“We, sir?” prompted Foxon.
“My bank manager and me.” Brinton sighed again. “No, I haven’t been embezzling or uttering forged notes or anything like that. But Jestin’s worried, Foxon, and he’s got me worried, too. He told me about it when I dropped in the other day—asked my advice, and I ... didn’t have any. Never come across this sort of thing before. Never mind you being unsettled—how d’you think I felt? This is my manor. I’m supposed to know what’s going on here. A bank manager does and I don’t.”
Brinton hesitated. He made up his mind. “Well, if I can’t trust you after this long, lad—but I’ll have your guts for garters if I ever find—”
“Cross my heart, sir. Scout’s honour.” The Old Man was starting to sound his usual self again; it’d been worth the risk of a rollicking. “Not a word. Uh—about what?”
“I suppose it could be blackmail, sir. Couldn’t it?”
Glumly the superintendent nodded. “It could—but it’s not exactly the logical answer, is it? I know most of these people, Foxon. Jestin gave me their names, though I’m not telling you.” His features twisted in a wry grimace as his hands closed about the cardboard folder. “I’ll keep the youngster’s confidence that far, at least.”
“Fair enough, sir. You know ’em.”
“Right. The whole bunch is honest-to-goodness backbone of England, salt of the earth—gentry, some of them. Not the sort to have secrets they’d pay hundreds—thousands, one or two of ’em—to hush up if some unscrupulous blighter found ’em out. Yes, I know,” he said as Foxon tried to speak. “I’ve jumped through the same hoops, laddie—and so has Jestin. ‘The most surprising people,’” he quoted. “But—so many of them? More or less at the same time? Men and women? I want to know what it’s all about and stop it before it gets any worse. We don’t want another suicide, Foxon.”
“Did she leave a note, sir?”
“No, she didn’t, poor old duck.” Brinton sighed again. “We haven’t a single clue about why she did it.”
“Oh.” Foxon sat up. “As for having a clue, sir, and old ducks, I don’t suppose ...?”
Brinton drew in his breath with a hiss. “No,” he said flatly. “Whatever it is—if it’s anything at all—I want her kept out of it, Foxon. Her—and her umbrella—and her whole blasted village. I like the peaceful life, I do. And if you do, too, you’d better not breathe a syllable of this to Miss Seeton. Because if you do, I swear I’ll ...”
To the uninitiated, it might seem strange that Superintendent Brinton should object to his junior’s oblique proposal that Miss Seeton might become involved in his current mystery. The elderly spinster was, after all, in technical terms a colleague. She had assisted the police, in the most innocent way, with their enquiries on many occasions over the past few years.
And there’s the rub. Perhaps not quite so innocent. Not in the dictionary sense of “harmless,” that is, though there could never be any serious doubt that the lady was “not guilty (of crime).” Guilty of imposing a strain on people’s nerves, yes; guilty of causing raised blood pressure in those who had dealings with her and her notorious umbrella. And yet ... guilty? Once more, the dictionary definition poses more questions than it answers. “Criminal, culpable; having committed a particular offence ...”
Miss Seeton offends without intention. She has no idea that her innocent—yes—actions may have such remarkable results. It has already been explained how her innocent prod in the back of César Lebel led to the latter’s arrest for the Covent Garden stabbing. What was not mentioned in that brief explanation was the subsequent partial breaking of a society drug ring. Nor was the associated murder, suicide, drowning, gassing, shooting, car crash, abduction, and embezzlement: none of which, her supporters protest, could seriously be considered Miss Seeton’s fault.
Her detractors—yet many of those who detract still find much to praise—point out that Miss Seeton was, well, there. Involved, no matter how innocently. She might not have meant to stir things up, but she did.
And does. They were not wrong who once described her as the Catalyst of Crime, something that induces a change in others without itself undergoing change. Whatever tempest may embroil those about her, Miss Seeton remains resolutely unembroiled. The question nobody has been able to answer after seven eventful years is, does Miss Seeton raise the tempest, or is she herself, like others, tempest-tossed?
