Slip? Skip! This awful echo of his previous thought had Brinton biting his lips with the effort of not allowing another groan to warn the manager that suspicion had been aroused in the official breast. At least let the chap sign the overdraft papers before he heard the chink of handcuffs!
“I’m fine, thanks, Mr. Jestin.” Brinton gulped. “Well, a bit on edge, I suppose. Wondering what they’re up to back at the shop while I’m not there keeping an eye on them ...”
He looked at his watch, checking it against the clock on Mr. Jestin’s wall. Percy followed his gaze and nodded.
“We can have the details sorted out for you by this afternoon, Mr. Brinton. If you’d like to come back around three ...” He hesitated. He cleared his throat. “If that would be convenient. But ...”
chapter
~ 2 ~
PERCIVAL JESTIN, NOVICE bank manager, had addressed the experienced superintendent of police in tones of ... eager uncertainty, thought Brinton with a sinking heart. Was the lad about to confess before he had a chance to be caught?
“But, Mr. Jestin?” he prompted.
Now it was Percy’s turn to gulp. “Well, Mr. Brinton ... I’m rather glad you called in this morning. Because ... if you can spare the time, there’s a—a confidential matter I’d like to discuss with you ...”
Brinton spared him a few moments for further gulping, then prompted again: “Confidential, Mr. Jestin?”
Percy tried to sound decisive. He was not altogether successful. “Something’s worrying me ... and I don’t know whether I’m right to worry or whether it’s just”—he shrugged—“looking for problems where they don’t exist. And perhaps they don’t—but after last time ...”
“I understand, Mr. Jestin.” Well, he didn’t really, but a few sympathetic noises wouldn’t do any harm.
Percy squared his shoulders and breathed hard once or twice. “It’s ... the old folk, Mr. Brinton.”
Brinton reeled. Was Jestin already starting a collection for the next round of Christmas hampers? He watched the young man watching him. Jestin was definitely worried. No, it was more serious than asking for a donation.
“Five or six customers from this bank alone,” announced Mr. Jestin. “And I’m sure they can’t be the only ones, but I haven’t been in my present position long enough to ...”
Brinton grinned. “To be accepted as a new shoot on the managers’ grapevine? It’ll come, lad—uh, Mr. Jestin—but we’ll do without the others for now. Tell me about these five or six you say you yourself know about.”
Percy’s eyes dropped to his hands, folded uncomfortably on his blotter. “It’s their accounts, you see. They’ve been pretty well emptied over the past few months—and not for the obvious reason, I think. Most of them are so old they’ve outlived what close family they have—and that age-group doesn’t throw money around on presents for distant relatives or friends, do they?”
“Two world wars and a depression make people learn to watch the pennies, all right.”
“That’s what I thought.” Reassured by Brinton’s tone, Percy sat upright as he went on speaking. “But they’ve gone down almost to the last penny, some of them beyond into the red, and one old lady even killed herself the other day. The others write rubber cheques for everyday expenses and just apologise nicely when I have to warn them about unauthorised overdrafts—or they put the tuppence-ha-penny that’s left in a deposit account and complain that the interest isn’t enough to live on—and I’ve tried writing and talking to them to find out why their finances are in such a mess, but nobody will tell me!”
He was wringing his hands now, and Brinton could understand why. This was the lad’s first responsible job; the last thing he wanted was a reputation for hounding impoverished old-age pensioners into bankruptcy or beyond, to the modern equivalent of the workhouse. Shades of Charles Dickens. “Uh—respectable old folk?” came the logical enquiry as Brinton applied himself to the problem.
“Salt of the earth,” said Jestin promptly. “I can guess why you ask, Superintendent, but I honestly don’t see any of them as blackmail victims. For one thing, isn’t blackmail usually a—a regular payment over a long period, not a lump sum? And even if they were being blackmailed—because I’m not so daft I don’t know the most surprising people have secrets—why so many of them? More or less at the same time? Men and women? All well past retirement age?”
Brinton nodded. “I see what you mean.” He applied himself a little more. “The old lady who died. What can you tell me about her?”
Percy sighed. “I suppose bank confidentiality doesn’t matter anymore when you’re dead—and intestate.”
