And there followed a long, pregnant silence.
chapter
~17~
THE LANDLORD OF a hotel sees many strange things during his lifetime, and Charley Mountfitchet lived, after all, in Plummergen, where almost anything might happen (and, since Miss Seeton had come to live there, frequently did). Dickie and Juliana were nevertheless surprised at the equanimity with which, after what felt like forever, Charley reacted to the tale of Mr. Nash’s slight mishap, and his calmness as he ushered the pair back up the stairs to view the damage. He seemed more disturbed by the dilatory manner in which young Maureen seemed to be setting about her morning’s work than by the rampant wallpaper coiled about the room.
“Lucky we’d not got round to replacing the carpet just yet,” he said, surveying the wreckage from the threshold. “Now, paste all over my Axminster’s something I can’t say as I’d care for—but, well, there you are, these things happen—and we’re insured, so it could be worse. Won’t take no more than a day’s work to put this little lot to rights, not if I get hold of my brother-in-law and a couple of his mates—and you two won’t mind moving into another room while we get it all fixed, will you? So how’s about you popping off for a bite of breakfast—tell Doris I said so—and I’ll be getting busy on the telephone?”
It was a shamefaced, though relieved, couple who crept at last into the dining room of the George and Dragon and sat at one of the tables, speaking in hushed voices and glad the worst was over. Doris, who had been laying tables for lunch, agreed to prepare toast and strong coffee and seemed glad not to be asked to cook anything complicated at this late hour or to have to ask Maureen to do so. Doris accepted the order cheerfully and bustled away to fulfill it at once; which enthusiasm for work drove Maureen (who had been at Wayne’s birthday party last night and had sapped most of her energies there) out of the kitchen at last and into the reception area.
Here, she hovered with a duster, trying to look as if she had serious intentions about working. She stood by the cheeseplant and flicked its leaves with listless feathers, listening to Charley with her mouth half open.
By the time the landlord had alerted his full decorating team, even Maureen understood what had happened to the Blue Riband Suite. “Coo, Mr. Mountfitchet, how funny,” she summed up the entire episode. “What a laugh, innit?”
“Not really, no.” Charley eyed her sternly. “To start with, it’ll mean extra work for you, my girl, because you’ll have to change all the bedrooms round, and Doris hasn’t the time to help like she usually does. Though where’s best to put them,” he added, to himself, “I’m not sure . . .”
Maureen shrugged. “If we got to change the Standons’ rooms anyway, I can’t see as there’s any problem. I mean, I don’t want to be swapping sheets backwards and forwards all the time, do I? Not as if I’m on overtime—”
“The Standons?” Charley frowned. “Don’t talk so daft, Maureen. The Standons are still using their rooms—booked till the end of the week, they are.”
Maureen gaped at him. “Then why was they loading up the car with their suitcases just now? Me and Wayne, we both saw them—they drove away just before—”
“What!” Charley’s cry silenced Maureen completely, and she dropped her duster in surprise. He ignored her as he hunted through the pages of the hotel register; checked the receipts on the iron spike; checked them again—and then shouted towards the kitchen for Doris.
The crystals of the hall chandelier were still ringing as the green baize door was pushed open and the headwaitress came hurrying out. “What’s wrong, for goodness’ sake? I’m right in the middle of making toast—”
“Never mind that now,” Charley broke in. “The Standons—Maureen says they’ve gone. Did they check out with you?”
“No, they didn’t. You don’t mean . . . No, they wouldn’t, surely. The kids may’ve been little horrors, but the old man was a regular gent—”
“Maureen, are you quite sure?” The anguished landlord fixed the startled slavey with a burning gaze. “Anyone can make an honest mistake, girl—they weren’t really driving away with their cases in the car, were they?”
Maureen tossed her head. “Best check in their rooms and see for yourself, Mr. Mountfitchet. I’m not one to imagine things—you go and look, and you’ll find I’m right.”
Charley thumped his fist on the hotel register with an oath. “Oh, I’ll do that, never fear—and before I do, I’m locking the front door! You stay here, Doris, and don’t you let that precious pair in the dining room try to sneak out. Maureen, you get along into the kitchen and keep a watch on the back door . . .”