Superintendent Brinton was no more able to solve this riddle than anyone else. He lived, however, a lot closer to Miss Seeton than, for example, Chief Superintendent Delphick of Scotland Yard. Plummergen was on his patch. If MissEss (as the Met’s basement computer insisted the lady’s retainer cheques should be addressed) ever showed signs of Starting Up Again, Brinton would demand more than the statutory four-minute warning. The local man, Police Constable Potter, had his standing orders. If anything—anything—remotely untoward in the neighbourhood of Sweetbriars or The Street or the village as a whole should happen, then Potter must advise the superintendent, whether at night or on his days off or (Mrs. Brinton had boggled at this, but being a policeman’s wife understood the urgency) on holiday. And at once.
The superintendent’s response to Foxon’s mischievous—miss-chievous?—suggestion of approaching Miss Seeton in the matter of the impoverished old-age pensioners had been automatic. Just letting off steam, as Foxon knew well—because, obviously, until they had some better idea of what was going on, their hands were tied. The Misguided Missile, as she’d been called, could not—thankfully, need not—be asked for help. Brinton and the Ashford force could rest easy in their beds. PC Potter would make no unsettling reports ...
Superintendent Brinton would have been considerably unsettled had he known that, even as he abandoned his Pauper Pensioners problem and returned to his official workload, a press conference was being held in London. Ignorance is deemed to be bliss; knowledge, somewhat paradoxically, is said to be power. It is open to question whether Brinton would have felt better or worse, more contented or less powerful, for knowing that even a distance of fifty miles might not necessarily be beyond the Seeton Danger Range covered by PC Potter’s standing orders ...
Time would show whether this knowledge was to be vouchsafed to him or not.
Miss Seeton had never been especially fond of sweet stuff. Wartime had been no great hardship to her. When rationing for confectionery was finally ended in the 1950s, she had not been one of those who rushed out to buy chocolate in such quantities that the system had of necessity been swiftly, if temporarily, reinstated.
This wasn’t to say that she found sugar, in its myriad forms, unpalatable. While she liked her tea weak and plain, not strong and syrupy, she would spread jam on her toast in preference to marmalade. She had a weakness for Battenburg cake, that pink-and-yellow chessboard sponge wrapped in marzipan—and for gingerbread—and for a certain brand of chocolate biscuit ...
She had not realised until she stepped into the exhibition proper just how overwhelming the flavour and the scent of chocolate could be.
And the sound.
The first exhibit to catch Miss Seeton’s eye was a huge, circular, low-lying vat in the middle of the floor, from which came a startlingly musical sequence of plops, blops, gurgles, glubs, and pings. Miss Seeton consulted her catalogue—she begged its pardon, the Elucidation—to learn that the vat contained milk chocolate at just above blood heat and that the three invisible jets at the centre of the vat sent up their triple fountain of chocolate spray, Prince of Wales Feathers fashion, to bounce off a triangular mirror of electro-polished stainless steel. Primaeval Nurture and Modernity: A Paradox. Miss Seeton found herself thinking of porridge in a saucepan and after a few minutes moved on, humming under her breath, to the next exhibit.
Resting on top of a tall Perspex cylinder was a large cardboard box, coated on the outside with silver paper. The open lid faced upwards. Another stainless steel mirror, of faintly embryonic shape, hung at a ridiculous angle—Miss Seeton blessed those years of yoga
that meant tilting her head to one side didn’t make her feel giddy—to reflect the interior of the box, which was dark brown and smeary in stripes the Elucidation advised were plain chocolate mixed, for better smearing, with coconut oil. Containment of the Degenerate Self. Miss Seeton had seldom felt less degenerate in her life.
Paper Clip was a long—very long—and thin stretch of what might almost have been chocolate wire without a single bend or kink. Another of Antony Scarlett’s paradoxes, Miss Seeton supposed. Its companion piece, Filing Cabinet, was no more than three cubes of chocolate set squarely one on top of the other. “Modern life,” trumpeted the Elucidation, “has lost its way in the labyrinth of bureaucracy.” Had it? Miss Seeton considered the Income Tax and sighed.
