Martha paused to inhale. Yoga might do wonders for her employer, but for herself she got enough exercise in the normal way, thank you, running around clearing up after folk who couldn’t, never mind what they said, clear up nearly so well as others. Just because they could tie themselves in knots on the floor as the fancy took them, and she couldn’t, didn’t mean she couldn’t run up The Street from her cottage to the bus stop, if the weather was fine—which it wasn’t—and if she didn’t have the remains of a cold ...
“Martha?” Miss Seeton peered through the rain and the uncurtained light from nearby windows at the panting paragon of domesticity on the pavement before her. “Why, Martha, is anything wrong?”
Martha emitted one final wheeze, shook herself, and nodded. “There’s no way to make it easy, dear—but we’ve had burglars, of all things! Well, one, anyhow,” she amended as Miss Seeton gave a little cry of alarm. “Tough-looking little beggar he was, too—not as that’s got anything to do with what you’re asking, of course, but yes, there’s something wrong, because if breaking and entering’s not wrong, then I don’t know what is, dear. And you won’t tell me otherwise, Miss Seeton!”
“Why, I wouldn’t dream of it.” Miss Seeton truly had no idea of how her perennial attempts to see the best in everyone often drove more pessimistic persons to distraction. “Burglars? This is shocking news, and I’m so sorry. I hope they didn’t take too much, or”—she sighed—“do too much damage. And anyone would agree that they—or, as you said, he—had done wrong ... But you’re naturally upset, Martha dear. And what does Stan have to say?”
“Nothing repeatable,” replied Martha, almost forgetting her troubles to grin, then sobering quickly to explain in full. “I’m sorry, Miss Emily, I didn’t make myself clear as it was your cottage he broke into, not ours. What’ve we got that’s worth pinching? But you, with all them lovely things left you by Mrs. Bannet, not to mention—Now, dear,” she said as Miss Seeton uttered another little cry, “there’s no need to take on, because aren’t I telling you I stopped him in his tracks before he did hardly more than poke his ugly head through the door?”
“Oh. I’m so sorry—are you?” Miss Seeton decided surprise must have made her miss that part; but she had no time to enquire further as Martha, having broken the bad news, gathered up her employer and began to escort her homewards down The Street, huddling under the shared umbrella partly for shelter, and partly for reassurance as she continued:
“On my hands and knees, I was, when it happened, doing the hearth. A shocking mess it’s got into, these last few days, and you know how those red tiles can come up lovely if only you give them a proper rub. And there was this new polish I’d seen in the shop I thought I’d give a try. Only I was late getting started, because that Tibs was in the front garden. I had to chase her out before Stan saw her—you know, Miss Emily.”
Miss Seeton nodded: she did. Everyone did. Tibs, the tabby from the police house, was the most infamous feline for miles. Rumour had it she was afraid of no creature smaller than an elephant, and would eat, fight, or forcibly mate with any creature smaller than a tiger. When Tibs was on the prowl, Plummergen dogs skulked in their kennels, and superstitious villagers made signs against the evil eye, for she was popularly suspected of shape-changing at the full moon. Villagers who were not superstitious were rather more energetic with their sign language as they ejected the Cyprian marauder from shrubberies, flower beds, and vegetable patches. Martha wasn’t superstitious, she insisted—not really—but then she didn’t want her hands scratched ...
“So I got rid of her in the end with the broom. Digging great holes to bury her mice as bad as a dog, or worse—and having to fill them in again before Stan found out—so when the bell goes, I get all tangled up in my apron strings as came undone where I knelt on them by accident, not properly fastened on account of that wretched cat and being in such a rush. And by the time I get myself sorted out and to the door, he’s gone—though I must say he give it a good, long ring.” Martha paused: for emphasis, Miss Seeton supposed, or perhaps the aftermath of her cold. It did not occur to her that her loyal henchwoman, accustomed as she was to detailed and tortuous narratives, didn’t generally deliver them while trotting in the dark through the rain.
