Miss Seeton's Finest Hour (A Miss Seeton Mystery)

by Hamilton Crane

  If he was dead. Rumour, gossip, exaggeration ...

  “I will come with you,” said Miss Seeton, and began to urge the girls back down the path in the direction of the clocking-on machine. While they were queueing she would try to find someone whose reactions were a little less ... emotional—understandable though emotion might be, in the circumstances—if Raymond Raybould, that was to say, was really dead. And, if he was dead—and if his death had been no accident, but deliberate—then she felt sure that this news should be imparted as soon as possible to Major Haynes.

  She had, however, no wish to telephone him with mere alarmist rumours. For almost the first time in her life Emily Dorothea Seeton was conscious of a fear of looking foolish. In the national interest she was, of course, prepared for far worse: but if a few moments’ conversation could establish the true facts, she would prefer to converse and establish before hurrying to the telephone and calling the Tower of London.

  Phone this number (the major had said) and someone will be in touch. If there’s anything in the nature of an emergency, you’re to phone this number and give the password ...

  Miss Seeton’s heart was fluttering as she slipped into the Welfare Office and found it empty. She uttered a thankful sigh: it would not have suited Emily Seeton at all to have Mrs. Morris commenting with scorn (as she was sure to do) on her young assistant’s state of nervousness. The death of Raymond Raybould was indeed being regarded by the police as murder, and Miss Seeton had to tell Major Haynes.

  Her heart fluttered still more as she reached for the telephone handset. Had she memorized the numbers correctly? Suppose she were to muddle which was which and quote the secret password to the wrong person? Suppose—?

  “Number, please,” said the operator’s voice in her ear. Miss Seeton licked her dry lips, crossed mental fingers, and did her best to sound confident as she repeated the emergency number.

  “I’m sorry, caller, I can’t hear you.” Miss Seeton’s best, it seemed, had not been good enough. She tried again.

  “Thank you,” said the operator, her voice muffled by the thump of Miss Seeton’s heart. “Trying to put you through.”

  There followed a series of clicks, whistles, and whirrs, above which a completely unknown voice (male) launched into a one-sided argument with someone he addressed as Cutie-Pie. Miss Seeton’s cheeks grew warm, and her hand tightened on the receiver. This was an emergency—and the lines were crossed! Should she break the connection and try again?

  But then there came the rhythmic burr of the dialling tone, which trilled barely once before someone at the other end was asking who she was and what she wanted.

  Miss Seeton’s cheeks flamed. She had braced herself for this, but it sounded so—so very melodramatic ...

  “What,” she enquired warily of the mouthpiece, “goes up a chimney down, but—but can’t go down a chimney up?”

  “What was that?” Once again, it seemed, her delivery left something to be desired. “Who is this?”

  Heavens! She had forgotten to identify herself—Major Haynes would not be pleased ...

  “My name,” enunciated Miss Seeton with care, “is Emily Seeton. I am calling from—from the Spitfire factory to ask what goes up a chimney down, but can’t—oh!”

  In her shock she dropped the handset back in its cradle, breaking the connection. A sudden hand had grabbed her by the shoulder and, trying to pull her round, shook her off balance, so that she stumbled and nearly fell against—

  “Mrs. Morris!” said Miss Seeton, aghast. “Please—let me explain—it isn’t—that is, I wasn’t—”

  “Be quiet!” the older, taller woman spat as she shook her again, not gently. “I knew I was right about you!” Shake. “I said sending you here was a mistake!” Shake. “You—you wretched little traitor!” Shake. “You spy!” Shake. “You—you murderer!”

  The repeated shakes and accusations had left Miss Seeton too startled to do anything but try to remain standing. Her face, already pink with embarrassment from the telephone call, now turned a fiery, indignant red. To Mrs. Morris this blush was final proof of the traitor’s guilt, and she shook her victim once more with great vigour, released and threw her so that she stumbled again, seized her arm, twisted it round behind her, and marched her to the open door of the office and out into the corridor.

