Miss Seeton Paints the Town (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 10)

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Miss Seeton Paints the Town (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 10) Page 17

by Hamilton Crane


  “And what makes you so dang-blad sure as I was doing anything last night, whether in the woods or no?” demanded Jacob. Delphick silently cheered. A genuine innocent would have come out with a straight denial: only those with something to hide ever answered question for question and tried to sound outraged to disguise their nervousness.

  “We have a witness.” Never mind that Miss Seeton had been a dozen miles away: any sketch of hers was worth fifty eye witnesses, in Delphick’s opinion. “We have a witness—a witness who places you in Ashford Forest at the time Miss Hawke was killed.”

  “It’s a lie!”

  Delphick said nothing.

  “It’s a mistake,” Jacob said, with rather less force.

  Still Delphick said nothing. The mole catcher began to look less certain of his ground.

  “No,” he said, almost to himself, “they’d not tattle to the police, not the likes of them . . .”

  “Are you sure?” Delphick looked, and made himself sound, extremely sure. “You should realise that they’d be happy to put the blame on you, a stranger”—this was a long shot—“rather than on one of themselves.” The mole catcher glared at him, and for the first time the light of misgiving gleamed in his little black eyes. Delphick waited.

  “Made out it was me, ’ave they?” Jacob said at last. “You got no right to believe them instead of me, the blanking liars that they are.”

  “Then suppose you give me your version of events,” said Delphick, “for comparison. Otherwise”—as Jacob seemed set on a bout of self-preserving silence—“the only version we have must be the version we believe.” And he hoped the old man would never learn that, until now, the only version of last night’s events was a sketch by Miss Seeton of three characters from a well-loved children’s book. “How about it, Mr. Chickney?”

  “All of us took our dying oath we’d never tell—but I should’ve known better than trusting any treacherous townie types, for all they paid me to keep silent, and nowhere near enough, neither.” Jacob hawked, then spat to express his disgust before recollecting where he was. He scowled at the watching policemen and reached for his pipe. “Furriners,” he snarled, “with their fancy London ways—I can’t abide furriners, not anyhow, money or no.”

  Delphick believed he could live with Jacob’s dislike of anyone from London. Living with the fumes from his pipe was another matter, but if the comfort of tobacco made it easier for the old man to tell his story, it would have to be borne. “For what, exactly, did these Londoners pay you, Mr. Chickney—apart from your silence, that is?”

  Jacob made a great performance out of lighting his pipe, mumbling over the mouthpiece, and sucking the air through in a series of nauseating pops. He ignored the dottle in the ashtray and took from his jacket pocket a small, battered tin with its enamel letters long worn away, prising off the lid with his thumbnail. Despite himself, Delphick winced.

  Having filled the bowl with the oily, pungent strings of black tobacco and tamped them down, Jacob fumbled in another pocket for his matches. He made a great performance of striking one on the sole of his boot, gazing into the flame until it burned almost to his fingers. He sucked and popped again at the mouthpiece of his pipe until at last it caught, and the familiar nauseating reek began to fill the air. It was enough to send shivers down the spine.

  Delphick would allow him to procrastinate no longer. “The truth, please, Mr. Chickney, and at once. About these Londoners, and the money they paid you, and what you were all doing in Ashford Forest last night.”

  “London money’s as good as any,” Jacob said, “and ’ard earned it was, too—left most of the work to me, they did, and by rights should’ave paid me more.” He regarded the palms of his hands complacently. “Work-’ardened, I am, long since, not like these weaklings from the city—couldn’t dig the way I could, for all their boastful talk.”

  Dig? Delphick was puzzled. Miss Hawke’s grave? But it had been in no grave that Miss Seeton had found her: maybe, if they had buried her properly, she might never have been found. What other reason could anyone have to pay Jacob Chickney for digging?

  To Brinton, the countryman, the old man’s meaning was clear. “You were digging for badgers,” he said in tones of utter disgust. “For baiting.” He glowered at Jacob with as furious a look as Jacob now turned on him. “You and your kind,” Brinton said, “you make me sick. Badger-baiting!”

