“We could hang decorative cords across the stairs—” began his wife.
“No, Meg! Some years ago now, but the same sort of thing—remember that woman with her confounded axe?”
“Oh, my goodness.” Lady Colveden, until this grim reminder, had deliberately driven from her memory the occasion when her husband found their nearest neighbour, a widow in her sixties, swinging an amateur axe at a cypress in his grounds. Harried from the property (Sir George only returning the axe he had seized from the trespasser once she was back on the Queen’s highway) the neighbour complained to Brettenden Rural Council, and insisted to the district surveyor that, if he looked through her late husband’s binoculars, he would see that the growing cypress now blocked her view of the bedroom windows at Rytham Hall. Lady Colveden spent some uneasy days thereafter glancing nervously upwards on the watch for privately hired helicopters, or even a hot air balloon.
Thwarted, the widow decamped in the end to Dungeness, where no trees more than a few feet high could grow because of the paucity of the salty, windswept soil. She professed a sudden interest in birdlife, and bought a very large telescope.
Lady Colveden grimaced. “Oh, yes, I remember. Then what should we do?”
“Interest is understandable, said so yourself—the village has known Nigel a long time. But they’d want ’em on display for more than an afternoon or two. Takes time to cart the stuff anywhere and lay it out neatly, and we’re busy enough as it is, with the boy away. Nobody to spare for the heavy work. And once he and Louise are living here with us, while the builders get on with renovating the house, there’d be no room to do the thing in proper style.” He stroked his toothbrush moustache, and winked. “Good enough, m’dear?”
Her ladyship smiled. “How clever of you, George. We can move things a few boxes at a time to the village hall, and everyone can look at them when Mr. Jessyp shows his film. How lucky we haven’t unpacked them since they arrived from Scotland.”
But Sir George shook his head. “Sticky fingers, in the dark. Too great a temptation for some. Entrapment,” said the magistrate knowledgeably. “Or breakages—just as bad. After the film show, that’s when we’ll start shifting things up there. Warn Potter to keep his eye on the place—next door to the police house, after all. Good man, Ned Potter.”
“And nobody knows we haven’t unpacked any of the boxes yet,” said Lady Colveden. “Only Martha, bless her, and she’d never breathe a word. You think of everything, George.” She blew him a kiss as she began to stack plates and tidy cutlery. “She’ll be here soon to help me finish the spare bedroom.” A wistful note entered her voice. “Won’t it feel strange, when Summerset cottage is finished and it really is just the two of us here.”
“Take in lodgers, if you’re lonely,” suggested Sir George. He hated to see his wife’s face even slightly downcast. He chuckled. “Could always look up Daphne Carstairs.”
“Daphne Carstairs will enter this house over my dead body,” said Lady Colveden. Her own soft wavy brown hair had always been a sad (in her mind at least) contrast with the luscious fair locks of her husband’s old flame.
“Black always looks good on blondes,” said Sir George. “Wait six months, of course.”
Lady Colveden, a sudden glint in her eye, set down the plates and drew a deep breath.
Smiling to himself, Sir George stroked his moustache.
Chapter Three
NIGEL AND LOUISE Colveden returned triumphant to Plummergen in the little red MG that had taken them to France to meet those of her family who had not travelled to Scotland for the wedding, and back via the Isle of Wight for their proper, private honeymoon.
“Only for a few days,” Nigel warned, “because of the farm. It’s close enough for me to get home in an emergency. They can always leave a message at the hotel—though I hope they don’t.”
Louise smiled, and patted his hand. “You must not worry your pretty little head about a thing. Have I that correctly?” The slight lisp of the French difficulty with “th” was enchantment to Nigel. “If they require you, of course they will say and we must go, but your papa was very sure they would not.”
“I would rather like to see the model village again. We came once when we were kids, me and Julia—Mother brought us—and it’s bigger now. Not the models, the village itself, there’s more of it, I mean.”
