“Aow!” Maureen’s shrill scream as she finished shaking out her hair pierced even the roar of the disappearing Kawasaki and caused Doris to abandon the tirade she had just resumed to clap her hands to her startled ears. The sudden appearance of Miss Seeton, hitherto concealed behind the statuesque severity of the head waitress, had done more to galvanise Maureen’s reflexes into action than any amount of nagging could have achieved.
“Aow! Aow!” Maureen shrieked again, her eyes wide with fright as she looked at Miss Seeton, who had been reminded by the shrieks of nothing so much as the wartime air raid siren’s high-pitched, penetrating howl, and was wishing the memories conjured up would go away again.
“Aow! Naow!” Maureen had caught Miss Seeton’s change of expression and redoubled her efforts, fearing what it might betoken. “Naow! Naow!”
Doris pulled down her hands and wound back her arm for one sturdy box of Maureen’s ears as the best cure for the frenzied state into which the girl was working herself all too quickly: yet not so quickly that Maureen didn’t guess what might be about to happen. With one last shriek of denial—against what, neither Doris nor Miss Seeton knew—she turned to run—Maureen, running!—across the asphalt car park into the George.
“Maureen, stop it this minute!” commanded Doris. Miss Seeton, with her wider experience of juvenile hysteria, knew that the command was in vain. In her senseless panic, the silly child could hear nothing. She must be stopped before she did herself or others any harm. In one movement Miss Seeton dropped her shopping basket and snatched the umbrella from her arm. She scuttled after Maureen’s flying, arms-akimbo form and lunged forward, the crook handle poised like some quaintly curved spear to pinion its prey about the upper arm. Miss Seeton tugged as Maureen stopped in her tracks, frozen with terror. Maureen, her shrieks silenced, was forced to turn.
She took one long, wide-eyed look at Miss Seeton’s face no more than an arm-and-a-brolly’s-length away ...
And fell with a muffled groan in an appalled swoon facedown upon the grey asphalt of the car park of the George.
When Charley Mountfitchet heard Maureen’s screams, he was put in mind not of air raids, but of pig killing. Since Plummergen farmers have always taken their beasts to authorised slaughterhouses, he thought the noise worth investigating. He was halfway out of the door when the screaming girl began her swooning descent to oblivion and was at her side in good time to assist Doris and Miss Seeton as they disentangled the latter’s umbrella and set about a gentle slapping of Maureen’s pallid cheeks.
“Best take her inside,” proposed Charley, scooping up his unconscious employee as easily as he would heft a beer barrel from its cellar rack to the tap-room pump.
“Too many late nights, that’s what it is,” muttered Doris to Miss Seeton as she helped the latter collect her scattered belongings. “Can’t burn the candle at both ends, not for long you can’t, and I’ve told her so many a time. But would she listen?”
“The young,” observed Miss Seeton, “are sometimes so uncomfortable—impatient—with the idea of physical frailty, are they not?”
“Think it’ll never happen to them. Huh,” said Doris, the voice of experience. “Give it time.” She rolled her eyes in the direction of Charley and his burden, now vanishing through the George’s front door. “No need to bother anymore, thanks. You get on with your shopping.”
“Well—if you are sure,” said Miss Seeton doubtfully. One had no particular knowledge of first aid in the sense of being trained, but so many years of dealing with schoolgirls had certainly resulted in a knowledge of what one might call the basics. Loosened collars and the application of a moderate amount of cold water, for instance ...
“And we’ll burn a feather or two under her silly nose,” said Doris cheerfully. “She’ll be fine.”
“Yes, indeed. Like the candle,” said Miss Seeton with a smile. “Though only one end, of course.”
With another smile and a nod, she was gone before Doris could work out what she meant. Which—as Doris herself remarked to Charley Mountfitchet once she’d followed him inside—was nothing unusual, was it? Just so long as the shock of watching Maureen go into hysterics hadn’t turned the poor old lady’s mind, that was to say.