  Delphick’s blood ran chill in his veins, and Bob Ranger, adopted countryman, felt slightly ill. Badger-baiting—no wonder Jacob had been slow to speak of it. Disliked though he knew himself to be, his involvement with this so-called sport must make him more unpopular than ever with all right-minded people.

  For sport, a group of men with dogs and spades would lay waste a badger’s sett in the middle of the night, when there was least fear of discovery from those who might protest. The men would dig down through the earth to where the badger—often hunted through its own tunnels by dogs driven into the sett with kicks and blows from their owners—stood at bay in its final retreat. Its mighty arms and powerful jaws would help it to fight bravely—for a while. But the sheer weight of numbers would exhaust it, and it would be dragged out, thrown into a sack, and driven off to some isolated place where it would be goaded by men who had laid out vast sums of money into fighting for its life against a dog, or more than one. If it was unlucky, the men would not wrench its claws from its front paws: in this way it would be able to fight for even longer, hoping against hope, before being torn to pieces.

  Delphick swallowed. When he spoke, his voice was cold. “So you were involved with a group of badger-baiters from London, Chickney. Presumably they paid you to show them the poor creatures’ setts.”

  “Poor creatures? Vermin!” Jacob Chickney was too busy justifying himself to notice that the chief superintendent had modified the courtesy of his address. “Vermin’s to be got rid of, and that’s my job, and never mind your townie way of talking. Poor creatures, indeed! A good badger can fight a fair few hours, let me tell you.”

  “Before it dies,” Delphick said. “Tormented, exhausted, and outnumbered—and you find the prospect enjoyable? No doubt you have attended a few such entertainments yourself. The countryman at his age-old pursuits! The word barbaric comes to mind, among others less repeatable. I only wish the new Act of Parliament had become law, Chickney, because I assure you it would give me the greatest of pleasure to instigate proceedings against you and your cronies—whether or not”—and his voice became even colder—“Miss Hawke’s death was anything to do with any of you. Which I strongly suspect that it was.” He leaned forward, his grey eyes dark with menace.

  “So tell me about it, Chickney. Tell me what happened!”

  Jacob clenched his teeth and set his pipe jigging as he muttered something. Delphick fixed him with a stern eye.

  “Speak up, Chickney. What happened last night?”

  “That interfering besom from the George,” Jacob snarled. “She’d no call to be poking about the woods in the middle of the night when Christian folks belong in their beds . . .” He caught Delphick’s quizzical glance and snatched the pipe from his mouth to jab it in the chief superintendent’s direction. “Don’t you go accusing me of being a heathen, for a heathen I ain’t, it being my job to be out of my bed when others did oughter be in theirs—not that they pay me anywhere near enough for the saving of their sleep, but—”

  “But you were going to tell me what happened,” Delphick reminded him, tired of the mole catcher’s perpetual harping on money. “So tell me.”

  “She must’ve seen the torches,” said Jacob, “for all of a sudden she comes bursting out of the trees yelling stop and a-waving of her arms. Carrying on something terrible, so she was, set the dogs barking and made me drop my spade . . . which was too dark to find it again right away.”

  Delphick filled in the gaps. “Somebody hit her over the head with a spade to keep her quiet?”

  “Not me,” Jacob said quickly. Not a vestige of loyal
ty to his erstwhile employers remained: if the blame were to lie between them and himself, there was no hesitation, no attempt to make excuses.

  “Not you—if you say so.” Delphick didn’t know whether or not to believe him, but knew that, while the old man was in the mood to spill the beans, he would have to press on. He wondered just how badly, by his own standards, the mole catcher had been paid, and how much of a grudge could be relied on to produce the full story. “What happened next?”

  “She was dead, that’s what happened.” Jacob looked away quickly and drew on his pipe. It had gone out. Delphick’s penetrating gaze unnerved him so much that he did not try to light it again. “She was dead, any fool could see that, all mangled as ’er head was—and these townies, they asked me what to do.” There was a note almost of pride in his voice, pride in his ability to think faster in a crisis than the city slickers. “So I told ’em.”

  “Told them what?” Delphick was losing patience. “This is a woman’s life we’re talking about here, Chickney, and a case of murder. Not some so-called sporting event.”