Mrs. Bloomer recovered herself and plunged on with her story. “Must be important, I thought, so whoever it was is bound to call again, or phone, or pop a note through the door. I didn’t bother looking outside because I wanted to get back to the hearth to have it done and the fire laid proper”—even now, Martha couldn’t resist that little dig—“before you came back, and so I was on my hands and knees, dear, like I said, when I thought I heard a noise outside, round the back. Only with the rain, and the weather, and that cat, I wasn’t going to get up again in a hurry, and of course that’ll be when he must’ve looked through the window and thought the place was empty. And there was this funny sort of scratching, and a rattle, and suddenly there he was, bold as brass, opening the door of the sitting room and me on my hands and knees in front of the fire.”
The enormity of what had happened was taking a long time to sink in. Miss Seeton responded on automatic pilot with a faint “Good gracious, Martha, you must have had a shock.”
“Not half as much of a shock as him.” Martha—who, as the pace of her narrative increased, had perforce slowed the pace of her walking to save her breath—now quickened her steps again as the climax (and, coincidentally, the cottage) came in sight. “I yelled at him what did he think he was doing, and he jumped back pretty smartish, I can tell you.” Martha clutched Miss Seeton’s arm in the agitation of reliving her exploits. “I grabbed the poker and was up from my knees in a second,” she said proudly. “Chased him right out of the house and down the path—but then,” she said with a sigh, “I lost him. Had his car parked just outside the bakery, jumped in, and was off up The Street without switching on his lights—I never even got his number. I’m sorry, dear, I really am, but with the sun down by then, and The Street not lit, I just couldn’t, though I did my best.”
“You did more than enough,” said Miss Seeton, her voice unsteady—and not from the speed of her walking. “Oh, Martha, suppose you had been hurt? I would have felt so very much to blame, for no amount of—of sentimental attachment to one’s belongings,” said Miss Seeton firmly, “can equal the kindness of one’s friends. I would always have had my memories, Martha dear, no matter what he had taken, and—”
“Now, don’t you fret, he didn’t take nothing.” Martha’s clutch tightened as she shook her employer’s arm. Drops of rain splattered from the umbrella to the ground about their feet. “I could see that much, for all he turned tail and ran—not unless it was small enough to fit in his pockets, which I’ve had a quick look and I can’t say I noticed anything’s gone. Mind you, Ned Potter says you’d best check round for yourself, so’s to know—”
“Constable Potter?” Miss Seeton halted in her tracks, disturbed more by this final intelligence than she’d seemed to be by all that had gone before. “Oh, dear. Martha, I’m sure—indeed, I know—that you acted from the very best of motives, and I am most grateful—but when the police are always so busy with important matters, and as you say he stole nothing—”
“Nothing I could tell, dear. But two heads are better than one. And me and Stan, we were very fond of old Mrs. Bannet,” returned Martha mysteriously.
Miss Seeton’s eyes pricked with sudden tears. “I know, Martha dear. So was I.” She sighed. “If one views this—this escapade in the light of a—of an affront to her memory—exaggerated though this may sound when, on reflection, I cannot help but think of it as a—as a prank, which went wrong: a case of mistaken identity, perhaps, and although rather foolish, not, I feel sure, malicious ... but if Mr. Potter believes it to be necessary, then naturally I will do as he suggests. He is, after all, more expert in these matters than myself.”
He was also (though unknown to Miss Seeton) a young man with a healthy sense of self-preservation. Duri
ng the first foray into the Plummergen affairs of Miss Emily Dorothea Seeton, her adopted community had become involved in drugs-related murder and attempted murder, a vicious drowning, various car crashes, gassing, shooting, abduction (of Miss Seeton, by a youth with ginger hair), and embezzlement (of client funds, by a solicitor with a booming voice). After the little art teacher’s second, equally irregular irruption into local life, Superintendent Brinton had, in desperation, drawn up his Standing Orders. With these, PC Potter—on pain of dismemberment, demotion, and (the ultimate deterrent) Traffic Duty—had strict instructions that he must at all times comply. If anything—anything—untoward relating, however remotely, to Miss Seeton, should occur at any time within a five-mile radius of her person—or, in her absence, her cottage—such occurrence must be reported at once and without fail to Potter’s Ashford superior: even if (a rider Old Brimstone had added in a spirit of desperate self-sacrifice) it occurred in the middle of the night, or on the superintendent’s day off.
