The Cat's Paw Cozy Mysteries

by Fiona Snyckers

  Luigi hurried over to the computer. Vito stood up and went to look over his shoulder.

  “How do the orders work exactly?” asked Fay.

  “We get an alert on the computer if someone places an order through the mobile app or the website,” Vito explained. “One of us – usually Joe – will write the order down on a piece of paper and stick it up on the takeaway board where we can see it while we’re cooking. Same thing with the telefono. Whoever takes the call will write the order down and stick it up on the board.”

  “So, if it was a telephone call, there won’t be a record of it?”

  “No, we have an electronic switchboard that keeps a log of all incoming and outgoing calls.”

  “There is no record of an order coming in on the app or via the website that late yesterday evening,” said Luigi. “It must have been a phone call.”

  “There it is.” Vito pointed at the screen. “At eight-thirty-four. The conversation lasted forty-nine seconds. That was the last phone call of the night.”

  Fay hardly dared to hope. “Please tell me the calls are recorded?”

  Vito shook his head. “I’m afraid not. The computer technician - he offered us this option, but it cost extra money, and for a small ristorante like ours it seemed… how do you say?”

  “Overkill?” said Fay.

  “Sì. Overkill. If you want to find out what was said on this telephone call, you must speak to Joe. If Luigi did not take the call, and I did not take the call, then it must have been Joe.”

  “What time are you expecting him back?”

  Luigi looked at his watch and frowned. “That’s funny. He should have been back by now.”

  Chapter 6

  Fay looked out the window at the empty space where Joe normally parked his bicycle.

  “I’m sure he’ll be back soon,” she said.

  “Of course he will,” said Vito. “He is so careful on that bike.”

  Fay shook off her feeling of unease. “I’d better go now. I need to get back for lunch. Joe will come up to the Cat’s Paw later this afternoon to deliver my eggs. I’ll talk to him then.”

  Vito and Luigi kept Cornish hens in their spacious backyard and Fay had a standing order with them for fresh eggs.

  “What must we do when the police come here?” asked Vito. Now that she was about to go, his anxiety surfaced again.

  “Just tell them exactly what you’ve told me. And if you remember anything else from last night, tell them that too. They’ll go through the motions, but there’s no way they’re going to think either of you had anything to do with this.”

  Fay saw that it was one o’clock already. Slinging her bag over her shoulder, she set off up the hill at a brisk pace. Morwen liked to serve lunch by one-thirty at the latest. Fay pumped her elbows and quickened her pace to get up the steep hill. As a New Yorker, she had thought that she walked a lot, but it couldn’t compare to the amount of walking she did on the island. The village was built on a slope that tumbled down to the sea. You were always either going up a hill or trying to prevent yourself from falling down one.

  Fay had her grandmother’s old car, but only used it for longer journeys. It never seemed worth it to get the car out just for puttering around the village. The roads were narrow, and parking non-existent.

  Fay was puffing by the time she got up to the Cat’s Paw. As fit as she was, that hill always took it out of her.

  “Sorry I’m late.” She burst into the kitchen. “Oh wow, that smells delicious. I’ll make the salad as fast as I can.”

  Morwen’s chicken pie was resting on the kitchen counter in all its golden glory. Pen and Maggie were hanging around looking hungry as Morwen mixed up a jug of homemade salad dressing.

  Fay washed her hands. Then she washed the lettuce, spun it dry, and tore it apart into a glass bowl. She washed the baby tomatoes and threw them in afterwards. Then she washed the cucumber, diced it into skinny spears, and threw those in the bowl too. She crumbled the feta cheese with her fingers and sprinkled it over. While she washed her hands again, Morwen dressed and tossed the salad, and they sat down to eat.

  Maggie could talk of nothing but the murder.

  “I caught a glimpse of him when Jones and Chegwin carried his body out on a stretcher. His arm was sort of hanging down and I saw his fingers. They looked grey.”

  “Yes, thank you, Maggie.” Morwen frowned. “Not at lunch, please lass.”

