subordinate in some amusement. “I’m glad it meets with your approval, Sergeant. It now remains for me to obtain Miss Seeton’s approval, or perhaps I should say permission, for the use of her telephone. As a member of the family, do you think you could slip along to the kitchen and ask her?”

  Two minutes later, he was standing, with a curious Bob at his side, in the hall, holding the telephone receiver in one hand while the fingers of the other beat an impatient tattoo on the table. “Come on, Chris—Foxon—anyone, just answer this damned phone!”

  The station switchboard broke in. “Sorry, sir, there’s no answer from Superintendent Brinton.” Delphick resisted, with a considerable effort, the impulse to retort that he knew this very well. “Would anyone else do instead?”

  “No, thank you.” The idea of explaining to a stranger how a doodled bottle or two of wine had inspired a Scotland Yard ace to demand a detailed investigation of the catering firm hired by the Central Electricity Generating Board did not appeal. “Couldn’t someone run a spot-check around the station? Today, of all days, I can’t credit that he isn’t on the premises—and my call has some bearing on the matter of Her Royal Highness’s disappearance, which means it’s more than urgent.”

  “I’ll put you through to the front desk, sir. Sergeant Mutford’s more likely than most to know where Mr. Brinton’s gone—if he’s gone anywhere, that is.”

  Delphick acknowledged the worth of this suggestion; he knew Mutford of old. The Holdfast Brethren maintained the most strict adherence to rules, regulations, and biblical law of any sect he knew: for a Brother to allow a telephone to go unanswered when his job was to answer it would be a serious lapse in observance.

  It came, therefore, as some surprise when the telephone, yet again, went unanswered, though the switchboard let it ring for over a minute before breaking in to enquire whether the chief superintendent wanted to hang on, or whether he was quite sure nobody else would do.

  “Try Mr. Brinton’s office again, please. Even if he’s not back, perhaps young Foxon could take a message—and I can’t,” he said, aside to Bob, as the connection was made, “stand much more of this. We’re wasting valuable time here while—hello? Hello!”

  “Hello,” came the cautious response on the other end of the line.

  “Chris, is that you?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “Chris, stop playing games. You have a serious case on your hands, and there isn’t time to—”

  “Oracle!” The relief in Brinton’s voice was obvious. “Thank the Lord for that. I’ve only just escaped with my life from a crowd of reporters out the front—Mutford and his gang are doing the Horatius-at-the-Bridge bit while Foxon and I made a run for it—and I was afraid you were another of the blighters who didn’t believe that No Comment was honestly all I had to say right now.”

  “Reporters,” said Delphick, momentarily sidetracked by memories of his own suffering at journalistic hands. “Yes, I can well imagine the sort of thing you’ve had to put up with. It’s a great pity that Mel Forby and Thrudd Banner are still, as far as I know, out of the country—they tend to have a civilising influence, of sorts, on their more importunate colleagues.”

  The pair to whom he referred—Amelita Forby of the Daily Negative, and her close friend Thrudd Banner of World Wide Press—were acquaintances of long standing. They had severally entered the Oracle’s ken by becoming involved in one or other of Miss Seeton’s many adventures, and—being as fond of Miss Seeton as they were of headline exclusives—had succeeded in persuading Fleet Street and the news broadcasters that it was in everyone’s interests to keep Miss Seeton’s name, if not her adventures, out of the public eye. Nobody quite knew how they had managed to achieve this, but achieve it, on the whole, they had: for which Delphick and the rest of Miss Seeton’s friends were more than grateful to them ... and for which Miss Seeton was not in the least grateful, since in the first place she remained unable to conceive that her adventures were adventures at all—and, even if they were, she would suppose them to be the business of nobody but herself and (because they paid the retainer for her sketches) the police.

  If anyone could make life at a press conference easier for Superintendent Brinton, it would have been Mel and Thrudd: but they were both, as Delphick had thought, out of the country. Thrudd had recently achieved a spectacular Drugs Scandal scoop, involving high-ranking of
ficers in the Swiss Navy and an eminent pharmaceutical conglomerate. The supplying of substandard seasickness pills to Helvetian matelots had been only the first step on the downward path of corruption which Thrudd, with his usual brilliance, had excavated. His World Wide employers had given him worldwide coverage—and a bonus, which he had summoned Mel to the fleshpots of Geneva to assist him in spending.

