The Cat's Paw Cozy Mysteries

by Fiona Snyckers

Fay gave David a sideways look as the Volvo climbed the hill, protesting all the way.

  “It hasn’t cut out once. What more do you want?”

  “Are you sure you took it to be serviced?”

  “Of course, I’m sure. That’s not the kind of thing you can be uncertain about. I took it to Mike and Andy, just as you recommended. They kept it overnight and I picked it up this morning. They said they had done everything they could.”

  “That’s what we say when the patient is ninety-six years old and has high blood pressure and a dicky heart.”

  “Are you saying that my car is a hopeless case?”

  “Yes.” At last she understood. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  “Well, I like it. I remember my grandmother driving me around in this car when I was a little girl visiting for the summer vacation. This car has been on this island longer than you’ve been alive.”

  David just shook his head. “Another reason why it’s time to get a new one. But never mind that for now. What did you find out from Mr. Gary Malkin back there?”

  “You mean before you came in and scared him half to death? He told me that Mrs. Saville’s daughter visited her here just a few weeks ago. It sounds as though there was some conflict between them because her visit was a source of stress and annoyance to Mrs. Saville.”

  “I thought she hadn’t been on the island in months.”

  “That’s what she told me. For some reason, she was lying. It might not be significant, but I would like to know why she tried to keep that latest visit a secret.”

  “Do you think it had something to do with the will?”

  “You mean that Candice got wind of the fact that her mother was about to change her will and came over here to persuade her not to?”

  “Possibly.”

  “It doesn’t make sense, though,” said Fay. “Why would Mrs. Saville’s will have been on anyone’s mind? As far as we knew, she was a perfectly healthy fifty-seven-year-old woman. That’s not the age at which people start jockeying for a place in your will. She could have lived another thirty years.”

  “Except that someone was already planning to murder her. I heard about the bullets that were stolen from Lady Chadwick’s display cabinet. They could have been taken weeks ago.”

  “That’s true.”

  “And she was being poisoned by arsenic. Apparently, the housekeeper was also featured in the will. Nobody would have better access to Mrs. Saville’s food and drink than her.”

  “I suppose I should speak to her again,” said Fay. “She didn’t seem suspicious to me, but first impressions aren’t reliable.”

  “Are you going to speak to her now? I wish I could come with you, but I have another patient in twenty minutes.”

  Fay shot him a glance. “You sound as though you’re enjoying this.”

  “I must admit there is something enjoyable about hunting down a genuinely evil person and bringing them to justice. It’s an intriguing intellectual puzzle. Laetitia thinks I’m crazy. She doesn’t get it at all.”

  “You used to think I was crazy too.”

  “I did. And then I helped you with the Eleanor’s Dowry matter and changed my mind. Now I can’t stop thinking about what happened to Mrs. Saville.”

  “I’ll probably visit Bertha Maidstone this evening. You’re welcome to come along if you like. She might respond better with you there.”

  “Thanks, but Laetitia would hate it.”

  Fay drew up at the bottom of the road that led to the surgery.

  “Why would she hate it? Do you have other plans for the evening?”

  “No, but this plan contains two things she really doesn’t like. My sticking my nose in where it doesn’t belong, and…” He broke off. “I’ve forgotten what I was going to say.”

  Fay could only guess how he had been about to finish that sentence. “Well, if you change your mind, just send me a message. You’re welcome to join me tonight.”

  David climbed out the car in one fluid motion and came around to Fay’s side. He reached in through her window and ran his fingers gently along her jawline, fluttering them behind her ears and over her neck.

  “Your glands have gone down and you’re looking better. Looks like it was a twenty-four-hour virus. Short and sharp. I’m glad it didn’t last long.”

  Then he turned and strode up the hill towards the surgery.

  Fay continued on her way to Penrose House, her thoughts scattered. As hard as she tried to think about what would be the best use of her time that afternoon, her mind insisted on scampering away from her.

  She wanted to talk to Martin Trenowyth again. She wanted to talk to Bertha – either with or without David. She needed to find out what Candice had been doing on the island a few weeks earlier. She should probably try to establish exactly when the different amendments to Mrs. Saville’s will were made.

  But first, there was Morwen’s ploughman’s lunch to be enjoyed.

  Fay had had no idea what this referred to when she had first arrived on the island. Now, it was one of her favorite meals. When you broke it down to its essentials, it was just bread and cheese. But the way Morwen served it, it was so much more. Fay could fully understand why it was one of the most popular pub lunches in the west country. The bread was freshly baked. The cheese ranged from the mildest Gouda to the sharpest mature Cheddar, to the subtlest of soft cheeses in between. Then there were various jams and preserves and chutneys to delight the palate. Not to mention the freshest of farm butter.

  It was no wonder her feet quickened as she headed for the kitchen.

  “Ah, there you are, Miss Penrose. Would you mind telling me why there was no daily newspaper under my door this morning?”

  It was Candice Saville-Wareham, appearing from around the side of the house. It was as though she had been lying in wait for Fay.

  “Oh, hello,” said Fay. “It’s Saturday today. The Bluebell Bugle is only printed Monday to Friday.”

