The Cat That Was Bigger Than You

by Fiona Snyckers

  Morwen pulled a sympathetic face. “It’s hard to judge someone in a situation like that. You don’t know what kind of pressure they’ve been put under.”

  “Exactly. Both nurses seemed to deserve a second chance. But the fact that they were hired at all is part of a pattern. Argyle Holdings were trying to cut corners and save money on patient care.”

  “What else?” asked Maggie. “You said there were some people you wanted to speak to.”

  “I want to ask Argyle Holdings how often it happens that one of their patients changes their will in favor of a caregiver. Penny Sweet told me it has happened a couple of times to her. The patients become so fond of her that they leave her last-minute bequests. The amounts involved might be small, but it’s definitely worth looking into.”

  Maggie shook her head. “I know Penny really well. I can’t believe she would do anything to hurt someone.”

  Fay could only shrug. “Everyone who has ever done something bad has someone in their life who can’t believe that they would ever do such a thing. I also want to speak to Argyle Holdings about the fact that Maggie’s grandmother and Iona Busby had two of the biggest, north-facing cottages on the estate. These can now be rented out for a much higher price now that the former owners have passed away.”

  “Is it a fixed rental agreement for the life of the resident?” asked Morwen.

  “That’s right. You don’t actually buy your property, but you have life rights to it. You pay for the right to live there in the form of fixed monthly instalments. Those amounts are not allowed to increase over the lifetime of the resident.”

  “With property prices going up on the island every year that’s quite an incentive for Argyle to increase the turnover of their residents,” said Morwen.

  Maggie nodded. “I never thought of it like that. I remember how pleased we all were that the amount Granny was paying would never go up. We didn’t think about how that made the lifespan of each resident a liability for the owners.”

  “It all seems to come back to Argyle Holdings,” said Morwen.

  Fay could only agree.

  Chapter 21

  Fay spent the afternoon catching up on Cat’s Paw business and making herself visible and available to the guests. She felt as though she had been somewhat absent over the last few days, which wasn’t good for guest relations. Morwen did a great job as innkeeper, but the guests liked to know that the owner was also taking an interest in their welfare.

  She put in a couple of hours at the reception desk, chatting to the guests as they came and went. She took her master key and inspected the rooms while the guests were out. She was pleased to see that Maggie was keeping up high standards of cleanliness and neatness.

  She baked lamingtons and Florentines for tea and made sure she was present and available for the full hour between four and five o’clock.

  When she and Morwen had finished clearing up after tea, she sent David a message to ask how his father was. The reply came back fast.

  David: Completely fine, apparently. He’s insisting on getting up and going to his Museums Committee meeting this evening. He says he’s sick of the sight of me hovering over him. I must admit I’m feeling a little stir crazy myself.

  Fay read over this a couple of times. Then she started to type.

  Fay: Why don’t you and Laetitia come over for dinner? Morwen’s making pasta, so there’s enough to feed an army.

  There was a long pause. Fay imagined him texting Laetitia to see if she felt like this. The answer was very likely to be no, but at least she had offered. When the reply finally arrived, it was not at all what she had been expecting.

  David: Laetitia has left. I saw her off at the ferry an hour ago. She’s flying out of Heathrow at 9. But I’ll come to dinner if you don’t mind me on my own.

  Fay found that her heart was beating rather hard, which was ridiculous. She resisted the urge to reply immediately, not wanting to say something stupid.

  Fay: Of course. You’re very welcome. Come at about 7.

  Fay went downstairs to the kitchen to help Morwen. She had never been the world’s greatest cook. Baking was more her speed. But she was perfectly capable of assembling a salad, and that was what she proceeded to do now.

  She saw that the vegetable drawer was empty, so she grabbed a bowl and went outside to the kitchen garden to pick what she needed.

  The kitchen garden was Pen’s pride and joy during the warmer months. In winter, it yielded little more than potatoes and root vegetables like turnips and swedes, but the rest of the year it offered a cornucopia of fresh produce.

  The garden was beautifully laid out with flat white paving stones in a checkerboard pattern to allow easy access to all the plants. Luckily, Pen didn’t have the same attitude to the kitchen garden as he did to the rest of the grounds of Penrose House. If you wanted to pick flowers, you had better do it in the dead of night under cover of darkness when Pen was fast asleep. And even then, he was guaranteed to notice the next morning and give you a scolding. That was why Fay ordered flowers for the guests’ rooms and the communal areas from Bluebell Island’s Bluebells.

  But anyone was welcome to pick vegetables from the kitchen garden, or fruit from the orchard. In most cases, picking stimulated growth, so Pen was all for it.

  Fay picked a long English cucumber, a head of cos lettuce, a few leaves of spicy radicchio, five stalks of spring onions, and several sun-ripened tomatoes from the vine that had been trained to grow up a trellis against the garden wall. She took everything inside to give it a good wash.

  Morwen was stirring a huge pot of marinara sauce. She gave Fay’s bowl of vegetables an approving nod.

  “David is coming for dinner, by the way,” said Fay.

  She tried to drop it casually into the conversation, but it landed like a bomb. Morwen’s stirring stilled for a moment before picking up speed again. Fay knew she was weighing up the wisdom of whatever she wanted to say next.

