“In case anyone is not sure,” continued Miss Seeton, “what a spindle tree looks like, it has smooth green bark when it is young, and its leaves are shiny blue-green above and paler underneath. At most it will be eighteen feet or so tall, probably less. We will look out for a young spindle tree—suppose we make it another competition?”
Some of the children had a far lower threshold of boredom than others, and, despite the fearsome fate rumoured to overtake those who misbehaved in Miss Seeton’s presence, a few began to lose interest in the hunt for spindle trees. A small rubber ball, bright red, was produced and tossed from hand to hand behind Miss Seeton’s back.
Miss Seeton turned.
Marcus was just about to throw the ball to Genefer and was thoroughly startled. His aim went awry; the ball flew sideways from his hand into a tangle of brambles.
“You’ve lost my ball,” Biddy said. “I want it back.”
Miss Seeton fixed them all with a stern eye. “Nobody had any business to be playing with a ball in the middle of a natural history ramble—but since you were, and it has been lost, we must try to find it again. And then, Biddy, I shall confiscate it until the end of term. Does that seem fair to you?”
“Yes, miss. I’m sorry, miss,” said Biddy, adding, “but you will get it back for me, won’t you? It was a birthday present.”
“Then most certainly I will try my best,” Miss Seeton assured her. “But those brambles look—oh, dear . . .”
Miss Seeton knew little about blackberries, except that they made delicious bramble jelly when properly cooked and strained through muslin; Martha Bloomer and Stan had taken her on one or two picking trips, but she had to confess that the prickles were, well, prickly. They caught on clothes, and in hair, and even the crook handle of her umbrella was not always a match for their toils. Miss Seeton had a wary respect for blackberry brambles—but surely even her most vivid memory of the thickety turmoil never conjured up so excessive a tangle?
“What colour was the ball?” enquired Miss Seeton with a frown, peering into the brambles. “I see something blue . . . Stay there, children, while I . . .” With her umbrella she tried to part the bramble sprays, concentrating so hard that she did not hear the chorus of voices telling her that the missing toy was bright red.
“Oh, dear,” said Miss Seeton as the umbrella worked its way through. “Surely—surely not . . . Children, stand well back, and let me . . .”
She worked the umbrella out again, then reversed it, and, using the handle to pull and probe, managed to clear part of the spiky tangle of stems sufficiently to show . . .
“Oh, dear,” said Miss Seeton. “Oh, no . . .”
chapter
~18~
MISS SEETON WAS sitting in Ashford police station, drinking a cup of tea.
“She likes it weak—by police standards—remember, and no sugar,” Chief Superintendent Delphick had warned, having learned that Miss Seeton, in a state of delayed shock, was being brought to Superintendent Brinton for her statement. “She’s probably going to be in a bit of a stew about the children, too. Has Jack Crabbe rung yet to say they’ve all reached home safely?”
“Just a minute ago, sir,” said Bob Ranger.
“Any trouble? I shouldn’t think so—she seems to have coped admirably with them at the time.”
“A little girl was a bit upset, but that was something to do with a lost ball, I think, from what Jack said. There wasn’t any time for any of them to see—what Miss Seeton saw. She chivvied them all back to the bridle path without letting them anywhere near.”
“Too busy worrying about other people,” Delphick said, “to spare time for herself. It must have been a shock—a summer day, a school outing, and suddenly a dead body in a bramble thicket. You notice, Bob, that she didn’t succumb to any show of weakness until all her responsibilities had been taken care of? The British gentlewoman at her best.”
“Miss Seeton is the best, sir,” said loyal Bob promptly. Delphick grinned.
“As she’s practically a member of your family now, your opinion comes as no surprise. Blood, Sergeant Ranger, will tell, or so they say. By inference, you, too, should consider yourself the best—but don’t take that as a compliment,” Delphick said cheerfully. “You’re large enough already. With a swollen head, you’d be impossible.”
“Sir . . .”
Delphick ignored his sergeant’s red face and embarrassed feet. “Large or small, you’re the nearest we’ve got right now to a tea-boy. Trot along, Bob, and do your stuff. If that radio message was correct, the car bringing Miss Seeton should be here any minute.”