Before The Life-Force Reappraised, Miss Seeton halted for a long time. This was partly from interest, but more from relief that the piece had been arranged near an open window: it would be a long time, she thought, before she would wish to eat a chocolate biscuit again. Perhaps Antony Scarlett had begun to feel the same way, for Reappraised was constructed—it was the only word—of rounded heaps of eggshells, illuminated between and from beneath by pale blue fluorescent lights. “The vacant sterility of Being thrown into cold relief by an unseen power whose Power is more than seen.” Oh. But the eggs, fortunately, didn’t smell, and there was a refreshing, if a trifle chilly, breeze from the window ...
Wandering from exhibit to exhibit, consulting the Elucidation after her initial guesses had invariably been proved wrong, Miss Seeton began, in an odd way, to enjoy herself. The exhibits themselves were ... interesting; one had always to keep an open mind ... but the comments of others walking round the gallery were more than interesting. Miss Seeton’s sense of humour, as has been remarked, is far from robust; but she has a dry appreciation of the absurd and a genuine clarity of vision Antony Scarlett and his iconoclastic ilk perhaps (that open mind again) do not.
“Awe-inspiring.” A young man of aesthetic appearance gasped in front of a bunch of bananas on whose skins Antony Scarlett had drawn, in purple ink, a series of numbers and abstract squiggles, the whole suspended on a gleaming brass chain from a stainless steel plate in the ceiling. Futility and Decay. “Oh, doesn’t that speak volumes?”
The equally aesthetic young man at his side—how Oscar Wilde would have adored them—fervently agreed that it did. Miss Seeton, who had never suffered from a hearing deficiency in her life, waited for a moment, decided there was more vocal sprightliness in the Oxford English Dictionary, and moved on. Different generations ...
She was farther now from both window and door than at any point in her progress around the gallery. Red light glowed in a relentless tunnel—Facilis Descensus Averno, though Miss Seeton had never envisaged the descent to hell as being down a stainless steel tube dotted with dabs of white chocolate—and drew her ever onwards. The smell of chocolate and decaying fruit (the infrared-spotlighted slices of apple comprising The Mother of All Is to Blame had been floating in their stainless steel bowls for a week) was overwhelming.
But as she emerged from the tunnel, Miss Seeton felt for the first time that her steps were being guided; felt that there might, after all, be some power—though she wouldn’t care to speculate what kind—in Antony Scarlett’s work one could not dismiss out of hand as (she rather feared) mere self-indulgent bombast.
Here, at last, was the pièce de résistance of the Rubens of Refreshment: the first representation of anything like a human form Miss Seeton had yet seen, lying massive and, yes, surprisingly graceful in its smooth white contours on a bed of—inevitably—scarlet satin, artistically rumpled to catch every point of light from the mirror-ball revolving slowly overhead.
“Very potent,” observed a man with moustaches Salvador Dali would have envied and a malicious gleam in his eye. “Wouldn’t you say?” And the young woman hanging on his arm sniggered happily as she joined him in gazing at the front of the reclining figure, which lay in a sleeping position, one arm bent to support the head, one leg bent at the knee.
As the pair tittered together before drifting away, Miss Seeton contemplated the well formed and rippling muscles of the sculpture’s—the moulding’s—back. Consulting the Elucidation, she discovered that the white chocolate nude—Desires of the Heavenly Flesh—was an exact replica of The Artist himself, moulded in his studio over several laborious days during which, for perfect authenticity, he had consumed his own body weight in chocolate—to the last ounce. Miss Seeton couldn’t help wondering whether he had eaten anything else in between his frantic bouts of scoffing and (if not) what the effects on his digestion had been. Or even if he had. The young. So much more enthusiastic about their work than prudence might advise ...
Miss Seeton moved round to the front of the sleeping figure. She stopped. She stared. She saw what the Dali Moustache and his giggling girlfriend had seen ...
The midriff of the desirable, heavenly chocolate body had been pierced by some sharp instrument that, it seemed, had then been twisted in a disembowelling motion before being withdrawn and—Miss Seeton blinked—applied to the figure’s genitals. Which had been cut off.
Miss Seeton shook her head. Such a waste. The figure, from the rear, had displayed a gentle, flowing grace proving that Antony Scarlett—besides being a fine figure of a man—had some natural sense of form and balance, of line and harmony he would have done well to develop in the classical style that was now, after all, so old-fashioned it could have been hailed as avant-garde, with Scarlett the leader of a new artistic movement. But such wanton damage ...
