“Beforehand, I mean.” Miss Seeton gave the alarm box an absentminded pat as she turned to make her way back down the stairs. “I believe it is recommended for insurance purposes, always assuming one has a good camera and knows how to work the apparatus without blurring.” She gestured as if in demonstration, and dropped the keys, which tumbled to the foot of the stairs with a crisp rattling sound. “Oh, bother—how silly of me. No, don’t trouble . . .” But Bob was down on his knees already. Miss Seeton descended the remainder of the stairs to join him.
“The resulting picture, that is to say, and focus is important, too, though I understand there are modern cameras which focus without having to be set on a dial, yet rather expensive, I feel sure, for most old people, and one can’t help wondering—oh, thank you!” She gripped the keys firmly as once more she headed for the door. Bob followed, dusting creases from the knees of his trousers, and watched as Miss Seeton picked up her bag and her brolly and turned, for the second time, to leave.
“Why the government,” continued Miss Seeton, as finally she closed the door of Sweetbriars on an empty, but well-protected home, “can’t provide some form of portable studio to visit old people and take a photographic record of their belongings for future reference.” She regarded Bob thoughtfully. “An impertinence to suggest it, perhaps, but could the police not organise . . . ?”
“You know, in principle that’s a pretty good idea,” said Bob, “though not really what the police feel they should be doing. It’s our job, unfortunately, to collar the villains after they’ve done the stealing, though of course we’re happy to advise members of the public on crime prevention.”
“And what a wicked crime,” Miss Seeton said, as the car headed down The Street away from Sweetbriars. “Exploiting a lonely old person’s sense of loneliness and tricking them into absorbing drugs—how callous that is! For it may well be,” said Miss Seeton, her voice indignant, “that these poor old people are already taking some form of medication with which the sedatives will disagree. It might make them seriously ill!” And her eyes shone with disapproval.
Bob said nothing; Delphick had decided she was not to know of the death of Regimental Sergeant Major Brent unless it was absolutely necessary. “Let her think she’s simply coming to draw a portrait or two of the female chummies who actually go into the house. We might try taking her along to Brent’s place if there’s time—though we needn’t go into details about what happened—just to see if she can pick up any atmosphere. I can never make up my mind whether she’s psychic or not . . .”
“Such a very boastful, public way of committing robbery, don’t you think?” continued Miss Seeton, leaning forward to speak more directly into Bob’s ear. He must be so bothered about this case: normally he put her to sit beside him in the front of the car . . . but, since he had settled her so carefully in the back, she must not disturb him by saying anything. “Swaggering,” she went on, “indeed, one might say defiant, like pirates in the olden days flaunting the Jolly Roger and daring law-abiding ships to catch them if they could. Which, being without guns, as far as I recollect from my reading, of course they could not do, and were rather being chased and caught themselves. And walking the plank, such a flamboyant gesture, and quite unnecessary, if the pirates had such sharp swords, or do I mean cutlasses—or maybe,” mused Miss Seeton, seeing sharp metallic curves in her mind’s eye, “I mean scimitars . . .”
Bob was still considering her suggestion of pre-robbery photography, and as he drove was daydreaming with that part of his concentration he could spare. Suppose each town council bought one camera per a certain head of population, and trained up a town clerk—he was hazy as to what a town clerk normally did, but supposed it wasn’t vital—to use the thing, and set up a darkroom, to be paid for from the rates. And then somebody would have to work out a rota, one street a week, say, and there’d have to be a strongroom with a good lock for storing the negatives and duplicates because otherwise all the chummies would have to do would be burgle the town hall and find out where they could find the most suitable things to steal . . .
“They’d be sure to find out,” he said. Miss Seeton leaned forward again. “Indeed they would, but not until they had hoisted the skull and crossbones, I suppose,” she said, “although my knowledge of that period of history is somewhat vague, Long John Silver and the Hispaniola, such a graceful, romantic name—but then ships always are, aren’t they? Which is why they’re always ‘she’ instead of it, except, I believe, for submarines, or is that boats? Anyway, it would hardly be before then, without sharp eyesight to read the name on the prow, or is it the bow, of the ship. Would it?”
