Miss Seeton Flies High (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 23)

by Hamilton Crane

  Dutifully Miss Seeton looked, but could see nothing beyond the expected hills, hedges, roads and a distant gleam of water. Water! “I had always thought,” she ventured as Grace drew breath, “that the sign for Aquarius was a man pouring water from an urn or a jar. But you said a phoenix. I’m sorry, but I fear I don’t—”

  “Or an eagle,” broke in the lecturer quickly. “The symbolism is what’s important.”

  Miss Seeton knew nothing of the symbolism, and murmured to that effect.

  “The moon goblet of Chalice Well—the Holy Grail in one of its earliest incarnations—was illuminated at the summer solstice five thousand years ago. Five thousand years!” Grace appeared to think this was explanation enough. Miss Seeton felt it was not, but knew the fault must lie with herself for having hitherto believed there to be only one Holy Grail (if, indeed, any at all) and for her ignorance as to what the moon goblet had to do with it. In whatever incarnation. Really, Glastonbury was quite as confusing as she’d been warned by Miss McConchie. Three swords for King Arthur—more than one Holy Grail ...

  “... the castle of the Fisher King.” Grace Howe’s bemused audience forced herself to pay attention. “They say Wearyall Hill is named for Joseph of Arimathea, that it’s where he fell asleep for his staff to take root and grow into the Holy Thorn, but not everyone understands that, as one of the Fish in Pisces, it has a far deeper symbolism ...” Miss Seeton couldn’t help it. Her mind wandered again as she struggled with the Phoenician fish-god, with Poseidon, with Babylonian seals and the Celtic salmon of knowledge ...

  One really did not wish to break into such enthusiasm, but there were eleven further signs of the Zodiac—even a normal Zodiac—and Miss Howe had just spoken of a whale and a dove as well, not to mention—

  “Arthur?” Eagerly Miss Seeton broke in as Grace paused to jab the umbrella in another direction. “I have a particular interest in King Arthur,” she was thankful to be able to say, without appearing too rude.

  The glasses in their gold wire frames flashed. “Hercules!” cried Miss Howe, with Miss Seeton’s umbrella continuing to outline on the landscape below figures that Miss Seeton simply could not see. “Hercules the star-god on his charger—the constellation Sagittarius depicting the High King Arthur on his horse, with the rest of the constellations his knights, the Zodiac his Round Table—”

  “And Camelot?” gasped the desperate Miss Seeton. “Can you show me Camelot?”

  Grace turned to point the umbrella. “Cadbury Castle—over there, with all those trees round the base.” Miss Seeton peered in that direction. Doubtfully, she nodded. Miss Howe laughed in sympathy. “I know, a bit of a disappointment, isn’t it? They’re ten miles apart, and they say you can see Avalon easily enough from Camelot, but you can’t really see Camelot from Avalon because of the higher ground behind.”

  “Everything,” agreed Miss Seeton thankfully, “is blue and blurred.” She gazed about her, hoping to deflect this young enthusiast from yet further bewildering assaults on her unprepared mind. One tried, naturally, to keep one’s mind open to new ideas, but one did prefer to have sufficient time in which to absorb and contemplate them. Miss Howe, bursting with information about the earthly Temple of the Stars, had not yet learned how to present that information in manageable mental paragraphs.

  “Is it possible to go to Cadbury Castle?” Miss Seeton wanted to know. “A day trip by coach, perhaps?”

  Grace, about to unleash a further explanatory torrent, stayed the umbrella and shook her head. “It’s just an Iron Age hill-fort. There’s nothing much to see, and it isn’t part of the Zodiac, which lies in the other direction—a circle ten miles in diameter—we’re on the edge of the circle here ...”

  Miss Seeton blinked as her umbrella darted through the air, still sketching shapes she could not see, though it was clear that Miss Howe could. Or (Miss Seeton privately amended) believed she could. She had now moved on from Camelot to Scorpio, the Water Gate of Death, and Virgo, the Earth Gate of Life. It seemed they lay between Avalon and Camelot ... for reasons Miss Seeton realised she would never understand.

  Her bewilderment must have shown, for Grace suddenly laughed, lowered the umbrella, and hung it over her own arm. “You don’t know what I’m talking about and you can’t see any of it, can you?”

