“I’m a copper, Miss Forby,” interrupted Brinton, thumping the pile of reports with an irritated fist. “Are you trying to tell me I’m no good at my job because I’m too . . . too emotionally involved, or some other trick-cyclist claptrap like that? Lacking in judgement? Not professionally detached? Because if you are, I’d call that a—”
“No, I’m not!” Mel could break into a conversational flow with as much abruptness as Brinton, when she saw the need. “You’re doing a grand job—you always do, as everyone knows. But so do I, and everyone knows that, too. I’ve made this area of Kent my particular pigeon over the past few years, what with Plummergen Pieces and assorted articles on Local Crafts, and Kentish Customs, and History—and,” with slow emphasis, “Farming . . .”
Mel’s tone made Foxon sit up and Brinton swallow the irate reply he’d been about to unleash. Her shrewd look reminded the detectives that the young reporter wasn’t just a pretty face: didn’t Scotland Yard’s own Oracle think highly of her? “So, Miss Forby,” remarked the superintendent, as Mel continued to regard him with that bright-eyed gaze. “What do you think you know about—farming—that all of us seem to have missed?”
Mel smiled, and leaned back in her chair, folding her arms as she shot a triumphant look at her unwilling host. “Hops,” she said. “Or rather, hop pickers. If you’re looking for someone who was around this place a year ago, who hasn’t been in evidence again until now . . .”
Foxon uttered a muffled exclamation; Brinton simply stared. Mel, pleased with the effect she’d created, added thoughtfully: “You know, it could just be worth checking on the coppers’ grapevine if anybody else has had the same sort of thing happen on their patch during the last twelve months, and hushed it up for some strange reason.” Then she grinned. “Still, if I’m right about the hop-picking connection, Scotland Yard are the logical ones to investigate other Blondes in Bags—and as far as I know they haven’t had any. There’s not very much that goes on around Town I don’t hear about, one way or another . . .”
Brinton found his voice at last. “Foxon, get me Detective Chief Superintendent Delphick on the blower, will you?” He nodded his astonished thanks to Mel. “Could be I’ve misjudged you, Miss Forby. If the Yard have got anything like this on their books and haven’t told us . . .”
As Foxon asked for an outside line, Mel sighed. “Remember, it’s a pretty long shot, Mr. Brinton—though it’s certainly worth a try. But you know the Oracle, and how he always plays fair. Would he really sit on a story like this, when he could never be sure I wouldn’t be after him to spill the beans at the very first hint of a scoop? I’d have his guts for garters if he tried to pull a stunt like—”
At Brinton’s sudden gesture, she stopped speaking, looking on with interest as he picked up the telephone from his desk in response to Foxon’s signal. “Oracle? Chris Brinton here . . . Yes, up to my eyes. You must have heard our latest. . . Yes, poor kid. A regular nasty mess—which is why I’m calling. It’s what you might call a pretty long shot.” He winked at Mel. “Suggested, I might tell you, by a friend of yours who waltzed in here without so much as a by-your-leave and made herself very much at home—and who’d like to be remembered to you, I dare say,” as Mel made a face. “Guessed it in one!” Brinton grinned, holding out the receiver so that Mel could hear the burst of tinny laughter echoing down the line. She blew a cheerful kiss towards the telephone, and smothered a giggle as the superintendent looked shocked. He became serious all at once. “Now, listen, Oracle, our mutual friend Miss Forby harbours deep suspicions of you and your pals in the Smoke . . . Yes, I know, but she could just have a point, so I thought it was worth checking . . .”
Five minutes later, Mel was apologizing for having wasted police time, hoping Mr. Brinton wouldn’t back out of the bargain they’d made because she’d guessed wrong. She’d said all along, she reminded him, that it was unlikely—
“But you’re right, it had to be checked,” Brinton told her cheerfully, “so no real harm done. And it doesn’t mean that you were wrong the whole way through—why shouldn’t our chummie be one of these hop pickers? Maybe he only goes doolally when he’s off his own territory, so to speak.”