  “Importunate,” spluttered Brinton, “be damned! All they said they wanted was a statement, to begin with—and then once they’d got me there the blighters were firing questions at me left, right, and centre. How many times does a bloke have to say he doesn’t know before Fleet Street starts to believe the poor devil?”

  “I sympathise,” said Delphick, who certainly did, “but I have a notion that I may be able to increase your knowledge somewhat. You may have gathered that I am speaking from a—a village not a million miles from Ashford—”

  A weary groan interrupted this circumlocution, followed by a thud as—or so Delphick deduced—the superintendent dropped heavily into his chair. “Don’t tell me,” begged Brinton. “You-know-who’s been sketching again!”

  “She has.” The time for circumlocution was past. “And something she’s sketched suggests to me that it might well be worth your while investigating the firm of caterers who supplied the food and drink—especially the drink—for yesterday’s beanfeast. In depth,” he added, as there came a long silence from the other end of the wire.

  “Bragbury’s,” said Brinton at last. “Bragbury’s Banquet and Buffet Service: they did the lot. They’re a family firm—the electricity people like to support local industry as far as possible—and how the hell,” he cried, “did Miss Seeton know? Though I ought to be over letting her surprise me, after all these years ...”

  “Know what?” Delphick tried to suppress his excitement. “You mean she’s on to something—confirmed something—you already knew?”

  “In a roundabout way I suppose you could say that, but there’s a good few checks I’m going to arrange right now before I’ll say she’s hit the nail exactly on the head—”

  “For heaven’s sake, Chris!”

  “Sorry. It’s just that it isn’t my case, as such, with Georgina on my plate enough for any man—not that ‘I’d be likely to handle an ordinary RTA anyway, at my rank—”

  “A road traffic accident?” Delphick’s response was swift. “And one of the Bragbury crowd was involved?”

  “The father,” said Brinton. “He and one daughter were both there yesterday, mum and sister stayed home to cook for other orders and do the washing up. Daughter and another girl were waitressing—silver service to impress the nobs with how well they could dish out the smoked salmon patties; dad drove the van, helped set the stuff out, hung around in a bow tie and swish jacket looking lofty. Quite a performance. They’ve done one or two of our police bashes, and they know—knew—their stuff, all right.”

  “Past tense,” said Delphick, thoughtfully. “I see.”

  “For the father, yes. Car came off the road last night, went into a tree, and bingo. Dammit, Oracle, it seemed like a straightforward accident! The chap was known to be a fast driver, except in the van—Traffic’ve given him more tickets than he’s given them hot dinners. Nobody was surprised to hear he’d finally written himself off. But now ...”

  “Now,” advised the Oracle, “you’d better have what’s left of that car checked and doubled-checked, Chris. There is the distinct possibility that it was a third party who did the writing, in this particular instance—and, if so, it would be of the greatest help in recovering Georgina if we could only find out who that party might be.”

  chapter

  ~ 14 ~

  DELPHICK AND BOB thanked Miss Seeton for the use of her telephone, caught Martha’s eye, and drank a hasty cup of tea. Then, making their excuses, they were gone.

  By the time they had driven to Ashford, a distance of fifteen miles at most, official inspection of the Bragbury car was well under way.

  “Good, you’ve made it in time.” They might have expected rather more by way of salutation, but Superintendent Brinton was never one for the niceties when there was work to be done. Before either Bob or Delphick could blink, he had whisked them along to the garage where a team of experts was subjecting to rigorous examination the wreckage of the vehicle in which Donald Bragbury, founding father of the catering firm, had died the previous night.

  They watched, and waited. Mechanics in oil-stained overalls crawled underneath the ruined car, and peered knowledgeably inside it. People wandered about with spanners and wrenches, looking important. Notes were jotted on pads of paper clipped to boards, measurements were taken; and taken again, as photographs were consulted.

  “Then she was right—as if we couldn’t have guessed.” Brinton’s tone was resigned as he read the report rushed to him by the leader of the expert team, and discussed over a brief, private huddle. “Driving that route, he’d never have stood a chance, the way he always used to motor on the first clear stretch of road ...”

  “May I?” Delphick, unable to bear the suspense, took the clipboard from his colleague’s hands, and studied it as if the mysteries of the internal combustion engine and its working were to him no mystery at all. “Ah, yes.”

