Miss Seeton Flies High (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 23)
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Miss Seeton Flies High
A Miss Seeton Mystery
Hamilton Crane
Series creator Heron Carvic
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Note from the Publisher
Preview
Also Available
About the Miss Seeton series
About Heron Carvic and Hamilton Crane
Copyright
Chapter One
Hidden from general view in a small wood halfway up a hill, two men lurked. Leaves rustled, birds sang, flying insects whirred and buzzed; only an occasional cough, or the rumble of traffic along the main road nearby, disturbed an otherwise unbroken silence. The pair had been waiting a long time. Conversation ran out quickly on a day as warm as this, when summer could still hold autumn at bay and the sun rode high above the horizon throughout most of the afternoon.
It glinted through the trees, and sent flickers of light from the binoculars resting on the dashboard of the car in which the two men sat. Muttering, the man in the passenger seat lifted the binoculars down and put them on his lap. “This is getting monotonous,” he said.
His companion grunted, glancing at his bare left wrist. Normally he wore a watch, but he’d had to hide it in the pocket of his shirt because the links of his expanding metal bracelet caught the sun whenever he moved. His colleague had complained. “We could change seats,” he’d offered, but the offer had been refused.
“Feels like hours,” he said now.
“It is.” The man in the passenger seat consulted his own, far cheaper watch with its non-reflective leather strap, and smirked for the shirt-pocketed model. “They said to get here well before, and that’s what we’ve done.”
The driver grunted again. He found his eyes closing, and blinked himself awake. “Time to stretch my legs,” he said.
“Be careful opening that door. If he spots any movement—”
“He’s got to get here first—but, okay, better check. Is there anyone in sight?”
The binoculars were raised, focused, turned from one side to the other, scanning the empty view perhaps a little more slowly than necessary. “Not a sausage—yes, there is, though.” The passenger sat up; the driver snatched his hand from the door. “Lorry coming from the east—down the lane—turning into the lower road—can’t see clearly because of the hedge, but it looks like crates of farm produce under a tarpaulin. Could that be him?”
“Anyone else in the cab with the driver?”
“The sky’s reflecting too much to see properly, but I don’t think so. Could always be someone hidden under the tarp, I suppose.”
“If there is, and if that’s a load of fruit, let’s hope he’s not bothered by wasps.”
“Liven things up a bit, wouldn’t it?”
For a third time, the driver grunted. Above the sturdy hedge the lorry was now clearly visible—and audible, as it clattered steadily and cheerfully along the lonely road.
“If that’s not him,” growled the passenger, “he’ll scare him away. What a racket!”
“He’ll be local, from one of the farms. They must have allowed for—hey!”
The cheerful clatter had become a sudden screech. Rubber burned on tarmac as the lorry swerved across the road and back, the driver trying his best to steer but obviously out of control. He swerved again. Brakes squealed. There came a jangling crash as the front of the cab hit a tree—crumpled—and the whole lorry tipped sideways into the ditch. The tarpaulin burst its securing ropes. Crates erupted messily across the road.
“That’s torn it.” The driver started the car. “He won’t come now.”
“Won’t be able to, the road blocked like that.” His companion was busy with dials, switches, and a microphone. “Hello, HQ, hello, HQ. Panda 123 calling. Do you read me?”
A tinny voice assured Panda 123 in brisk official tones that he was being read.
“Stakeout aborted, repeat, stakeout aborted. There’s been an accident—overturned lorry blocking the road, driver still in the cab. We’re on our way, but it looks as if we might need an ambulance—and a couple of patrol cars from Traffic to stop anyone else coming smash around the corner into this little lot ...
“But whoever comes now,” he added as the tinny voice acknowledged his message and began to issue instructions, “it certainly won’t be chummy.”
Two hundred miles away, on the eastern side of the country, at Rytham Hall in the county of Kent the women of the house had been baking.
Lady Colveden removed her oven gloves, dusted down her apron, and gazed from her daughter-in-law to the fruit cake sagging glumly on its wire rack. She sighed, and shook her head. “I wonder what we did wrong this time?”
Louise, half-French, half-Scottish and wholly practical, giggled. “Since I have come to live with you, dear Belle-Mère, the chickens of the house have started, so Nigel tells me, to lay many more eggs than they did before, and so many of them brown and of an intriguing flavour. Nothing is ever a waste, is it?”
“I suppose not, though at the rate we’re going we may have to consider ducks or geese as well as hens.” Her ladyship smiled. “We won’t tell George, though.”
“Or Mrs. Bloomer,” nodded Louise. “It would be sad to disappoint her after so much kindness on her part in sharing her secrets.”
Martha Bloomer, invaluable cleaner, cook and general factotum to a few select families in the village of Plummergen, had “took a real fancy to Nigel’s bride” and resolved that once the historians and builders had finished work at Summerset Cottage, and the newlyweds could finally move into their new home (it being in fact several centuries old), young Mrs. Colveden would be able to keep house with the best. Some of the other ladies for whom Martha “did” were well set in their ways, but Louise, daughter of a French count or not, could still be taught, and Martha had made up her mind that she should be.
