She saw it. Them. Scuttling about the floor, too many to count, grey and brown and with long tails trailing, black eyes gleaming, whiskers twitching. Miss Seeton, shaking her head again, stood up, seized her umbrella, and thwacked it on the table, twice. Her egg wobbled off its toast, her knife clattered to the floor, her teapot lid danced a tarantella inaudible above the continuing squeals and cries. She thwacked the table again, then tried to add her own voice—the voice, one trusted, of moderation—to the rest.
“Ladies—ladies! These are nothing more than mice . . .”
As reassurance, this information achieved poor results. Although those nearest Miss Seeton had been so surprised by her actions that they had fallen briefly silent, and had thus been able to hear what she said, her calm confirmation of what they had feared served only to make matters worse. And as their outcry redoubled in pitch and volume, so, by some strange alchemy, did that of the others.
Miss Seeton was about to employ her brolly for a third time when she saw something which made her stay her hand. Through the door of the café came a man—young, grinning, a shoe box under his arm—who darted to the nearest table on which a terrified woman had taken refuge, and snatched her handbag from beside her plate. Slipping it over his arm, he ran to another table, and seized another bag—to another, and seized two—ran again, and again, until he must, Miss Seeton guessed, have had a dozen handbags—stolen handbags—in his possession. Then, as those who had been robbed in such a . . . mischievous way were coming to their senses, he threw down the shoe box—the lid fell off—and a further scrabbling, scurrying, bewhiskered overflow of mice poured out all over the floor.
Which made remonstrating with the young man, Miss Seeton realised, even more difficult than it had been before. She would not from choice have stood so idly by as he robbed her fellow diners, but her progress towards him in order to . . . to do something, she knew not what, to prevent this robbery had been hindered by her wish not to tread on any of the mice as they scampered to and fro in panic—panic, one could not help but feel, every bit as great as that of the women whose shrill cries must hurt their ears, whose great leaps would crush horribly if they landed upon the poor creatures.
One could not, however, allow that impudent young man to escape the consequences of such wrongdoing. Miss Seeton, the point of her umbrella sweeping to and fro before her to clear a pathway through the rampaging rodents on the floor, reached the café door perhaps eight seconds after her quarry, who had run out less swiftly than he had run in. Twelve handbags will hamper anyone, no matter how long his arms may be, how tight his grip.
It was not, however, the hampering handbags which had so slowed the young man’s escape that Miss Seeton now stood a fair chance of catching up with him as she emerged from the café, fully expecting him to have vanished with his booty in some waiting car. She had hoped to hail a passing taxi, or to encounter a policeman on his beat who would radio full details of the criminal to . . . to whoever needed to know them. Miss Seeton’s grasp of constabulary procedure, for all her long acquaintance with Scotland Yard and other forces, was vague; but she knew that a policeman was the right person to approach, and had been prepared to do so.
What she had not been prepared for was to find the young man still within sight, dancing frantically back and forth as he sought a passage around the swinging rear end of an enormous skip now being unloaded from a delivery truck which had just driven down the street, unnoticed by those in the café—understandably unnoticed, as they had all had more pressing matters on their minds. Especially the young man, who was now looking in fury at the skip and the truck—the truck which, as the winch slowly cranked its load towards the ground, almost entirely blocked the road, and completely blocked the pavement on one side of it. And the other pavement was blocked by a crowd of interested spectators . . . For it was, as Miss Seeton had earlier established, the hour for lunch. Office workers were shopping; shoppers, thinking of food, were heading for various cafés and snack bars. The street was a local thoroughfare, popular and busy at certain times—of which the midday break was one.