Louise enjoyed watching him relive his childhood treat quite as much as he enjoyed the whole excursion. “Godshill is where they ended up in The Day of the Triffids,” he said, and having to struggle with translation was even more enjoyable as he acted out the threat of an eight-foot walking plant with a venomous lashing sting. They laughed and joked. Louise saw something sinister lurking in the undergrowth and Nigel had to hold her close, in case it came to get her.
He was bursting with pride and happiness as they neared his own, full-sized village, and he drove very slowly down The Street so that everyone could see them. Behind windows, lace curtains twitched. Honest goggle-awpers (more translation needed for his wife) came outside and waved. Nigel’s heart was full.
The young couple were received ecstatically by Lady Colveden, with a bashful grin and a nod by Sir George, who turned pink as Louise kissed his cheek, and shook Nigel firmly by the hand in case he’d picked up foreign habits while abroad.
Nigel was full of questions about the farm. While his mother whisked his wife away to inspect the spare bedroom he pestered his father with demands to know what had been done, who had done it, and how they had all coped while he was away.
“Thank goodness we tied the knot in Scotland,” he said. “If Louise and her father had insisted on France I’d have eloped with her. Six weeks’ residence requirement is far too long for a working farmer to kick his heels in idleness. And talking of the farm...”
“Relax, m’boy, and stop worrying. Won’t say you weren’t missed, because you were, but I promised we’d manage and we did. You’ve trained young Hosigg well. He worked like ten men, much later at night than I really liked, but then he used to drive those long-distance lorries. Said odd hours wouldn’t bother him, if we didn’t make it a regular thing. Your mother had Lily and the baby here a couple of times so that Len wouldn’t worry and they wouldn’t be lonely. Ah.” Sir George blushed. “Your mother. Yes.”
“We haven’t been married five minutes,” protested Nigel.
His pink-faced father turned purple. “She’s bound to ask,” he muttered. “Given her ideas, little Dulcie on the spot. Just thought I’d warn you.”
“Well, thanks, but if she wants to dote on grandchildren she can visit Janie in London and dote on her.” Nigel grinned. “And what’s all this about the presents going on show?”
Plummergen had agreed that the official opening of the wedding-present display at the village hall should be carried out by the young couple on their return. After all, the presents had been given to them and they ought to have a say in the matter.
“Gave Jessyp time to do a good job on the photographs,” said Sir George. “Enlarged them as far as he can without losing too much definition. Got ’em with the colour prints in order round the walls, with your bits and pieces on tables underneath.”
“Do we have to cut a ribbon, or make speeches? Or do we just say ‘Hello, everyone, come along in for a snoop’?” Nigel enquired. His father supposed that a few words of welcome from the groom, some smiles and waves from the bride, and a ceremonial cutting of Martha Bloomer’s cake would probably do the trick.
“I’ll borrow your ceremonial sword,” said Nigel, and practised a ceremonial wave.
Some days after the Crassweller investigation had begun, in an office on the umpteenth floor of New Scotland Yard, in a paper-laden atmosphere of concentration, two tired men simultaneously set down their pens, closed their notebooks, and yawned. Around tottering heaps of documents befrilled with cross-reference slips, they peered at each other thoughtfully.
It was Delphick who finally spoke. “Of course, we don’t talk the same
language as the cloak-and-dagger merchants, and I accept that a degree of obfuscation must remain, in the national interest, essential, but one has to ask if all this—” he swept a cautious but expressive arm around the crowded room “—is indeed all of it? In the context of our investigation it hardly makes much sense, if it is.”
“We know a lot more about all sorts of stuff we didn’t know before,” said Bob. “If the Special Branch were happy to sponsor him through university, it makes him an unlikely villain. They’re pretty thorough in their vetting procedures, aren’t they?”
Delphick smiled. “He appears to have supplied them with not a few likely prospects in the student radical stakes on whom, no doubt, the eyes of the security forces will have kept more than passing watch through the years. Some of those names, indeed, are familiar today as pillars of society. Yes, we know far more than we did.”
“Trouble is,” said Bob, “most of it doesn’t exactly point in any particular direction, does it, sir?”