All Charley had to say was “feathers.” Bearing in mind the likely sensibilities of the George’s overnight guest, he had whisked with his fair burden through the foyer to the kitchen, where he had dumped the girl on the table and was energetically fanning her with a tea-towel. A watcher might have seen her eyelids start to flicker as the colour crept slowly back to her cheeks.
Doris giggled. “Oh, aren’t I the daft one? Yes, I’ll get a duster from the cleaning cupboard. We can spare a feather or two.” It wasn’t as if Maureen made much use of them. The girl generally sneezed and asked someone else (meaning soft-hearted Dogsbody Doris) to do the high corners and cobwebs. “Matches,” added Doris, poised to hurry off dusterwards. “Candles!” And she giggled again with relief that the shock of all the fuss and bother hadn’t really turned poor Miss Seeton’s m—
“Candles?” Maureen, finding herself laid out as a virgin sacrifice, sat bolt upright with a shriek that had Doris clapping her hands to her ears. “Naow!” screamed Maureen, struggling. “Let me gaow! Help! Help!!”
“Don’t!” cried Doris.
But the warning went unheard above the screams. She shot out her hand to grab Charley’s arm as it wound back to box the girl’s ears and was about to box them with her own free hand when the screaming stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Maureen’s face was as white as it had ever been. Her eyes met those of Doris and were once more wide with horror as visions of the Black Mass floated before them.
For a moment, nobody moved; nobody made a sound.
Then, with an indistinct gurgle, Maureen closed her eyes and fell back into her swoon.
chapter
~ 10 ~
SUPERINTENDENT BRINTON’S long-standing orders to Plummergen’s PC Potter were that Potter should immediately advise his Ashford superior of any untoward occurrence in the vicinity of Miss Emily Dorothea Seeton.
Potter knew his Plummergen. He was also more than well acquainted with Brinton’s temper. Mountains out of molehills were a local speciality and hardly untoward in the routine scheme of things. PC Potter had far more sense than to waste the superintendent’s time, or risk his own skin, by reporting to Ashford either the current village speculation that Miss Seeton’s latest enterprise might be the procuring of young and innocent females for the benefit of a London-based vampire, or the hysteria said enterprise was starting to generate in such impressionable persons as Emmeline Putts and her friend Maureen.
Brinton’s blissful ignorance of the latest Plummergen brouhaha meant that when the superintendent set out on his own scene-of-the-crime inspection, he did so with no more to worry him than whether he, like Foxon, might not have his purpose mistaken by some nervous householder. Two cases of concussion and four black eyes in the space of three days would be mathematically undesirable for the morale of the force. The boy had gone in an unmarked police vehicle: he, Brinton, would be driven by the uniformed PC Buckland in a regulation panda.
“We’ll start with the Abinger place,” he instructed, strapping himself into his seat belt as Buckland prepared for the off. “Just because the Yard hasn’t come up with anything yet doesn’t mean we needn’t try making the blighter feel a little uncomfortable. Bashing cops over the head is something we don’t want to encourage, Buckland. Let him and his neighbours get the idea we’re keeping an eye on him, and it might just stop anyone else following his example.”
“Right, sir.” Buckland had been more worried about his friend than he had cared to admit, although Foxon’s natural chirpiness had begun to surface by the end of last night’s hospital visiting hour, and there were rumours he might be released later that day. “Abinger’s, then where? Round the other places poor old Foxon never even got to?”
Brinton scowled at the sheet of paper in hi
s hand. He hesitated. Buckland politely stayed his hand on the ignition and his foot on the pedal. Brinton cleared his throat. “Well, more or less the same, with just one new place. Doc Wyddial put me on to it this morning as a—as a possibility, she said. Might not be anything at all to do with this business—apparently he’s neither starving himself to death nor flat broke like the rest—but we asked for info on things that don’t seem quite right, and when another doctor over the border mentioned it at some medics’ get-together, she thought it, uh, didn’t. Doesn’t.”
“Over the border, sir?” Buckland’s attention, now that he had set the car in motion, was on the road ahead, but he could still think. “You mean ... Sussex?”
