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

by Hamilton Crane

  “My guess,” interposed Haynes before an argument could start about anything else, “is that the Home Guard spotted Coleman fiddling about with some widget he had no business to be touching. The poor old chap’s health wouldn’t support his working full-time at the factory, but we know he had a certain amount of engineering experience in his background. He would have understood rather better than a casual bloke-on-patrol that what the manager was doing was potentially damaging, and my suspicion is that he challenged him about it and ...”

  “Had his head bashed in for his pains,” said Cox darkly. “So much for the rewards of virtue!”

  “The same theory holds, presumably, in the case of Raybould,” said Chandler.

  Everyone sat up.

  “Raybould,” said Captain Grange. “Ha! If Beaverbrook had only told us, things might have been very different.”

  Aylwin grinned at him. “I thought the Royal Navy view was that everything should be done in duplicate where you can? If not in triplicate?” He reeled back as if a thought had just struck him. “Good heavens! Suppose—”

  “Fool,” snapped the captain with a scowl. The resultant awkward silence was broken by Haynes.

  “The Beaver has his own approach to problems,” he said. “I agree it would have been advisable for him to consult us before sending in his own undercover agent, but given the urgency I can see why he wasted no time with red tape and simply got on with the job.”

  “Got Raybould on the job, you mean,” said Aylwin. “Was the man a genuine conchie? I wouldn’t put it past the old man to have arranged a—a pool of the blighters, ready to spy out the land in all sorts of dodgy situations.”

  “Currying favour as patriots,” said Cox, “when they’re not prepared to fight. Ugh.”

  Chandler said quickly that the war was being fought for the safeguarding of freedom, including the freedom to hold genuine religious or philosophical beliefs. As it happened, however, Raybould was not a conscientious objector. He was an army captain, wounded at Dunkirk and still technically on furlough, whose convalescence had been ... interrupted by an appeal from Lord Beaverbrook, a family friend.

  “He was good for sweeping,” he explained, “but not much else. The shrapnel wounds gave the mortuary quite a shock when they looked him over. In theory he was barely able to walk, but when Beaverbrook told him what he suspected was going on he made a tremendous effort and ...”

  He finished with a rueful shrug, and a sigh that was echoed round the table.

  “A good man, by all accounts.” The naval captain paid tribute to his army junior in a gruff, regretful voice. “If only we’d been told, we might have got someone there sooner as—as backup.”

  “We sent Miss Seeton,” said Chandler.

  All heads turned as one towards Major Haynes, who bowed quietly in acknowledgement of the salute.

  “Much good she would have been in a scrap,” said Cox as Aylwin chuckled.

  “She came up with the answer,” said Haynes, indicating with a forceful gesture the sketchbook lying on the table around which they sat. “Don’t ask me how she knew, but she did. That girl has a—an uncanny gift, there’s no getting away from it.”

  Aylwin eyed him shrewdly. “Thought you said she wasn’t pretty?” he said with another chuckle.

  “She’s not,” said Haynes calmly. “No glamour at all. She’s quiet, ladylike, has her own way of looking at things ... and somehow, I don’t know how she does it, she makes you look another way at her, too.”

  “A quaint little body,” agreed Chandler. “I can see the attraction to those who appreciate the ... unusual.”

  Aylwin snorted. So, in a very different way, did the misogynist Cox. Captain Grange cleared his throat. Chandler glanced at Haynes, who bowed again. In the awkward lighting of the little room, it was difficult to tell if he was blushing or not.

  “So,” resumed Chandler, “the unusual Miss Seeton drew a peculiar picture, and you took the risk—the grave risk—of accusing Coleman on the strength of this doodle and nothing else. You called it a witness statement, but the girl was hardly a witness. She wasn’t there. She didn’t see either of the murders take place—how could she?”