Everyone assembled in Superintendent Brinton’s office: the superintendent himself, Delphick, Bob Ranger, and Miss Seeton, grateful for the tea and still upset about her discovery in Ashford Forest.
“It must have made it worse for you,” said Delphick, “as soon as you realised that you knew who it was. Or were you not able to see clearly at first?”
“Something blue—her blouse,” said Miss Seeton. “I had been looking for a rubber ball, you see. Sometimes, despite one’s very best efforts, they grow slightly bored and start to fidget—and what could be more natural to a child than bouncing a ball? It was a birthday present, she said, not that I would have allowed her to keep playing with it, and they can be very fair-minded, I’ve found, if one approaches them the right way. I suppose . . . it seems foolish, in the circumstances, but a child cannot be expected to understand beyond its own small world—and I did make a promise to try my best, even though I said I should confiscate it afterwards. And she agreed. If the police were to find it . . .”
Delphick responded with a gentle smile to the question in her eyes. “Any rubber balls we find in the undergrowth,” he assured her gravely, “will be handed over to you for you to deal with as you think best. But when that will be, I’m afraid I couldn’t say. We don’t have umbrellas to hook back the stems—we have to make do with secateurs.”
“You are very kind.” Miss Seeton sat up straight and put her teacup back on its saucer. “Too kind, perhaps, for trying to distract me, when it is clearly my duty to tell you everything I know. Which of course I will, though I fear it won’t be much, and Miss Forby was the one who told me in the first place, mostly. Although, after the magpie, I suppose I could claim some acquaintance—and my bicycle, as well. She wanted to borrow it, and naturally I agreed, not needing it in the middle of the night, you see. But I wonder why we didn’t notice it on the way into the forest? Children are usually so observant, which is why they can be such a pleasure to teach . . .” She frowned, and looked anxious. “I did my very best not to let them notice the body—they can be too observant, sometimes . . .”
“You did a grand job, Miss Seeton,” Delphick told her, and Superintendent Brinton nodded. “They’re all back in Plummergen now,” he said, “and I’ve told P. C. Potter to give them a Road Safety lesson—should take their minds well and truly off anything they might have spotted in the wood. He likes ’em to act out the parts,” he explained. “Makes them roar up and down the playground being motorbikes and lorries—they won’t have enough energy left to worry after that.”
Miss Seeton brightened. “Thank you so much, Mr. Brinton. That is a weight off my mind. I was afraid, you see, that somehow I had failed in my trust—not that I could have known, of course, that there was a body in the brambles, but Mr. Jessyp and their parents had handed them over to my care, and to leave them alone . . .”
“They’ll be all right, Miss Seeton,” Delphick assured her. Children forget; they’d be all right. But would Miss Seeton? She wasn’t growing any younger, and she’d known the dead woman—well enough to lend her . . .
“Your bicycle, Miss Seeton. Can you describe it? We’ll have some men to look out for it. And perhaps you’d tell us why this Miss Hawke had borrowed it in the first place. For use in”—Delphick cleared his throat—“the middle of the night. It seems unusual.” Although, with any connection to Miss Seeton, the unusual could be al
most guaranteed.
Miss Seeton told her story, muddling the magpie and Tibs with barn owls and nature rambles and Mel Forby’s discovery that Miss Hawke planned to write the definitive book on the Kentish countryside. But her general sense was clear, and the three policemen knew her of old. Delphick usually seemed to understand what she was talking about; Bob Ranger tried his best, and sometimes did, but had given up worrying over it several years back; Brinton grumbled in public, but privately thought she had her good points.
“So you see,” concluded Miss Seeton, “while I could not have expected to find her there, it was not, in a way, much of a surprise. That she was there, I mean, not that she was dead. Which was indeed a surprise, although when I noticed that she had not returned it this morning, I had wondered if she might have tumbled off and hurt herself—one sometimes loses one’s balance, over bumpy roads—and I hardly thought that she might be sleeping late, because dear Mel, that is, Miss Forby, is staying in the George and Dragon as well and says that Miss Hawke asks for sandwiches at the strangest hours, and poor Doris gets rather upset. She hardly seems to require any sleep at all—Miss Hawke, I mean . . .”