“I don’t mean Bonnie Scotland, lad—and before you ask, no, I haven’t talked to Inspector Furneux. We’re only going to look at an empty house, for heaven’s sake. It’s not one of your cross-border raiding parties breaching professional etiquette left, right, and centre.” Brinton, who still wasn’t sure the whole thing wasn’t a mare’s nest, had no wish to make a fool of himself by involving his opposite number in the Sussex constabulary any earlier than he must.
He cleared his throat again. “Seems some old chap this side of Hastings was beaten up about six months ago, only according to the doc it wasn’t a burglary as such—nothing pinched, no vandalism, just—just personal spite, and they never found who did it. He ended up in a home—a really posh place, not Knight’s—suffering from loss of memory.” He coughed. “And it hasn’t come back, so nobody knows quite how or why it all happened. But the whole affair seemed so pointless—doesn’t make sense ...”
Like the other cases, he reminded himself as Buckland slowed the car for the turn into Abinger’s road.
As Foxon had done, Brinton and Buckland took careful note of the gables, dormer windows, tiling and brickwork, and curving gravel drive of the house previously owned by the late Mr. Pontefract, now the property of Patrick and Lucy Abinger. A net curtain in the front window twitched, but there was no other sign of life. Even the worms seemed to have abandoned their under-lawn excavations, for the grass was muddily green but unsullied by mounds of earth.
“Miss Addison next,” said Brinton, quite as baffled as he’d been before he came, but not giving up yet. Buckland muttered something about damned-if-he-was-doing-the-garden-for-her, which Brinton chose not to hear. The car rumbled on its way with Brinton brooding in the passenger seat.
At Miss Addison’s house they pulled into the kerb behind a sturdy vehicle Buckland soon identified as belonging to the district nurse: a plaster-cast inspection was suggested as the reason for the visit. Brinton grunted and climbed out of the car without saying whether he agreed or not. Buckland maintained a discreet silence as he followed.
“Gate needs painting,” remarked Brinton after a few uneasy moments, unconsciously echoing Gran Biddle. “Drive’s suffered some frost damage, too. It’ll cost some money to put that right, though I suppose the old girl won’t be using her car for a while, with a broken leg.”
“No, sir,” said Buckland absently. He was looking at the drive and frowning. “Surely that’s new,” he murmured to himself. “And it’s not as if the winter’s been all that cold. Wet, yes, but ...”
Beside him, Brinton stirred. “Let’s get on,” he said. One minute he’d suspected a conspiracy of overkeen housebuyers; now it was importunate motorists after low-mileage cars. “We’ve half a dozen more addresses to check before the light goes. Buckland, stop daydreaming!”
“Sorry, sir.” He didn’t altogether sound it. There was something on his mind—at the back of his mind, refusing to come forward. Something that wasn’t—like the super’d said before—quite right, although ...
“Buckland!” roared Brinton from the panda; and Buckland wisely sprinted down the pavement without a backward glance at the house of Adelaide Addison.
As they drove away, it was not only the occupant of the passenger seat who was, this time, brooding. Buckland’s honest brow, like that of his superior, was furrowed deep in thought. Anyone given to the practice of atmospheric incision could have perfected their art inside that panda car.
The third house turned out to be a bungalow, almost invisible under a shroud of heavy-duty fluorescent plastic while a gang of large and muscular men clumped up and down ladders carrying boxes of nails and hods of pantiles to repair the battered slate roof.
“This one’s sold,” Brinton roused himself to say, unnecessarily. Buckland nodded. The estate agent’s board might have gone, but there was no mistaking the frenzied activity generated by a new homeowner demanding instant perfection. The lorry parked nearby carried bags of cement and planks of wood as well as roofing materials. There were drifts of sawdust interlaced with whitewash footprints going in both directions along the asphalt drive, on one part of which an enormous pile of paving stones had been erected.
“I hope those are reconstituted,” muttered Brinton, his crime-prevention instincts coming to the fore. “The real stuff costs a small fortune, so if that’s what they are, the owners’ll be damned lucky if the whole lot hasn’t walked by the end of the week.”
“Less noisy than gravel, sir,” said Buckland. “No frost damage, either.”
“Just don’t spill yoghurt on them,” growled Brinton as they headed back to the car.