  “Not one word from you, my girl!” Mrs. Morris gave her prisoner’s arm a swift upward jerk. Miss Seeton winced, but uttered only a brief cry as she stumbled on in the direction she was being forced. “If you open your mouth to a soul,” the older woman threatened in a low snarl, “I’ll tell them just what you were doing when I caught you, and how you were trying to send a message in some filthy code to the Huns—and then I’ll let you go.” She jerked Miss Seeton’s arm again. “I don’t think,” said Mrs. Morris grimly, “you’ll get very far, no matter how fast you can run. The sentries are armed, remember, with orders to shoot to kill ...

  “Ah, George.” They had reached the cubicle in which the one-armed man sat all day on watch, and Mrs. Morris spoke in her normal voice. “I want you to fetch one of the policemen from outside. Tell him it’s an emergency, and don’t take no for an answer—and bring him here at once.”

  George looked from Mrs. Morris, bright-eyed and stern, to Miss Seeton, pink-cheeked and flustered. “I didn’t rightly ought to leave the door,” he said at last. “I’m supposed to be on guard, aren’t I?”

  “We will remain here until you return,” Mrs. Morris told him. “You—and a policeman,” she added with another tweak of Miss Seeton’s arm.

  Despite herself, Miss Seeton gasped. Old George looked more closely at the two women and slowly nodded. “But if you let anyone in that’s not authorised,” he reminded them as he edged out of the cubicle, “I won’t answer for the consequences. You keep ’em out unless they’ve got a pass!”

  It was an uneasy few minutes before George reappeared. Miss Seeton ventured—once—to speak, but she did not try again. Her right arm and shoulder were warm and simmering from the tweaks and jerks applied by Mrs. Morris every time her captive displeased her: and of course the welfare officer had never been pleased at the idea of an assistant. There was, Miss Seeton reflected with sad philosophy, more behind this—understandable—mistake than mere hatred of murder, spies, and treachery ...

  She sighed—and then yelped. Mrs. Morris hissed at her to be silent, and she obeyed. It seemed the wisest thing, in the circumstances, to do.

  The magnificent specimen of police sergeantry who appeared at Old George’s side was greeted by Mrs. Morris with a conspiratorial glance and a swift murmur that George must be back in his cubicle before she could reveal the reason for her summons.

  “He said it was urgent,” said Sergeant Hammersley, whose muscular development was admired by Miss Seeton the artist but contemplated with apprehension by Miss Seeton the suspect traitor, who began to wonder if she would ever be able to hold a pencil or paintbrush without pain ...

  Once George was inside his cubicle, Mrs. Morris ordered him to close the hatch. This, reluctantly, he did, and she turned to address the burly sergeant.

  “This—this creature,” spat Mrs. Morris, giving Miss Seeton a final shake, “is a spy! I caught her using the telephone in my office to send a coded message,” she hurried on as the sergeant tried to express his surprise. “You must arrest her immediately—and not just for spying. I’m sure she knows far more about the murder than we suspect—and if you look inside her sketchbook you’ll see how—how helpful it would be to the enemy—you must arrest her and lock her up before she can do any more harm—and keep her locked up until she can be dealt with!”

  Just because Sergeant Hammersley was a large, well-built man did not mean that he was a pattern of bucolic stupidity. He snapped to attention at the word spy and listened keenly to the rest of the hurried explanation while keeping a close watch on Miss Seeton’s reactions.

  “So, what have you got to say for yourself?” he demanded as Mrs. Morris drew to a
breathless halt. Miss Seeton, whose arm had endured one final vicious tweak, shook her head with tears in her eyes, and said nothing. “She says,” prompted Hammersley, “you’re a spy, sending messages in code ...”

  For the first time a note of uncertainty crept into the sergeant’s voice. This young woman in her quiet tweeds and, well, peculiar hat didn’t look like his idea of a spy; she looked English through and through. But then, that might be the Germans’ cleverness—a sort of double bluff—and as to whether or not she’d looked guilty when the Morris woman was telling her story, it had been hard to tell, with her being shaken all the time and her arm twisted round and Morris not letting her go in case (he supposed) she made a bolt for it, which—with the police on the premises, not to mention the LDV perimeter patrol—didn’t seem likely, unless she was one of the fanatical sort that would prefer a quick death and glory to being locked away in prison ...