  “Just him on his own?”

  “I invited Laetitia as well, but she’s gone back to the States. He decided to come on his own.”

  “Then it’s a good thing I stopped at the market for a block of fresh parmesan cheese. We’ve got the dried kind, but it’s not the same.”

  “I’ll make an olive oil and vinegar dressing to go with this salad, shall I?”

  “Yes. That’s perfect, thanks. Just remember to leave yourself time to get changed and do your make-up before he arrives.”

  Fay shook her head as she ripped the lettuce apart. “Absolutely not. This is just a casual kitchen dinner. David is in a relationship. I would think less of him if he started putting the moves on me the moment his girlfriend was out of town.”

  “But she’s wrong for him. We all know that. The only one who hasn’t realized it is David.”

  “Then that’s something they need to sort out between themselves. I won’t have a hand in splitting them up.”

  Morwen wagged the sauce-covered spoon at her. “You’re too principled for your own good.”

  “You wouldn’t do it either, Mor. You once told me that you know what it’s like to have someone come into your life and implode your relationship and how you’d never do that to another woman.”

  Morwen couldn’t argue. She would never forget being twenty-two, divorced, and the mother of two small boys. And while she blamed her ex-husband for what had happened, rather than the woman he left her for, she had a serious problem with people who broke up couples.

  “Okay, you don’t have to get changed. But tidy your hair and put on some lip gloss.”

  In the end, the thing that enabled Fay to shake off her nerves and to view the upcoming evening calmly was the thought that she could talk about the Sunset Acres mystery with David.

  He was the only person she knew who was as interested in solving puzzles as she was. At first, he had allowed himself to be drawn into her world reluctantly, believing that mysteries were best left to the police. But his attraction to the intellectual exer
cise of working out the significance of clues was undeniable. Once he realized that Fay wasn’t some inexperienced amateur, but a woman with twelve years of service as a police officer behind her, he had happily embraced the role of her conspirator-in-chief.

  Now there was no one she enjoyed brainstorming with more.

  David arrived at seven with a bottle of chilled white wine.

  “Perfect, thanks! We can have this with our dinner.”

  Fay was relieved that he hadn’t brought flowers. He had also dressed down for the occasion in a pair of blue jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. Because he was still officially on leave, he hadn’t been shaving as diligently as usual. There was quite a five o’clock shadow around his jawline.

  The overall effect might have been casual, but it was also extremely attractive. Fay ordered her hormones to behave.

  “How is your father this evening? He didn’t really go to his committee meeting, did he?”

  “He really did. By three this afternoon he was sitting up. By five he was dressed and doing his paperwork. And now he has gone down to the village to discuss museums. It has been an amazing recovery.”

  “Faster than if his attack this morning were due to natural causes?”

  “Definitely. I wanted to talk to you about that, actually.”

  Fay led the way to the kitchen where Morwen was helping herself to pasta.

  “Evening, Morwen.” David seemed pleased to see her. They had known each other forever. “That pasta smells amazing. My compliments to the chef. You’ll be joining us, I hope?”

  Morwen put her plate on a tray. She ignored Fay’s pleading expression.

  “I’m afraid not. I have a date with the new season of Narcos. I’ve been looking forward to this all day.”

  She picked up her tray and shot Fay a wink behind David’s back. “Enjoy yourselves.”

  Fay and David helped themselves to pasta and salad and sat at the old oak table with their wine. David made a contented sound.

  “I love this kitchen. It somehow manages to be large and airy while also being warm and cozy at the same time. I remember your grandmother telling me once that it had always been the heart of Penrose House. I guess it still is.”

  The cat flap creaked, and Smudge walked in. She rubbed her ginger head against Fay’s ankle to say hello. She was followed a moment later by Olive, the grey tabby. Fay’s grandmother had a theory that they might have come from the same litter because they were inseparable even as feral strays.

  “The cats love the kitchen as much as the humans,” said Fay. “As soon as they hear voices in here, they appear out of nowhere.”

  “Where’s my buddy Ivan?”

  “Probably looking for somewhere ridiculously wet and uncomfortable to sleep. He might come in when he hears your voice. Don’t be surprised if he jumps on your knee.”

  “I’d be honored. I wanted to tell you that I found the vial Ben Farlow used to inject my father. It was correctly labelled as a cortisone injection to be infiltrated into a joint space, but it seems to have contained pure adrenalin. That’s as much as I can tell from testing the residue in the vial. It looks to me as though someone swapped the labels and put the vial back in my father’s medical bag.”

  “Was there nothing to tip him off that it had been tampered with?”

  “The vial was a slightly different size and shape, but that would have been easy to miss, especially with the label saying exactly what he expected it to.”

  “Okay. So, assuming that Dr. Farlow used that vial on your dad by accident …”

  “Which he did.”

  “Which, according to you, he did. But let’s say it was an accident – how did that mislabeled bottle of adrenalin get into your father’s medical bag?”

  “And how did a bottle of adrenalin get into Ben’s supply of insulin, which he injected into himself a few days ago?” David topped up their wine and bent to stroke Ivan, the shaggy Siberian who had indeed appeared on his knee. “In each case, the doctor concerned had been at Sunset Acres with his medical bag the previous night.”