Which fact seemed to have slipped the mind of the young man when he first released those myriad mice on the café floor. Miss Seeton, forging her slow passage through the throng, found herself, for one wild moment, even admiring his original scheme—one’s respect for an expert at work—and feeling some fleeting regret that careless planning had caused it to misfire. The skilful playing on so many foolish women’s fear of the harmless mouse—the cool judgement he had shown in waiting for the café to be sufficiently full of customers to make it worth his while . . . and then, his bad luck in not knowing the skip would arrive at the exact instant he planned to escape, coupled with his original failure to time that escape before the surrounding offices emptied of their workers . . . the fatal error which, as one had read somewhere—or had it been mentioned by dear Mr. Delphick, or by Mr. Brinton (such a sense of humour) or dear Bob—that Fatal Error which every criminal always made.
Miss Seeton, breathlessly buffeted by the crowd, which surged backwards from the skip as the chains by which it was being lowered screamed a last metallic warning, gave herself a sharp mental shake, and, having restored her normal common sense, nodded approvingly. For, if they never did, it would perhaps not be so easy for them to catch them.
“Make such errors,” announced Miss Seeton in firm tones, reinforcing her return to normality after that inexplicable lapse into sympathy with a wrongdoer. “Criminals—and, of course, the police . . .”
The winch had stopped turning; the chains had stopped screaming. The skip, with a final, resounding clang, had safely reached the ground—and Miss Seeton’s words, clearly audible, fell into the sudden silence.
“Who wants the police?” demanded an overweight man with a gold chain stretched across his waistcoat. “ Is somthing wrong, madam?”
Others nearby had caught, if not Miss Seeton’s original words, then those of the overweight man. “What’s wrong?” “There’s something wrong!” “There’s been an accident!”
The comments, increasing in wildness, rose all around, and Miss Seeton, still wedged in too-close proximity to that plump waistcoat, found herself in danger of being trampled in the crush as the crowd surged even farther back from the skip. Albert the crane driver, caring little for anything but the job in hand, had cranked the mighty jaws downwards to pick up his first load of rubble and swing it round to feed it into that yawning metal mouth. There was a general feeling that something was about to go wrong . . .
Londoners are connoisseurs of construction. They view with expert eyes the gyrations of bulldozers, diggers, and demolition balls as they transform the face of the city; and they are always curious to know what will happen next. Like Jerome K. Jerome, work fascinates them; they can sit—or, as it usually goes on in the street, stand—looking at it for hours, whether behind wooden hoardings or not. Memories of wartime queues mean that, where one or two Londoners are gathered together, several more will join them, as curious as they. Raise the cry of accident or some other emergency, and they swing together into action.
“Get a doctor!” “No, she said the police!” “Somebody dial nine-nine-nine!”
There was too much noise now for Miss Seeton to make her breathless pipe heard above the clamour of the crane, the cries of the crowd. Too much noise, from too many people—people who were pushing and shoving, all trying to see what the fuss was about, blocking her path to that young man who, burdened with so many handbags, was trying to look as if he carried business samples. And he really—Miss Seeton found herself thinking—ought to have emptied them and then thrown them away when he had the chance—except, of course, that he’d never had it, because the street was already too busy when he ran out into it from the café. As she herself had run out—oh. Her heart missed a beat.
“Oh, dear—my poached egg!” She had run out without paying for it. Was this, she wondered, theft? Would it be sufficient excuse that she had only left the caf
é in such a precipitate fashion in order to pursue—
“I’m a doctor!” came a voice in the near distance. “Is somebody ill?”
“No, no, there’s been a mistake!” cried the fat man with the waistcoat, who had moved, far more quickly than from his bulk would have seemed possible, as far from Miss Seeton as he could. “This poor lady seems to be a . . . a little unwell, but . . .”
Indeed, Miss Seeton, still struggling to make herself understood, anxious about her act of unwitting larceny, did look far more red in the face and flustered than anyone fully compos mentis would be: but it was unfair of the fat man to suppose she had been thinking of herself as a poached egg, whether or not such supposition is said to be the sure sign of a deranged intellect. And his sideways whisper that anyone who had a straitjacket ought to bring it quickly was decidedly uncalled for.
“That young man!” Miss Seeton had wriggled free of the press about her and was pointing with her umbrella over the heads of the crowd towards the handbag thief. “Stop him!”