PC Potter was not only blessed with a strong sense of self-preservation: he was blessed with a happy marriage to wife Mabel, and with daughter Amelia as happily settled at the village school. He was, in short, contented with things as they were: he had no wish for change. Neither had he any wish to put ideas into the head of Superintendent Brinton, whether about his competence (and consequent fitness for promotion) or lack of it (with subsequent risk of demotion to traffic wardenhood). For the past seven years, PC Potter had walked a narrow tightrope in his dealings with Ashford headquarters, and knew to a nicety which untoward occurrences he should report to his apoplectic superior, and which might safely be ignored.
“Burglars,” groaned Brinton, over a snatched cup of tea in his paper-piled office. “Why did it have to happen now? Come to that, why tell us at all? Doesn’t the idiot realise we’ve enough on our plate with two murders to solve, and no idea where the hell either case is going, to start chasing burglars?” He drew a deep breath, gulped a mouthful of tea, and glared at Foxon as if that young man were personally to blame for his Plummergen colleague’s behaviour. He sighed. “Sometimes, laddie, I wish Miss Seeton had stayed in Hampstead and given the lads on Parliament Hill something to take their minds off cruising homos, or people walking mad dogs, or idiots flying kites too close to the air lanes—and if I didn’t know Potter better, I’d think he was trying to take the Michael. Especially as the blighter got away without a sausage, by all accounts.”
Foxon closed the file on the Quendon killing, hesitated, and pushed it aside without a word. This uncharacteristic taciturnity went, for once, unremarked by Brinton, who was so full of his own misfortunes he failed to notice his generally ebullient junior’s current low score on the irritant scale.
Foxon was too busy pondering a moral dilemma to play his usual part as the super’s mentally stimulating sidekick. As he drew the Mimms update towards him, he hesitated again. Hadn’t he promised? But then MissEss couldn’t—could she?—expect him to keep quiet when they’d started trying to steal the vital evidence of her sketchbook from under the very noses of the force. He’d done his best to keep his word—suggested to Brinton it could be worth checking on who’d sold what, and who’d bought it, in the records the Candell burglar had made such a mess with, as if he’d been looking for something and had chucked the lot on the ground when he couldn’t find it ... He’d asked if Brinton didn’t think, sealed or not, the sooner the auctioneers got their files in order, the better; and Brinton had said he couldn’t agree more, but the whole affair seemed to have sent the one woman who understood the system into hysterics, and until she was in a mood to get back to work, there wasn’t much they could do, so they’d have to rely on good old-fashioned detection the way they always did.
“Miss S. was in a funny mood this afternoon, all right.” Leave it to fate: if Brinton took S for Stanebury, that was Foxon’s mind made up, he’d hold his tongue, and suggest some other course of action once he’d thought of it. But if the old man took it he’d been referring to Miss Seeton ...
“Funny mood.” Brinton repeated the words in a hollow tone. “Funny mood?” He started, set down his mug—some of the tea splashed over the top—on his blotter, sat up, and glared across the room. “Foxon! I ought to bust you back to uniform, you—you—insubordinate—insubordinate ...” Struggling for a suitable epithet, he turned an interesting shade of purple. Foxon jumped from his seat in alarm.
Brinton gave up the struggle as the young man drew near. “You’ve been sneaking off to Plummergen without telling me,” he roared, “when you were damned well meant to be checking statements at Candells—and you’ve been fobbing me off with some tom-fool excuse about getting them typed up properly! You—you’ve known all along about this blasted burglary, you—you—”
“Steady on, sir. I can explain—please, sir, put that paperweight down—I am waiting for the typists, and—hey!” Foxon sounded genuinely aggrieved as the missile missed his head by half an inch, crashed against the far wall, and fell with a horrid thump to the ground.
There followed a thoughtful pause, during which Brinton sat breathing hard, and Foxon dropped heavily on his superior’s visitors’ chair for his own spell of laboured respiration. “Come off it, sir,” ventured the young man at last, as the face behind the desk slowly regained its normal ruddy hue. “That was a bit much, if you don’t mind me saying so. I mean, you might have killed me, if I hadn’t got such quick reflexes.”