“No heirs? No relatives?”
“Nobody, Mr. Brinton.” Percy’s smile was sad. “Only a cat. Miss Byng—Philippa Byng—was a dear old lady who should have been living out her last days in peace with a pension and a moggy and a nice bit of garden—and she didn’t. She committed suicide because she was flat broke and too proud—or too afraid—to ask for help.”
“That generation prides itself on staying independent, lad—uh, Mr. Jestin.”
Mr. Jestin shuddered. “I know. To them I’m still wet behind the ears, but it’s my job to look after them—and they won’t let me! And I’m afraid some of the others might be going the same way as Miss Byng, and I don’t know why—and I don’t know what to do about it! I just don’t know!”
“I don’t know. It sounds a downright waste of good food to me, Miss Emily.”
Surviving even one world war left vivid memories of past privations. Martha Bloomer, Miss Seeton’s devoted domestic paragon, had been a girl in 1939. Like Miss Seeton, she had lived in London for the duration. Cockney Martha and her family would not forget the Blitz or the doodle-bugs or the rockets; with the rest of the country they remembered having to queue in near-hopeless hope outside shops with no glass in their windows and no goods on display. Miss Seeton’s tale of how her dear mother had stood for two hours outside the fishmonger’s in pursuit of rumoured kippers, and how the winner of what must have been the last fish in Hampstead had allowed her neighbour next in line to buy half of it, had been capped by Martha’s memories of running out each night to feed the back-garden rabbits and hens with a tin bath on her head against what sometimes seemed like a permanent rain of shrapnel.
It was now not Martha, but Martha’s husband Stan who was officer-in-charge of chickens: and they were not Bloomer birds. They belonged to Sweetbriars. Miss Seeton had been bequeathed by Cousin Flora not just her cottage, but with it the dear friends who had helped the increasingly frail Mrs. Bannet to remain happily at home until her death at the age of ninety-eight. As the old lady’s garden had become too much for her, farm worker Stan from over the road, where The Street narrowed to cross the canal bridge, had volunteered his horticultural services in exchange for a share of any saleable surplus in the flower, fruit, or vegetable line. While Martha took care of the house, Stan looked after the fowl house. It was an arrangement so convenient for all concerned that there had been no question of Miss Seeton’s wish to continue in the same way when she came into her inheritance seven years before. Were not Martha and Stan, after all, as close to her as family could ever be?
“Well, Martha dear,” said Miss Seeton now, doubtfully. “Well ... I agree that it does sound a somewhat ... unusual means of—of expressing oneself. But modern art ...”
Honesty here prevailed and Miss Seeton fell silent. One must, of course, try to keep an open mind, but ...
“Modern, fiddlesticks.” With an unnecessary bang, Mrs. Bloomer thrust her broom into an already dust-free corner. “Art? I’ve seen it in the papers and on the telly, and it’s rubbish. Bits of scrap metal I’d pay a man to take to the tip—great lumps of concrete full of holes—a couple of pink blobs with a triangle someone calls a masterpiece, selling for thousands of pounds—why, the kiddies in school can do better than that, specially with you teaching them, dear.” Martha turned to radiate approval on her employer and friend. “Things lo
ok like what they are when they’ve been properly taught—which is how I like to see them.”
Miss Seeton made a sudden movement, but Martha gave her no time to speak. “And seeing things is what it’s all about, if you ask me. Pictures, or a nice statue, I don’t mind that. But when it comes to—to eating things ...”
Words finally failed her. Miss Seeton, with a doubtful smile, decided it was safe to begin trying to explain. As far, that was to say, as she could. Which, she feared, was unlikely to be far, since she couldn’t help but feel that there was much in Martha’s point of view. Still, when one recalled that food rationing ended in 1954 ... and allowed for the fact that a whole generation had grown up unaware of the—the respect, one might almost say, in which those who had survived the war held wholesome provender ...
“They say it’s all very clever,” said Miss Seeton, with a faint sigh.
“Then they’re mad,” returned Martha at once. “Painting walls with chocolate! Telling people to lick it off! Well, I should hope you’ve got more sense than that, Miss Emily, but there’s a good few that haven’t. What about the germs? Serve him right if they’re all ill again—and them, too, for being so daft as doing it.”
