Miss Seeton Quilts the Village

by Hamilton Crane

  The explosion did not come. “It needed only that. Do tell me. What do they think about this…this brief encounter?”

  “They don’t, sir.” Brinton blinked at him. “Honest. For once, she’s out of it.”

  “She won’t be for long. She can’t help it. It’ll just happen, and we poor sinners will have to put up with it and try to make the best of it.” Then he brightened. “That bank-box sketch of hers—I wonder if it could tell us their address? I think we need to have a word with them, if only to set my mind at rest.” He was reaching for the telephone when Foxon stopped him.

  “I’ve had a thought about that, sir. They’re retired, aren’t they, so even if the Saxons left them nothing they’ll still have the state pension to live on.” Brinton’s hand fell back. Maybe a call to the Oracle might not be needed after all. “We could check at the main post office first, sir, and if there’s no joy we can ask around the banks in case it’s paid direct to their account.”

  “Almost, Foxon, you can be intelligent. Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “Because we weren’t exactly concentrating on the Brattles at the time, sir. You’d have thought of it soon enough if you felt it was important.”

  “Well, my feeling now is that it may be. Call it a process of elimination. Well done, laddie. I’ll leave it all to you for the moment.”

  Foxon slipped off the desk, and stretched himself. “The post office won’t believe me over the phone, so it’s got to be face-to-face and I’ll show my warrant card. I’ll go over to Brettenden right now, sir. Fancy a change of scene?”

  Again Brinton paused in the act of reaching for the telephone. “I’ve better things to do than leave my office on what may prove to be another wild goose chase. Come back for me if you find the golden egg this time around, and we can hatch it together.”

  Foxon, halfway out of the door, looked back. “Say hello to Bob Ranger for me, sir.” And was gone, grinning, before the superintendent could find anything to throw at him.

  Nor could Brinton find anyone at Scotland Yard, or at least no one who would have understood his state of mind. The switchboard reported that both Chief Superintendent Delphick and Detective Sergeant Ranger were taking a few days’ leave. Was Superintendent Brinton’s call urgent? Would he like to talk to Commander Gosslin? The superintendent declined the offer and rang off. Commander Gosslin, the Oracle’s boss, of course knew of Miss Seeton as Plummergen’s most important (from the official viewpoint) inhabitant, but he didn’t know Plummergen the way Delphick did. Life was far too short to explain to the high-ups why the gossip brought back by Foxon made Superintendent Brinton uneasy.

  He took a gloomy peppermint from the packet in his desk. As he savoured its extra-strength fumes and the sugar boost to his brain, he brooded on the lull before the storm, the war movies when It’s quiet out there—too damned quiet heralded imminent mayhem. But that was for ordinary people, ordinary circumstances. You couldn’t call Plummergen ordinary. Ever since Miss Seeton had come to live in the village things were very rarely too damned quiet and even if they were, they got worse than anyone could reasonably expect before they got better. And too much had been going on there in recent weeks. Potter, good man, kept him fully up to date on the place with regular reports as per Standing Orders, even if there could be times when he didn’t report anything untoward for weeks at a time. Now the place was seething with foreign fascists and rumours of Nazi spies and murderous servants and death-dealing aristocrats and, heaven help him, buried treasure too...

  And all since Miss Seeton came back from her holiday.

  He took another mint, and did his best to look on the bright side. Perhaps he was over-reacting. In “a few” days—which could mean anything from two or three to a week—things might have calmed down, and he’d feel a fool for having rung a bloke of higher rank, friend or not, just to say he had an uncomfortable idea the mulligatawny might be about to boil over when maybe, after all, it wasn’t. But the Oracle and his sidekick were on leave. They knew nothing about his problems. He’d have to cope, if any coping was needed, without the acknowledged experts. You couldn’t deny that Plummergen did things, saw things, differently. The whole blasted village was simmering, according to Foxon, and that sort of mood in that sort of place usually led to trouble sooner or later...

  No wonder, he told himself as he crunched a third peppermint, that his wife and his doctor kept warning him about his blood pressure.