  “It must have been an accident,” said Pen. “That’s all I can think. People don’t go around poisoning guests. Not here on Bluebell Island, they don’t. That man must have come into contact with something he shouldn’t have. He has no one to thank but himself.”

  Fay looked at him in surprise. That was the most she had ever heard Pen say. Usually, he devoured his lunch in silence. “I like to save my breath for cooling my soup,” was his favorite saying.

  The other surprising part was how well she had understood him. When she first came to the island, Pen might as well have been talking Japanese for all the sense she could make of his accent. Her ear must have become attuned to the Cornish way of speaking.

  “I think we can assume that this was no accident,” said Fay. “The police will have to investigate. We can expect them to be in and out of Penrose House over the next few days. They’ll want to question all of us. The best thing we can do is to tell them the unvarnished truth. No leaving out important details or shading the story to make it sound better. Just the plain and simple truth. It’s always better in the long run.”

  “Do they really think the poison was on the pizza?” asked Morwen.

  Fay nodded. “I’m afraid so.”

  Pen looked up quickly.

  “It weren’t the husbands.” The way he said it sounded like oosbands. “Not Vito and Luigi. They wouldn’t hurt a fly, them two. Anyone who says differently will have to go through me.”

  “I’m sure Sergeant Jones and Constable Chegwin don’t seriously suspect them. But they’ll have to ask questions down at the pizzeria, just as they will up here.”

  “If young Ronnie Chegwin goes sticking his nose in where it don’t belong, he’ll have me to reckon with.” Pen glared into his chicken pie.

  “They have to do their jobs, Pen,” said Morwen. “It’s a terrible thing to happen here on our peaceful island. I still can’t quite believe it. It must be an outsider. There’s no way it was a local who did this.”

  “If I were in charge of this case, I’d be keeping an open mind,” said Fay. “You never know what people are capable of.”

  Fay retired to her office after lunch. She was about to sit at her desk when she went back to the doorway and called down the stairs.

  “Call me when Joe gets here with the eggs. I want to talk to him.”

  Morwen’s reply came faintly from below. “I will.”

  Fay had got into the habit of spending the hours after lunch working on her admin. She did her online banking, paid her suppliers, drew up her monthly budget, paid her salaries, and pursued overdue accounts.

  Her biggest fear in taking over the Cat’s Paw had been that she would run it into the ground through financial irresponsibility. The only budget she had ever had to balance was her own personal living expenses. Now she had three people depending on her for their livelihoods, and a four-hundred-year-old legacy that had been left to her sole guardianship. It was empowering to realize that she was better at financial management than she had ever suspected.

  She had been working for an hour when the first visitors began to arrive in her office.

  First came Whisky, looking dapper with his black and white tuxedo markings. He jumped on the desk, propped himself against Fay’s laptop, and began to wash. Something shiny rolled onto her keyboard.

  Fay picked it up. It was a sparkly silver thimble. She had never seen it before.

  “Oh, man,” she sighed. “Where did you get this, Whisky?”

  He responded by washing his tummy with renewed vigor.

  “Now I’m
going to have to ask all the guests who is missing a thimble.”

  Whisky had a terrible habit of sneaking into the guests’ rooms and stealing shiny objects. Fay was constantly having to trace the owners and apologize to them.

  “You are a terrible magpie, my boy.”

  He started to purr in response to this rebuke.

  Next came Sprite, the lilac-point Balinese. She climbed to the top of the scratching post and settled there, angling her body so that she could keep an eye on Fay and on the birds in the tree outside the window at the same time.

  A minute later, Ivan strolled in. His bulk rolled from side to side as he walked. Fay had long suspected that he wasn’t as big under his shaggy coat as he appeared. Perhaps she would have him shaved in the summer to find out. He wasn’t built for the mild Cornish climate and would probably be much happier without his thick pelt during the summer months. She would check with the vet first.

