Miss Seeton Cracks the Case (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 9)

by Hamilton Crane

  “Oh . . .” Then in his turn Brinton was silent. “Well, I suppose it was a long shot, but—dammit, Oracle, you’ve chased them out of London and they seem to have ended up on my patch. I need all the help I can get! Couldn’t you send me a copy of what she produced—just in case it makes some kind of sense to me even though everyone knows you’re the one who understands her best?”

  Delphick attempted to demur, but Brinton overrode him. “How many did they rob in your area before that old chap was killed? They’re getting careless about the dosage. I don’t want another death in any case, but certainly not when it’s partly the Yard’s fault if one occurs.” Delphick protested more vehemently at this, pointing out that the Sherry Gang never seemed to strike in the same area more than once or, if they’d had a particularly good haul, twice:

  “Which makes them almost random, Chris, and you know as well as I do they’re the hardest kind to catch. And it may also mean they’ll only do perhaps one more before they leave the Ashford area and move elsewhere, if that’s any comfort.”

  But it was black comfort. No policeman cares for crime, and cares for it even less when the victims are the very old or the very young, or the otherwise vulnerable. This latest victim, though not even as old as Mrs. Blaine, had been in a wheelchair. The drugs she took, medically prescribed to make her life at least bearable, had reacted with what was dissolved in the sherry and resulted in her having to give her disjointed witness statement from a hospital bed. “This one could have died, as well,” said Brinton, in a controlled voice. “I want them caught, Oracle, every bit as much as you do, and I’m not going to turn up my nose at any help you or anyone else can give me . . .

  “Even,” he concluded, with a sigh, “Miss Seeton.”

  chapter

  ~13~

  IT WAS ONE of Martha Bloomer’s two days a week spent “doing for” Miss Seeton, and she was being as busy as ever: but something, Miss Seeton decided after a while, seemed to be wrong. There was less cheerful clatter and tuneless song—Martha was tone deaf, though Miss Seeton would never have dreamed of passing comment on her inability to hold a note, as this would have been a personal remark and ungrateful, as well. Martha and Stan had made her so welcome, and looked after her so well, and now that it seemed poor Martha might be in need of looking after herself, Miss Seeton’s duty was clear.

  “Is everything all right?” she enquired, as Mrs. Bloomer emerged from the kitchen with a feather duster in one hand, and her apron crooked. “You seem a little anxious, Martha.”

  Martha ran the back of a sturdy hand across her brow and smiled. “Oh, it’s nothing, just that I didn’t sleep too good last night, tossing and turning for hours, I was, and Stan, too. Means there’s bad weather to come, that’s the usual way of it, and I can’t abide thunder. Makes the top of my head feel like it’s about to explode.”

  “Oh, my dear, then you shouldn’t be here bothering with my nonsense, if you aren’t well—”

  “Nonsense it is,” interrupted Martha, “just a bit of a headache—no, not even so much as that, just a funny sort of feeling, a buildup to the storm. When it finally breaks I’ll be fine again, just you see.” She glanced through the window. “Clouds building up, and it’s getting darker. We shall have rain before long, and that’ll please Stan. What with all the sunshine we’ve been having he’s none too happy about the state of the garden.”

  Miss Seeton nodded. “He spoke to me the other day about a second water-butt, and I confess it had completely slipped my mind, but will you tell him, please, that of course he is to do whatever he thinks best.” Greenfinger, who pointed the gardening way so very clearly, waxed eloquent on the dire results of inadequate watering at critical times, and Miss Seeton had no intention of ignoring either of her mentors. “And anything else he might need, Martha—and you too, of course,” said Miss Seeton. She turned slightly pink with the embarrassment of discussing money, which she always felt had no place in polite conversation. “Tell me of your requirements, Martha dear, and I will, that is to say, after what is needed has been bought—er, selected, then payment, I mean a cheque, rather than the bother of cash . . .”

  As Miss Seeton flustered to a halt, Martha took pity on her, turning away to wield the feather duster against which no cobweb would dare to dangle. “Don’t you worry,” Martha told Miss Seeton brightly, forgetting her incipient headache in her amusement, “about a thing. Stan and I will manage fine, and let you know all you need to know.”