“So it would appear.” The chief superintendent emphasised the final word. “As an exercise in widening our intellectual horizons, these past days have been...enlightening, but as to their true importance in the greater scheme of British security I wouldn’t care to hazard an opinion. According to such evidence as we have studied, when we’ve been able to make sense of it, Gabriel Crassweller does indeed appear to have been as loyal and trustworthy as everyone always thought he was.”
Bob looked at him. “So you think the Foreign Office and…that other chap’s anonymous ministry are holding something back too, sir?”
“The possibility has certainly crossed my mind.” Delphick frowned. “You know, Bob, I can’t help wondering whether...”
Sergeant Ranger waited. The Oracle wasn’t usually so...hesitant. Granted, this was hardly the usual sort of case, but after spending as much time as they both had looking into things, he generally had some sort of theory.
“Oblon admitted I’d been set up over the news coverage,” said Delphick at last. “After so many days with these labour-intensive files, it occurs to me that I might also have been set up in other respects.”
Bob gaped. “Wh-what for?” was all he could manage.
“And there you hit the nail on the head. I can think of no reason anyone should wish to nobble me on this case. Can you?” Bob could only shake his head. “If they hope, by embroiling me in this particular investigation, to deflect me from some future investigation of dark importance about which as yet I know nothing, their methods are more than convoluted, they’re impenetrable. They move in their mysterious ways—yes?”
Sergeant Ranger suddenly jumped. A thought had occurred. He found his voice. “Talk about impenetrable, sir, it’s only just dawned—the computer.” Delphick sat up. “Well, sir, none of this looks anything like that line-printed paper with holes down the side. What we’ve got here is all carbon copies and fading type, the way it’s always been. Our mechanical monster in the basement churns out reams of the striped stuff the minute you press the appropriate buttons. I can’t believe the security bods don’t have a computer of their own. Sir.”
It was Delphick’s turn to be struck mute.
“So we’re not seeing everything, though they assured us we should,” he said at last. “An interesting thought. This could put an entirely different perspective on the case, if case indeed it is. Now, I wonder.”
Bob coughed. “Talking of perspective, sir—seeing things a different way, I mean—”
“No,” said his chief at once. He saw Bob’s expression, and mellowed. “She’s still away, quite apart from any other considerations there might be.”
His sergeant accepted this mild rebuke with a grin. “You’ve already checked, sir?”
“Miss Seeton,” Delphick informed him sternly, “has been visiting friends in the north. Even an art consultant retained by Scotland Yard is entitled to take a holiday.” Miss Emily Dorothea Seeton, seeing herself as a private and conventional English gentlewoman, would have found highly distasteful any suggestion that she might be psychic. Over the years she had convinced herself that it was for what she regarded as “IdentiKit sketches” that she was paid so handsome an annual retainer, and she could never grasp that her lightning-swift, instinctive drawings were of value to the police because they so often held the key to cases that had baffled more conventional investigation.
Bob nodded. “Yes, after Nigel’s wedding she went to spend a week with the MacSporrans—Lord and Lady Glenclachan and young Marguerite—then she was off to stay with a bird-fancying friend in the Lake District. But I imagine you already know this from Superintendent Brinton, sir.”
The Oracle gave him an oracular look. “It may have come up in the course of a friendly telephone chat, yes.”
“You didn’t tell me, sir.”
“You didn’t ask. And it could have been viewed as a mere idle speculation, with no definite aim. To learn of Miss Seeton’s absence was hardly a cause for dismay because, should I ask her to come to the Yard to produce one of her special drawings for us, I’d have to know what to ask her to draw. Being unable to get any particular sort of handle on the case, I wouldn’t really know where to start.”
Bob thought about this. “It’s odd Crassweller’s body hasn’t been released for burial. They’ve fudged it nicely by saying they can’t find his next of kin, but we know that’s not true.” He tapped a bulging folder. “So it’s...odd.”