  Haynes shook his head. “I told you, I don’t know how she does it—any of it,” he said. “But she was a witness: she witnessed Coleman’s response to the bombing raid and to the accident, a genuine accident, to young Betty. There was honest shock, horror, in his reaction to the kid’s injuries—remember, he’d always tried to avoid hurting anyone as far as he could, especially the younger workers with their lives ahead of them. Miss Seeton seems to have ... latched on to this in some way I—we—can’t understand ... Maybe it was the bump on the head, poor girl, that made her extra sensitive, but we have to accept there was a definite tendency in that direction even before she was blown up. Otherwise,” he concluded, “we wouldn’t have been so bothered by Steptoe’s original report. And we would never have sent her to the factory in the first place.”

  “We take,” reiterated Chandler, “the point.”

  “Might try using her again,” suggested Captain Grange. “Seems to have done well enough here,” he added as everyone looked at him in some surprise. “Worth a try,” he said once more, and subsided with a fit of coughing.

  Chandler returned quickly to the main topic under discussion. “Raybould,” he said, “being a cleaner, had as much right to wander the place as Coleman. Whatever he saw that roused his suspicion of Coleman we can’t guess—and before anyone suggests it, I don’t propose asking Miss Seeton to sketch her guesses, thank you. Leave her where she is, at least for the moment.”

  “When’s she coming back?” asked Cox, carefully not looking at the major. “And do we send a personal escort when she does?”

  “Miss Seeton,” Haynes informed him in level tones, “who has, it seems, quite remarkable powers of recuperation, will shortly be taking over full-time as workers’ welfare officer at the factory following the—ah—unexpected collapse of Mrs. Morris after the ... regrettably fatal accident to Mr. Coleman. She, that is Emily—Seeton,” he added just too late to prevent Aylwin’s chuckle, “will remain there in the interests of the general morale until a more suitable, permanent replacement can be found.” Then he let a grin soften his features. “And they’d better hurry up,” he said. “She means well, but ...”

  “But,” supplied Chandler as his colleague fell silent.

  “Says it all, really,” said Captain Grange. “About the girl, I mean. No doubts now about her loyalty, patriotism, sense of duty, and so forth. But ...”

  “Quite,” said Major Haynes as the naval beard wagged up and down in a paroxysm of speechless confusion.

  Cox, who had been scowling in his normal manner at the sketchbook on the table, looked at Haynes. “Coleman’s death was,” he enquired, “an accident?”

  “I made very sure it was,” the major told him. “He knew the game was up, and he knew he had a choice. End up going before a court, risking publicity—even MI can’t guarantee to catch everything before it gets in the papers—with the subsequent loss of morale—or the alternative of what must, I suppose, be called the Gentlemanly Way Out.”

  “Offered to lend him your revolver and lock him in the library, did you?” Aylwin was as irrepressible as ever.

  “I asked him to take me on a guided tour,” said Haynes. “Accidents can happen in the best-regulated factories, particularly when they’ve been working flat out round the clock for weeks and everyone is always more than half-asleep even when they’re theoretically awake ...”

  There was a thoughtful silence, broken at last by Captain Grange. “Good,” was all he said, but he echoed the general sentiment, and Haynes once more inclined his head.

  “And nobody smelled a rat?” This from Cox.

  “Accidents,” Haynes reminded him, “happen in the best-regulated circles. The police were glad to have it sorted out without a lot of ... unpleasantness. My driver—the young chap who’s coming to see us next
week—told me the locals had wondered all along about the wisdom of putting Coleman in charge of the place, but they assumed he’d been vetted and, as we did in fact suppose, was putting the needs of his country before his private philosophy.”

  Captain Grange coughed. “Did the decent thing in the end,” he said. “In one way you can see his point of view—son killed, futility of war—but ...” And again the beard signaled its confusion.

  “So kind of Hitler to give us one last chance to see it for ourselves,” said Aylwin after another short silence. He grinned. “If you’d told me it was April Fools’ Day coming round again four months late, I’d have believed you!”

  “Bit of a cheek,” said Chandler, “littering the countryside with leaflets. Last Appeal to Reason, indeed! As if anyone in his right mind would believe a single word of that lunatic’s speeches!”

