The Cat's Paw Cozy Mysteries

by Fiona Snyckers

  “Lady Chadwick, you sprinkled powder on the takeaway pizza that was standing open on the counter at Pappa’s, didn’t you?”

  “It… it wasn’t standing open. I opened it. It was my pizza. Luigi had made it for me.”

  “But it wasn’t your pizza. The pizzas that are served in the restaurant are placed on wooden boards. Takeout pizzas are placed in cardboard boxes.”

  Lady Chadwick looked even more confused. Fay realized that she barely knew what the word takeout meant. In her aristocratic world, one never ordered in. You either ate at home or you went out for dinner. There was nothing in between.

  “Young lady, it is my business and mine alone whether I choose to detoxify the food that I am about to eat. I had every right to treat that pizza.”

  “But you don’t just do it for yourself, do you, Lady Chadwick? You try to save other people from gluten and fluoride too, don’t you? Just like you tried to save me yesterday.”

  “It doesn’t do any harm! It is better than allowing everyone to be poisoned by toxins.”

  Fay couldn’t help feeling sorry for her. It was certainly not okay to go around dosing other people’s food and drink with random concoctions, but the village knew about Lady Chadwick’s quirk and mostly tolerated it. No one would have come to any harm if someone hadn’t taken advantage of her.

  “I can see what you’re thinking,” said Lady Chadwick. “I can see what you want to accuse me of. But if that bottle isn’t mine, where did it come from? Yes. You see? You can’t answer that, can you?”

  Chapter 24

  Fay opened the bottle, taking care not to let her fingers touch it. She held it to her nose and sniffed cautiously. There was quite a strong smell of almonds. The thought that Lady Chadwick had been carrying this around with her since Tuesday night made Fay feel light-headed. She could have poisoned herself and half the village by now. It was a miracle no one else had died.

  “Well…?” Lady Chadwick was waiting for an answer.

  “When you walked into Pappa’s on Tuesday night, can you remember someone bumping up against you or jostling you in the doorway?”

  Lady Chadwick’s face turned thoughtful as she tried to remember.

  “Vaguely, yes. I remember being a little annoyed at a young man who refused to step back for me in the doorway. The decline of modern manners is quite shocking.”

  “A young man?”

  Fay took out her phone. From Lady Chadwick’s perspective, a man of fifty might well seem young. She found the photograph of the three Estonians and held it up for her while she put her glasses back on.

  “Have you seen any of these people before?”

  “This one.” She touched the man on the right. “This could have been the man who bumped into me. I can’t be sure, but it’s possible.”

  “Pol Peters says he saw a dark-haired man drop something into your purse on Tuesday night. I think this man slipped the bottle into your purse. And because it was lying on top you used it to dose the pizza.”

  Lady Chadwick’s air of self-confidence was wavering. “What… what do you suppose is in that bottle?”

  “It needs to be tested in a laboratory before we can say for sure.”

  “Will you take it to Truro?”

  “Maybe.”

  Fay tried to remember where she had seen a laboratory somewhere on the island quite recently. Then it came to her.

  “Actually, I’m going to take this to the doctors’ surgery for now.”

  “Good idea. Dr. Dyer has built a small laboratory there, I believe.”

  Fay’s police training was too strong for her simply to take the bottle without documenting it. She asked Lady Chadwick for a piece of paper and wrote her name and the date on it. Underneath, she wrote a brief statement of how the bottle had come into her possession and where she intended to take it. She signed it and made a record of the time.

  Since she was on a roll, she wrote out a statement for Lady Chadwick too, detailing her habit of dosing other people’s food and drink in the belief that she was detoxifying them. She added a statement about the man who had jostled Lady Chadwick on Tuesday night and about the two nearly identical glass bottles.

  She made Lady Chadwick write out her full name, address, and title - Mary Elizabeth Catherine, Lady Chadwick, Dowager Baroness of Porthtowan, Chadwick Manor, Chadwick Road, Bluebell Island, Cornwall.