  “Dear Martha,” said Miss Seeton in gratitude, and behind her eyelids felt a little prickle of tears. How emotional of her—the approaching storm, no doubt, so unsettling, as dear Martha had already found, although what she owed to Martha and Stan she could never be too thankful for, and it would seem callous to attempt to deny the emotion. Miss Seeton blew her nose briskly on the neat linen handkerchief she kept in her pocket, and, with a final fond look at Martha’s busily dusting back view, trotted upstairs.

  As she was uncurling from her favourite Cow-Face Posture—yoga, so relaxing, she had entirely managed to forget that storm which was still, it seemed, looming—she heard the voice of Martha from downstairs.

  “All right with you if I hoover now, is it? Whatever the black stuff was you spilled on the carpet, you didn’t manage to get it up properly. A brush is no good for the likes of that. You need a good go with the vacuum to shift it, short of taking the carpet outside to beat it.”

  Miss Seeton was now at the top of the stairs, looking pink once more. “Oh dear, yes, I did my very best, but the charcoal seemed to crumble even more than when I trod on it, and so spreading, too, but I thought, as it was in a corner behind the sofa, nobody would notice . . .”

  “I’ve my reputation to keep up,” Martha informed her, a laugh in her voice. “I’d never be able to look my other ladies in the face again if I knew there was that great patch of black—charcoal, did you say it was?—in your sitting room for anyone to see if they went round the back of the sofa. And now you’ve finished tying yourself in knots I can get the hoover out to see what can be done.”

  Miss Seeton, feeling guilty, came back downstairs and crept into the kitchen as Martha was rummaging in the understairs cupboard for the vacuum cleaner. A temperamental piece of equipment, it functioned best of all for Martha, if in a grudging way: but for Miss Seeton it never seemed willing to beat, or to sweep, or to clean. The electric kettle, however, was something she could easily cope with.

  Above the steady roar of the vacuum cleaner there seemed little point in calling to tell Martha that she was making a cup of tea. Miss Seeton, whose voice had in its time been sent ringing across an entire classroom, shrank from applying a similar number of decibels within the confines of her own home. She switched on the kitchen light—really, that storm was going to be rather spectacular when it finally broke, maybe the atmospheric effects would be worth trying to capture on canvas—and, having checked that the kettle was full, plugged it in. Miss Seeton remembered enough of the war—although not a householder, she had taken her fair share of responsibility—not to rely upon the continuation of the water supply. Last thing at night one should always top up the kettle, so that there would in the morning be at least the makings of a cup of tea.

  Having plugged in the kettle, she switched it on.

  There was a sudden flash which hardly had time to dazzle before it was followed by a tremendous bang, immediately overhead. From the blackened sky came a downpour of rain; from the blackened socket came a whiff of burning; and from Martha in the sitting room came a startled scream.

  “Sparks! Oh my word, running up and down the flex—oh my word, what’s happened?”

  Miss Seeton shook her head to try to clear the ringing from her ears and the blobs from before her eyes—rather an interesting abstract pattern, and one that might serve as a basis for the storm painting she hoped to achieve, but now there was no time to think of art when Martha seemed to be in trouble, and maybe it was partly one’s carelessness that was to blame .
. .

  “I only switched on the kettle,” began Miss Seeton, “and I suppose it must have been a fuse, although I confess I had no idea the results would be so dramatic—oh, dear!”

  As she spoke, she came into the sitting room, to find Martha on the hearthrug, breathing deeply and pointing with a finger that shook at the vacuum cleaner on the other side of the room. Her frozen stance suggested to Miss Seeton’s skilled eye a pose adopted after a momentous leap—as far away as possible, she realised, as she followed that pointing finger, from the vacuum cleaner.

  Which was emitting a series of ominous crackles as the sparks which had startled Martha continued to run up and down the flex. “Oh, dear,” said Miss Seeton again, feeling foolish and inadequate. “Did I do that, too? I never feel entirely happy with electricity, though of course—”

  “We’ve been struck by lightning,” interrupted Martha, who had been roused from her trance by Miss Seeton’s daft willingness to accept the blame for everything. “Nobody’s fault at all—and your insurance ought to cover it. But I was a bit surprised, I admit, and what are we going to do about those sparks? We can’t have the whole place burning down round our ears, but I don’t fancy touching it, yet it’s got to be switched off somehow, and unplugged.”