  “Messages in code,” reiterated Sergeant Hammersley, and produced his notebook. This action prompted him to ask what Mrs. Morris had meant about the sketchbook, and she told him. Her story made him frown—and the unhappy figure of Miss Seeton made him think.

  “We’d better take you and your sketches into protective custody, miss,” he said at last. “There’s a war on, remember, and bloody murder been done, and if you’re safely out of the way, then everyone else can get on with what they’re supposed to be doing, and if it turns out later we’ve made a mistake, then—”

  “I told you,” broke in Mrs. Morris, “I heard her! If she wasn’t giving them some sort of coded message ...”

  “That’s enough!” Sergeant Hammersley leaped to the rescue as Mrs. Morris vented upon the unfortunate Miss Seeton her frustration at having her word doubted. “Now, that’s quite enough, madam, thank you.” Sergeant Hammersley loosened the white-knuckled grip of Mrs. Morris and allowed Miss Seeton’s arm to relax into his own, more gentle custody. “She won’t be giving me any trouble—will you, miss?”

  “Indeed, no,” the prisoner managed to gasp while flexing her cramped muscles, trying to betray no further weakness. Was she not, after all, a soldier’s daughter?

  “I’ll take you along to the station,” the sergeant continued as Mrs. Morris prepared to argue, caught his eye, and subsided. “If you’ll fetch the sketchbook, madam, I’ll take it along as well, and I’ll come back later for your official statement—if it’s necessary,” he found himself adding. The young woman really did look a most unlikely spy—but he knew he couldn’t afford to risk judging by appearances.

  Because if he got it wrong, the way things were he could just be putting out the welcome mat for the Germans ...

  chapter

  ~ 22 ~

  THEY HAD (Miss Seeton reflected) been stern, of course, even hostile—but it was a polite hostility, and if the politeness had been somewhat forced, that was only to be expected, as they supposed her to be a spy; and despite popular belief (to which she did not subscribe) that spies were treated roughly, they had not been ... violent. Mrs. Morris (mused Miss Seeton, flexing her aching shoulder and arm) had treated her with more violence than the police.

  They had been brisk and efficient, taking her to a quiet room at the rear of the station to ask her questions, noting her careful answers, and saying—but not threatening—that she should make “a proper statement” later, when they were in less of a hurry. She would (they said) understand their hurry, because there was a war on—and murder on top of that. She had assured them she understood very well, and they had smiled grim smiles and said it was lucky for her that she did.

  They told her they would give her time to think things over, and took her to a cell with modest facilities and a door with a stout lock. Miss Seeton heard the key turn behind her and sat down to await rescue.

  She wished they had not insisted on keeping her sketchbook: it was, after all, not hers. It was the property of His Majesty’s Government, at least insofar as a government department had paid for it, even if she might be considered responsible for it in the short term. But she could see why they had done so—the police, that was to say—and it had seemed wiser not to make too much fuss and, by fussing, to draw attention to herself any more than circumstances had already contrived. The identity card describing her as a civilian war artist did not, in her opinion, look either impressive or credible, at least when the situation was as grave as ...

  “Murder,” Miss Seeton whispered in the silence of her cell. “Poor Mr. Raybould. And yet ... why should anyone wish to murder one of the cleaners?”

  The factory complex was large, its staff legion—and increasing daily, as Mrs. Morris had told her, with the enormous growth in output. Miss Seeton knew that for every cleaner she had seen (and sketched) at work, there were a dozen others out of sight, all of them always at work. The loss of one life was regrettable—more than regrettable—but the loss of one worker was ... incomprehensible. There were more workers to replace him, and more to come ...

  Miss Seeton rubbed her upper arm and frowned. Raymond Raybould had been murdered, then, because of who he was as himself, not because of who he was in the working sense. Anyone could sweep a floor. It required, as far as she knew, no special training. One took one’s broom, applied it to the floor, and pushed. When the pile being pushed seemed likely to spill, one collected it by means of a dustpan—the industrial size had made her chuckle the first time she saw it—and tipped the contents through a sieve into a sack. Any metal pieces caught by the sieve were dropped into other, smaller sacks or linen bags to be sorted at home by village housewives ...