  “I see. Well, I suppose that’s okay then.”

  “Can I ask you a question while you’re here?”

  “Go ahead.” She sounded a little uncertain.

  “Why did you tell me that you hadn’t been on the island for months when you actually visited your mother just a few weeks ago?”

  Chapter 22

  “How do you know that?”

  Candice sounded annoyed.

  “Your mother told her homeopath that you were visiting her, and he mentioned it to me.”

  “It sounds as though you have both been talking about things that are none of your business.”

  “This is Bluebell Island. Everything is everyone’s business. It took me a while to get used to it myself, but that’s the way it is. Also, your mother was killed on my property. And you made me stay and listen to your dispute with the lawyers the other day. I’m involved whether either of us likes it or not. One of the first things you said to me when you checked into the Cat’s Paw was that you hadn’t been on the island in months. I’m allowed to ask why you lied about that.”

  There was a pause while Candice seemed to consider what to say next. Fay hoped she wasn’t preparing another well-rehearsed lie.

  “I was embarrassed, okay?”

  “Embarrassed about what?”

  “I could see that my mother wasn’t well. She was clearly in pain. And I did nothing about it.”

  “What kind of pain was she complaining of?”

  “Stomach pain. Mother was a bit of a hypochondriac. She was always one to fancy herself ill and to quack herself with various alternative remedies. After a while, you stopped taking it seriously.”

  “Has she always refused to see doctors?”

  Candice laughed. “No, that’s a recent thing. Seeing doctors used to be her favorite thing in the world. She was always inventing ailments for herself, so she could be sent for tests and scans. There’s a name for that, isn’t there? Munchausen’s Syndrome or whatever.”

  “I think that’s something different.
That’s when people make themselves ill, so they can be treated in hospital. We had a case like that in my old job. It sounds like your mother suffered from regular hypochondria. Did something happen to put her off doctors?”

  “The ones she was seeing in London stopped taking her seriously. They wouldn’t send her for any more tests and they stopped prescribing her pills. That really annoyed her.”

  “So, she swore off the medical profession?”

  “Not at first. She started seeing alternative practitioners like naturopaths and homeopaths. She liked them more because they always had time to listen to her long list of symptoms and they were happy to do as many tests on her as she liked.”

  “Tests? I thought only doctors or nurses were allowed to draw blood from you.”

  “These were just finger-prick tests. They would take a drop of blood from your finger and have it analyzed and then their computers would spit out a whole profile of your health. And then they’d tell you to stop eating dairy products or to start taking some or other pill or potion that they wanted to sell you.”

  “But at that stage she hadn’t gone off doctors completely?”

  “No, but she was quickly learning to appreciate the alternatives. Then she got swept up by the idea that western medicine is evil and Big Pharma is making us all sick. She became actively frightened of doctors. That was shortly before she came to live here. As far as I know, she hasn’t consulted a doctor in the last ten years.”

  “It must have crossed her mind when she was getting sick recently? She was in a lot of pain.”

  Candice sighed. “Whatever homeopath she was seeing had told her that the pain would get worse before it got better. He told her that the pain was a sign of the sickness leaving her body. He said it was a sign that his remedies were working. The pain would get worse and worse and then one day she would wake up and she’d be better.”

  “I see.”

  Fay thought she was keeping her tone and facial expression neutral, but Candice once again read judgment there.

  “You’re wondering why I didn’t try to talk her out of that craziness. Well, I did. I told her there was a perfectly good medical practice on the island and that she should go there to get a proper opinion on what was causing her pain. She refused to listen. She got quite angry with me.”

  “You said you felt guilty about her illness. Why was that?”

  “Maybe I didn’t try as hard as I should have to get her to see a real doctor.”

  “Did you think it wasn’t serious?”

  Candice looked at the ground. “Actually, I thought it was something very serious. You didn’t see how much pain she was in. I thought she had a serious internal disease and that there was nothing to be done about it. I knew my mother wouldn’t have wanted to undergo a lot of painful and unnecessary treatments that were going to fail anyway and would eat up all her money. When I saw how resistant she was to the idea of going to a doctor, I decided just to leave well enough alone and not keep bugging her about it. That was the last time I saw her alive.”

  Fay tried to think of the right thing to say.

  “Your mother’s death was nobody’s fault except for the person who pulled the trigger. She didn’t die of whatever was poisoning her. She died of a gunshot wound.”

  “But she could have died of the poisoning.” Candice’s voice sounded tearful. This was the most sentiment Fay had ever seen her display. “She could have died because I didn’t try hard enough to make her see a doctor.”

  “I think her housekeeper would have called a doctor in the end. She seems to have been distressed by how much pain your mother was in.”

  “Her?” The word vibrated with anger. “Have you seen what she looks like? She doesn’t have a caring bone in her body. She was probably waiting for my mother to die so she could get her hands on the inheritance, like a vulture.”

  “I haven’t seen anything to suggest that.”

  Candice looked unconvinced. Fay decided to throw in the question she had been leading up to.