  Fay’s next two visitors arrived at the same time. They did everything together. The grey tabby was Olive, and her ginger sister was Smudge. Olive jumped onto a window ledge, while Smudge settled on one of the lower tiers of the cat-tree. Ivan swiped lazily at her tail as she passed.

  This was how Fay knew that the cats of Penrose House regarded her as their owner. They were happy enough to hang out with Morwen in the kitchen, or with Pen in the grounds, but their favorite thing in the world was to be wherever Fay was.

  At three o’clock, she was surprised to hear the sound of a motorized scooter coming up the driveway. She clicked SAVE on her document and joined the cats at the window. She saw Joe swinging his leg off the scooter and lifting a helmet off his head. He picked up a box of eggs from the storage container at the back of the scooter and walked around the house towards the kitchen entrance.

  “Now what?” Fay muttered. She trotted down the stairs to meet him in the kitchen.

  Fay heard Morwen give a small scream as Joe entered the kitchen.

  “Joseph Potter, look at the state of you! What on earth happened?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know, Mor.”

  Fay entered the kitchen to find Morwen staring at Joe as he put the eggs on the kitchen counter and took out a delivery receipt for her to sign. It was easy to see why she was so taken aback. Joe’s clothes looked as though they’d had a close encounter with a stretch of asphalt. His shirt was shredded on one side, and his jeans had a long tear down the right leg, revealing a lot of grazing and bruising on his skin. His right arm was bandaged from wrist to elbow.

  “Why are you even here?” said Fay. “I could have come down to the village to collect the eggs. You look like you should be in bed or at the doctor.”

  “What happened, Joe?” said Morwen. “Don’t make me phone your mother to find out.”

  “Everyone is making such a fuss about it,” he said. “You’d swear I’d broken every bone in my body from the way the husbands are carrying on.”

  “They’re worried about you. It’s only natural. But what happened?”

  “It was just a silly accident. I was out on my bike on the South Ferry Road when this car came out of nowhere. It was driving much too fast, of course. You know how that road winds with all those hairpin bends. I could see the car was taking the corner too fast. It looked as though he was going to hit me. I tried to swerve out of the way, but the road is narrow just there. There was nowhere for me to go. At the last second, I made a decision and threw myself off the bike.”

  Morwen slapped a hand to her mouth. “What happened?”

  “I went for a long slide along the road. That’s how I got hurt. My bike stayed behind. The wheels of the car went right over it. You should see what it looks like. You’d swear it had been through a mangle.”

  “And the driver?” asked Fay. “What did he say? Please tell me he at least apologized?”

  “He didn’t even slow down. I could have been lying dead in a ditch, but he kept right on driving.”

  “A hit and run!” Morwen was shocked. “How can people do that? It’s disgusting, that’s what it is. They should lock him up and throw away the key.”

  “It could have been worse. At least I escaped with my life, and a whole skin. More or less. My bike is a write-off, though. I’ll have to get another one. In the meantime, the husbands have lent me their scooter. So, I’m fine, really. There’s no need for any fuss. It was just an accident.”

  “But that’s the thing,” said Fay. “I don’t think it was.”

  Chapter 7

  Joe and Morwen stared at her.

  “What do you mean?” said Morwen. “Of course it was an accident. Why would someone deliberately swerve to hit a cyclist?”

  Fay held up her hands. “I might be wrong. It might be a coincidence. But coming so soon after the murder of Mr. Caldwell, it seems suspicious to me. This is the island. We don’t have murders… or hit-and-runs. Now we’ve had both within the space of a few hours.”

  “You’re talking about your guest who was found dead in his bed this morning?” said Joe. “What could that have to do with my accident?”

  “Have you spoken to Vito and Luigi today? How much did they tell you?”

  “We mostly talked about my accident, and whether I should go to the doctor or not. Then Vito bandaged my arm. He mentioned that the man who died was the one that I delivered the pizza to last night, but that was all. He said you would talk to me.”

  Morwen gave Joe’s uninjured arm a squeeze. “Just remember, none of us think you had anything to do with it.”