Bob suddenly came to his full senses and realised that he had no idea what she was talking about. “You could well be right,” he hedged, and then, before she had time to reply: “Good lord! I’m so sorry, Aunt Em, to have stuck you in the back like that—I wasn’t thinking straight.” He glanced in the driving mirror, flipped on his indicator, and slowed down into the side of the road.
“Come and sit next to me,” he invited, mentally kicking himself for not having noticed before. “Why didn’t you let me know? I was busy wondering if your idea would work,” he explained, as Miss Seeton moved around into the front seat. She regarded him questioningly.
“About the pirates?” she asked, and he uttered a harsh laugh as the car pulled away again.
“Pirates is one word for them, yes. But I think you had a better feel for it when you called them vultures. Picking their way through old folks’ belongings, and using such a nasty trick, too. Promise me,” he said hastily, “that you’re not going to let anybody strange help you home with your shopping, or—well, no, you wouldn’t need helping to cross the road, would you?”
“Indeed I would not,” returned Miss Seeton proudly, with thoughts of Yoga and Younger Every Day very much in her mind and a glow of satisfaction as she considered her knees.
“Good. I don’t like to say so, but there are times when you—when anyone—can be too trusting . . .”
“We’re trusting to you, Miss Seeton,” said Chief Superintendent Delphick, “to give us a little more of a line on this crowd than we’ve managed to get so far. The old folk are upset, bewildered. We try to gentle them along, send a woman police officer to talk to them and help them remember what they can of how the villains looked, but of course they don’t remember much. One or two of your sketches . . .” With a smile, he indicated the flat case which Sergeant Ranger had set beside Miss Seeton’s chair.
Miss Seeton looked slightly anxious as she replied, “Of course, I will certainly do my best to help, for as I explained to . . .” She hesitated. Did one acknowledge one’s adopted aunthood when discussing what was, after all, a professional police matter with one’s nephew’s professional superior? Perhaps, she reflected, one did not. “To the dear sergeant here,” she supplied brightly, and Bob blushed as Delphick favoured him with a quick look.
“You see,” said Miss Seeton, “of course I am entirely used to life classes, and to still life, and portraits and abstracts, but . . . but I am not entirely sure of my ability to produce what I believe you want, which must be a portrait of the, the criminal—” she frowned—“drawn entirely from a description, of someone I have not seen—and I do so prefer to draw only what is there, or has been, but of course I was not there to see it, or them . . .” She coughed delicately. “I rather fear,” said Miss Seeton, “that it may not result in the quality of picture for which you hope. And for identification purposes, it may be of no use—although naturally, I deplore such wicked, callous behaviour, such lack of respect for a person’s privacy and dignity. I shall be glad to do all I can to assist you, but I should not wish you to be too disappointed . . .”
She gazed at Delphick with a worried look in her eyes, to which he was quick to respond. “I understand exactly,” he said. “I feel the same way, too—about the callousness of it all. And I want to catch them, and, so far, all we know about them is that they’re just an
ordinary bunch of people, two women, one man, could be anyone. You have a real gift for drawing those little sketches that give us the impression of who we’re after, not an exact likeness. We don’t need a routine portrait, just the atmosphere, the feeling. Remember,” he smiled at her, “how you and I and Sergeant Ranger—” with a wink—“first met? You sketched me the Covent Garden killer and we knew at once who he was. Even the sergeant,” nodding in Bob’s direction, “who isn’t what you’d call artistic, recognised him.”
“But,” said Miss Seeton, “I had seen him, you see, and these poor people will have to describe these others to me, which is bound to distress them, when I have not. Seen them—the others, I mean.”
Delphick decided to be a little stern with her, before she worked herself up into a state about not producing the goods for him, and sent her emanations or whatever they were completely skew-whiff. Because it was the emanations which he wanted to make use of, not Miss Seeton’s routine skills in portraiture: he wanted one of her flashes of inspiration to inspire him when he looked at the sketches she eventually produced.