He was halfway up the stairs before he had finished and did not hear Doris countermand his orders with the suggestion that it should be Maureen who stayed in reception while she herself checked on the state of the toast, which she now feared in her haste she might not have switched off properly. Maureen could hardly be trusted to use the toaster in the normal manner, let alone cope with it if it had caught fire: but a locked front door (and Charley had pocketed the key) ought not to tax her intellect too greatly.
Charley came back down the stairs with a grim expression on his normally cordial countenance. “Done a flit,” was all he said and headed straight for the telephone. Maureen’s presence in lieu of Doris did not seem to worry him as he set his finger in the dial and, without having to look up the number, rang the house of Plummergen’s PC Potter.
Juliana and Dickie were on their third cup of coffee, wondering what had happened to their toast but not wishing to make a fuss, when the door of the dining room juddered open and Charley Mountfitchet marched in, flanked by Maureen (still armed with her feather duster) and a uniformed police constable.
Dickie pushed back his chair and leaped to his feet with a cry of alarm. “I say—I mean, I told you we’d be glad to pay for the redecorating—surely we can come to some suitable arrangement! Couldn’t we talk it over? Aren’t you being a bit, well, hasty?”
“I’d say that depends, Mr. Nash,” replied Charley while Maureen brandished her duster and Potter favoured these dubious guests with the official glare he found so useful at chucking-out time. Dickie, aghast, subsided; Juliana, with a surge of desperation, said:
“I know it’s absolutely no use our apologising without some more practical expression of—”
“Never mind all that now!” barked Charley. “Just part of the camouflage, isn’t it? How often have you played that trick before, Mr. Nash? Got it down to a fine art, you have! Regular little decoys, the pair of you, and me so busy listening to your tale I never spotted your pals sneaking off with their cases—very clever, you must think yourselves! The row those kids were kicking up all the time, when they kept quiet anyone’d be thankful for it and pay no heed—and that’s what you all rely on, don’t you? Only this time you tangled with Charley Mountfitchet, and he’s not one to take such shenanigans lightly—there’s a police cell waiting for you two, make no mistake!”
At this ominous point in the proceedings Doris emerged from the kitchen with soot in her hair and a frown on her face. “Just a minute, Mr. Mountfitchet,” she said formally above the gasps and horrified exclamations of Juliana and Dickie as PC Potter flexed his muscles and prepared to play his part. “We’ve had little enough time to think about this—but one thing I’ve got to say, and that’s as how these two had lunch with Miss Seeton yesterday and took her out in the afternoon for a drive, so she must know them and could maybe speak for them, and perhaps it’s nothing more than a queer coincidence, what’s happened. I thought.”
“Oh.” Charley looked at Doris with some interest. “Did they? And they dined at the Hall last night, too—but then, Sir George is a magistrate and must know all manner of folk—still, it might just be there’s been a bit of hasty speech on my part, and an apology due—yet I don’t know,” he said slowly as looks of tentative relief began to appear on the faces of Dickie and Juliana. “I don’t know . . .”
“So what if they’re friends of Miss Se
eton’s?” demanded Maureen, scowling. “She’s one as has any number of queer friends, everybody knows that. The Standons, for one thing—she was only talking to them just before they drove away, wasn’t she!”
Sensation. Miss Seeton’s general “queerness” had been hotly debated in Plummergen from her earliest time there: a debate which had split the village in two. Some said that at the very least she was a witch; others maintained her to be a perfectly normal gentlewoman to whom adventures merely happened, without her instigation, and that her response to said adventures made her a credit to the place.
Maureen was not of the latter opinion. “Chattering away nineteen to the dozen, so she was, friendly as you please, and if you don’t believe me, you can ask my Wayne, because he saw them at it as well.”
The frown was creeping back into Charley’s eyes, and he turned to PC Potter. “Reckon there’s still something here ought to be looked into, I do.”
“Well, I don’t,” Doris informed him roundly. “If Miss Seeton thinks these two’re all right, then all right they’re sure to be—everybody”—and she glared at Maureen—“knows that. Why, when she was here with them yesterday, she’d got her gold-handled umbrella along of her, and she’d not bring that out for any queer folk, now would she?”