“But that particular exhibition,” Miss Seeton reminded her, “was unfortunately held in summer—not winter, as I believe was the original plan. Some muddle over dates at the gallery, if I remember aright. One can well imagine the poor man might, in the relief of having it all sorted out at last, forget that the temperature—such very large windows, for the best light ...”
“Lick it off the walls like a heathen or eat it off a plate, if that’s what you do, I’ve never much fancied the idea of caviar.” Martha wrinkled her nose. “Smoked fish eggs? Ugh!”
Miss Seeton, whose one (conventional) taste of this delicacy had been so enjoyable that she had, unusually, taken a second helping, accepted that knowing what caviar was made of might put one off. She did not remind Martha that chickens, too, produced eggs that one could eat.
“Jelly gone mouldy on purpose!” went on Martha, warming to her theme. “Have a kiddies’ party and leave the washing-up for a week, and I’d like any of your critics to tell me the difference ...”
It was a review by the celebrated critic Meghan McKinnie in that morning’s Daily Negative that had annoyed Martha so much that she had popped across, when it wasn’t strictly one of her days, to ask for her employer’s opinion in exchange for a quick dust round. As a general rule, Miss Seeton read the broadsheet Times, although from time to time she would glance through a Negative out of interest as to what case her friend, ace crime reporter Amelita Forby, might now be working on. Miss Seeton had never before thought of the tabloid Negative in the light of serious art criticism and, always willing to keep an open mind, was happy to oblige dear Martha by reading the article in question—even if such reading required on her part a far greater effort of concentration than normal because of Martha’s accompanying snorts of irritation as she banged around the cottage with her broom.
Return of the Refreshment Rubens! the banner headline had screamed in a typeface that made Miss Seeton wince. Brave New World At Galerie Genèvre ...
It was (argued Miss McKinnie) brave indeed of Antony Scarlett, the Rubens of Refreshment, to herald his return from self-imposed exile by using even more comestibles in his current exhibition than he had in the infamous “Food Poisoning Fiasco” show of the previous July. Readers (wrote Miss McKinnie) would, of course, recall the snarling-up of central London in the fearful traffic jams caused by fleets of ambulances ferrying those who had attended Scarlett’s vernissage, or private viewing (the Negative, in an attempt to go up-market, had poached the services of Miss McKinnie from one of the drier broadsheets), to hospital for emergency admission. “Has the salmonella ghost at last been laid?” demanded Meghan McKinnie. “In the opinion of this critic, it most certainly has!”
Rubens, the Negative readers would also recall, had been renowned among other causes for his voluptuous and sensual depictions of the naked human form. Rubens rejoiced and encouraged others to rejoice: he celebrated the flesh and was not ashamed of that. He revelled in life: he renewed and refreshed the spirit ... and Antony Scarlett, with his bold and imaginative use of food, the very basis of life, could rightly assume the title of a modern Rubens. “Refreshment” in Scarlett’s case referred not only to food and drink, but also to his renewal, by his Art, of the very fundamentals of the human soul ...
Miss Seeton paused in her reading to study the photographs around which the columns of print had been set and to compare them with what she could remember of Scarlett’s previous work as described in the sober pages of The Times. She supposed one could, at a pinch, accept that a chandelier made of toffee, slowly melting in the heat from a hundred light bulbs, might be a metaphor for the fundamentals of the human body, since the body did eventually decay. Though probably far less stickily. But surely the greatest attribute of the human spirit—the soul—was that it was ... imperishable? Immortal?
“Immaterial,” murmured Miss Seeton, that most literal of souls, and read on.
Antony Scarlett had (according to Meghan McKinnie) gone far beyond his earlier, overt representations of the human form and condition towards an almost completely abstract view of the ultimate spiritual struggle. The female nude nibbled out of blocks of voluptuous blue-veined cheese; the nude moulded from slices of bread, exactly equal in weight to that of model Kristeena; the nude formed of jet-black caviar, gleaming on a background of flaming satin, should be remembered only as the juvenile seeds of what, in his months apart from the world, he had developed into a mature and satisfying philosophy. The meaning of the ultimate truth (wrote Meghan McKinnie) must of necessity be a mystery, but in the works of Antony Scarlett it had perhaps found one of its most intelligent and stimulating twentieth-century interpreters ...