“Scotland Yard knows what it’s doing, Miss Seeton,” said the chief superintendent firmly. “You’ve no need whatsoever to concern yourself with anything except chatting to this Mrs. Birchanger and drawing what her statement suggests to you. Don’t worry about accurate likenesses. You’re not a camera, you’re an artist. And that’s what we pay you for.”
Miss Seeton bowed her head in acknowledgement, and in a little embarrassment that Mr. Delphick should think she might be, well, forgetful of her duty. The generous retainer paid to her could never allow her to be that . . . but from the twinkle in his eye she could tell he was not really scolding her, merely reminding her there was work to be done, and that by her wish to be conscientious and explain she was guilty of taking up police time. Miss Seeton blushed.
“Very well,” she said, rising to her feet. “When you are ready to leave, Chief Superintendent, then so am I!”
chapter
~9~
DELPHICK HAD TAKEN great pains to study each file on all the earlier Sherry Gang cases, and his in-tray had mysteriously cloned itself a twin, overflowing as dramatically as its brother. His out-tray had as mysteriously vanished: there was no room for it on the chief superintendent’s desk. Bob Ranger’s desk, however, in a yet more mysterious fashion boasted two out-trays and one dangerously full in-tray, which loomed over his telephone and always seemed to be in the way. This, said Delphick, was a fair division of labour; he did not ask what the sergeant’s opinion was.
“I think I’ve found just the one we’re looking for,” he informed Bob with relief, after reading through a dozen or more accounts that were distressingly familiar. Uniformed police officers first on the scene all reported the old folk dizzy, confused, and unable to help; detectives, arriving when in theory the victims should have calmed down and the drug was out of their systems, reported no great breakthrough. By the time they were sufficiently calm, their recollections were hazy, to say the least; and interviews of shop assistants or others who ought to have witnessed the skilful pickup of the marks were also unhelpful. “Didn’t really notice her . . . nothing special to look at . . . just like anyone else, I suppose . . .”
Which was what the hardened policeman expected from the all-observant and cooperative public, and what the Sherry Gang had evidently bargained for. Their very ordinariness made them invisible, like Chesterton’s postman; and they had guessed, as well, that their victims would remember little and be able to communicate less.
In every case but one, they had guessed correctly. But Mrs. Birchanger was different. “With a vengeance,” Delphick told Bob, grinning. “And I use the word advisedly.” For it might have been the Sherry Gang’s big mistake when they met Elsie Birchanger outside the supermarket and offered to help her home with her heavy bag of groceries.
Elsie was voluble and vindictive. “Like to get me hands on the bleeders, I would,” she informed the constable who took her statement. “Never in all me born days did I dream of such a thing, and what Mr. Birchanger would say if he’d been spared, I wouldn’t care to repeat.” She primmed her lips and looked wise. Her gaze drifted meaningfully towards a large photograph in a plastic frame on the sideboard: a man with a Crippen moustache, who looked scarcely capable of thinking, let alone uttering, unrepeatable thoughts. Elsie scowled at the doubtful expression on the young constable’s face. “Oh, a regular devil he could be, could Birchanger, when he’d the drink in him. And stand for any nonsense? Not him! If he’d known what them bleeders was up to with their Do let me help you with that heavy shopping bag, dear, and coming right into the house offering me a glass of sherry, I can’t tell you what he’d have said to them. Unless,” she reflected in some honesty, “he was sober. Which he weren’t, to speak of, much. And the sherry, that wouldn’t have been enough to stop him, drugs or not. But there it is . . .” And she produced an artistic sigh. “He weren’t here to protect me, his better half, all them years married and when the time come when he mighter been of some use at last, well, it were too late.”
The young constable longed to ask what she was talking about, but decided it was better left unquestioned. Elsie Birchanger, he thought, would not be an easy woman to be married to: he wondered what the late Mr. Birchanger’s death certificate gave as the cause. If suicide appeared in the printed box it would come as no surprise.
Angry rather than upset, he wrote across the top of the interview form; and it was upon this that Delphick pounced. “She doesn’t sound like the weeping and wailing sort, Bob—she’ll be able to come up with something, I feel it in my bones. Although what she’ll make of Miss Seeton—and what on earth Miss Seeton will make of her . . .”