  “No doubt the Reichstag swallowed it whole,” said Cox. “Now we’re the aggressors—after what the blighters have done to Czecho and Poland and Denmark and France and—”

  “Useful salvage, though,” put in Haynes as Cox paused for breath. “Paper pulp is in increasingly short supply, and every little helps. Once it’s been mashed and bleached and whatever else they do, what was originally written on the stuff won’t hurt ... any more than it hurts now,” he added with a laugh.

  The others laughed with him, Chandler quickly reminding them of how those people lucky enough to find one of the Nazi propaganda leaflets dropped over southern England during the night of 1st August had been putting them up for auction, all proceeds going towards the war effort. Britain, with her back to the wall, knowing the situation could explode at any minute, still contrived to keep her sense of humour.

  With courage, resolve, and a sense of humour, much can be achieved in a nation’s darkest hour ...

  The German assault on London—the capital’s first serious daylight raid—began in the late afternoon of Saturday, 7th September, to endure for seven interminable hours and twenty unforgettable minutes. In a sinister formation one and a half miles high and covering eight hundred square miles of sky, the enemy aircraft (almost a thousand—three hundred of them bombers) crossed the Channel and headed inland to their target. So ferocious was the eventual onslaught that invasion code word Cromwell was flashed from post to post across the country, and church bells were rung as the whole world throbbed and roared and howled and the sky darkened with wave upon wave of aircraft dropping over three hundred and fifty tons of bombs to such effect that, by Sunday morning, four hundred and forty-eight Londoners were dead, and sixteen hundred seriously injured. Twenty-eight British fighter aircraft were lost in the counterattack, and three more were destroyed on the ground.

  Those in the know rejoiced at this change of Nazi strategy from aerial combat between military pilots to wholesale slaughter of innocent civilians and the destruction of their homes. Those in the know were well aware that, though the desperate shortage of fighter aircraft was—thanks to Lord Beaverbrook—less desperate than it once had been, it would take very little for the shortage of pilots—all of them exhausted, some flying with no more than ten hours’ combat practice behind them—to render the Battle of Britain lost.

  But the Battle of London—the Blitz—had begun. Grim as its beginning had been, with the threat of worse to come—it was to be more than seven weeks before the bombing ceased, and then only for one cloudy night—it had bought for Britain a breathing space. The chiefs of the air staff, the government, and the Intelligence services knew that the price at which it had been bought was high, but that no price, in the circumstances, would—or could—have been too high. Hitler’s invasion plan had failed. Britain—with luck, and hope, and prayers—might have a chance.

  Far from London Miss Seeton heard the news, and ached to be at home rather than where she was. While Hampstead was not bombed on the seventh, communications were disrupted, and Alice was unable to send a message that she was, for the moment, safe. Her daughter knew where her duty lay: she would not press for her replacement at the factory, but she worried, and her dreams were very troubled.

  Release and her replacement came on 10th September, the day after Hampstead’s first bombs fell. Miss Seeton, weary and travel-stained, reached home next day to find all the mainline stations closed and another air raid in progress, so that it was not until very late in the evening of the eleventh that she picked her shaky way through the blackout to the welcome little porch, to be greeted with a maternal kiss, a smile, an envelope, and two wrapped packages.

  “It’s your birthday,” Alice reminded her with another smile. “Poor Emily. You had forgotten, had you not?”

  “I... had,” Emily agreed, stifling a yawn. “I’m sorry—but I—I’ve had rather a lot on my mind recently.” She told her mother nothing of what she had been thinking, or doing, and Alice knew better than to ask.

  “Mr. Churchill gave such a splendid speech on the wireless,” she said. “One cannot say that he minces matters, of course, but it is better to be told the truth and have the chance to face up to one’s difficulties, wouldn’t you say?” She gave her daughter no time to agree. “He told us,” she went on, “that Hitler has transport barges all along the Channel coast, and there are batteries of guns everywhere, and thousands of troops, and we must expect invasion next week because of the weather ...” She watched as Emily unwrapped the first of her packages. “Your aim,” she said quietly as the paper fell away, “will be steadier than mine, but I polished them with great care—it seemed the very least I could do.”

  “Th-thank you,” was Emily’s reply as the bullets lay shining in the palm of her hand.