Brinton grunted. “My aim’s better than that, laddie. If I want to hit you, I hit you. When I think of all the peppermints I’ve wasted on you over the years ...”
The truth of this claim could not be denied, and Foxon acknowledged it with a faint grin. When Brinton did no more than groan and roll his eyes, it seemed worth pressing on with the explanation that had been so vigorously curtailed slightly earlier in the proceedings.
“Honest, sir, I haven’t been to Plummergen in weeks, not since Christmas. Miss Seeton’ll tell you the same, because the first thing she did was wish me a Happy New Year when I met her—by accident, sir—this afternoon, in Brettenden. Right outside Candell and Inchpin ...” Foxon regarded his superior with an expert and calculating eye. That mention of peppermints had reminded Brinton of the presence in his desk of an unopened packet: the clench of his jaw had relaxed, and he was groping happily for the handle of the top drawer on the right.
He’d risk it. “Well, coming down the front steps, sir, actually.” Brinton popped two mints in his mouth but said nothing. “She’d just finished inside, sir—as far as she could, I mean.” An accusing note entered Foxon’s voice as, in Brinton’s continued silence, he continued to speak. “She was a bit bothered, sir, that she hadn’t managed to—to get anything useful, if you know what I mean.” Brinton’s raised eyebrows and vicious crunch suggested that this knowledge was denied him, and Foxon had better elucidate quickly.
“I know she often needs a bit of—of coaxing, sir, to hand it over, but when she seemed so—so upset,” said Foxon, still accusing, “I didn’t sort of think it was exactly my place, sir. Not when you were the one that’d asked her, and I was sure she’d bring it along in the end, the way she always does ...”
Brinton closed his eyes, crunched once more, gulped, and swallowed noisily. He opened his eyes in a bleak, desperate glare. “Are you trying to tell me, Foxon, that Miss Seeton has been—has been Drawing again?”
“Of course, sir. As you—oh.” Light, at last, dawned. “As you don’t,” Foxon said, “know. Er—do you, sir?”
“I do now.” Brinton buried his face in his hands. “Oh, I do—and I wish I didn’t. Damn and blast you, Foxon. Why the rip-roaring hell did you have to tell me about it?”
chapter
~ 20 ~
“BUT—SIR, I THOUGHT you knew. Miss Seeton was talking as if you did ...” Then Foxon frowned. “At least, I—I think she was.”
Brinton lifted his head, his eyes rolling again. “You think. Think means something else, laddie, and right now you d
amned well don’t! Nobody does, where Miss Seeton’s concerned. It’s all guesswork and waiting for inspiration and translating what the wretched woman sees into something even more obscure ... No,” he said as Foxon opened his mouth to protest, “you’re right. I’m being unfair.” He shot a quick sideways look at his subordinate. “I think.” He even managed a grin. “She’s helped us in the past, and no reason why she shouldn’t again. I suppose.” He sighed. “But you know I can’t cope with her, Foxon. She makes me nervous. She’s more the Oracle’s pigeon than mine, for all she lives in my manor. For some crazy reason, he seems to understand better than most what makes her tick. Which probably,” he said with a wry twist to his mouth, “says something about the man’s subconscious I’d rather not know. And if you tell him I said so, I’ll have your guts for garters.”
“As if I would, sir. But ... talking of Mr. Delphick, if we—you—can’t make any sense of MissEss’s doodle, couldn’t we ask him, once she’s brought it in?”
“We don’t know that she will.” Brinton groaned. “Come to that, we don’t even know if she has—done any doodling, I mean, because you’re not really sure what she said. Are you? Well, then. But if you are sure she said I sent her off sketching the scene of the crime at Candells, all I can say is, I didn’t. The Yard promised her years back—well, I don’t recall the exact words, but you don’t send Miss Seeton into every blessed case that turns up, not unless you’ve got nerves of steel, you don’t, no matter how desperate you are—and we aren’t that desperate yet. The Mimms business was only a day or so ago, dammit. Let’s give good old foot slogging a proper chance before we bring in the Battling Brolly—if,” he added heavily, “we do. If it’s worth the effort. From what you say, strikes me the poor old girl’s cracked at last and started imagining things—”
Sold to Miss Seeton (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 19) Page 17