  “Well, no,” confessed Miss Seeton. “Though you make it all sound most interesting. One does, of course, try to keep an open mind, even when the concept is unfamiliar. There are books, I know, and perhaps if I could read one at my leisure I might better understand the principle, but as I am here for only a few days I rather fear there will be insufficient time, when it is King Arthur who is of especial interest to me.”

  “Have you been to Bedivere Books?” Miss Seeton said she had. “She knows her stuff, does Octavia, but she never gives discounts, not even for regular customers, and it’s almost impossible to go in there and come out again without having spent a lot more money than you meant to.”

  Miss Seeton, with a smile, admitted that she, too, had thought much the same, although when Miss Callender learned she had already bought raffle tickets to help the Abbey she had not pressed her to buy more.

  “Vincent Weaver’s balloon.” Grace sighed. “I’ve bought as many as I can afford, for the chance to win that flight—I’d love to see the Zodiac properly, from above, the way it was meant to be seen. Maps and photographs just aren’t the same.”

  Miss Seeton braced herself, as Miss Howe unhooked the umbrella, for more information about the Zodiac, but there was no need. The brolly was handed back to her with a smile.

  “If it’s fated—if it’s in the stars—then one of my tickets will win,” said Grace bravely. “If it isn’t meant to be, then I’ll have to wait. My time will come, even if the circle must turn more than once.” She contemplated Miss Seeton, nodded, and then spoke in a throbbing voice. “You have listened, and not laughed. You have kept—unlike some—an open mind. Such courtesy merits good fortune. You may well be the lucky winner and then, from high above, you will be able to see the truth I have been trying to share with you.”

  Before Miss Seeton could answer, the umbrella was snatched back as Miss Howe’s mood suddenly lightened. She began once more to point into the distance.

  “See those ugly square buildings beside the Bristol Channel over there? The concrete bunkers?” Miss Seeton could not deny that the Brutalist architecture was all too visible from the top of Tor Hill. “That’s Hinkley Point nuclear power station. Entirely the wrong sort of power, of course. You would hope, with the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, the promise of enlightenment, that it shouldn’t take too long to initiate those who have set themselves in control of the world’s destiny, but they just don’t seem to listen ...”

  Again Miss Seeton braced herself for another burst of bewildering enthusiasm as the umbrella stabbed further down the coast. “That hill is Dunkery Beacon—on Exmoor, almost forty miles away beyond the Quantocks—you know, Wordsworth and Coleridge and the person from Porlock?” Miss Seeton nodded with relief; this was something she did know.

  Another stab. “Miles away over there, though you can’t see it, is St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall.” Miss Seeton knew of the Mount, and of its even more spectacular counterpart in Mont Saint Michel, off the coast of France. “St Michael’s Mount,” said Grace, “is linked by the ley line of the Dragon directly to St Michael’s ruined church on Burrow Mump over there—and to St Michael’s tower here on Tor Hill—and then on through Creech St Michael and beyond, as far as the Norfolk coast!”

  Miss Seeton smiled, and for good measure nodded. To her new acquaintance the information was clearly significant, and Miss Seeton still felt guilty at having allowed her attention to wander at the start of the discourse. She must acknowledge this significance in the only truthful way she could. But it was really very puzzling. The coast of Norfolk was several hundred miles from Somerset. Young Miss Howe, undeniably an enthusiast, nevertheless seemed to dart from fact to—well, fiction, sup
posed Miss Seeton, and back again in a—well, one had to say, an almost incoherent fashion. She was, however, young. With some young people it took longer than with others to learn the wisdom of ordering one’s thoughts. Had her ideas been better organised, better presented, a newcomer might more readily grasp—“Burrow Mump,” announced Miss Howe with another stab of the umbrella. “It is the hill that forms the muzzle of the Great Dog of Langport.” Miss Seeton blinked. Once more Miss Howe’s voice throbbed and deepened.

  “The Great Dog guards the entrance to the Zodiac, between Cancer and Gemini, just as Cerberus guarded the entrance to the underworld. King Alfred burning the cakes is based on an ancient truth, you know. Oh, the legend has become distorted over time, but Alfred, for all his Christian piety, knew enough of the old ways to make sacrifice and offerings to the holy hound when asking for help in his coming battle with the Saxon invaders ...”