Buckland shot him an anxious look. “Er ... I think that was whitewash, sir. Paint of some sort, anyway.”
“What? Oh, that.” Brinton emerged from his abstraction to grin a rueful grin. Mrs. Brinton, on a recent visit to the dentist, had picked up some overambitious home improvement ideas from a women’s magazine. Her husband liked gardening no more than did Detective Constable Foxon and sadly foresaw a long, strenuous, and yoghurt-ridden spring ahead for the Brinton ménage. “No, it’s what they paint statues with to get ’em to grow moss just like real old stone. A couple of years and you’d never know it was just powdered marble and resin under there, I’m told.” He sighed. “What will they think of next?”
“Next, sir?” Buckland had only caught the tail end of his superior’s musing. “Right.” And the car set off at a brisk speed towards household number four.
Dull pebble-dash walls and uncurtained windows looked down upon an overgrown front garden. Shabby asphalt, frost-pitted and potholed, wound between scruffy flower beds to a double-doored garage in which broken panes of glass were mournful eyes surveying desolation.
“Vandals,” growled Brinton. “Probably hasn’t even been reported, if the place is standing empty. We don’t stand a chance of catching the blighters if the public doesn’t cooperate—but do they listen?”
Buckland, for one, wasn’t listening. He was staring at the broken-windowed garage and frowning. “She hasn’t got a car,” he said. “She never drove, even before her busted ankle, according to Gran Biddle. I wonder ...”
Brinton blinked. Light was beginning to dawn. He might be imagining things, but ... “These places we’ve been checking,” he said slowly. “Apart from the fact some poor old soul used to live there and doesn’t anymore ...”
“Yes, sir?” The tone of Buckland’s response seemed to suggest that he, like Brinton, might have begun to see the light. The superintendent let out a quiet sigh.
“Of course we’ll look at the other addresses,” he said slowly. “To make sure. But before we do, if you’d care to wager a small sum on what else they’ve all got in common, I’d be happy to take you on ...”
PC Buckland was shaking his head. “No bet, sir,” he said firmly. “I think,” prudence made him add. “Not until we’ve seen the rest of the list, anyway ...”
“Then let’s get going,” commanded Superintendent Brinton. Whereupon they got.
Plummergen, on the whole, is conservative at heart. The villagers view change-for-the-sake-of-change with suspicion. A smooth-tongued commercial traveller had, however, with some difficulty talked Mr. Stillman’s wife Elsie into trying a different brand of tinned pineapple chunks at a Special Introductory Pric
e, and the relative merits of “Juiceo” and “Ananas” were being enthusiastically debated as the Brettenden bus, with a squeal of brakes, pulled up at the stop outside the post office.
Ears pricked; conversation faltered. People forgot what they were saying and moved from the display counters in the middle of the shop towards the window and the half-glazed main door. Taller shoppers, longer in the leg and with bags and baskets over their arms, barged and elbowed their unfair way to an even better view than their shorter, disadvantaged sisters. As far as anyone knew, everyone who had gone into Brettenden earlier that day had already returned. For the bus to stop meant that somebody had requested it to do so: somebody who was most likely a stranger.
The rubber doors of the bus thudded open, and a figure materialised in silhouette on the platform. A collective sigh of deep satisfaction confirmed to all inside the post office that nobody who saw the figure recognised it. Her. Despite the mufflings of a heavy tweed overcoat and the fact that only the back was visible, the figure must surely be female. Conservative Plummergen could not conceive that any normal man would dare to flaunt such glorious, waist-length auburn locks in public.
“Coo! That hair’s never real,” said an envious Emmy Putts, who had stolen a march on the rest by mounting the aluminium steps Mr. Stillman kept behind the counter for less popular items on the top shelf. Balancing on tiptoe, Emmy scowled over the heads of everyone else at that lustrous red-gold mane as its owner, still with her back to those watching, continued (so the watchers assumed) to address words of thanks and farewell to the bus driver. “Out of a bottle, that’s got to be. Coo ...”
Sweet Miss Seeton (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 20) Page 13