  Lady Chadwick read over the statement to make sure she agreed with it. Then she signed it and Fay witnessed it.

  Feeling that she had done the best she could in less than ideal circumstances, Fay said goodbye to her hostess and drove to the surgery. She had the bottle next to her in a Ziploc bag. Part of her wanted to leave it to the next day when she could take the ferry to Truro and hand it in to a police laboratory there. But what if Truro didn’t have a police lab either and made her go all the way to Exeter? With every hour that passed, it became more likely that the perpetrators would get on the next plane back to Tallinn. This needed to be sorted out today. The fact that talking to Dr. Dyer made Fay want to run away and hide was not the point.

  “Fay, love!”

  Doc Dyer seemed delighted to see her. He was walking up and down in front of the surgery with his corncob pipe, which told her that it was after five o’clock.

  “Hi, Doc.”

  “Was that your grandmother’s car I saw you arrive in?”

  The surgery was on a pedestrian-only street, so Fay had parked at the bottom of the hill.

  “It certainly was. It keeps cutting out on me. I’m constantly worried about whether it will start up again.”

  “Sounds like it needs a good service.”

  “That’s exactly what David said. And speaking of whom, is he in?”

  “He’s with his last patient of the day. I’m sure he’ll be out soon.”

  As he spoke, they heard a door opening and voices inside the surgery.

  “But I don’t like taking pills, Doctor,” said a woman’s voice. “it’s not natural.”

  “If you don’t take your medication, you won’t get better, Mrs. Lawton.”

  “But won’t nature take care of it, Doctor? I’ve always believed that nature is wonderful.”

  “Nature will take care of it by spreading the infection from your toe to your foot to your leg until you develop septicemia and die.”

  “What did they do in the old days before we had all these newfangled medications, Doctor?”

  “Amputation, Mrs. Lawton. Let me know which option you prefer.”

  Mrs. Lawton hobbled out of the surgery with a bandage on the big toe of her left foot. A moment later, Dr. Dyer stalked out of his consulting rooms and onto the porch of the surgery.

  “You again, Miss Penrose? What is it now?” He caught his father’s eye and amended this somewhat. “I mean, good afternoon. How can I help?”

  Fay held up the Ziploc bag with the bottle of powder in it. “I’d like you to test this, please. I suspect that it might be concentrated cyanide.”

  “That sounds highly unlikely.”

  Fay opened the bag and held it up. “Smell it.”

  He sniffed the bottle and recoiled. “Burnt almonds.”

  “Exactly. I noticed you had a laboratory set up here. Did you study chemistry?”

  “About as much as any medical doctor studies chemistry. But it interested me, so I paid attention. My father and I are tired of the long waiting time for lab results here on the island. Everything has to be sent to the mainland and takes ages to come back.”

  “True,” agreed Doc. “It’s very frustrating.”

  “I set up a lab here, so I could conduct some of the more basic tests myself. I can certainly handle a test for hydrogen cyanide. I’ll mix some of this powder into a PH-neutral solution and add iron sulfate. Then I’ll acidify it with mineral acid. If it turns dark blue, we’ll know it has turned into prussic acid which is a form of cyanide.”

  Fay’s nodded. She knew nothing about chemistry herself, but he seemed to know what he
was talking about.

  “Shall I… leave it with you then?”

  “What?” His eyebrows snapped together. “Certainly not. I want to hear where you found this.”

  Doc Dyer waved his pipe in the air. “You two go ahead then. Don’t mind me. It’s good to see the children playing together nicely for once.”

  This earned him a glare from his son and an eyeroll from Fay.

  “Come on then.” David held the door open for her.

  Fay had been in enough police labs to recognize that this one was different. Modern commercial laboratories had entered the digital age. Artificial intelligence did a lot of the work of scanning blood, tissue and trace evidence and interpreting it. This was a more low-tech set-up where the scientist mixed the compounds himself with test tubes and Bunsen burners and acids and bases, and interpreted the results according to what he observed.

