“One can always increase one’s fortune,” Mister Conrad replied, sipping his tea.
Pattie did the same. It was Darjeeling, Elliott’s favourite.
“But I gather you didn’t walk all this way to discuss generalities of business,” Mister Conrad said in a low voice. “You indicated that you would like to talk about FelynePro.”
“I would,” said Pattie calmly. “But first, do you have any allergies?”
“Allergies? Not that I know of. Only a mild lactose intolerance, I’m afraid to say.”
“Excellent.”
Pattie reached down and opened the door of her pet carrier. Immediately Jasper jumped out, and then proceeded to sniff Mister Conrad’s shoes.
“It’s considered rather rude to unleash a pet in another person’s home without asking, Mrs Lansbury,” the man said calmly, glaring at the animal.
“He’s very friendly.”
To illustrate, Jasper jumped up onto Mister Conrad’s lap. The entrepreneur did not seem significantly put off, and even stroked the cat a little until he curled up on his knee.
“He’s here to settle a point, Matthew. I am an owner of a Feline Retirement Home, and a cat owner. As are many people in Little Hamilton. May I ask what FelynePro is in the business of?”
“Well, cats, to put it simply. I bought the business several years ago. It has a corporate division, which sells pet products and certain treatments, and a research and development division, which works on new designs for toys and accessories, as well as new flea treatments and medicines. It was doing rather well until about a year ago. It survived the recession but bombed when some rival firms came out and made a killing off the internet. I was thinking of selling it for parts.”
Jasper remained curled up on his lap, purring.
Pattie handed him some photocopies of the papers that D.C. Downey had given her the day before. “Were you aware that their listed head office address is out of date – and that their list of employees may include some fictitious names?”
Mister Conrad scowled and took the papers, scanning then as he stroked the cat. “I was not aware of that. But what you just handed to me is not evidence of either. I shall have to look into it myself. How did you learn about this?”
Pattie said, “All around North Yorkshire, there have been reports of pets going missing. Almost exclusively cats. Even here in Little Hamilton, cats have gone missing. Some people have reported seeing men in vans parked outside cat-owners’ houses. And this week, a man came to me under a false name to register a new cat which I know for certain was stolen. He’s one of the so-called employees of FelynePro. I believe they have targeted my practice as a way to register the stolen cats with new, fictitious owners.”
“For what purpose?”
“I don’t know. I was hoping you could tell me.”
“Patricia, I knew knowing about this. Rest assured I will look into it.”
“I’m sure you will,” replied Pattie. “Because if you did have something to do with it, it would make me wonder whether you invested in my practice precisely so that you could use it as a laundering business for one of your illegal enterprises. I would be very upset about that.”
“I wouldn’t do such a thing,” said Mister Conrad. He put the papers into his suit jacket pocket and then stroked Jasper a few times, before pushing him off his lap. “And was this the stolen cat you mentioned?”
“No, that’s my cat, Jasper. He has a very special ability: he seems to know when people are lying.”
“So it was a test. And I appear to have passed: Jasper didn’t react negatively to me at all.”
“No,” said Pattie, coaxing Jasper back into the carrier. “He did not. But we both know that you’re a master at maintaining composure, Mister Conrad.”
He smiled and stood, straightening his jacket. “If I learn anything at all, I’ll let you know immediately, Mrs Lansbury. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.”
Chapter Ten
Pattie and Elliott spent the second half of the morning calling all the people who had left Pattie voicemails about their missing cats. They explained that there seemed to be a single group of culprits and that the local police had some leads. If Pattie heard anything, she would keep them all informed.
There were a hundred questions, of course. Everyone wanted to know who exactly the suspects were, and whether Pattie knew anything specifically about their cat, and whether the local police chief was going to be making any kind of announcement. Pattie had no choice but to disappoint them all.
After a rushed lunch, Pattie opened the vet’s as usual. There were no new cats being registered. In fact, all of Pattie’s customers were people she’d met before, all locals from Little Hamilton. Two of them were the owners of missing cats, wanting the opportunity to ask more questions.
“But when will we know more?” demanded Mrs Atkinson.
“We don’t know,” Pattie replied wearily. “Please, Mrs Atkinson. If you don’t have a sick pet with you, then you shouldn’t be here taking up an appointment slot. I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
Once the afternoon was over, Pattie collapsed into a chair surrounded by her beloved cats. Elliott was well-prepared with a hot pot of tea and a simple sandwich for her to recover her strength.