“If you’ve got the basics of sewing,” said Martha sternly, “then you’ve a head start on some—” with a pointed look at her ladyship, barely able to do more than replace a button—“and that means I won’t be wasting my time, as I might well be with others.” Lady Colveden smiled ruefully. “But as two’s little more bother than one, and you know I can’t parley-vous, her ladyship can learn along of you and help out with explanations when needed.”
The former Mademoiselle de Balivernes had surprised and pleased Mrs. Bloomer by the excellence of her scones, until recollection of the long-dead Scottish mother and the still living Scottish relations made Lady Colveden, to whose own efforts the term “excellence” hardly applied, suddenly laugh. “I should have realised when you called them skons,” she said. “That’s a very northern pronunciation. In the south we tend to think of them as skones, don’t we, Martha?”
Martha shared in the general laughter, then said she would instruct both ladies in the art of making a rich fruit cake.
“She tried,” said Lady Colveden, contemplating the sadly sagging shape now on the rack before her, “but at a guess there was some wrinkle—oh, a trick, a dodge—she didn’t tell us, to pay us back for teasing her. Don’t worry, my dear, Martha can take a joke with the best, and I’m sure next time everything will be fine. I never was much good at baking, as Nigel or George can tell you.”
When in due course Sir George appeared for his afternoon break, he observed a large plateful of scones, some in rather better condition than others, and half a sponge cake left from the previous day. “Plenty of jam,” he remarked. “Good. Far better indoors, this time of year. Wasps.” He accepted a cup of tea, selected a scone and began happily buttering. “Nigel not in yet? Thought I heard a bit of a kerfuffle as I passed the sheep-run, but it didn’t sound serious.”
Louise looked only a little concerned for her husband’s well-being. It had not taken her long to realise that life on a working farm had its frequent small excitements. “He is with Len Hosigg this afternoon,” she said, half to herself, knowing that the young farm foreman would have raised any alarm he thought necessary.
“Not any more he isn’t,” announced a voice from the doorway. The baronet’s handsome heir came in, grinning. “He’s half dead with hunger, and in need of sugar. For shock.”
“Nigel!”
“What happened?”
“Does it hurt?” burst from the other three in a startled chorus. Mr. Colveden’s face was discoloured by a large purple bruise that was swelling into a fine example of the blackest of black eyes.
“A sheep kicked me.” Nigel collapsed on a chair and regarded the teapot thirstily. “Thanks, Mother, just what I need. An extra lump of sugar, I think. A wasp at its most dozy buzzed straight at my head, so of course I ducked. Anyone would, but you just can’t explain to a sheep. The poor old thing was as startled as I was—and there you are. Those hooves pack more of a punch than you’d expect.”
“Ice.” Lady Colveden rose to her feet. “If you don’t try to stop that swelling you won’t be able to see a thing tomorrow.”
“Just so long as I can see tonight,” said her son cheerfully. “Remember, Louise and I are joining the Young Farmers’ trip to Ashford cinema for Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It’s not been out long, but people say it’s very funny, and we’ll go for a drink afterwards. It’s a coach party,” he added, before his magistrate father could say anything. “Jack Crabbe will be driving and picking up as he goes, except that Louise and I will walk down to the garage because we’re the only ones who live in this direction.”
Lady Colveden, returning from the kitchen with a packet of frozen peas and a towel, passed both to her son and regarded her daughter-in-law thoughtfully. “Monty Python is very English humour, as I understand it,” she observed. “I do hope it won’t be too much for you, my dear.”
“Nigel will translate,” said Louise. “Or will try to,” honesty made her add. “But it will in any case be pleasant for him to meet with his friends, and for me to meet them also.”
“While the old folks put their feet up and spend a quiet evening at home,” said Nigel, “leaving us young ones to roister through the night. Until closing time, anyway.”
“Don’t make too much noise coming in,” warned his mother.
“Don’t sleep too late in the morning,” advised his father.
“We will be sure to set the alarm clock,” promised his wife, and everyone smiled.
In the directors’ office of a small factory on the outskirts of Glastonbury in Somerset, two men were waiting. There was a close physical resemblance between them, but while burly Bill Callender prowled up and down, consulting his watch at each turn and cross-checking it against the digital clock on the wall, his brother Crispin, two years younger, sat gracefully at his ease behind his desk, doodling on a pad of lined paper. The top sheet with his neat jottings had already been torn off and placed on a table to one side of the room. Every time the restless Bill saw it as he prowled, he sighed and looked pointedly at his watch.
“They really should be here by now,” he grumbled. “Time’s money, and we’ve a lot to discuss, and some of it’s likely to be complicated.”
“Octavia won’t leave the shop until five,” said Crispin. “We four can talk pretty much at any hour within reason, but the customers can’t buy if the door’s locked. Tavy’s no fool.”
“She has a business head on her shoulders,” agreed Octavia’s elder brother, grudgingly. “But Val works for herself, for pity’s sake. She at least could have been here ages ago. She knows how important it is to start talking things over.”
“Perhaps she felt it would look too much like us three older ones ganging up on Tavy if we had the chance to talk together first.”