  Without a word, he handed the clipboard to Bob, who received it with a faint grin. Brainy though the Oracle undoubtedly was, that brain had its limitations. Understanding what went on under the bonnet of a car was one of them—especially if what went on was anything at all out of the ordinary. Come to that, Bob didn’t go much for custom motoring, either ...

  “Track rod ends,” he said, having reached the relevant passage. This, at least, Sergeant Ranger understood, even if he had his suspicions that the Oracle didn’t. As a loyal subordinate, he’d better help the old man out. “You mean somebody mucked about with the poor devil’s steering?”

  “Looks like it.” Brinton, like Bob ignoring Delphick’s little sigh of relief, jerked a head in the direction of the wrecked car. “From what you said on the phone about wine bottles, I might’ve wondered if he wasn’t drunk, or’d had somebody slip him a Mickey Finn—and I suppose the autopsy could well show something-or-other on top of the rest—but it was the steering. Lucky it didn’t catch fire in the crash, because it was easy enough to find the evidence, once MissEss’d put us on the right track—and that’s a laugh.” He wasn’t laughing. “Talk about tracks, that’s what chummie did—loosened the lock-nut on the track rod end, then knew he only had to wait for Bragbury to try taking a sharp bend. Try being the operative word, of course. Go in a straight line, and he was perfectly safe. Take one corner, and ...”

  “And the tree he hit,” said Delphick, “is, I assume, on the first corner he would reach after leaving home?”

  Brinton rolled his eyes. “Give you three guesses.”

  “Top marks to Miss Seeton, then.” Delphick nodded to Bob, who passed the clipboard back to his superior without a word. “There seems little doubt,” murmured the chief superintendent, “that someone wished to take advantage of Donald Bragbury’s known propensity for speed ... Do we know yet why he was on that particular route at that particular time?”

  “Have a heart.” Brinton sounded hurt. “We’ve only this minute found out he was murdered, never mind a blow-by-blow timetable of his movements for the past twenty-four hours—but if you’d like to bring your young giant along to take notes, I think we should be able to remedy the situation before very much longer.”

  There were no obvious signs of mourning at the Bragbury home: no curtained windows, no black-ribboned hatchment on the gatepost, no procession of callers to the front door bearing condolences and flowers—food, of course, in such a circumstance would have seemed, perhaps, tactless.

  When Brinton rang the bell, it clanged, unmuffled, in the hall. Hurrying feet soon came to answer it.

  “Yes?” Mavis Bragbury, a massive white apron around her ample form, frowned at the three tall men on her doorstep. They gazed
at her with some interest: here were no swollen eyes, no tear-stained cheeks, no haggard look of a sleepless night. “Yes? You looking for me?”

  “Er,” said Brinton, recovering himself, and producing his identity card. “Mrs. Bragbury, we’re police officers. We’re extremely sorry to have to disturb you again at a time like this, but—”

  “Whatever it is you’re about, it’d better not take too long.” Mavis took the offered card and peered at it, then sighed as she handed it back. “I suppose you’d best come in—but we’re very busy today, you know.”

  “I can imagine,” said Brinton, in his most sympathetic tones, as Mavis led the way into a chilly parlour, papered in muted tones of beige, grey, and a peculiar green which matched the ugly pattern of the carpet. The only sign of frivolity in the entire room was the flock of plaster ducks winging their mournful way across the wall opposite the net-curtained window—the window through which, since it faced north, no sun could ever shine to lighten the gloom.

  “Can you, indeed?” Mavis sniffed. “I very much doubt it—not unless you’ve ever been expected to cater a sit-down meal for sixty people forty miles off with nobody to drive the van. Have to pay someone, I will, even if I can find ’em at such short notice, which’ll mean double wages, in any case. Can you imagine a way round that?”

  Brinton goggled. “Well, er ...”

  “You are a courageous woman, Mrs. Bragbury.” Delphick came promptly to the rescue of his floundering colleague. “To be able to sublimate your grief in your work—your late husband would, I am sure, have been very proud of you.”

  Mavis favoured the chief superintendent with a sour look. “Satan’s never found mine a pair of idle hands, nor any in this house, believe me—and I’ve no patience with them as’d rather be passengers than crew. We’ve our living to earn, whether Donald’s here or not, and never a minute to waste in earning it.” She looked pointedly in the direction of the sad-faced clock on the marble shelf above the empty grate, and sniffed again.