  Into Miss Seeton’s mind, relieved that none of this had been her fault, came a long-forgotten memory of Mrs. Thorley, who taught science at the little school in Hampstead where Miss Seeton had spent so many years. Mrs. Thorley’s physics party-piece, so the girls would excitedly inform her (their art lesson being time-tabled immediately after the physics class), was, every year on the introduction of “electricity” to the course, to wire herself somehow into the mains with suitable cable while standing on an overturned plastic washing-up bowl, there to stand for some minutes while a breathless class timed her with a stopwatch.

  And at the end of a given period, Mrs. Thorley would leap from her insulating bowl to the floor, her feet giving off a burst of sparks and crackles, in otherwise perfect safety. But the bowl, Miss Seeton recalled, had to be perfectly dry; and hers, she knew, was full of soaking pans.

  “It must not be touched directly,” she said, remembering other snippets of information as annually disseminated by an enthusiastic class. Indeed, so enthusiastic were they that Miss Seeton always encouraged them to paint abstracts of the thrills they had just witnessed, in shocking blue and vivid green and slashing scarlet, in order to calm themselves down in time for the next lesson. “It must not be touched, but it has to be disconnected from the mains. Now, I wonder . . .”

  The vacuum cleaner was still fizzing as she came hurrying back from the hall armed with her second-best umbrella, the one with the wooden handle. “Martha,” instructed Miss Seeton, “you must not attempt to touch me if I become, I believe the term is live, or you will run grave risks. While I am attempting to deal with this, please go into the kitchen and empty the washing-up bowl and bring it to me, but it must be absolutely dry . . .”

  And, without looking to see whether a startled Martha was following her instructions, Miss Seeton proceeded to creep up on the fizzing vacuum cleaner in the manner of a big-game hunter stalking a tiger, holding her umbrella before her like an unwieldy rifle.

  The tiger continued to snarl at Miss Seeton’s approach, her rifle poised to knock it over; then she hesitated, and reversed her grip, so that it was the curved handle that was now free. With a brief prayer and a deft tweak, Miss Seeton seized the fizzing flex with her umbrella and jerked the plug out of the socket, just as Martha came to her senses and was about to go into the kitchen.

  “Oh, well done, Miss Emily!” she applauded, and Miss Seeton, breathless, flushed with triumph, bent cautiously over the now silent vacuum cleaner and prodded it, without sparks or shocks or other signs of distress. It was dead.

  And so, as the electrician from Brettenden informed her, was the kettle, though the rest of the house, including the ring-main, had fortunately survived the thunderclap. “Not worth the bother of repairing, these aren’t,” he said, with a frown and a shake of the head. “Reckon you had a lucky escape there. What did you say you used?”

  “My umbrella,” said Miss Seeton, thankful that Martha was not here to see the expression on his face. Evidently she had somehow misunderstood the exact nature of the feat performed by Mrs. Thorley, and Mr. Spellbrook had delivered a stern lecture.

  He had also delivered an electric kettle. “Brought it along on spec,” he told her, as Miss Seeton was delightedly boiling water for tea and biscuits. “You don’t have to take it if you don’t want it—we’ve got others in stock—but this is as good a model as you’ll find, though I says it as shouldn’t. Your cleaner, now, that’s another matter. Best come into the shop and take a look round yourself—more choice, and you might want to try a cylinder instead of an upright, or one of them fancy round ones . . .”

  Miss Seeton explained that she must consult Mrs. Bloomer on the subject, and would drop into the Brettenden shop once a decision had been made, either with Martha or, if she was otherwise engaged, without her, but with a note of what exactly was required. She and Mr. Spellbrook parted company on the best of terms, once he had repeated his warnings of the inherent dangers of electricity, and Miss Seeton tied a knot in her handkerchief to remind her to speak to Martha.