  “You can always take one with you,” said Alice to her daughter, who was still gazing at the bullets. “Your dear father’s regimental sword will suit me best, I think, and is with his revolver on the hall table, which seems the most sensible place for it—unless they land on the roof, in which case I think the noise will wake us and there will be time to run downstairs and shoot them once they have tumbled to the ground—or stab them as they lie there. They are sure to be winded by their fall, which ought to slow them down long enough for us to play our part. Aren’t they?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Emily, after a pause in which she marvelled at how adversity could change—could surprise—people. Her gentle mother’s plans to repel Nazi invaders were hardly practical, but they showed a fighting spirit of which Hugo Monk Seeton need not, when his wife and daughter met him again, feel ashamed ...

  “Oh,” said Alice, “and something else—a letter for you—now, where did I put it? There was no time to send it on, as you had said you hoped to be back soon.”

  It was the now familiar brown OHMS envelope, but addressed in an unfamiliar hand. The letter inside invited Miss E. D. Seeton to attend the Tower of London at two-thirty in the afternoon of Friday, 13th September. Miss Seeton smiled as she checked the postmark. Section G must have known well before she did when she would be coming home.

  The signature, in blue ink, was both neat and legible. It was not Haynes ... it was Chandler.

  “Miss Seeton, thank you for coming,” was Chandler’s greeting at the sentry-box end of the bridge. “I hope you and yours suffered no great inconvenience in this morning’s raid?”

  Miss Seeton, stifling a sigh, assured him that while she—and her mother—had been unaffected by the four hours of bombing, she was sorry to have heard from a policeman that Buckingham Palace had been hit.

  “More than once,” Chandler told her. “Of course, things could have been worse, when you remember the blighters were here for eight hours last night as well. There’s been quite a little party, all over town—the House of Lords had an incendiary, and they dropped another in Downing Street—though if they were hoping to get Churchill, they didn’t.”

  “I’m very relieved to hear it,” said Miss Seeton.

  There was a pause. “Yes,” he replied at last. “Look, Miss Seeton ... let’s go up to my office, shall we?”

  H
e offered no more small-talk as he led his visitor through the hidden passageways and across the courtyards of the Tower. “First,” he said, “I want to tell you that we’re more grateful than we can say for your efforts at the factory. You deserve a medal. We’ll have to see what can be done—though, of course, we can’t promise.”

  “Good gracious, of course not,” said Miss Seeton, shocked at the very idea. A few quick sketches, a short spell of office administration, a handful of silly girls who needed (and received) a swift lesson in common sense could be taken—had been taken—by an art teacher in her stride. Even that foolish misunderstanding with Mrs. Morris had been sorted out with remarkably little inconvenience to anyone save herself, who was a soldier’s daughter, while the bump on the head and the damage to her knees could have happened to anyone in an air raid. They certainly did not merit any form of official decoration, which is what Mr. Chandler seemed to be saying.

  “Of course not,” said Miss Seeton, gazing high overhead to where swirling white vapour trails showed the presence of those who truly deserved a medal. All our hearts, Mr. Churchill had said, go out to the fighter pilots. With most of that sentiment, Miss Seeton would not disagree.

  “I’m sorry,” she said as she realised that Chandler had been speaking to her, and she had heard nothing. “I do beg your pardon, but I was ... distracted.”

  “You’ve had a time and a half of it,” he said with some sympathy. “Look—don’t let’s go indoors just yet. Fresh air is such a blessing, and while the sunshine lasts ...”

  Miss Seeton glanced at him. For some reason, he seemed to be uneasy. She did not care to think what that reason might be, and embarked upon an anecdote from her time at the factory, when one of the pilots reported a maniac kettledrummer inside his engine whenever he dived. He was accused of hallucinating, insisted it was either a kettledrummer or a midget with a machine gun, and was mollified only when it was found that the petrol tank’s self-seal covering had split. At high speeds it flapped between the tank and the armour plating with a vibration so very staccato that anyone could have been forgiven for thinking the plane might shake to pieces in midair.