  Chapter Eighteen

  HALF A PACKET of peppermints later, Foxon reappeared. Brinton was still at his desk, trying to distract himself by catching up on paperwork. “Good grief, sir! Your in-tray—it’s almost empty!”

  “You could at least shut the door before you start shouting your mouth off. Now the whole ruddy station knows. They’ll collect up every bit of bumf for miles and bring it to me because they think I’ve nothing better to do—”

  “But you have, sir. I’ve found the Brattles—not through the post office, I tracked them down through the third bank I went to. They weren’t keen to tell me the address at first, though after some prodding they confirmed the name. They did a very close check of my ID and agreed I might be me, but to make absolutely sure they telephoned Sergeant Mutford...”

  “Who complimented them on their trustworthiness and recited a verse of scripture.”

  Foxon grinned. Desk Sergeant Mutford, who considered himself the mainstay of Ashford police station, belonged to the Holdfast Brethren, a teetotal, vegetarian sect of the Christian church whose tenets included the strictest possible adherence to the law. If banks were supposed, by law, to keep client confidentiality, Mutford was duty bound to be delighted that this particular bank was keeping it.

  “He asked them for a full description, sir.” Foxon’s eyes danced. “Lucky my gran made me this tank top. There’s nothing like it anywhere else in Kent.”

  “Thank heaven.” Brinton rose to his feet. “But I admit a Fair Isle pattern wouldn’t have been as good, for identification purposes. Just don’t let her knit you another.” They headed out to the car. “I must say, I’m pleased to know it takes a bit of arm-twisting for a bank to let someone, even a copper, waltz in and ask where I live, and be told. Everyone’s entitled to some privacy.”

  The ten-mile journey to Brettenden took longer than Brinton would like, but slow tractors pulling heavy trailers can be safely overtaken only when the road ahead is visible for several hundred yards. Young Foxon, for all his daft ways, was serious about his job. Good driver, too. Brinton wondered again about letting him try for sergeant. He didn’t want to stand in the lad’s way, but he wondered how hard it would be to find someone else if the high-ups decided promotion meant relocation. They might send him back to Maidstone, where he’d started on the beat before plain-clothesing his way across to Ashford. There was a bit more life in Maidstone, he supposed. He couldn’t blame the lad for getting itchy feet...

  “And here we are,” said Foxon. Brinton blinked. “Everything okay, sir?”

  He’d spent longer brooding on Foxon’s career prospects than he’d realised. Well, it had taken his mind off his other worries. He pulled himself together.

  “Good. Let’s hope they’re home, not out chatting to Miss Seeton again.”

  “Nice little house.” Foxon lived in lodgings. “Not quite roses round the door, but I wouldn’t say no if you were thinking of my next birthday.”

  “The plumbing and mod cons must be an improvement on where they were before, from what I’ve heard.”

  Sam Brattle opened the door. Brinton recognised him from Miss Seeton’s Bluebells-on-the-Bank-Box sketch, though he’d seen it only the once. No doubt about it, the old girl was sometimes bang on the money with her scribbles.

  Mr. Brattle eyed the two policemen thoughtfully, hardly glanced at their identification, and ushered them into an armchaired room at the front of the house.

  “I’ll fetch Agnes,” he said, before Brinton had properly begun to explain. They heard his feet thud up the
stairs.

  “Almost as if they were expecting us,” murmured Foxon.

  “He didn’t seem all that surprised,” agreed Brinton. “Guilty conscience?”

  “You don’t think it might really be true about—”

  “No, I don’t!” burst from the superintendent as voices and footsteps overhead showed that whatever Mrs. Brattle had been doing upstairs she was about to stop and come down to join them.

  She and her husband manifested themselves quietly at the door, and as quietly came into the room. Agnes Brattle studied their identification rather more closely that had her husband, but like him she did not seem unduly surprised at the visit. She settled herself on the edge of a chintz sofa, while he sat beside her.

  “We’d just like to ask a few questions, and we hope not to keep you too long,” said Brinton. “We understand that you lived until recently in Plummergen, working for Miss Griselda Saxon.”