He had telephoned Elsie to make his unusual request. He was from Scotland Yard, the big time, was he, well, it was no more than she thought her due, given that she paid her taxes with the best and hadn’t Mr. Birchanger done the same all those years, with never a murmur, so she was glad to see that at last it was paying off and she’d be getting a decent return for all that money, one of the high-ups coming to sort out what the local coppers couldn’t cope with, only they were too proud to say so and what reason they’d got to be so full of themselves she really couldn’t say, seeing as it wasn’t the first time this had happened, was it, not by a long chalk, yet the police no nearer catching the bleeders as had done it as they’d been the first time, were they?
“I’m afraid we’re not, Mrs. Birchanger,” Delphick agreed cheerfully. “Which is why we’re asking you for your help.”
Elsie was intrigued. “An artist? To draw what I tell her? But I looked at all them photographs for you—well, for them other coppers, anyhow. And not a flicker of a likeness did I see, search as I might. You wouldn’t be wasting my time, would you?”
“I hope not, Mrs. Birchanger. It’s because you couldn’t spot a likeness in any of the photos that we’d like to bring the artist along to talk to you, so that she can as we might say develop whatever you can tell her into a more realistic portrait. Miss Seeton is very skilful. With luck, you may be able to help us a great deal.”
Elsie pondered. It was a flattering thought that there was at last to be someone hanging on her every word as she recounted her recent experience: the local paper hadn’t been nearly interested enough, saying she wasn’t the first—this had rankled until she felt she had a genuine grievance, as Delphick had heard—and so only worth a paragraph or two on an inside page, and no photo. Perhaps this artist might agree to do a proper picture of Elsie Birchanger, as well as likenesses of them thieving bitches. Look nice, that would, over the mantelpiece where her prized silver teapot used to stand . . . Wait. Teapot—now, might that mean . . . ?
“What time would you be thinking of bringing her along?” she asked in a wary tone. “I’m not making cups of tea or fixing to cook a meal, not with my knees, I’m not!”
“At whatever time would be most convenient to you,” said Delphick quickly
, in his most reassuring voice, although at the other end of the telephone his eyes danced. “And if you would care to join us for a quick bite of something, either before or after the interview, I’m sure Miss Seeton and I would be glad of your company.”
Mollified—evidently the copper didn’t expect her to pay out good money on feeding him and this artist—Elsie was about to grumble out her acceptance of the proposal when memory flashed bold headlines before her mind’s eye. “Miss Seeton, did I hear you say?” she demanded. “Her what gets in the papers as the Battling Brolly? Coming here with a bloke from Scotland Yard to talk to me?”
And as Delphick admitted that it was the very same Miss Seeton, Elsie resolved that all the neighbours should learn of her approaching apotheosis. She, too, would be written and read about in Anyone’s! She would be the envy of everybody—and it wouldn’t cost her a penny. Almost as good, reflected Mrs. Birchanger with pleasure, as being on the telly . . .
The reality of Miss Seeton startled Elsie Birchanger as much as it always startled those who had only read about her exploits, and had never met her. The photographs Elsie had seen (front page, large, smudgy black-and-white) looked, as they always did, like anybody except their subject. But certainly she’d got the idea, from what she’d read, that Miss Seeton ought to have been—well, bigger, somehow. Not a poor little shrimp of a thing in stockings as grey as her hair, and looking like a puff of strong wind would tumble her to the ground. Elsie pondered her own comfortable bulk, and felt pleased. She knew what proper feeding meant, which is more than this Miss Seeton evidently did, for all she was supposed to be so clever, though if she’d ever caught herself a man she’d have had a different tale to tell. The only way to keep a man, through his stomach, never mind what people said—and the cheek of that doctor, saying it was his heart as took poor Birchanger and she ought to’ve kept him to a diet. Even if he did slow down a bit towards the end, not that he’d ever been much use in a married way of speaking right from the disappointment of the honeymoon, at least he’d died happy, Elsie had seen to that. And kept the death certificate, with Apoplectic fit resulting from over-eating written clearly in the box marked “Cause,” out of sight and out of mind.
Miss Seeton Cracks the Case (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 9) Page 7