“I think that’s precisely what Patricia wants to avoid,” Rex said.
“Why ever not, though? After all, Claude is educational. Did you know the meaning of contradictory when you were knee-high to a grasshopper?” Roger asked him.
“I did,” Connie retorted. “And look where it got me.”
“Oh, come off it, old girl. You’re well rid of Nigel. He had absolutely no imagination. Running off with his secretary, indeed!”
“They’re not called that anymore, Roger! And what does it matter? She’s young and she’s pretty, and I’m stuck with bringing up two kids on my own!” Connie burst out of her chair, knocking it backwards onto the grass and spilling her tea.
“Oh, dear,” Roger said watching as she stumbled back to the house. “Did I say something wrong?”
“You probably should not have said anything at all. Seems she’s still bit raw over her divorce.”
“Nigel was a swine. Why does she persist in mooning over him?”
Rex was not there to answer that question and wished Roger had not caused Connie to leave. Or had he done so on purpose? Rex glanced at him innocently drinking his tea. Charles came hobbling towards them and took Connie’s vacated chair.
“What’s up with Connie?” he asked. “Rushed past me in tears. Did Mother upset her again?’
“No, it was me,” Roger admitted. “I’m afraid I put my foot in my mouth. Say, what’s wrong with your own foot?”
“I tripped over one of Archie’s mice. The black-and-white chequered thing with catnip in it that he liked so much. I think I sprained my ankle. Dot’s fetching some ice. I don’t know why Mother doesn’t get Faye in once a week to tidy up. It’s not like she can’t afford it, and Faye needs the money. The place is such a mess you can barely see the floor. Someone’s going to have a really bad fall one of these days. Ouch,” Charles exclaimed, stretching out his leg and depositing his sandaled foot gently on the soft bed of grass.
Dot approached on her cane with a bag of frozen peas and handed it to Charles with instructions to place it on his swollen ankle for twenty minutes.
“You are such a busy bee,” Roger said. Rex could not tell if he was mocking her.
Charles thanked her profusely and bent forward to wrap the packet around his bare ankle.
“Would you like some more tea, Reginald?” Dot asked.
There was nothing Rex would have liked more, and said he would get it himself.
“Sit, sit,” she told him before he could get up, holding out her arm for his cup and saucer. “Milk, sugar?”
“Aye. One, thank you.”
“Note how she didn’t ask if I wanted any tea,” Roger said with amusement as she hobbled to the table.
“Well, she only has the one hand,” Rex pointed out. A walking cane occupied her other.
“Wouldn’t have made a difference. She doesn’t like me.”
“And why is that?”
“She’s jealous of my relationship with Patricia. Dot is a wannabe writer. Doubt she’s any good, but she’s always pestering Patricia with questions about writing and gets resentful when I’m here at the house trying to get some actual work done.”
This triangle involving Patricia reminded Rex of the one Roger had mentioned existed with Noel, the neighbour. It all seemed unnecessarily complicated and childish. “Well, Dot is sewing on your button,” he reasoned.
Roger shrugged his narrow shoulders. “I tried attending her book club, but really, it was too pretentious. I felt outnumbered by all the women. This village is full of old biddies. If I weren’t so attached to my cottage, I’d leave. It must be something in the sea air. They just keep on going on. They’re indestructible.”
“Noel doesn’t attend the book club?”
“No, he’s got more sense. As do the other men around here. They’re probably glad to get rid of their wives of a Wednesday evening and watch whatever they want on the telly.”
“Where is the book club held?”
“It’s a revolving thing. The members take turns to host it. It’s usually a wine and cheese do.”
“Do you happen to know where it was held this past Wednesday?”
“When Archie took sick, you mean? Are you sleuthing?” Roger grinned, baring a fine set of teeth, which might have been false. “You’re a Crown prosecutor up in Scotland, aren’t you?”
“I am.”
“It must be hard to switch off from asking questions, am I right?”
“Something like that,” Rex prevaricated. Roger was a shrewd fellow, the sort of person you never knew quite where you stood with. Rex did not wish to divulge too much.
“It was held at Madeline’s,” Roger said. “She runs a small bed-and-breakfast to help pay her mortgage. Her husband ran off, just like Connie’s, but made it all the way abroad. Took the lady of the manor with him. That white mini-mansion on the hill. She was the doctor’s wife.”
“Dr. Beaseley’s?”
“Yes, but remember, we call him Beastly around here. And you know what’s even stranger about Dr. Strange’s name, the local vet’s?”
Rex was not sure any of this was relevant to his cat murder inquiry, but asked the required question anyway.