  “Told ’em to put her where nobody with any sense might expect to go poking for many a month, till the beasts would have done their work and nobody could tell who she was. And if some other blanky interfering fool hadn’t gone poking about in they brambles, she’d have stayed safely hid and not a soul the wiser—and,” said Jacob, regaining some of his self-confidence, “a good job if she had. The likes of her’s no loss to anyone, fussing about vermin all the time, and a woman, what’s more. Time was when they knew their place and kept their mouths shut, but no longer, and more’s the pity.”

  The monstrous old man folded his arms, raised his head, and glared as he delivered what he apparently intended as his final word on the subject. He sucked on his pipe, then reached for his matches, and before Delphick could stop him struck another match on his boot. He gazed into the flame with narrowed eyes, and a queer smirk twisted his wrinkled mouth. “I like a fill or two of baccy every day,” he said, and set the flame to the bowl, still smiling lopsidedly.

  Suddenly Delphick had had enough. “Make the most of what you’ve got there, Chickney. It might have to last a long time. We intend to charge you—accessory to murder, concealment, cruelty to animals—”he raised his voice above Jacob’s roar of protest—“and that, I assure you, is just the beginning.”

  chapter

  ~22~

  THE CHIEF SUPERINTENDENT rose to his feet, towering above the grimy, wizened figure on the other side of the table.

  “You will give us,” he continued, in a voice as cold as his eyes were grey, “the names and addresses of everyone who was with you last night—”

  “Can’t,” snapped Jacob. Then he saw Delphick’s expression and hastily added: “Don’t know ’em, nor anything about ’em. All I know is they come down from London t’other night and found nothing, so they come back again and asked around and found me, and said as they’d pay me for my help, which I give ’em—and for what? Nothing but trouble, that’s what.” And, forgetting himself, he spat.

  “A woman is dead, Chickney.” Delphick spoke with deadly calm. “Which, believe me, will mean the greatest possible—trouble—for whoever was responsible. Whoever it was . . . and, since you claim to know nothing about these people, we must refresh your memory. You will remain here in custody—be quiet, Chickney,” as Jacob roared again. “You will stay here until you have studied as many books of photographs as it takes to identify the people who killed Miss Hawke. You will look at every one, and you will tell us what we need to know.”

  “Wrongful arrest,” cried Jacob as Delphick drew breath. “I’ll have the law on you!”

  “Assisting the police with their enquiries,” Delphick corrected him. “Your memory is slightly too convenient, you see. Maybe, if you were left to your own devices, it might bring back precisely the information we require—and we shouldn’t care to have you warning your . . . associates of our interest in them. You will stay in custody until we have brought all your companions from last night’s sordid adventure in for questioning—all of them.” And the bleak expression in his eyes convinced Jacob that Delphick meant exactly what he said. His own eyes lost something of their dogged insolence, and he began to waver.

  Once the mole catcher had been duly charged and taken to the cells—protesting bitterly when his malodorous boots, with their string laces, were removed—Delphick flung open the window as wide as it would go. “I need some fresh air, and plenty of it,” he said. “Seldom have I encountered such a deliberately nasty piece of work.”

  “The professionals at least take a pride in what they do—they don’t like messes, especially killing,” Brinton said. “Amateurs like him—ugh.”

  “He’s literally an amateur,” said Delphick, “being nasty for the sheer love of it—not an ounce of remorse, nothing but complaints about how badly he’s paid for whatever job, whether legitimate or not, he undertakes.” He grimaced. “I don’t envy your desk sergeant, Chris, having to take the creature his regulation cup of tea and seeing those beady little eyes glaring at him through the Judas window.”

  “Judas is about right, too,” Brinton said. “Shopped his London pals quick enough, didn’t he? Oh, he’ll recognise a mugshot or two before he’s much older, mark my words—he’s got that look in his eye. He’s just hanging on for a while out of sheer bloody-mindedness—keeping the police on the hop is second nature to the likes of him, but when the time comes, he won’t hesitate a minute to save his own skin. A decent crook might have made at least a show of not wanting to split on them—but not our friend Chickney. It’s no surprise to me that nobody in Plummergen can stand him—I loathe the man myself, and I’d never met him before today.”