She tailed off as she recalled that the subject of her explanation would now sleep for longer than ever before, and looked uncomfortable. She dropped her gaze to her lap and clasped her hands to still their unhappy dance. Delphick sat forward.
“Miss Seeton—has something just occurred to you?”
She looked up at him blankly. As her attention wandered away from them, her hands unclasped and began to dance even more unhappily. “I—I don’t really think so,” she said.
“Come now, are you quite sure? You haven’t remembered something—anything—the slightest impression—that might help us discover who did this dreadful thing?”
Her conscience thus appealed to, Miss Seeton looked from one watching face to another. Bob Ranger, who knew the signs as well as Delphick, gave her an encouraging nod. He murmured, “Go on, Aunt Em,” and ignored Superintendent Brinton’s quizzical stare.
Miss Seeton blushed. “Perhaps,” she faltered, “that is, it really is simply an impression—I tried so hard not to look at her, once I realised . . .”
“But you could draw it for us, couldn’t you?” Delphick was looking at Brinton as he spoke. “Chris, have you paper and pencils and the rest of the paraphernalia?”
They left her by herself in the superintendent’s office while they repaired to another room, ignoring her protests that it felt wrong for her to be, well, evicting the poor man. “He doesn’t mind one bit,” Delphick told her, glaring at his friend. “Not in the furtherance of justice—do you, Chris?”
“Not at all,” said the superintendent, disguising his true feelings. He liked Miss Seeton—after a bumpy start to their relationship, he’d almost come to admire her—but she made him uncomfortable, her and her drawings. All this psychic stuff was, well, uncomfortable—spooky, if you like—not that he’d admit it to just anyone, but The Oracle and that massive young sergeant of his weren’t just anyone, they were the Yard’s recognised Seeton experts. If they thought she’d better draw something, then he supposed she’d better draw it: but he didn’t want to be around watching her while she did.
“We’ll have a chat to young Sleaze in the meantime,” he suggested, regaining his composure as they closed the office door behind them. “He’s due to report in around now—might be a good idea to check on what the Choppers were up to last night, and where. Though I have to admit,” he added, “until now I wouldn’t have thought murder was their style.”
For murder Miss Hawke’s death undoubtedly was: unless, of course, she could have hit herself on the head several times, crawled into the middle of the blackberries, and uprooted the most ferocious stems to cover herself from all but the least casual view. Which seemed unlikely.
Detective Constable Arbuthnott was shocked by the news of Miss Hawke’s murder, but able to give his new companions a reasonable alibi for the early part of the night, at any rate. Although, he added, once they’d split up and said they were going home, he’d had to take it as fact that they had gone home. He could hardly track all of ’em to their separate lairs; he could only testify that their mood hadn’t been one of intent to frolic in the forest and bash on the head any old ladies who happened to wander into their path.
“So,” summed up Brinton, once Sleaze had departed, “we’d better not rule out the Choppers. One of ’em might have got in a panic when Miss Hawke spotted him doing, oh, something he shouldn’t have been doing—but what the hell you can get up to in a forest in the middle of the night that’d be worth killing for, I can’t imagine.”
“It seems to have the feel of panic,” Delphick said, “even though whoever did it kept his head well enough to take the weapon away with him. Something hard, flat, and with a sharp edge—might be a spade, I suppose, yet it’s hard to see why anyone would go to the forest prepared to bury a dead body and then just shove it under the brambles—unless they panicked. She was bound to be discovered once the leaves had fallen—he didn’t think it through.”
“Preserve me from the spur-of-the-moment random killer,” Brinton growled. “They’re by far the hardest to nobble—”
“Unless,” Delphick reminded him, “the nobbler is helped by somebody who detects crime by similar means, which is to say by instinct. As Miss Seeton seems to do. Suppose we go along and see whether she’s had time to finish her drawing?”