  “When you were talking to your lawyers, you said that you promised your creditors weeks ago that there would be money coming in. You said that was why you were disappointed that the inheritance wasn’t as much as you’d hoped. Why did you think you would be coming into money so long before your mother died?”

  There was an uncomfortable silence.

  “Okay, I’ll admit it,” Candice said. “I didn’t think my mother had much longer to live, especially without treatment. I thought I’d be getting my father’s money within months at the most. I admit that I tried to stop the creditors from foreclosing on me by promising them an imminent inheritance. It was a bad thing to do. I’d be the first to admit that. But I did not kill my mother. I’m not proud of the fact that I thought she was going to die anyway, but it’s the truth.”

  She turned to walk back to the house and Fay walked with her.

  “I’m not the only one who inherited part of my father’s fortune, despite being his nearest living relative. You should speak to those others. They’re the ones who really had motive.”

  Normally there wasn’t much conversation around the lunch table on ploughman’s days. Everyone was too busy chewing to chat. Pen liked to nurse a half-pint of bitter while he ate. His usual lunchtime beverage was a glass of milk, but he made an exception on ploughman’s days.

  Fay decided to break the silence. She wanted some local information and there was no one better placed to give it to her than her lunchtime companions.

  “What do you guys know about Martin Trenowyth?”

  Pen grunted. “He’s the vet, isn’t he?”

  “That’s right. The new vet. Well, I say new, but I don’t really know how long he has been here. Longer than I have, that’s for sure.”

  “Just shy of two years,” said Pen. “Word is he’s too focused on small-animal work for a place like Bluebell Island. The farmers around here don’t reckon he’s up to much. ‘No good come lambing season’ is what they say about him.”

  “Nonsense,” said Morwen. “Everyone I know thinks he’s marvelous.”

  “Ah. That’s because everyone you know is a townie. The old biddies with their cats and rats and canaries do think he’s marvelous. It’s what I said – he’s a small-animal man. That’s all fine and well for them that lives in the village, but not so good for the farmers when they’re trying to turn a breech calf at two in the morning.”

  “We can’t all be good at everything,” said Morwen.

  “The last vet was. Old Dr. Pinnock. He could treat your four-hundred-pound bull just as well as your goldfish. It was a real shame when he died.”

  “Oh, go on with you, Pen. You always think that the old ways are better than the new ways, and that the new person in the job can’t possibly be as good as the old one. Pay him no mind, Fay.”

  Pen shook his head slowly. “Now, that’s not true. I’ve no objection to herself, have I?” He jerked his chin in Fay’s direction. “Doing just as good a job as her gran, I reckon.”

  Fay tried not to blush. A casual word of approval from the dour Cornishman was worth more than sonnets of praise from other people.

  “Martin thinks that Fay is very capable too.” Morwen’s smile was twinkly. “In fact, he has rather a soft spot for her.”

  Fay closed her eyes. “You know I’m not interested in him, Mor. Why do you keep on taking his side?”

  “I think that when a man pays one the compliment of being interested, one should at least do him the courtesy of looking at his good points.”

  “That’s where your generation is different,” said Maggie.

  “What do you mean?”

  “People your age always seem to think that a man is doing them a favor by being interested in them. It’s like you believe you owe him something for his interest. For girls like Fay and me, it’s not like that. People are responsible for their own feelings. Liking someone doesn’t mean they owe you anything.”

  Fay was amused to be lumped into
the same generation as Maggie. At thirty years old, she saw herself as halfway between the thirty-nine-year-old Morwen and nineteen-year-old Maggie. But she couldn’t deny that what Maggie had said was true.

  “I suppose I can see your point,” said Morwen.

  “And another thing,” said Maggie. “This vet guy was secretly seeing Mrs. Saville all the while he supposedly fancied Fay. And somehow, he got her to change her will to leave him a big chunk of money. And they were only together for a short while. He doesn’t sound like a great catch to me. Our Fay can do better than that.”

  Morwen looked struck by this logic. “You’re right, Maggie. I was blinded by that cute, puppy-dog face of his. He has those big, brown eyes that make him look so sweet and appealing. I didn’t think about what he has actually done lately.”

  “Yeah, well. You know who else has a cute puppy-dog face? Serial killers, that’s who.”

  Chapter 23

  Fay didn’t think she was dealing with a serial killer, but she wanted to speak to Martin anyway.

  He seemed to be the person who had been closest to Mrs. Saville in the weeks before her death. He knew more about her last days than anyone.

  Unfortunately, she had already used the excuse of needing to consult him for professional reasons. If only all her cats weren’t so healthy. As she played with the kittens after lunch, Fay examined them for any hint of a problem that could justify consulting the vet. There was nothing. They were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Every one of them was eating well, sleeping well, and bounding around like bunnies in the springtime.

  Even Zorro, the runt of the litter who had almost died in her first days of life, had caught up with her siblings and was now, if anything, slightly bigger than her sister, Cinnamon. Fay would never forget performing kitten CPR on her tiny body and carrying her around cradled against her neck all day while she recovered her strength. But now she was fine, and the five adult cats were in excellent health too. There was no reason to consult a vet until it was time for the kittens’ shots, and that wouldn’t be for another month.