Foxon cleared his throat. “Could be there’s something in the air, sir, that makes him go peculiar. When you think how many, well, odd types there are within a fifteen-mile radius of here—”
“Shuttup, Foxon!” Brinton, with a new trail to pursue, was almost his old self again. “I’ve warned you before about winding me up with talk of a certain retired art teacher and her assorted friends . . . and enemies,” he found himself adding, as he mused on the oddness of the Nuts as well as on his blood pressure.
“Sorry, sir,” chirped Foxon, who had ignored the rebuke as he rummaged through his own files. “If Mel—Miss Forby,” as Brinton shot him a blistering look, “is right, and chummie is one of the hopping lot, then with the description those three witnesses gave we might be able to pull him in for questioning, at least.”
“If she’s right,” said Brinton. “And if the witnesses were right, too. From the statements, I admit it sounds as if it was the girl they saw—but when these youngsters are all dressed up, their mothers couldn’t necessarily be sure it was them, in a crowd. And as for the bloke they think she was with . . .” He retrieved his copies of the witness statements from the files, hesitated, glanced at Mel—who favoured him with her most wide-eyed, entreating gaze—and read aloud:
“Twentyish, jeans, wavy brown hair, athletic build . . . Middle to late twenties, tallish, light brown hair . . . About twenty-five, thick brown hair, slim build, casual dress . . . Could be almost anyone, dammit.” He glared again at Foxon. “Could even be you, if it comes to that—depending on what they mean by casual dress, heaven help us all.” He switched the glare from Foxon to Mel, who was stifling a snigger as she recalled her days as the Daily Negative’s fashion reporter. Foxon, she knew, prided himself on his appearance and sense of style: she rather admired them herself, although he had a long way, in her prejudiced eyes, to go to equal the manifold charms of Thrudd Banner.
Brinton scowled down at the witness statements, and Foxon brooded in his corner. Mel stared at the ceiling for a few thoughtful moments, waiting.
“It would be,” said Brinton at last, “entirely against regulations for you to accompany us on official business, Miss Forby, whether or not the expedition might have been partly due to your own suggestion.” Mel smiled sweetly at him as she continued to wait. He sighed. “You’ve hired a car, I suppose?”
“From Crabbe’s Garage,” agreed Amelita Forby at once, in her most dulcet tones. “You may know the place, Mr. Brinton—it’s in Plummergen, where I’m staying for a few days.”
The superintendent shuddered. Foxon, moving out of his superior’s sight, shook a warning head in Mel’s direction. She ignored him as she went on: “I’d thought, you know, of writing another article in my Kent: County of Contrasts series for the Negative. Contrasting modern farming methods with the old ways—seeing what’s lasted through the generations, and what’s given way to new technology. I thought,” she said pointedly, “of starting with the hop industry—show how Kent is different from Worcestershire. Everyone knows Kent,” she assured him brightly. “Apples, cherries—hops . . . and women. Some more than others, of course . . .”
“Blackmail,” groaned Brinton, shuddering again.
“Ten out of ten,” said Mel, with another smile. “Amelita Forby can read a map and drive a car as well as any newshound in the country—and, right now, she’s the only newshound in this particular corner of the country, remember. The others—including Banner, the Boy Wonder—have gone chasing off after red herrings . . . though I don’t imagine it would take them long to work out how they’d been fooled, if anyone happened to drop the right sort of hints . . .”
Foxon, who knew Mel rather better than did Brinton, gave a choking cry at the very idea of her letting a scoop escape her for the sake of thwarting the police by allowi
ng others to share it; but Brinton was by now so rattled that the risk of her carrying out her threat struck him as all too likely. He rolled his eyes, and clutched at his hair.
“The Oracle, lord knows why, says you’re to be trusted,” he said, in tones of deepest despair. “I’m damned if I’m taking you as a passenger, though—and I’m damned if you’re going to be allowed to sit in on any interviews we might have with any suspects. But . . .”
“But there must be a dozen or more hop gardens within a five-mile radius of here,” said Mel. “And who’s to say I wouldn’t find the right one before you did?” She shook her head, and frowned. “Guess it would just be put down to good old coincidence if the Negative splashed an exclusive interview with a selection of murder suspects all over the front page before the police had even arrived . . .”