  The powers that be had reduced the Brettenden bus to a once-a-week service, but Plummergen is not so easily thwarted. Crabbe’s garage, where Old Mr. Crabbe was reluctantly handing over the reins to his grandson, Very Young Crabbe (whose father, Young Crabbe, had died during the war), after a year of listening to the grumbles of the village had come up with a solution. Twice a week, on days not covered by the official bus, a charabanc decorated in the Crabbe livery of dark red and olive green would chunter its steady way the six miles to Brettenden, wait there throughout the day, then turn round and chunter back. Very Young Crabbe’s oldest son (distinguished by his Christian name of Jack) drove the bus, and whiled away his waiting hours in the compilation of cryptic crossword puzzles, which he submitted, with regular success, to one of the more literary periodicals.

  It was an arrangement that pleased everyone in Plummergen except Old Crabbe, who would have liked to drive the bus himself. His grandson had vetoed this on the grounds of his insistence that the safest place to drive was as far from the edge of the road as possible: the centre white line, he said, was much easier to see, as well. Very Young Crabbe hid the spare set of keys from his grandfather, and on days when the charabanc service ran took care to lure the old gentleman to the workshop at the back of the garage, so that the sight of all that red-and-green glory setting out for Brettenden should not disturb him.

  In the little notebook which she always carried in her handbag, Miss Seeton had carefully inscribed Martha’s first and second choices; she made sure her chequebook and gold pen were also there, and, picking up her umbrella—today’s weather forecast had promised a repeat of the recent thunder and heavy rain, perhaps she should take a lightweight mackintosh, as well—made for the front door. She cast a guilty look back up the stairs in the direction of the control box for the burglar alarm: the bolt of lightning, she had found on the next occasion when she had left the house, had somehow killed that system as well as the kettle and the vacuum cleaner. Miss Seeton could not help feeling slightly glad, almost as if one had wished misfortune upon the whole apparatus, ungrateful though this might appear, and really it was so much less troublesome to be without it, although she must mention its demise to that kind Mr. Spellbrook who had been so knowledgeable about her kettle, and perhaps he could be persuaded to take a look at it . . . some time. Meanwhile, one could revel in the freedom from worry, and the comfort of being able to leave one’s house in the normal manner, without the tedious checking and re-checking that the alarm system had required . . .

  Miss Seeton was surprised, on her arrival at Crabbe’s Garage, not to see the familiar red-and-green charabanc in its usual place. She consulted her wristwatch: she must be ea
rly, for there was the bus, still parked on the forecourt—but why was there a tree lying across it?

  “Struck by lightning,” Jack Crabbe told her gloomily, when he popped out of the petrol booth to find her prodding with her umbrella at the branches which scraped against the dented flanks of the red-and-green conveyance, and sorrowfully clicking her tongue.

  “The tree, I mean,” he went on, “and just look at them scratches on the paint, not to mention the other damage, and it may be insured but it’s not the same, is it?”

  “Indeed it is not,” she assured him. “So forlorn, those broken windows, aren’t they? Like eyes that have been suddenly struck blind, and the rain on the upholstery, as well. So distressing for you. Does this mean—I hardly like to mention it, but—will there be no service to Brettenden now until market day?”

  He grinned at her. “Crabbe’s won’t let you down, Miss Seeton. No need to wait till Friday to go to town. We know how much the village depends on us, so Dad’s hired another bus, from Omney’s, for every day till we’ve got ours fixed, and a driver with it, for I’m not insured to drive the Omney bus, regulations, see. With luck it shouldn’t be for long, though. I hope not, I enjoy our little jaunts.” He looked as regretful as a man can who sees his chance of compiling a cryptic crossword snatched from him for at least one day, and probably more. He glanced over her shoulder. “Here’s Omney’s now, so you’d best get going if you want a decent seat, and the driver knows to wait for just as long as I always do, so no need to hurry your shopping. Have fun!”

  And Jack Crabbe, whistling bravely to hide his disappointment, returned to his solitary gloom in the petrol booth.

  Miss Seeton was not the first to enter the Omney bus, for she paused to study its colour scheme of dark blue and deep orange, and to compare this with the familiar Crabbe’s livery. Such a great pity, but how very public-spirited of the old gentleman, or whichever Mr. Crabbe it had been who thought of it, to propose hiring another coach, for indeed it would have been an inconvenience to have to wait until Friday, as dear Martha had strong views about dusty carpets and there was still the stick of charcoal she’d trodden underfoot to be cleared up, so careless to have dropped it, but when one’s sketching equipment is being transferred from one bag to another, these accidents will happen . . .