Which successfully quenched Maureen and convinced the rest of the company: even Dickie and Juliana were impressed. PC Potter remarked that it might be worth Mr. Mountfitchet’s time—for peace of mind, nothing more—just to step across the road to Sweetbriars and ask Miss Seeton for her views, but for himself he was prepared to accept the evidence of the gold umbrella, and would suggest Mr. Mountfitchet did the same. “Or”—as Charley muttered something—“you could give Sir George a ring, though I don’t doubt you’ll hear the same from him, a bit on the shorter side, of course”—with a grin—“but to the same effect, you can be sure.”
Charley supposed that he could, adding that, taking Miss Seeton’s umbrella into account, he reckoned he didn’t really see the need to go bothering people, either. He was sorry for any little misunderstanding, but he hoped Miss Popjoy and Mr. Nash would look at it from his point of view . . .
Which, of course, Dickie and Juliana said that they did.
“So now there’s only these vanishing guests of yours to be sorted out, Charley,” said PC Potter, accepting a cup of coffee and amiably joining the late breakfasters. Maureen, sniffing with disapproval, drifted away on some unspecified errand of her own, leaving Doris to produce vast quantities of hot buttered toast which the landlord intimated that he, too, would share with the suspects of a few moments ago, to show there were no hard feelings.
“Besides,” said Potter, spooning marmalade with a lavish hand, “we’ll not catch these here Standons—if that’s their real name, which I take leave to doubt—without statements from everyone as saw them, so while we’re having our bite to eat, you can be thinking what they looked like, ready for me to write it all down. Saves time, you see,” said PC Potter, and everyone agreed with him, although Charley secretly had doubts as to whether anything useful could be achieved.
Everyone was getting on extremely well with everyone else, and had even managed to recall a few details about the Standons which Potter thought would be useful, when the door of the dining room was flung open with almost as much force as before. They all stopped eating and turned to stare.
Maureen, her eyes bright, her cheeks almost as red as her lipstick, came rushing in, more excited than either her employer or PC Potter (whose instinctive thought was drugs) had ever seen her.
“I told you so,” she said breathlessly to Charley Mountfitchet, “only you wouldn’t listen—I said as how she was in it with them, and you didn’t believe me, did you? Well, you was wrong and I was right!”
“Talk sense, girl. Wrong and right about who? In what with who else? Getting yourself worked up about nothing, that’s what you’re doing.”
“Oh, no, I ain’t!” Maureen glanced round the table with triumph in her eyes. “I just done what you should’ve done, Charley Mountfitchet, but you can’t say as nobody warned you—Miss Seeton, that’s who I’m talking about!” There was a sudden, intense silence. She smirked. “Went to ask her, didn’t I, only across the road, not five minutes away—and was she there?” She did not wait for them to answer. “No, she wasn’t—and that’s why she was talking to them Standons when Wayne and me saw her. She was getting ready to skip, that’s what she was doing!”
Only a brief flicker of doubt crossed Charley’s face: he was still prepared to accept the verdict of the gold-handled umbrella, which the whole village knew to be Miss Seeton’s pride and joy. But the face of PC Potter wore an anxious aspect. Not that he dreamed for one minute of Miss Seeton’s being in league with the defrauding Standons—but if the evidence of Maureen was correct, and the old lady had been in conversation with them just before they absconded . . .
With anyone else it wouldn’t have mattered: but Potter knew Miss Seeton of old. The marmalade suddenly tasted very bitter. Things tended to happen to Miss Seeton that would—that could—never happen to anyone else.
He swallowed his mouthful of toast and got hurriedly to his feet. “We’d best be on our way to Ashford,” he said, to everyone’s surprise. “More sensible to give the statements there, see, about how these Standons looked, and the sort of car they was driving and all. And the sooner we can be on our way, the better.”
But he did not add his silent reason for this unexpected change of plan: which was his fear that Miss Seeton had been kidnapped . . .
chapter
~18~
AT ASHFORD THE Plummergen party discovered that Superintendent Chris Brinton was out and likely to remain so for an unspecified time. Desk Sergeant Mutford took great pleasure in dwelling upon this inconvenient fact.