  “Anything to do with what?” Joe began to look alarmed.

  “It seems the man who died – Martin Caldwell – was poisoned with cyanide that someone put on the pizza.”

  “The pizza that I delivered? So, people think I did it? I was the one who brought it to him.”

  “No, no,” said Morwen.

  A thought struck Joe. “Do you think the person who drove into me was looking for revenge?”

  “I think it’s more complicated than that,” said Fay. “Martin Caldwell didn’t order that pizza himself. Someone ordered it for him. The records at Pappa’s show that the order came in by phone. You were the one who took the call. Perhaps someone is worried that you could identify them.”

  “But that means they might come after him again?” Morwen grabbed his arm. “Joe, lad, you must be careful.”

  “Can you remember anything about the person who phoned to order pizza for the guest in the Penzance suite?” asked Fay. “Anything at all?”

  Joe pressed his fingers to his eyes. His hands were shaking. The accident had upset him more than he was prepared to admit.

  “It was a man’s voice,” he said. “I thought it was the guest. I remember now. He said I and me, rather than he and him. Like, ‘I’ll have the pepperoni and olives.’ And ‘I’m staying in the Penzance suite at the Cat’s Paw.’ I didn’t for a second think he was ordering it for someone else.”

  “What did his voice sound like? Did he seem young or old?”

  “Sort of medium. It wasn’t a high voice like a kid’s, but it wasn’t shaky either, like an old person. A mature man, is what I’d guess.”

  “That’s excellent, Joe. What about his accent? Did he sound like he was from around here?

  “Definitely not. He sounded like a foreigner. Like English wasn’t his home language. When he first started talking, I thought he was British. But the more he talked, the more I could hear that he was foreign.”

  “Did his voice remind you of anyone, Joe? Did he sound like someone you might have heard before?”

  Joe thought for a moment.

  “His voice kind of reminded me of the time my mates and I went up to London for the weekend. We spent most of Saturday night hitting the pubs. Some of the waiters and barmen had accents like that. Both the girls and the guys.”

  Fay and Morwen looked at each other.

  “An eastern European accent, perhaps?” said Morwen. “Many of the youngsters who work in London pubs come from eastern
Europe.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking too.”

  Fay took out her phone and searched for east European accents on YouTube. When she had found a few, she played them for Joe. He listened carefully but became confused quite quickly. By the end of it, the only thing he was sure about was that the Hungarian accent was “wrong”, and that the Estonian and Romanian accents were “close”.

  It wasn’t much to go on, but it was more than they’d had before.

  “What about the car that almost ran into you?” asked Fay. “Can you remember anything about it?”

  “Uh…” He seemed confused again.

  “For instance, was it an SUV, a sedan, or a hatchback?”

  “Oh, right. Yes, I remember that. It was a sedan. It had a long, low hood that was quite flat on top. I remember thinking that it looked like a battering ram when it was coming for me.”

  “What color was it?”

  “I think it was red. Yes. It was quite a dark, brick red.” He thought for a moment. “Actually, maybe it was brown.”

  “A late-model car?”

  “I don’t think so. It was a funny shape, with that long hood. It might have been quite old.” He rubbed his hands over his face. “I’m sorry. I’m useless at this.”

  Fay shook her head. “You really aren’t. You’ve been great.”

  “Are the police going to ask me this as well?”

  Morwen shook her head and smiled, but Fay chose to have more faith in Bluebell Island’s finest.

  “They probably will. It all depends if they make the connection between…”

  All three of them jumped as the iron bell at the front door of Penrose House clanged violently.

  “What on earth…?”

  Morwen stood up. “I’ll go.”

  Fay and Joe were silent after she had gone, their wits scattered by the urgent pealing of the bell. What could possibly be happening that required so much noise? Most people walked around to the kitchen door.

  Fay and Joe froze as Morwen squealed.

  Fay was out of her chair in a second, her reflexes on high alert. She took the stairs two at a time, with Joe trailing in her wake.