“It’s been a long few days,” he said warmly, passing her the plate. “You need to keep your strength up in times of crisis.”
“All those poor people,” she said. “Some of them told me they thought their cats must be dead. At first they were so happy to hear from me, but when I couldn’t tell them what they wanted to hear, they were probably even more upset than before. What are we to do?”
Elliott sat on the arm of her chair and held her for a moment. “Don’t worry, Patricia. We will get to the bottom of it.”
Pattie relaxed in the warmth of his arms. It was so comforting having Elliott around. It had been such a long time since she had somewhere there to comfort her when she was anxious or alone. She had gotten used to protecting herself, and had become cold, calculating – not bad qualities in a consulting detective, but it made it so much harder to react when things were outside of her control.
She opened her eyes within Elliott’s embrace. That was when she saw.
“Elliott!”
He pulled back, startled. “What is it?”
“The kitten enclosure!”
For the last few weeks, Pattie had kept a baby-proof fence around the corner of the room, where the kittens could roam around without being bothered by the bigger cats. They hadn’t yet tried to jump out of it, and some of them were still too small. But now the enclosure had been knocked down, and all the kittens were missing…
“Where are they?” Pattie asked, jumping to her feet. “They never had a chance to leave this room! Help me look, Elliott!”
They checked behind and under the suite, in every small corner of the adjoining kitchen, behind the television, even the shelves and fireplace. The only kitten they found was Churchill, who was crouched and shivering behind the curtain with his foster-parents, Harlequin and Tyson, crouched next to him protectively.
“Someone took them, Elliott!” Pattie cried. “When I was working in the office, someone must have come into the lounge and taken the kittens!”
She could see that Elliott wanted to reassure her, but they both knew the truth. There was no other explanation. The kittens had been cat-napped from right under their noses.
Chapter Eleven
Elliott called D.C. Downey to tell him of the theft. It wasn’t technically a break-in, because Pattie invited her customers into her home to sit in the hallway, where chairs had been laid out. The doors to the other rooms were closed with polite notices on them, but they weren’t locked. As Pattie dealt with her customers in the office, along with the likes of the nervous Mrs Atkinson, someone had simply walked in and taken them.
Now Pattie knew how Mrs Atkinson felt. Her babies were missing, and who knew what was happening to them?
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She had her print-out of employees and business addresses related to FelynePro and went through them one at a time. She realised that she had figured something out without knowing it.
Many of the fake employee names were cat-related, and obviously false. She used Google to check her assumptions, and found that she was right: the only name on the list that could possibly be genuine was Adam Wainwright, and he was associated with a subsidiary of FelynePro that had a business address registered in North Yorkshire, not ten miles from Little Hamilton.
“At least one of these addresses had to be genuine, in order for the business to be properly registered. It’s the same thing I had to go through when I set up the vet’s. The others might be fake, just listed as assets or published on websites for the sake of appearances, but this one here has to be a real place.”
Elliott looked at her hesitantly. “I hope you’re not suggesting what I think you are.”
“I want to go there. Now. I already know what I’ll find.”
“Patricia, if you just wait a few hours then we can talk to D.C. Downey about it when he gets here, and maybe he’ll send a few trained officers…?” Elliott protested.
Pattie shook her head. “I’m going now. Come with me if you must, but I’ll already have company.”
“Oh? Who’s going with you?”
Pattie gave him one of her wicked smiles. “Fetch the pet carrier.”
Chapter Twelve
It was already dark by the time they set off in the car. Elliott drove, complaining all the way. “Patricia, you know that I care about you, a lot, but this is a very bad idea. We don’t know what we’ll find.”
“I can handle myself. My son was a policeman, you know. He taught me everything that I need to know in these scenarios.”
“I doubt that he taught you what to do if you’re caught sneaking into a criminal’s headquarters in the dark, Patricia. Let’s go home.”
“Hush. We’re nearly there.”
Elliott’s GPS brought them to the address that was registered to FelynePro’s subsidiary company, F.P. Research and Development. Pattie was afraid of what she might find, but she wasn’t afraid to look. She needed to know, and if she was right, then she wasn’t going to let those horrible people have one minute longer to harm her kittens.
When they’d left the house, Harlequin was beside herself with worry. She hopped around in circles on her three legs, meowing. When Pattie picked up little Churchill and put him in the carrier, Harlequin jumped up to knock the carrier out of her hand. Pattie had to use her stern cat-trainer voice, and eventually shut Harlequin in the lounge as they got ready to leave.