  Delphick was thinking. “I wonder, though, if he might have been perhaps just a little too quick to split. Didn’t you get the feeling that underneath all that nastiness there was something he was still trying to keep from us?”

  “If it’s something worse than murder, and badger-baiting—which is animal murder, no matter which way you look at it—I shudder to think what it can be. Someone with a mind as warped as Chickney’s could have any number of peculiar secrets, and I can’t say I’m looking forward to finding out what they are.”

  “Miss Seeton seems to have known,” Delphick said. “Some of them, anyway. Her picture of Badger’s home and the lurking menace—it wasn’t the fire, it was the diggers who were about to overwhelm the place. The mole in the foreground is as good a pointer to Jacob Chickney as we could wish for, now we understand its meaning.” And he made a mental note to pass on the thanks of the police to Mel Forby, who had drawn his attention to that meaning.

  Brinton had wandered off along his own train of thought. “At least he’s solved one puzzle—that car with the London number-plates spotted by that woman near Ashford Forest, and the strange lights she saw moving about in there on the night Notley Black was killed in the Half Seas Over fire. Coincidences do happen, and I’d say this was a good example—no connection at all with the murder, just those damned badger diggers on their first unsuccessful visit from Town, when the poor brutes were left in peace.”

  “I suppose so,” Delphick said. “But, if that’s the case—we’re right back at the beginning with the arson business, aren’t we? Jacob Chickney will point us in the right direction over the Hawke murder, sooner or later, but what other leads do we have for the fire-raising?”

  Bob cleared his throat. Brinton and Delphick turned as one to look at him: for someone so large, he could render himself remarkably unobtrusive when the mood took him. But now he had a suggestion to make.

  “The fires, sir—suppose it’s not crooks cashing in, but someone, er, kinky. I thought—well, whenever he lit his pipe he stared at the flame on the match, didn’t he, and, well, it seems weird. Chickney, I mean—and you did say, didn’t you, sir, that you thought he had something else to hide besides the Hawke murder.”

  “Miss Seeton,” said Brinton glumly,
“stares at flames in her yoga practice, or so she told me. Which is what started this whole affair in the first place, remember?”

  “I think we may safely acquit Miss Seeton of any form of deviance,” Delphick said, with a placatory grin in Bob’s direction. “There’s nobody more conventional—and nobody,” he added in reflective tones, “more remarkable. The superintendent was joking, Sergeant. But he’s reminded us that there is indeed a Seeton connection to consider: her sketch of the nightclub scene, with the Twenties costumes, the woman wearing the black pearl necklace, the man she held in her toils—if you’ll excuse the fancy language—and the other man looking on from close by. If we could interpret the picture properly, we’d be a lot closer to solving this outbreak of arson, I believe.”

  “If,” Brinton said heavily. “That’s your job, Oracle, as well you know. It’s why I called you into the case in the first place—she’s why I called you in. I’d rather do what I’m doing, which is all the by-the-book routine work—I’ve got the Fraud boys checking up on everyone who’s lost anything through fire in this area over the last month, even that farmer from Plummergen”—he glanced at Bob, frowning—“what’s his name? Mulcker? I can’t seriously imagine he’s the centre of an insurance conspiracy, or whatever they’re up to, but I’m taking no chances. I’ve asked for every detail to be checked, and checked again, and young Sleaze is being pulled off the Choppers’ surveillance, if that’s what it can be called, to go through every report with a fine-toothed comb. He may look a mess, but he’s a good copper.”

  “Suppose,” Delphick said, “it’s neither an insurance fraud nor vandalism—though I agree with you, the Choppers are small-time operators to be involved in something as big as this—but is, in fact, the sergeant’s kinky candidate? Not necessarily Jacob Chickney, but, for instance, the Russian gentleman with such a keen interest in Plummergen’s smithy. As witnessed by myself, in the exhibition of Before and After pictures—and by Mel Forby, whose opinion I’ve come to respect over the years. I suppose a journalist’s instincts about people must be almost as well-tuned as a detective’s—if she says there’s something strange about him, I’m prepared to believe there might be.”

 

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