“A horrible murder, we’ve just had reported,” he said, gloating. “Chap cut to ribbons, Ruckinge way—couldn’t give you the slightest idea when Mr. Brinton’ll be back, I’m afraid. Course, there’s young Foxon just come in—that is, if you didn’t mind the glare . . .”
PC Potter had dealt with Detective Constable Foxon on previous occasions and was untroubled by that young man’s idea of “plain” clothes. Foxon it would have to be, since it was not possible to follow standing orders: the lad was, after all, acquainted with Miss Seeton, and one of Brinton’s regular team.
The standing orders had been issued by the superintendent some years ago, to the effect that he was to be informed—if necessary by telephone, at home—of any (repeat, any) untoward occurrence either in Plummergen or involving Miss Seeton. (This was in addition to the regular weekly reports which, shortly after Miss Seeton’s arrival in the village, he had insisted that Potter should supply.) Brinton had, at the time of issuing the orders, thought it far better to be safe than sorry: but there had been several occasions since then when he had felt ignorance to be decided bliss.
It was not long before Dickie, Juliana, Maureen, and Doris were in various interview rooms, looking at mug shots and giving statements. Potter had agreed Charley could come over later, under his own steam: the landlord was understandably reluctant to leave his hotel unoccupied for any length of time, in view of what had happened: the details of which, gleaned from the others, Potter was now explaining to Foxon, describing the Standons, and their swindle, and the possibility of Miss Seeton’s involvement with them.
“And I wouldn’t care to say for certain whether or not she’s been kidnapped,” he concluded, “but I thought as you, or Mr. Brinton rather, should be told about it, her being one of us, as you might say.”
Anything less like a regular member of the constabulary, with their truncheons, than Miss Emily Dorothea Seeton, with her umbrella, Foxon could hardly imagine. As he glanced at his watch, he chuckled. “Well, unless they’ve chased her into Brettenden and nobbled her there, she’s perfectly safe, for once. I met her myself, not forty minutes ago. She’d popped in for an hour or two’s shopping—”
Potter slapped himself on the forehead. “Market day, of course, and she’ll have taken the bus—fool that I am for not thinking of that! Only, with it being Miss Seeton, and knowing what she can be like . . .”
Foxon nodded. He knew, all right: few better. “I’ll give your report to Mr. Brinton the minute he comes back, of course—we don’t really want to take chances where Miss Seeton’s concerned, no matter how indirectly. When you drop the others back to Plummergen, better check she’s got safely home again—the bus runs every couple of hours on market day, doesn’t it? She told me she didn’t plan to stay long—just fancied a change of scene, she said.” He did not add that she had been coaxed into using her artistic abilities to help him make his latest choice of plainclothes fashion, steering him away from his favorite pinks and purples towards a more decorous (by his standards) deep orange shirt with green polka dots. “Suppose we leave it that you’ll ring in if she’s not on the next bus? Otherwise, we’ll just concentrate on the swindle and assume that Miss Seeton’s chat with the Standons was pure coincidence.”
With this suggestion Potter was content: but Superintendent Brinton, when he returned shortly after Potter had gone, was not. He turned a withering glance upon his subordinate, who looked (to Brinton’s mind) too cheerful by half.
“Coincidence be damned! As if I didn’t have enough on my plate, with this knife murder—and you swanning off to the shops when for once in your life you might have been of some use . . .” He snorted, and scowled. Foxon hid a grin.
“I’m sorry, sir. But if I’m to hang around that new disco without anyone knowing who I am, I need some smarter gear—and they had a sale on—and,” he added wickedly, “Miss Seeton helped me choose it, sir. Very good eye for colour she’s got, sir—the artist’s eye, of course.”
Brinton’s own eyes were sideways slits. “You’re trying to wind me up, Foxon, and you think you’ve succeeded. Just because Potter’s brought us the gypsy’s warning that Miss Seeton’s about to start up again—and you know there’s no such thing as coincidence where she’s concerned—”
Hands Up, Miss Seeton (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 11) Page 13