  Both Brattles exchanged a quick glance, then nodded.

  “And when she died, you came here. You’re not from these parts originally?”

  “London born and bred,” said Sam. “The pair of us.” Agnes nodded again.

  “You weren’t tempted to go back home when the chance came?”

  “We’ve been a long time in Kent,” said Sam. “Came down with the colonel before the war. There’d be nobody left in the Smoke that we’d recognise, or them us, even if we wanted them to.”

  “Which we wouldn’t,” said Agnes. “Besides, there’ve been so many changes, with the bombing and clearance and rebuilding, it wouldn’t feel like home any more.”

  “Then why not stay in Plummergen? After forty years that must have felt like home.”

  Once more the Brattles exchanged glances. “Gossip,” said Sam. “Tongues wagging, nosiness, no real privacy. We’ve always preferred to keep ourselves to ourselves—a polite nod in passing, not the Spanish Inquisition every time you leave the house. The Saxons were a good family for that. They didn’t go out much, especially after the colonel was took sick, and they didn’t encourage visitors. Minded their own business and left us to mind ours, which was looking after them and nothing more.”

  “Shopping in Brettenden to avoid the wagging tongues, of course. But now you’re living here...”

  “We still don’t have to talk to the neighbours beyond Good Morning,” said Agnes.

  It was Sam’s turn to nod. “A quick chat in the street with a stranger we’ll never see again is one thing, but much more than a hello where you live, and next door will be round every five minutes to borrow sugar, or the lawn mower, and then just happen to drop by at the right time for afternoon tea. We wouldn’t care for that.”

  Agnes murmured her agreement. The two detectives knew there was no law that said you couldn’t try for absolute privacy in your life, if that was what you wanted. Brinton thought of the bank. He wondered how the Brattles would react if they knew how Foxon had tracked them down. He thought of what he himself had said about arm-twisting privacy...

  “Interesting you should mention chatting to strangers in the street. Did you have any particular stranger in mind?”

  “The umbrella,” said Sam Brattle promptly. “We wondered if it might be that—we both recognised your name, you see. A lady dropped it, and we picked up her stuff and she told us you’d given it to her, and we admired it—very nice, nothing vulgar—and we chatted a bit about gold not tarnishing and needing polish the way silver does, and she said there was some Roman stuff in the museum. And that was about it.”

  “That’s right, Mr. Brinton. A quick chat, as you might in a shop when buying something, but a minute or two at most, and it wasn’t as if she fell and hurt herself. She just dropped everything when she bumped into us, and we helped her collect it all back into her basket.”

  Brinton couldn’t prevent a smile, while Foxon, taking discreet notes, kept his head low to conceal his grin. Dropped everything? Umbrella included? To be picked up by witnesses nobody at the time knew might be important? He regarded that sort of thing as pretty much par for the course with Miss Seeton.

  “I hope she’s not saying now there was any more to it than that,” said Sam. “Because if she is—”

  Brinton raised an imperative hand. “Nothing to worry about there, Mr. Brattle. That’s not why we’d like to talk to you both. It’s about Miss Saxon.”

  After a brief hesitation, Sam Brattle asked, “Oh? What about her?”

  “She left you nothing in her will, which is unusual for an employer whose employees have been with her a long time.”

  “She’d got nothing to leave, Mr. Brinton. If you’ve talked to her man of business, and you must have done to know about her will, then breach of confidence as it is I’d have thought he’d tell you that.”

  “I’d have expected a pension of some sort. Even a small one.”

  “She didn’t have anything to leave.” Again, Agnes was her husband’s echo. “She had next to nothing to live on, by the end.”

  “And you stayed to the end. Highly commendable. A model employer, evidently, even if she didn’t pay well.”

  The Brattles exchanged looks. Sam shrugged. “She wasn’t the sort who’d thank you for liking her, nor any of the family—but we’d been with them from first marrying and it suited us to stay. We did a good job, and they respected us for it and didn’t interfere, nor us with them. Of course, as they dropped off the twig one by one things was bound to change, but the proper distance was always kept on both sides.”