On a plain white saucer, a sad little mound of melted white chocolate marked, Miss Seeton supposed, the remains of the artist’s confectionery genitalia. Beside it there was a notice scrawled in Antony Scarlett’s favourite purple ink.
“Some might view what has happened here as wanton damage to a work of Art. I, the creator of the Work, accept it as a statement of one (albeit anonymous) individual’s response to the piece, and as such I must consider it contextually valid. For this reason, I have no intention of carrying out what some might call repairs, but others might rightly condemn as a falsification of the basic artistic truth.”
Oh. Miss Seeton hid a smile. She thought it far more probable that Mr. Scarlett was tired of eating chocolate ... undoubtedly a valid response, given the number of pieces in which he had used the stuff.
“You find it amusing?” Evidently she hadn’t hidden her smile sufficiently well. “I, on the other hand, Miss Seeton, find it depressing.”
Miss Seeton blinked. She turned. She smiled. “Why, Mr. Szabo! How pleasant to see you again after so long.”
Ferencz Szabo bowed, one plump hand on his pink silk waistcoat. As a compliment to Miss Seeton, for whose good opinion he had a high regard, the Bond Street dealer moderated his Hungarian accent—carefully lost when he became a British citizen; as carefully cultivated when he realised it was a professional asset—to a minimum. “Miss Seeton, the pleasure is all mine. To find in this—this puerile farrago someone with common sense is a delight. Allow me to take you out for lunch to celebrate our escape. Am I right to assume that you have already seen the rest of the exhibits?”
Miss Seeton confirmed his assumption. She twinkled at him. “A little bread and cheese, perhaps,” she suggested. “I doubt if my appetite for anything ... exotic will return for some time yet.”
Ferencz patted his corporation—yes, perhaps he was somewhat plumper than the last time they had met—and sighed. “Had I but your strength of will, Miss Seeton ... but there, dieting is for the determined, which I freely confess that I am not. Apart from my determination to be away from here as soon as possible, that is. You will allow me to escort you?”
Miss Seeton gladly gave her permission, and the two were about to leave when she turned to look once more at the nude Desires of the Heavenly Flesh, and the wanton damage—for so she must regard it—done by that anonymous commentator. She sighed. Such a waste, indeed.
“The only piece worth co
ming here for,” said Ferencz, following her glance. “Which is not to say much. But, as a gallery owner myself, I could say very loudly that I wish the wretched Scarlett had cared less for his damned contextual validity and more for common sense.” He tucked Miss Seeton’s arm under his own and proceeded in stately fashion towards the door.
“There are those, you know,” he whispered gaily as they walked, “who see the destruction of the digestive areas as somebody’s Statement”—the emphasis was withering—“on the food poisoning débâcle at Scarlett’s previous exhibition—a hint that Revenge,” he said in melodramatic accents, “is on the cards.” He gestured dismissively with his free hand. “They could well be correct, although that does not matter except insofar as, were I the young Scarlett, I would be wary whose invitations to dine I accepted in the near future.” He and Miss Seeton exchanged friendly smiles.
“No,” he went on, “what really matters, Miss Seeton, is the nonsensical satisfaction this foolish youth evidently feels about the affair and the way his response may influence others. Has it not occurred to him that he and his fellow artists, and the owners of the galleries where their work is displayed, are—in the light of this deplorable damage for which no one has yet been brought to book—now wide open to any amount of ... of blackmail a certain type of mind might conceive?”
It was, thought Miss Seeton, perhaps the most valid comment anyone at the Galerie Genèvre had made all day.
Even as Mr. Szabo and Miss Seeton contemplated the genius (or otherwise) of Antony Scarlett, Miss Genefer Watson, nominal owner of the Galerie Genèvre, was deep in conference with her sleeping partners about that self-same genius. As the two friends left the exhibition in pursuit of a light lunch, Miss Watson and her conferring colleagues began to have the glimmerings of yet another idea to boost publicity ...
Sweet Miss Seeton (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 20) Page 5