  “Walk me through it,” he said as he prepared a solution of part of the powder.

  “You’ll need to clarify that.”

  “This powder. Where did you get it? How did you get it?”

  Fay reached into her purse and pulled out Lady Chadwick’s signed statement. She read it out loud.

  Dr. Dyer made an impatient sound. “I can’t believe she is still doing that. I gave her a very serious lecture on the stupidity and recklessness of what she was doing. I thought I had got through to her.”

  “You might intimidate the rest of Bluebell Island, Dr. Dyer, but Lady Chadwick is made of sterner stuff. Those old aristocrats aren’t easily cowed.”

  Fay found that Dr. Dyer was directing a fierce look at her.

  “What?” she said.

  “Nothing. I was just thinking that you aren’t easily cowed either.”

  “I like to think not.”

  Even under torture, Fay would not admit to finding David slightly intimidating.

  He added the iron sulfate to the mixture and let the resulting solution stand for a while. Then he acidified it with the addition of mineral acid.

  The mixture turned dark blue before their eyes.

  “Prussian Blue.”

  “So, it is cyanide,” said Fay.

  “It is indeed. What is this all about, Miss Penrose? You have found the murder weapon and the unlikely agent in the figure of poor Lady Chadwick. But why? Who wanted to kill Martin Caldwell and why?”

  “He was a financial advisor from Birmingham who specialized in high-risk, high-return, short-term investments. I believe he came to Bluebell Island to look into the possibility of funding a salvage expedition to locate the treasure of the HMS Coronation that sank off the coast of Bluebell Island three hundred years ago.”

  “Now that’s a high-risk investment. There have been several well-funded, scientific expeditions to locate the Coronation over the years, and they all yielded nothing.”

  “I believe something convinced Martin Caldwell that this time would be different.”

  “Something… or someone.”

  “That’s what I wondered too.” She told him about the delegation from the Estonian town that had twinned with Bluebell Island and how two of the men from that delegation, who also described themselves as financial investors, had now gone missing.

  “You think the three of them were planning to invest their money…”

  “Or their clients’ money,” said Fay.

  “On a salvage operation for pirate treasure? That sounds like something out of a story book.”

  “Not necessarily. Admittedly, that’s what I thought at first. But what if this whole thing was a scam from the beginning? What if the real mark was Martin Caldwell all along?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m starting to think that the Estonians never intended to go after the treasure at all. What if they just wanted him to invest a large sum of money in a non-existent salvage operation and then intended to disappear with his clients’ money?”

  Dr. Dyer stripped off his latex gloves. “That sounds less far-fetched. But why him and why a shipwreck? Why not… I don’t know… try to sell him the Brooklyn Bridge or whatever con artists do these days. Worthless dot-com shares or an elaborate pyramid scheme.” He thought for a moment. “Hang on. What was the name of the captain of the Coronation who supposedly ran off with the daughter of the captain of the Spanish galleon?”

  “Captain Caulder.”

  “That’s it then.” He looked up and smiled at Fay. It transformed his face. “Caulder and Caldwell are the same name. At least around here they are. Caldwell is a modern version of the older island name Caulder.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “It’s an island thing. Everyone around here knows that Caulder and Caldwell are the same name, like Smith and Smythe.”

  His excitement infected Fay. “You think Martin Caldwell might have been descended from Captain Caulder and Isabella?”

  “Who knows? The important thing is that he might have believed he was descended from them. Historians can’t agree on whether they survived the shipwreck or not. Local legend has it that they did, but local legend also believes that Bluff lighthouse is haunted.”

  A missing piece of the puzzle was falling into place.

  “He probably felt a sense of entitlement to that treasure,” said Fay. “Like it was rightfully his because it belonged to his ancestors.”