“Another angle on the possible setting-up of Yours Truly, perhaps? Hmm.” Once more Delphick favoured his sergeant with an oracular look. “Your adopted aunt, as I recall, has no objection to viewing dead bodies. Those visits to the hospital in her student days, as well as surviving London through the Blitz, must have hardened her for the sight of most corpses—yet I’m reluctant to show her Crassweller’s. The tree around which he wrapped himself in his car had a particularly unpleasing effect.”
“Aunt Em wouldn’t turn a hair, sir, you know she wouldn’t—especially if it was put to her that it was her duty to look at him. They could tidy him up a bit—somehow—couldn’t they?”
“You’ve seen the photographs.”
Bob shuddered. “Yes, well—and there you are, sir. Tell her it’s too grisly in real life, I mean death, which it certainly is, but that we need a decent likeness for—oh, some reason or other. Show her the pic from his personnel file, tell her it’s hush-hush and unsuitable for public use, but we could do with something better that doesn’t give away any state secrets. She’d believe that, sir, you know she would.”
“Particularly,” agreed Delphick, “when it happens, more or less, to be true. Thank you, Bob. I suppose you’ve had no news of her? No idea when she’s coming back?”
Neither he nor Bob had the least idea that, in Plummergen, Lady Colveden had for some days past been asking exactly the same question.
Nigel uttered words of welcome. He and Louise smiled and waved and thanked everybody for coming, and Mr. Jessyp for the photographs, and all those who had sent presents which they could see were most tastefully arranged. Sir George had refused the loan of his sword, but Lady Colveden had polished the horn-handled carving knife. The young couple cut Martha’s cake with a flourish as more photographs were taken, Nigel muttering that honest English baking beat piles of French profiteroles any day.
He muttered again as he eyed the locks and window-bolts of the hall. Police Constable Potter took him to one side and murmured that he wasn’t to worry, there’d be a watch kept on the place until it was all over, but to say nothing in case it put ideas into people’s heads, seeing as how there were some strange folk in town.
“When were there ever not?” said Nigel.
“Foreigners.” Potter tapped the side of his nose. “Real ones—but you’ve no need to concern yourself, you and your good lady,” he added in a normal voice, bringing Louise into the conversation. “Right glad we are to see you here for good, Mrs. Colveden!”
She was still in the proud, blushing stage of ma
trimony, and turned a delicate shade of rose. “Thank you, Ned—it is Ned, is it not? We have met before.”
“Ah, it’s the uniform that folk tend to remember, but Ned indeed it is, miss—that’s to say mamzelle, I mean, Mrs. Nigel.”
“Louise,” said Nigel, before his wife had quite disentangled the policeman’s accent. Cricket (both men played in the village team) is a great social leveller. “Come and meet Mabel and young Amelia—though not Tibs, I hope.”
“Rabbiting down by the canal,” grinned Ned. There were few in the village not made uneasy by his Amelia’s fearsome feline companion, a tabby of generous proportions who terrorised any living creature on four legs, and many (if not most) on two.
Nigel returned the grin, dramatically mopped his brow, and ushered his bride into the thick of the chattering crowd. Introductions were made, and promises to drop in for tea and a proper chat once things had calmed down a little.
The Colvedens had discussed the wisdom of leaving present-givers’ cards with their presents, but knew Plummergen would think they’d got it wrong whatever they did. They left the cards. If the village chose to compare and contrast personal generosity, and squabbles ensued—well, this was no more than what happened most of the time anyway. On tables ranged around the hall, therefore, beneath Mr. Jessyp’s photographic mural (the arrangement of which had involved a spirit-level, and a new brand of polish for the drawing-pins) three electric toasters stood guard over four shining toast racks. Two sets of coffee mugs flanked a yellow percolator that matched neither. A fondue dish in bright enamel was accompanied by a selection of cookery books. The ironing board stood loaded with sheets and pillowcases, gleaming in cellophane; blankets and an eiderdown, likewise embraced in shiny wrap, were on the next table.
Miss Seeton Quilts the Village Page 3