“Good gracious,” said Miss Seeton, coming to the surface for air. “Dear me.” She set down the paper with a sigh and shook her head. “Martha, I should rather like a cup of tea. Would you care to join me?”
“So long as you don’t try telling me my fruitcake’s a meta-blooming-phor for the mysteries of life, I’d love one,” returned Mrs. Bloomer, grinning. “I’m right, aren’t I, dear? It’s all a load of nonsense?”
Miss Seeton, after a spiritual struggle of her own, ventured to suppose it really depended on the impression made by the particular work of art (however art could be defined) when one actually saw it, as opposed to accepting the impressions of someone else who had. Whether or not they were paid to offer these impressions to the general public ...
Martha snorted. “And they pay good money for people to write this rubbish! Fiddlesticks I said, and fiddle it is, cheating and trickery and lies, never mind being a waste of good food. Sausage skins! Heaps of rice all over the floor—what about mice? Pyramids of hard-boiled eggs! Don’t you go getting Ideas, Miss Emily, chickens or no. Whatever would Mrs. Bannet have said?”
Miss Seeton hurriedly assured her she would never dream of doing such a thing, though she might slip up to London to take a look at the work of Antony Scarlett, which in its earlier incarnation she had elected to miss, but having now read the review, which had been so different from that in The Times, she was curious to know what it was all about.
“Then I just hope it isn’t catching,” said Martha. “You take care!”
Miss Seeton smiled. Dear Martha, always so anxious. Take care? Why, she never did anything else.
There are those of Miss Seeton’s acquaintance, however, who would not agree with her.
The topography of Plummergen, Miss Seeton’s adopted village, is simple. The wide, gently curving Street runs more or less north and south to divide, at its southernmost end, in two. The left-hand fork, as already described, narrows into a lane running between a row of cottages (in one of which live Stan and Martha Bloomer) and the high brick wall of Miss Seeton’s back garden as it slopes gently down to the Royal Military Canal, built against the
invasion of Napoleon Bonaparte and now a peaceful, winding waterway rich in bird life and much favoured by visiting artists.
The Street’s right-hand fork, having become Marsh Road, snakes its way along the edge of Walland Marsh to arrive, eventually, back at Brettenden. This town of some five thousand inhabitants lies to the north of Plummergen and (apart from Murreystone, arch-enemy to Plummergen for the past six hundred years) is the smaller parish’s nearest neighbour. Three times a week—once by official decree, twice through the patriotic offices of Crabbe’s Garage—a bus runs from Plummergen (five hundred inhabitants) to Brettenden for the benefit of those shoppers who cannot find what they want in the various village emporia.
Of the latter, the three most important establishments are the grocer, the draper, and the post office. All three sell groceries, confectionery, liquor, and stationery. Mr. Takeley, the grocer, has the smallest amount of floor space; Mr. Welsted, the draper, with his picture postcards and china souvenirs, caters more to tourists. The post office, run by Mr. Stillman and his wife, Elsie, has the largest floor space and the widest selection of goods. It is also most conveniently placed, being directly opposite the bus stop, and it is, therefore, by far the most important of the three most important of all the Plummergen shops.
One Thursday afternoon, the bus decanted its load of bargain-burdened Plummergenites at the post office stop and rattled off towards marshy oblivion, leaving such shoppers as had not found what they needed on any of Brettenden’s market stalls to pop into Mr. Stillman’s to make up the shortfall ... and (a minor point) to catch up on any items of gossip that might have come their way during the past few hours. The six-mile homeward journey was never long enough and was far too noisy as well.
After a polite shuffle in the doorway—the repeated jangling of the bell drove the Stillmans and young Emmeline Putts quite wild—everyone who wanted to gossip was safely inside. After more shuffling as people picked up tins they didn’t need and drifted in ragged groups towards the counter, it was Mrs. Spice who received the silent consensus that she should open the batting.
Sweet Miss Seeton (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 20) Page 2