The young man, who had been trying to look as nonchalant as anyone with a dozen handbags under one arm can be, turned his head quickly in the direction of that accusing voice—shrugged—turned away, and made one last effort to thrust through the hordes of shoppers, lunchers, and sightseers who had been trapped by the delivery of the metal rubbish skip. But the truck which had delivered the skip was revving its engine, prior to driving off: he could see a suitable gap—rather too near the café for comfort, but a gap nonetheless—into which, if his luck held, he might dodge . . .
“Stop that young man!” came the frantic pipe once more, and Miss Seeton, gesticulating wildly with her umbrella, was able to clear a space around her as those who had overheard the fat man’s muttered explanation to the doctor of an escaped lunatic moved hurriedly out of ferrule range. “He must be stopped! Those handbags are stolen!” Miss Seeton informed the crowd; and the crowd, encircling her at a safe distance, cast nervous glances in every direction in case her keeper should come panting up in search of her. And the young man, observing the crowd’s attention focussed elsewhere, prepared to melt, together with his handbags, hastily away.
Everything had happened so quickly up until now that there had been no time to think about what was happening in the café. The screams had started to die down as the mice, finding the door open as Miss Seeton had left it in her hurry, began to run through it to the more peaceful atmosphere outside. The gradual departure of the mice helped to calm the table-bound screamers, the boldest of whom clambered down and darted out into the street in search of their stolen property. They had little hope of finding it, though they intended to give the young crook, if they spotted him, a run for his money; and they were annoyed to find their way blocked by a large and slow-moving builder’s lorry which was hooting at some vehicle or other trying to come in the opposite direction, and by an excited crowd evidently watching a street magician with an umbrella instead of a magic wand . . .
“Hey! She was in the café!” Miss Seeton was recognised—a general cry went up—and the young man, who had almost made his way round the edge of the crowd to freedom, hesitated as he saw his intended path blocked by the lorry—which was trying to avoid not only the overspill of the crowd on the road, but also an impatient car coming the other way—and—which made him stop dead in his tracks—by a furious group of his former victims. He knew them—he heard their outcry, or at least their final words—and, knowing he had been spotted, he panicked.
Any passing pigeon, sparrow, or other avian overseer must have dined out for the rest of its life on its bird’s-eye view of what happened next. Everything was so confused, to those on the ground caught up in it all—who included in the first rank Miss Seeton, the crowd surrounding her, the angry group of women from the café, the young man with the handbags, Albert the crane driver, the man in the lorry, and the driver of the car he hit—not to mention (in the second rank) the unfortunate beat bobby who struggled to make some sense of what everyone was saying at the same time as he tried to clear the traffic jam, plus his colleagues from the ambulance and fire services called to deal with all those in the building when it collapsed . . . everything was so confused that nobody ever really knew the whole story.
Not even Inspector Borden.
chapter
∼ 16 ∼
INSPECTOR BORDEN OF the Fraud Squad sat in his office at New Scotland Yard, drinking his umpteenth cup of strong, sweet tea. This had been prescribed for him by his sergeant, a former Marine who had seen service in the Second World War and knew all about battle fatigue. If Borden had been a reformed smoker, the sergeant would have urged him to give up giving up—but he wasn’t, so the restorative powers of nicotine were denied him. He would have to win through this crisis on his own, with the help of a sympathetic listener.
The sympathetic listener was present, though it was not Borden’s sergeant, who cowered now in another office working off some of his own stress by typing a preliminary report. The rattle of the keys sounded rather like machine-gun fire, and the sergeant kept telling himself things could really be a great deal worse. He wasn’t sure he believed it.
“Even now, I’m not sure I believe it.” Borden gulped a frenzied mouthful of tea and reached for a fourth sugar lump. His companion did not prevent him. “I mean—we’ve had a few hairy cases in the past, Oracle. The depths to which human nature can sink when it’s after something for nothing might surprise your average member of the public, but not yours truly—and I’d rather prided myself on being, well, immune. Hardened to it, if you like. Cope with anything—anyone. You name ’em, we’ve seen ’em, in Fraud—gangsters, protection rackets, swindlers in all shapes and sizes—and we’ve put a fair number of ’em away. Tidily,” he added, a fifth lump of sugar going the same way as the fourth, “and without too much mess. But this . . .” He gesticulated helplessly towards the litter of photographs, newspapers, and handwritten statements spread across his desk. “All this—it’s . . .”