  “Salvage laws are complicated in Britain, but yes, he might have believed that. He probably never intended to declare any treasure he might have found to the authorities anyway.”

  “Still, he couldn’t have been a complete idiot,” said Fay. “If someone told me that I was descended from a person who might have found pirate treasure three-hundred years ago I wouldn’t go rushing to the other side of the country to look for it. And I definitely wouldn’t invest any money in it. How did they convince him that they had real access to the treasure?”

  “That’s a very good question.”

  There was silence as they thought about this. Then Fay snapped her fingers.

  “I’ve got it.”

  Chapter 25

  “Well?” said David, as Fay didn’t elaborate.

  “Sorry. I was working it out in my head. I think they salted the mine.”

  “They what?”

  “It’s an expression from the days of the gold rush. When you’re trying to sell a sucker a dud goldmine you scatter tiny nuggets of gold for him to find so he thinks he is buying a viable mine and signs on the dotted line. It’s called salting the mine.”

  “I’m familiar with the concept. I just don’t understand why you think it applies here.”

  “The night before he died, Martin Caldwell told Mavis from the Royal Hotel – you know Mavis?”

  “Of course I do. Dreadful woman. Never stops talking.”

  “Most people find her friendly and pleasant. But the point is, he told her that he had found something on the shipwreck hike. He said it proved that he had been right all along. Mavis says he was really pleased with himself – that he was gloating almost.”

  “Okay, let’s say they left something there for him to find. Some precious stones, maybe. Why did they then kill him later that night?”

  “Maybe he wasn’t meant to keep whatever he found. Maybe they had an agreement that they would share everything. If he tried to get away with something valuable, they might have decided to kill him.”

  Dr. Dyer picked up a blue folder from his desk. It was the autopsy report for Martin Caldwell. He opened it up and flicked through the information. “Nothing was found on his body or among his personal effects. If he kept something that didn’t belong to him, what did he do with it?”

  “I don’t know. His room has been thoroughly cleaned and nothing was found.”

  “All this is just conjecture until we find proof. What about the men who lured him here? Do you think they’ve gone back to Estonia already?”

  “I don’t think so. They came over with a very nice man called Mr. Olesk. He is from the same town, but otherwise has no
connection to them. He’s a museum curator. He says they are all supposed to fly back tomorrow. In the meantime, they checked out of the Royal and got themselves accommodation somewhere else. They’ve gone rogue.”

  “Did they have a car?”

  “An old Ford Cortina. They rented it on the mainland. It’s the same car that tried to run Joe over on his bicycle. He was the only person who knew that the pizza order was phoned in by someone with an East European accent.”

  “I treated Joe after that accident. He could have been killed.”

  “And now these men have disappeared. No one has seen them in days.”

  Dr. Dyer gave her a suspicious look.

  “I hope you’re not thinking what I think you are thinking.”

  “And what is that?”

  “That it would be easy enough for you to trace them. With your skills, you could probably do it in a couple of hours.”

  “Well…”

  “And that you should go there to confront them yourself instead of handing the information over to the police like a sensible person.”

  It was disconcerting that he had read her thoughts so accurately.

  “Just promise me you won’t do anything stupid,” he said.

  “I won’t do anything stupid.”

  It wasn’t stupid for an experienced NYPD detective to take on a couple of minor con artists, Fay told herself.

  It was perhaps not strictly protocol to enter a hot situation without backup, but this was Bluebell Island. The hot situations weren’t particularly hot.

  It was just after midnight and the island was deeply wrapped in slumber. Bluebell Islanders were early risers, which meant they went to bed early. Even the high street was quiet now. The shops and restaurants were closed and tightly shuttered. The only light came from the glow of shop signage and the old-fashioned lamps that lined the street.

  It was very cold. Snow had fallen that day, driving everyone’s hopes of spring into hiding.

  Fay turned off the high street and climbed to the top of Ridge Road, which led steeply up to a crescent of buildings clinging to the side of a cliff.