Brinton, with one final groan, pushed back his chair and rose to his feet. “Miss Forby, I think I hate you almost as much as I hate Foxon—but it seems I’m stuck with the pair of you. And if the Oracle’s got it wrong about trusting you, I’ll . . . I’ll . . .”
“He hasn’t,” Mel assured him, rising in turn from her chair. “One hundred and one per cent, that’s Amelita Forby, and no kidding. So carry on, Superintendent—me and my reporter’s notebook, we’re right behind you!”
Hops have been farmed in Kent for hundreds of years. The quaint variety of their names is music to the ears of ale lovers: Brambling Cross, Wye Saxon, Fuggle, Janus, Golding, Bullion, and Early Bird—whose tendency to suffer from the dreaded verticillium wilt can send shivers down the spines of dedicated drinkers. Each spring, the long-established roots send up new shoots which are trained to a high framework of overhead wires from which, in summer, the strange flowers known as cones hang down. The air in a hop garden, sheltered as it is from the wind, is lush and heavy; a rich green light filters through the interlacing of hop bines above the workers’ heads.
The greatest number of workers is needed in the picking season, which traditionally begins on the first of September. Before then, only skilled labour (walking on stilts is no easy task) is used to “string” the growing hops up their coir ropes to the high wire frames; to earth-up the mounds known as hills on which the vines grow; to mulch between the rows of hills with the unique mix of mattress flocking and chopped rags on which the hops thrive—and, as they thrive, to prune them back within their cage to a manageable shape.
With the coming of September comes also the great crowd of unskilled workers who descend upon the hop gardens from London’s East End. A farm worker will act as foreman to his gang of ten or a dozen Cockneys, first freeing for them the hop bines from the poles with a long rod, then watching as they strip the fruit from the vines by hand, and collect it in wicker baskets. For each bushel picked, a worker is given a token, carved wood or pressed metal: some plain, with no more than the farmer’s initials or the number of bushels counted; some decorated with monograms, or with quaint emblems or scenes of country life. It is a life which has changed very little over the last hundred years . . .
“All the locals,” Brinton told Mel, as they walked from his office to the police station car park, “look down on the hoppers, by and large—call ’em troublemakers and gyppos, and worse—though on the whole they’re no great bother unless they’ve had a drop too much. And they’re usually so tired after the day’s work they haven’t the energy to go down the pub, so most of ’em drink what they’ve brought with ’em, or what they can scrounge from the farmer, which means we don’t have a lot to do with ’em, thank the lord, in an official capacity. They keep themselves to themselves, and we let ’em sort out their own problems unless it’s anything serious—and until now,” with a sigh, “I can’t remember the last time there was anything serious.”
“I could be wrong,” said Mel, not sounding as if she believed it. Brinton sighed again, and shook his head. Now she’d made the suggestion, he was three-quarters of the way to accepting it. It made sense, after all . . .
Foxon, driving, dawdled politely until Mel had retrieved her hire car and fallen into place behind him, then gunned the engine and headed for the first of a depressingly long list of local hop gardens. Mel, her camera discreetly out of sight with her notebook, tried to look like someone who had every right to accompany the two detectives as they made their enquiries at each farm in turn, hovering just within earshot and paying close attention.
After six or seven such visits, she could have asked the questions herself—and returned the answers, too. The hoppers, it seemed, were a close-knit crowd. Not one of them had been out of sight of his comrades for more than a few minutes at the relevant times: teamwork was the order of the day. And, once the day’s work was done, the teams had congregated outside their huts to enjoy a convivial supper and gossip before turning in for a well-earned night’s rest—rest of a kind which could hardly be called private. Brinton heard jocular remarks about so-and-so’s snores, someone else’s restless waterworks, someone else’s habit of talking in his sleep . . .
“I suppose,” he said, as Foxon drew a despondent line under another list of names, “someone could be lying—trying to protect one of their own. It’s only human nature.”
Mel raised her eyebrows. “For a crime as revolting as this? No, don’t answer. I can guess.”