  At long last the umbrella, having stabbed and pointed and described the holder’s somewhat overwhelming knowledge in a breathless, all-enveloping circle, was handed back to its owner with an apologetic twinkle. “I do hope I haven’t bored you,” said Miss Howe, a little wistfully. Miss Seeton shook a truthful head. She had been overwhelmed, bemused, and puzzled, but she had not been bored.

  Grace beamed. “I tend to get carried away if there’s a sympathetic listener, and while I think you do not know it, you have just such sympathy—and something more. You have a true insight into the greater truth—into the reality that is hidden from less enlightened eyes.” Upon Miss Seeton’s startled brow a quick pucker flashed, and was gone. She had suddenly been reminded of Chief Superintendent Delphick, and the strange things he sometimes said. A coincidence, no more, but one had to wonder if—“Promise me,” urged Miss Howe, “that if you are fortunate enough to win the balloon flight you will scan the ground beneath for signs of the Zodiac figures I’ve tried to show you. There are so many books—promise me you’ll go on trying to keep an open mind, and not dismiss the Zodiac as no more than—than barefaced lunacy!”

  Again Miss Seeton’s memory fleetingly stirred. Miss Howe’s mention of books—there had been something—some one ...

  “Bedivere Books,” she murmured.

  Grace was quick to catch the reference. She beamed more brightly than ever. “Go and see Octavia Callender again,” she urged. “If you told her before that you were looking for Arthurian background I expect you didn’t buy anything beyond Susan’s little effort on the Three Swords and a history book or two—or three, knowing Octavia.” Miss Seeton had to twinkle back for the accuracy of the mischievous guess.

  “But all most interesting,” she hastened to add. “As listening to you has also been, my dear.” This, at least, was true. But perhaps one ought to drop a gentle hint, for the benefit of future chance-met strangers? “Rather a lot to take in at once, of course,” kindly, “yet I feel sure that, should I find time to read more on the subject, I will regard the landscape with—with even greater ... interest.” Honesty could not let her say that she would read more, only to suggest that she might.

  And yet, remembering Octavia Callender, Miss Seeton felt sure that a second visit to Bedivere Books would result in plenty of reading matter on the subject of the Glastonbury Zodiac.

  Superintendent Kebby was a worried man. Even his moustache seemed to droop.

  “The sister sneaked us the latest missive disguised as a note put out for the milkman. He’s been one of ours since we started keeping watch on the family home—and whoever missed that package being chucked over the garden wall is due the biggest rollocking of his career. When I find out who it was, I’ll make mincemeat of him.”

  “I may well join you in the good work.” Delphick had smoothed the bottle-curved print on his desk and held it flat under a rotary pencil sharpener, a box of paperclips, a stapler and a china mug filled with pencils. “This does, unfortunately, look genuine.”

  In stark black and white, Christy Garth sat with his elbows resting on a bare wooden table holding, its date and headlines clear, a recent edition of a national newspaper in both hands. One was heavily bandaged, the other as bruised as Christy’s face. His eyes were dark-rimmed and sunken, his expression hollow.

  “It could be faked,” said Kebby, “but he does look thinner than he did. Those wrist bones seem genuine, and you’d need to be pretty smart at fakery for that. They won’t be starving him into submission, exactly, but keeping him short of grub and knocking him about does put a lot more pressure on the family to pay up.”

  “You wouldn’t entrust a photograph of this type to an ordinary chemist for developing and printing,” said the Oracle slowly. “Whoever took this knew what he or she was doing. Of course, any professional can be blackmailed or otherwise coerced, but ... This is a wild guess, Jasper, for a possible starting point. Do we know of any criminals inclined towards kidnap, whether for fund raising or for revenge, who boast amateur photography as an apparently harmless pastime? Family members or other close connections who could make similar boasts?”

  Kebby made a note. “We’ll ask that mechanical monster in the basement to churn through its punch-cards, and I’ll try a few human elephants as well for likely memories, but somehow I think it’s a dead end. You said it yourself. Anyone can be coerced into almost anything, if sufficient pressure’s applied. We need another lead—and soon. I don’t like the look of this photo, and the message they didn’t send with it makes me worry all the more.”