The door of Brinton’s office was just opening as the three policemen walked back down the corridor, and Miss Seeton’s grey head popped out. She heard the approaching sounds of six regulation feet, looked in their direction, and smiled.
“I was just wondering how I might find you, Mr. Delphick, Mr. Brinton—in case you wanted to see my sketch.”
“If you’ve finished it, then certainly we do,” Delphick told her. “Shall we all go in and sit down again?”
“I can’t imagine,” said Miss Seeton shyly, once everyone was seated around Brinton’s desk, “what made me think of the book, but something must have reminded me—one of my childhood favourites—and the children were talking about paths made by badgers—and it felt, well, right when I completed the drawing, although now—on second thoughts, somehow I’m not so sure—it’s, well, not quite right . . .”
“The Wind in the Willows,” said Delphick, studying the drawing on Brinton’s desk. “There’s no doubt of that—but, now that I look closely, I do see what you mean.”
There indeed were the three animal friends from Kenneth Grahame’s classic: Mole, Ratty, and Badger, carefully drawn in loving detail. Delphick had known the scene at once. After Mole’s terrifying experience of being stalked through the snowy Wild Wood by the Weasels and Stoats, the Water Rat had come to his rescue and taken him at last to the safety of Badger’s nearby home. The weary pair of friends had been quickly restored by Badger in his underground fastness—or, thought Delphick, was it so fast, after all? Why had Miss Seeton shown the animals not sitting at their ease around the fire, but looking upwards over their shoulders? Almost as if they feared (from the expressions on their faces) that the ceiling was about to fall in on top of them. Mole, in the foreground, was shown in particular detail, while Ratty beside him was more the impression of a furry, anxious face. The teapot in Badger’s hand looked piping hot, the cups were waiting to be filled; the animals were toasting their toes beside the hearth, and the table was laden with comforting food. It was a scene that ought to have been idyllic, and at first glance appeared so—yet somehow was not. The shadows flickering in the corners were just too darkly brooding, the smoke from the fire smelled, Delphick felt sure, acrid, and the sparks would burn wickedly where they fell instead of fading out. The whole room looked as if a dreadful fate awaited it.
Delphick frowned. “I didn’t think that the Wild Wooders invaded Badger’s home,” he mused aloud. “I thought that it was Badger and his friends who thrashed them, right at the end, when they recaptured Toad Hall.
”
“So they did, sir,” said Bob Ranger. “Badger tells them about the hidden tunnel that leads up to the Hall, and they wait until the Wild Wooders’re having a great feast and then spring out on them and . . .” He stumbled into silence, turning red. Delphick raised an eyebrow.
“Your previously unmentioned progeny—those of which we had no inkling until the other day—would appear to have a traditional taste in bedtime literature, Bob. I congratulate you and Anne on the way you are rearing them.”
“My sister’s kids, sir,” mumbled Bob in explanation, yet more red. “They’ve grown out of the Jack the Rabbit stuff, but they still like me to read them a story sometimes. So, well, I do, sir.”
“I congratulate you again.” Delphick smiled. “No doubt you regard it as practice for the future, in any case . . . As for the present, we must concentrate on this picture. Miss Seeton—you’re not happy with it now you’ve come to look at it again, are you?”
“No,” said Miss Seeton, who had lost her smile as soon as the policemen had settled down to study her handiwork. “No, I’m not—I was at first, but now I’ve heard your comments, Chief Superintendent, I know there really is something wrong. It isn’t simply my imagination . . .”
And her unhappy expression echoed the anxiety in the hearts of the three policemen who watched her. Something was wrong—something else besides murder.
chapter
~19~
DELPHICK AND BOB drove Miss Seeton back to Plummergen and agreed to stop for a quick cup of tea and a slice of Martha Bloomer’s renowned fruit cake. At the end of their short visit Miss Seeton looked slightly happier than she had done when they arrived; but Delphick and Bob, as they trod down the short path to the front gate, allowed themselves to look anxious again.
Miss Seeton Paints the Town (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 10) Page 14