Now, Churchill sat quietly in the carrier on Pattie’s lap. It was almost as if he knew what was coming, that he was needed in order to rescue his helpless brothers and sisters, and that his special services would be required.
“Are you alright in there?” Pattie crooned softly.
“Mew,” said Churchill.
“Sometimes I wonder if I’ve gone totally mad,” said Elliott with a sigh, switching off his headlights at the end of a country lane. They had arrived. It was a farmhouse. “Now what?”
“Now we go inside, Elliott.”
They got out of the car quietly and walked towards the darkened farmhouse. A light was on in one room, but when they peeked through the window, the room was a hollow concrete shell with nothing inside. The rest of the farmhouse was the same.
“I don’t understand,” said Elliott. “If there’s nothing here, why is there a light on?”
They pushed open the creaking front door. All the rooms on the ground floor were the same: an empty building stripped down the brickwork, filled with dust and dried leaves. When they crept into the room with the light, they found the answer: a trap door.
“You can’t seriously be considering going down there,” Elliott said.
“Dear, you clearly have a lot more to learn about me.”
Pattie opened the heavy trapdoor and went down a flight of wooden stairs. Elliott followed. Churchill remained quiet in his carrier. At the bottom of the stairs was a wide basement, as bare and undecorated as the rest of the building. At the back of the room were strong ceiling lights over several tables with some laboratory equipment, and a wall of cages. The cages were filled with crying cats.
“My God…” whispered Elliott.
“Shhh…”
Two men walked around from the back of the wall of cages. One was carrying a kitten, which they put into a smaller cage on the table. The other man was putting on a green surgeon’s coat.
“Do what you do best, Churchill,” Pattie whispered to her little friend, and released him into the room. Churchill immediately ran across the room and stopped near the tables. The man couldn’t see the brave little feline, but the other cats could. With his innate leadership skills, he compelled them all to run to the left of their cages, then run to the right. As the kitten dashed back and forth, the cages rattled with the inspired prisoners.
“What the heck is going on?” asked one of the men.
Then Churchill let out a quiet meow. Immediately all the imprisoned cats began to wail, so loudly that the men had to clap their hands over their ears to protect them from the racket.
Masked by the wailing, screeching, yowling and meowing, Pattie and Elliott stole forward across the room towards the men. Just inches away, they picked up a heavy object each and hit each man over the head. They fell to their knees, groaning.
“The police are already on their way!” said Pattie. “So don’t try anything! Sit in those chairs!”
The men did as they were told. They were not outnumbered, but they were outmatched, and appeared to be science types, not thugs. Elliott discreetly called the police, struggling to be heard over the noise of the animals, and within ten minutes there was a car of police officers led by D.C. Downey.
“It’ll take a long time to figure out which cat is whose,” he said to Pattie. “But they’ll all get home, sooner or later. Well done, Mrs Lansbury.”
“This cage is for me,” Pattie replied, pointing to the cage with three squirming silver kittens inside. She opened the door and let brave Churchill rejoin his siblings, all bundled inside her pet carrier. “I recognise a few of the others, too. Elliott and I can return the ones stolen from Little Hamilton.”
“It was brave and silly of you to come here,” admonished the Detective Constable. “How did you even know?”
Pattie filled him in on how she’d deduced which address to go to. “I suspected that all the cats would be in one place. Someone told me that FelynePro had a research division. Since the cats were not all valuable, they must have been stolen for another purpose. Luckily we seem to have gotten here just before any illegal testing took place on these poor little animals.”
“Who told you about the research division?”
“I’m not sure he was involved – not yet, anyway. I should keep my source to myself.”
D.C. Downey looked at her with a hard stare. “Alright, Mrs Lansbury – seeing as we’ve rescued the animals. I’m sure these two gentlemen will tell us everything we need to know. There’s no obstruction taking place – but if you know something important, I would suggest you come forward. You’ve been a huge help to us in the past, but that doesn’t mean you’re except from the rules. Okay?”
“That’s perfectly fine, Thomas,” Pattie replied with a smile, remembering what the man had looked like when he was a baby in diapers. “But I think we’ve put a stop to this operation for good. For now, I just want to go home. I have cats and kittens to feed – and an extra special dinner to prepare for the lead detective on the case, Churchill, here!”
The End
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The Escapee and the Case of the Cat-Napper (A Pattie Lansbury Cat Cozy Mystery Series Book 3) Page 7