  “Yes.” Delphick removed the office impedimenta and picked up the photograph. “One would have expected an anonymous typed note, perhaps on the back, with demands for further payment and instructions on how it should be made, together with threats as to what will happen if the demands are not met. But apart from this disturbing portrait the rest, I fear, is a most uncomfortable silence.”

  “They must have worked out by now that the family’s come to us for help,” said Kebby. “They could have taken that photo and killed young Garth the same day. They could be turning the screw just for the fun of it, now.”

  “Fun? Another question for the computer, perhaps—always assuming that psychological analysis and interpretation are included among the facts that have been fed into the wretched thing.”

  “Trick cyclists,” muttered Kebby. “Long words, educated guesswork and some common sense, that’s how they work it.”

  “Copper’s instinct,” countered Delphick. “Different terminology and no string of letters after our names, but we ourselves have worked that trick for years.”

  Kebby brightened. “Yes, with enough experience you can usually spot a wrong ’un. Instinct. The very word.” He looked towards the Oracle, then reached for the photograph. “Yes, there’s always that ... special feeling,” he prompted. “Instinctive.”

  “She’s on holiday, Jasper.” Delphick glanced for the first time across the office to the corner graced by the enormous but tactfully silent form of Detective Sergeant Ranger. “Any idea when Miss Seeton’s due back, Bob?”

  “End of the week, I think, sir. It all depends on the weather, but I know she didn’t plan to be away too long because she wants to make a proper start on her sketches in good time for them to be scaled up for the scenery painters.”

  Delphick nodded. “There are a great many West Country connections to King Arthur. If she’s on a sightseeing spree we could waste more time chasing around Somerset to find her than if we leave it to the end of the week. The local bobby can let me know when she’s due back, and I’ll go straight down to Kent. That’s the best we can offer at present, I fear.”

  “And so do I fear,” returned Kebby. “Rather a lot. For Christy Garth, I mean.”

  “You’re not alone in that,” he was assured.

  It all depended on the weather. Miss Seeton had revelled in her sunshine climb of Glastonbury Tor, her meeting with Grace Howe and the subsequent, half-smiling, return to Bedivere Books to enquire after a book—or at least no more than two—about the Zodiac for leisure reading, once she
was home again. Octavia had looked surprised, then returned the smile on hearing of Grace’s lecture, and sold just one small paperback and a hand-drawn map to this remarkable customer before warning that it looked like rain tomorrow, and Miss Seeton might find herself reading about the Zodiac rather sooner than expected.

  The rain began as drizzle later that evening. Miss McConchie’s Hodge, in the cautious manner of cats, put a tentative nose out of doors, flicked his ears, retreated, and sneezed. He shook one forepaw after another, and lashed his tail.

  “What a shame.” Miss McConchie favoured her guest with a regretful look. “You just wait, there’ll be a proper downpour by tomorrow morning. Hodge is better than any amount of Met Office forecasts. Weren’t you lucky to climb the Tor when you did?”

  “Indeed I was.” Miss Seeton twinkled at the dignified tabby sitting beside his mistress. “If Hodge is correct—I trust he will forgive me for doubting him—but if he is correct in his suspicions about tomorrow’s weather I think I might undertake a short journey by bus to Wells. In the guidebooks it appears most interesting, and looks delightful.”

  She set off next day with every intention of enjoying herself. Why should she not? She had stout shoes, her umbrella, and (as reassured by her landlady) plenty of shops into which to pop should the downpour pour down even harder.

  The guidebooks had already prepared Miss Seeton for the sight of water pouring down the wide stone gutters of the main shopping street in the small cathedral city. A mediaeval bishop of Wells had ordered the great springs that gave the place its name to be diverted into channels as a clean and permanent water supply for the general populace; further diversions had created the moat around the Bishop’s Palace. Miss Seeton wondered if the celebrated swans, whose predecessors were trained by the daughters of a Victorian bishop to ask for food by ringing a bell, would be swimming or taking shelter. Then she smiled at her folly in supposing that swans or, indeed, any water birds would mind a few drops of rain.