  Miss Seeton wondered whether anyone had thought to tell Mrs. Beamish to expect her home late because she was in custody, suspected of being a spy. She sighed.

  She sat up. Spies. Microfilm! Perhaps one of those precious metal sweepings had been, not an ordinary nut or bolt or screw or rivet, but something hollowed out, with a secret message hidden inside ...

  “This is too melodramatic,” Miss Seeton scolded herself with a blush. Whatever would Major Haynes think of such fanciful notions?

  Major Haynes. (Giles?) Miss Seeton shook herself and blushed more deeply. How fortunate that her dear mother had always emphasised the importance to a gentlewoman of self-control. It had been ... unsettling to be accused by Mrs. Morris and arrested by the police, but the major had warned his protégée that she must on no account reveal to anyone, or even hint at, her connection with Military Intelligence Section G (Gabriel?) for fear of endangering national security. Despite the looming presence of an extremely large and irritable uniformed inspector of police, she had remembered that warning and refused to tell him any more than—what was the popular phrase?

  “Name, rank, and number,” she murmured, recalling the inspector’s black looks as she had remained steadfastly silent about the cryptic words Mrs. Morris had overheard. “She was in a hurry,” Miss Seeton had volunteered at last, and only once. “She might—she might have misheard ...”

  This was hardly a downright lie, but it made her uneasy; and as (not being a quick thinker) she could offer no less sinister interpretation for whatever words she might in fact have said, she said nothing, and had ended up in the cells—waiting for rescue. They looked after their own, the major had emphasised. She would not be forgotten.

  She smiled. She was confident that sooner or later this little—entirely understandable—misunderstanding would be cleared up. Her telephone call to the secret number had been answered; she had given the password, and ...

  “Oh, dear.” Miss Seeton sighed. How much of what she had tried to say in fact been heard at the other end?

  But there was no sense in worrying. She must wait and see—must wait and keep silent about what she knew, just as the major had told her.

  She looked around the little room in which she was a prisoner. “Such melodrama,” she scolded herself again, and resolved to turn her thoughts in another direction.

  Why should anyone wish to—to murder Raymond Raybould? What might he have done to ..
. offend anyone so deeply that only his death could ... atone?

  He had implied that he was a conscientious objector. Beryl and Ruby had said the same. His views were no great secret—and he seemed neither embarrassed nor ashamed of them. Perhaps he should have been. In the opinion of many, conchies (unless for avowedly religious reasons) were the lowest of the low. Might someone who had watched a loved one go to war, never to return, have taken exception to the cleaner’s declared philosophy and—and carried that exception beyond all reasonable bounds?

  “And yet,” Miss Seeton reminded herself sadly, “we are fighting this war for the sake of freedom. If one truly has strong moral views about—about killing ...”

  Then she remembered that it might not be long—it might be at any moment—that she, with the rest of the nation, would be called upon to make the ultimate decision whether to stifle those moral views or to uphold them.

  If the church bells rang ...

  They did not ring that night. Miss Seeton slept a troubled sleep and woke, stiff and weary, next morning to the sound of a thump on the door of her cell and the jingle of keys in the lock.

  “Are you decent, Miss Seeton?” It was Sergeant Hammersley who made the enquiry, to which the prisoner, stifling a yawn as she sat up, replied that she was.

  “We’re to apologise to you, Miss Seeton.” Hammersley popped his head round the door to see her trying to pat her hair left-handed into shape, grinned a shamefaced grin, and allowed the rest of himself to appear. “We’ve had a message—don’t know who, not allowed to ask—that you’re on the side of the angels, and we really didn’t ought to’ve brought you in yesterday even if it did look a bit ...”

  “Suspicious,” Miss Seeton concluded kindly as he turned red and coughed himself to a halt. “That’s quite all right, Mr. Hammersley. In an emergency one should always take every precaution, which you—which the police—did. I assure you that I blame nobody for what was a—an entirely understandable error—and indeed, it is I who should apologise—for the inconvenience to which you have been put. I trust that—that your investigation of poor Mr. Raybould’s death has not been too much hindered by ...”