  “You’re starting to agree that Sunset Acres is the key to all this?”

  “It’s the only thing that makes sense. We’ve had four elderly people die in similar circumstances – two of which were expected and didn’t appear suspicious, and two of which were a little surprising but not necessarily suspicious. Then we had two cases of what I can only call attempted murder. Ben and my father are just of the age where a dose of adrenalin like that is quite likely to be fatal without prompt medical attention. It makes me think you’re right - this person has some kind of medical knowledge.”

  Chapter 22

  Their minds worked in similar ways Fay realized as she sipped her wine.

  “A doctor, or a nurse, or someone who spent a lot of time around hospitals.”

  “Maybe,” he agreed. “I suppose actual medical training wouldn’t be necessary - just a general familiarity with drips and injections. This would be someone who understood the set-up at the Sunset Acres frail-care unit pretty well.”

  “That was my next thought,” said Fay. “The person would need to be familiar with everyone’s daily routine. As far as medical knowledge goes, it’s possible to find out from the internet what effect adrenalin has on an elderly heart. And you could find out by watching how to introduce a substance into a drip and how to substitute an injectable item into a doctor’s medical bag.”

  “Agreed. Who do you see as the main suspects?”

  Fay counted them off on her fingers. “There’s Dr. Farlow. I know you’re not on board with that one, but I can’t discount him. Yes, he appears to have been a victim of an attack himself, but that could have been an exercise in misdirection that got out of control.”

  “Fine,” said David. “He stays on the list, but I’m still convinced it’s not him. Who else?”

  “Matron Sale. She leaves at five o’clock every afternoon, so she supposedly wasn’t there on the nights that the patients died, but I have a witness who thinks she heard her after hours on one of the nights.”

  “What about the guardhouse? They make me sign in every time I enter. Don’t they have records of who was there on those nights?”

  “Only of who entered the estate, not when they left. They have recently started making visitors and staff sign out when they leave, but that was in response to this crisis.”

  “Why would the matron of a retirement estate do such a thing?”

  “Money has gone missing from the frail-care unit over the past few months. The parent company, Argyle Holdings suspected Matron Sale, knowing she was a gambler, so they clamped down on new expenditure in the unit. She was unhappy about that and constantly lobbied for more funding. Now she has got her wish because Argyle Holdings were afraid that the patient deaths might be blamed on a lack of funding. I know it doesn’t seem like much of a motivation to murder four people,” she added as she read skepticism on his face. “But it’s all I’ve got at the moment.”

  “Who else?”

  “The two nurses – Rowan Court and Meredith Disick. They had the easiest access to the patients and their drips.”

  “Motive?”

  “That’s what I can’t figure out. This is a second-chance job for both of them. It’s hard to imagine why they would do anything to endanger it.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “My last suspect is Penny Sweet.”

  David burst out laughing. Then he frowned when he saw she was serious. “Little Penny Sweet? Because she volunteers as a candy-striper on the wards? You might as well suspect poor Mrs. Tribble.”

  “Mrs. Tribble doesn’t have a motive. Penny has already had three patients change their wills in her favor before they died. It’s possible that Mr. Tait, who was one of the first patients to die this month, also left her something. He had a meeting with his lawyer shortly before he passed away.”

  “What kind of amounts are we talking about?”

  “The biggest was a thousand pounds
. Otherwise, it has been a few hundred at a time. Again, that doesn’t seem like enough of a reason to kill someone, but she could have been building up to a bigger pay-day - one that we don’t know about yet.”

  They had finished eating. David stood to clear the table, overriding Fay’s objections. He rinsed the plates, bowls, and cutlery and loaded them in the dishwasher. Then Fay made coffee and they took their remaining wine to the armchairs that stood near the wood-burning range. Ivan jumped back onto David’s knee the moment he sat down. Fay was joined on her chair by Sprite and Whisky, the cats she had brought with her from New York.

  David glanced at a text that had just come through. “Laetitia says she has cleared customs and passport control and is now having coffee while she waits for her flight.”

  “You must miss her when she’s away for so long,” said Fay. Just because she felt lighter when Laetitia Poynter was off the island, didn’t mean that anyone else felt like that too.

  “We parted on strained terms. I was annoyed with her for taking me away from my father this morning and she was annoyed with me for thinking it was okay to try to break our art-mile date because of my father’s illness.”

  Fay arranged her face into a sympathetic expression but decided against trying to comment on this. Discretion was the better part of valor when it came to lovers’ tiffs.

  David glanced at his phone and frowned. “She still hasn’t asked how Dad is doing. She’s totally focused on the series of lectures she is giving next week.”

  He made an effort to shake it off. He stroked Ivan until the huge cat vibrated with purrs.

  “Getting back to the Sunset Acres killings,” he said. “Can we really talk about a rational motive when someone has killed four people and tried to kill another two?”

  “Good point,” said Fay. “I suspected from the beginning that this was a serial killer situation. When you’re dealing with people like that, rationality goes out the window. You can’t even begin to guess what the motive might be.”