“If we wanted to gang up there’s always the telephone. Nice and private. Ideal for hatching all sorts of plots behind her back—if we wanted to.”
“Which we don’t.” Crispin nodded at him. “This family has spent more than half a century squabbling about one thing or another, right back to Great-granddad Ebenezer and his row with Granddad about setting up this business on his own. For goodness’ sake, let’s at least try to sort things out now without stirring up any more trouble.”
“Any more trouble than needful,” amended Bill, older and wiser. “They say you ought never to do business with friends or relations, and there’s a deal of truth in that.”
“We two get along all right.” Crispin doodled a pair of doves with olive branches in their beaks. “Have done for years.”
“Only because Dad was there to mediate when we disagreed, and to have the final word if we couldn’t reach a compromise. Things were bound to change when he went, we all knew that, only we always thought there’d be plenty of time for the company to have grown so much there’d still be room for both of us—and even for the girls, if either of them wanted to change her mind and join us. But now ...”
“Now it’s all been too quick for us to catch our breath.” Crispin shuddered. “I still can’t believe it—him dying like that ...”
“A freak accident, the coroner said. You know how he always joked about wanting to go out in a blaze of glory—”
“Don’t!” Crispin’s pencil stabbed dark, jagged lines across the paper. “Yes, I know he could see the funny side of being born on Bonfire Night, but ...”
Bill stopped prowling to clap him on the shoulder. Crispin rocked on his seat. “Graveyard humour’s sometimes the best way to cope, Cris. He’d have laughed himself stupid at the way everyone told us to forget about a funeral in church, and cremation being the only answer—you can’t say he wouldn’t.”
Crispin forced a grin. “Yes, and he’d have been thrilled to make the headlines, and he’d certainly have liked the publicity. Callender’s Coats is a national name, these days. If only it hadn’t happened the way it did.”
The late Guy Callender, born on the fifth of November amid the sparkle and roar of England’s annual firework celebration that Parliament was not blown up in 1605, had been “christened” by Peter, his exuberant father, with a splash of cider and a mouthful of jacket potato, roasted in the ashes of the Guy Fawkes bonfire. The newborn infant promptly spat out the potato but thoroughly savoured the cider, a fierce home brew that could strip the flesh from a joint of meat within weeks. Peter Callender’s scrumpy was a man’s drink, and Peter was resolved that his son should be as good a man as his father. Peter’s own father Ebenezer had been all too strictly teetotal.
Guy grew up able to carry his liquor, and boasted a cast iron liver. Nobody could be sure how the accident that killed him had happened, but it was supposed that, early one chilly morning, wearing a nylon padded jacket, he had spilled petrol while fiddling with the lighting plant in a distant shed, and rubbed his hands thoughtlessly down his front to make them less slippery. It wasn’t quite spontaneous combustion, but the static electricity thus generated had resulted in a sudden fireball from which, even had anyone else been with him, there would have been no time to save him.
“Yes, at least we could all agree on cremation.” Crispin forced another grin. “And no arguments about the tombstone, thank goodness!” Grandfather Peter, founder of Callender’s Coats, had been twice married, each time to a girl not Glastonbury born. Both wives predeceased him; both were laid to rest beneath their native turf rather than in their
husband’s parish. At Peter’s own death in 1954 his two sons, half-brothers Guy and John, known as Janner, were unable to agree either on where he was to be buried, or the exact wording of his tombstone. In the end the matter was settled by the trustees appointed to handle Great-grandfather Ebenezer’s will, which had been for so modest an estate surprisingly complex. The Callenders could be a quarrelsome family. Like Ebenezer and his only son Peter, disinherited when he went into business rather than work with his father on the farm, Peter’s two sons refused to speak to each other after the tombstone disagreement—a family silence that endured for more than twenty years, until Peter’s death meant that both sides had to meet under the same roof for his final obsequies. The Callender children might speak to their cousins, but all knew without saying that any close association would be frowned on by those of the older generation who remained.
“But now it looks as if we’ll have to talk to them,” said Crispin, roughing out a sharp-eyed legal head in a wig, surrounded by books and paper scrolls tied with ribbon. “Lawyers cost money, and with death duties we haven’t much to spare.”
“We haven’t any to spare.” Yet again Bill Callender produced the telling phrase. “Not unless Tavy’s found a cult best-seller everyone’s been flocking to buy from her shop, and has a fortune in the bank—”
“She hasn’t,” a cheerful female voice broke in. Octavia, afterthought child of Guy and his wife Eleanor, ten years younger than her sister Val, glided into the office in a floor-length caftan and sandals, her long hair floating free where it wasn’t held out of her eyes by a headband of bright glass beads. She looked from one brother to the other. “Val not here yet?”
“As you see,” said Bill. “And we told her, five-thirty at the latest.”
Octavia, who wore no watch, glanced at the digital clock and smiled faintly. “I’ve often thought Val should change her name from Callender to Chronometer. I’ve never known her on time for anything.” She drifted across to Crispin’s desk, pulled out the visitor’s chair and settled herself. “She’s happy in her work, though, and says she makes enough to live on with a little left over, which I suppose from her point of view is what really counts.”