Brinton snorted. “You can’t have been on the crime beat very long, Miss Forby, if you haven’t realised the lengths to which some people—usually your doting wives and mothers—are prepared to go, to make excuses for their menfolk. Pretty damned feeble excuses most of them are, mind you, and they aren’t the best of actors, so we tend to see through ’em without much difficulty. But I can’t say I’ve felt that old tingle in my bones with any of the people we’ve talked to this afternoon, more’s the pity—and then, even if the families’re willing to cover up, I don’t imagine any of the locals would be. She came from Murreystone, remember.”
“Which is how many miles further along this road?” mused Mel, consulting the map she had now drawn from her handbag. “Not that close—but close enough to count as a local, if my guess is right. So the nearer we get with each farm, the more likely it is we’ll be hearing the truth, from the full-time workers if not from the hoppers. How many more do you plan to see today?”
Brinton eyed her with interest. “Bored, Miss Forby, or just exhausted? Police work’s never as interesting or glamorous as the likes of you journalists make out, and as for the people who write detective stories—well! The simple truth of it is, even in a murder case there’s hours and hours of plain, plodding routine to be got through before we solve the case—if,” he said, sighing, “we ever do.”
Mel and Foxon looked at each other. In a snatched and private moment, the young detective had explained Brinton’s reluctance to involve Miss Seeton in the current investigation. Mel had been prepared to concede that the superintendent had a point—but not much of one, she added privately. She agreed with Foxon that Miss Seeton was the last person on earth to imagine crazed knifemen pursuing her through her dreams. Although it was Mel’s intention to follow Brinton on his hop-garden tour until a likely suspect presented himself, she hoped to spare a few convenient minutes to visit Sweetbriars, so close to her hotel; for Miss Seeton, she was sure, would be hurt if she found out that her friend Mel had been in Plummergen without calling on her. And if, during that call, the subject of Drawing should happen to come up in conversation—why, Mel would, of course, like a good guest, follow her hostess’s lead . . . But Brinton had not yet decided to call it a day, and Amelita Forby wasn’t going to be the first to give in now.
“Neither bored,” said Mel, very firmly, “nor exhausted, Mr. Brinton.” Once more she consulted her map. “So, where do we go next? They all look much of a muchness, to me . . .”
Indeed they did. It was not until next morning that one in particular was to etch itself permanently into the young reporter’s mind: the Cana Hop Garden.
chapter
~ 14 ~
WITH ALL T
HE excitement of Saturday evening, Miss Seeton was a little surprised to find herself waking some thirty minutes before her customary hour next day. It was a day which promised well for outdoor pursuits: no clouds were in the sky, a breeze rustled the leaves of nearby trees. It would, Miss Seeton mused, be an ungrateful waste to spend too long indoors, away from this glorious sunshine, this fresh September air—air even more than usually invigorating, when one was already partway to invigoration by having arranged oneself in the Mahamudra . . . Miss Seeton, in her bedroom, on her tartan travelling rug, sat with her left knee bent, the heel tucked against her crotch, and with her spine curving forward so that her outstretched hands could clasp her right foot, her head could rest on her right knee—a pose which required considerable contracting of muscles and holding of breath, but for which Yoga and Younger Every Day promised so very much . . . And with, one was so pleased—Miss Seeton released her pent-up breath, relaxed, and reversed the pose to favour her left leg—such honesty. One almost felt no need for breakfast. It would, however, be unwise to go fasting to church—Miss Seeton allowed herself to relax again, and breathed deeply—for there was, as one knew, despite the brilliant sunshine sometimes a chill in the air so early in the morning at this time of year . . .
Early. Perhaps, if she omitted one or two of the less vital exercises, she could attend the early service rather than her more usual eleven o’clock, which would leave the rest of the day delightfully free. One could then, with a clear conscience, enjoy oneself in the eradication of weeds, the planting of yet more bulbs—Stan was there to be consulted should further problems arise—and the gentle pruning of shrubs. Perhaps, (if one’s conscience permitted the indulgence) a picnic lunch under the apple tree, instead of a more formal meal indoors? With the approach of the equinox, the gradual shortening of the day became more obvious; and, with that shortening, came the as-gradual cooling of the air. One would display no more than common sense, Miss Seeton told herself as she lay in the Shavasana or Dead Pose and practised her rhythmic breathing, if one made the very most of such good weather as remained before winter finally arrived . . .
Miss Seeton Plants Suspicion (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 15) Page 12