  “A purely business arrangement, then.” Both Brattles nodded.

  “By the time it was only Miss Griselda,” said Agnes, “her health wasn’t so good, and of course the house didn’t help. I did my best with that range, but you need to keep warm and out of draughts as well as eat proper. It was hardly our place to ask Lady Colveden for help when Griselda had her rules, and she never was one to mingle. She began to lose interest in pretty much everything that last year or so—just ticking over, was what it boiled down to. We really looked forward to our shopping trips because we could be sure of a decent meal once a week, and somebody else to cook it on a proper stove.”

  Sam nodded. “We’re glad to be in a place of our own like this. Central heating and hot water and not having to chop wood.”

  “No draughts or damp patches,” Agnes added, “and a lovely fitted kitchen.”

  “It must have cost you a pretty penny,” interjected an envious Foxon, without thinking. Immediately, he and Brinton sensed both Brattles grow wary.

  “And you say there’s no pension?” asked Brinton, silently daring Foxon to say more.

  “Our old age pensions,” said Sam.

  “And we’ve saved, over the years,” said Agnes. “Nobody could call us extravagant.”

  “Could they call you honest?” Brinton remembered the Bank-Box sketch, and hadn’t entirely forgotten the blackmail theory. Either would explain how the Brattles could afford to buy a modern house while Griselda, last of the Saxons, faded slowly towards an impoverished death.

  He expected indignation. They’d been quick enough to protest at the idea they might have harmed Miss Seeton in some way, but they said nothing. He had the feeling, from the way they stiffened, that they were trying not to look at each other. He didn’t seriously think they’d had a hand in Griselda’s death any more than he suspected Lady Colveden—the old girl had been investigated thoroughly at her post-mortem—but it did seem there was something. Thanks to Foxon, and Miss Seeton, they’d got on a trail without realising where it led.

  “We didn’t help ourselves to the housekeeping,” said Agnes at last, “if that’s what you’re suggesting. More like us helping Griselda out, towards the end, with just her pension to keep her going, but in the early days they’d paid us well—”

  “Reasonably well,” interjected Sam. “Not generous, though.”

  “Paid us reasonably well,” amended Agnes, “only they didn’t allow for such a thing as inflation. Expected it all to stay the same from b
efore the war. But like I said, we’d put a bit by over the years, so I suppose you could call it turn and turn about when we had to help the old girl. But it wasn’t much, and it wasn’t for long.”

  “Ah, the war.” Brinton spoke almost casually. “Did you share their Nazi sympathies?”

  There was a sudden release of tension in the room.

  “We didn’t know if you knew,” said Sam. “It isn’t right to speak ill of the dead, and she’s not been gone five minutes. And we didn’t talk politics with any of them. Like I told you, we respected each other’s privacy—and of course it isn’t a servant’s place to presume in any way, which politics would have been.”

  “Not that we held with their carrying-on,” said Agnes. “Some of the friends they made in London! Some of the things my husband heard them say! Had to bite your tongue more than once, didn’t you, Sam?”

  “I did. But it’s not a servant’s place to disapprove of his employers.” He smiled at his wife. “It’s ‘for better, for worse’ once you’ve took their wages. And for a servant what matters is not so much what your employers think, it’s the way they behave. How they treat you. And by their lights they treated us well enough, at least in the early days.”

  “Before the money got tight,” said Brinton.

  “We could have left when the war broke out,” said Agnes. “But we didn’t. Everyone else upped and went the minute they could, but we wanted to stay together, and found ourselves war work locally. Sam helped on the farm at Rytham Hall, and I got took on for the domestic. The place was full of the military, only don’t ask why because to this day I don’t know. None of my business to know, beyond there were men in uniform everywhere. And even hush-hush men want meals and laundry and mending done, just like anyone else.”

  “What did the Saxons do during the war?”

  “Looked pleased when it seemed as if he might come, then you could say they sulked when it seemed he wasn’t going to.” Sam Brattle frowned. “They had a few chickens, but as to sharing a pig or keeping rabbits there was nothing of that sort. It would have meant mixing with the common folk, and they never held with that.”