“It’s not exactly Miss Seeton’s fault,” Delphick said, trying to sound as if he really thought so. “She has a very tidy mind. She certainly didn’t mean anything like this to happen—”
“She never does! And that’s the trouble—it’s the . . . the horrible contrast between what any normal person might expect and what she actually delivers that makes life so damned difficult for your average humble copper. I read the papers, Oracle”—Borden thumped the scattering of evidence on his desk with an anguished fist—“and I hear the rumours—and I’m not going to forget what happened on that nightclub case a few years back, when the racecourse gang had that punch-up in the car park, and my man Haley was knifed, and there was that so-called bomb in the dress shop, and a real bomb in her cottage—for which”—and he glared accusingly at Delphick, who made haste to change a chuckle into a cough—“I can’t say, right this minute, I’d blame anyone for attempting, for the sake of the resultant peace and quiet . . . Well, okay, I’m being unfair,” as Delphick looked shocked. “Unfair, and ungrateful—we’ve been after the blighters for weeks, so I suppose you might say MissEss deserves a medal for handing ’em to us the way she did, even if she”—he gulped—“didn’t mean to . . .”
“At least,” Delphick soothed him, “nobody’s badly hurt, which has to be almost a miracle.” Several bystanders were in a state of shock, and Albert the crane driver was in hospital wondering whether or not to have a nervous breakdown; but, because the arm of his crane and its counterweight had fallen at such a remarkable angle from their height of one hundred feet, they’d caused far less damage than might have been feared, whether to the building on which they’d fallen, or to the people in and around it. Delphick hadn’t visited the scene of the crime—or crimes—in person—he’d been too busy responding to frantic requests for assistance in dealing with Miss Seeton and in understanding enough of what she said to be able to extract her statement—but he’d heard several highly coloured descriptions of the aftermath of his friend�
�s activities, as well as being shown—by yet more anguished police officers, most notably from Traffic Division—not only the official photographs, but also those on the front pages of every evening newspaper in London.
Brooding on the disruption to city streets for a considerable distance around the incident—the falling crane had gouged out a large slice of the road surface, thus severing the electric cable which fed several vital sets of traffic lights (gridlock was being used as an expletive by the most mild-mannered men)—Delphick helped himself to another cup from the outsize teapot he had instructed the canteen to provide, full to the brim with a double-strength brew. He refrained from adding sugar: it wasn’t, he reflected in wry amusement, really his case. Extreme reactions such as those of poor Borden would be no more than self-indulgence on his part—but he certainly couldn’t blame the inspector. Despite his proud boast, the man obviously wasn’t as hardened to his work as he’d liked to think he was . . .
“And all because of Miss Seeton,” the Oracle murmured, stirring his tea with a thoughtful spoon, sugar or no sugar. He felt it might help his concentration. “The handbag thief was captured by the crowd—”
“With concussion,” interposed Borden grimly; then a grin appeared on his face. “Serve him right, too—he deserved all he got, working a smart-alec trick like that. And he’ll have had a few nasty moments before that brick brained him, realising he’d been sent right into the thick of a Women’s Institute on the warpath—enough to freeze anyone’s blood. And if you’re daft enough to freeze right in the firing line of a crane with an overloaded grapple—”
“A metallurgist would no doubt be able to explain why it buckled in quite so spectacular a fashion,” said Delphick, fishing out from the pile a photograph showing miscellaneous steel writhing amid brick and concrete wreckage. “One may suppose, of course, that the driver was so intrigued by what was happening below him that he picked up too much at once, or too quickly, or something of the sort.”
Miss Seeton Goes to Bat (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 14) Page 13