“His middle name is Moore!” Roger laughed with childish delight. “As if Strange wasn’t enough.”
“Getting back to the Wednesday book club, you seem well-informed for someone who doesn’t attend anymore.”
“Well, they’re always wittering on about it. I don’t know what they’ll do when they run out of Jane Austen.”
Dot came back with Rex’s tea, apologizing for it having taken so long. “I had to make a fresh pot,” she explained.
“Don’t worry about me, Dot,” Roger said pointedly. “I’ll get my own.” And rose to do so.
“Roger is a frightful gossip,” she said to Rex. “I don’t know what he’s been telling you, but you should take everything he says with a grain of salt.”
“He was just telling me aboot your book club. My mother enjoys hers.” Rex explained it was one of the few things that got her out of the house.
“Shame she doesn’t live here. We could do with some new blood.” Dot sat down stiffly in Roger’s chair, resting her cane against her knees, and slid the handles of the patchwork bag from her arm. Within seconds she was knitting again, needles jabbing and clicking.
“How many members do you have?” Rex asked casually, stirring his tea.
“Seven now. All women!”
“That’s a good turnout for such a wee village.” He wondered how he could ask which guests at the tea party had been present without seeming too obvious. “Does Connie attend when she’s staying at her mother’s?”
“No, she never has. And she didn’t arrive until after…you know. But we do have a guest on occasion. This week it was Felicity Parker giving some tips on how to find an agent. She had some business with Patricia and was kind enough to stay for the club.”
Rex looked around for Felicity.
“She’s inside with her client,” Dot informed him. “Fortunately, the story’s almost finished. Patricia said she can’t bear to look at it. Says it’s her last one.”
“Hopefully, Felicity will persuade her otherwise.”
“I think she’s in there doing just that.”
Roger, returning with his refill of tea and a glass of lemonade, said Patricia probably just wanted to get on with burying her cat and for everyone to go home. He drew up a spare chair, since Dot was sitting in his.
“Roger,” she said in a whining voice, “I sometimes think you say things just for effect, without the least regard for how they might sound.”
“Just as well I’m not a writer then. I’d be censored right, left and centre by every book club in Britain!”
“Roger’s right,” Charles interjected from his chair, removing the peas from his ankle. “Once Archie is laid to rest, perhaps we can all get back to our lives.”
*
“Charles, don’t be so heartles
s,” Dot said.
“I didn’t mean to be.”
“What are you knitting, Dot?” Roger asked. “Is that robin egg blue? Lovely colour.”
“It’s a baby blanket for the WI.”
Rex was hypnotized by Dot’s deft fingers as the woollen square grew before his eyes.
“Archie was ailing, let’s not forget.” Roger set his empty cup under his chair. “Better to have him go out with a bang. I’m sure Felicity will put out a press release. There’ll be a surge in sales once word gets out. Perhaps news of his ‘murder’ will introduce Claude to a whole new readership. ‘Who is the cat killer?’ everyone will be asking. Can you imagine the outrage from cat lovers all over the world?”
“You don’t sound overly fond of Archie,” Charles remarked. “For one who created his fictional image.”
“He was a cat, for God’s sake. Naturally, I’m sorry for Patricia. I know it’s hard to lose a pet, especially a cash cow. But Archie was not the saint she makes him out to be. He got to be very demanding, imperious even, and she was at his constant beck and call. Archie this, and Archie that. And would you just look at Archie!” Roger downed the rest of his lemonade and crunched on an ice cube. Rex wondered again if he wore dentures. He was still a handsome man, if a bit haughty-looking.
“Not to mention the hairballs he chucked up all over the place,” Charles said with distaste. “One time I found one on the bed.”
Rex wished now he’d been more insistent about staying at Madeline’s bed-and-breakfast.
“Truth be told,” said Roger, who seemed inclined to tell the truth at every turn, “the last two Claude books didn’t do nearly as well as their predecessors, like I told Rex earlier. It appears the great Patricia Forsyth is losing her touch and running out of ideas.”
“Really, Roger!” Dot chided without missing a beat in her sewing.
He continued regardless. “Sales have dwindled dramatically, according to her editor, whom I dined with last week. Claude the Contortionist Cat and Claude the Contrary Cat had ‘weak and predictable plots,’ the reviews said, and lacked the cautionary aspect that parents had come to love so much. ‘See what happened to Claude when he got too inquisitive?’ ” Roger said, his voice denoting quotation marks. “ ‘That’s right! His tail got stuck in a mousetrap!’ Or, ‘Look what happened to Claude when he gazed in the mirror once too often. He saw the image of a bigger, meaner cat that Horrible Harry had pasted over the looking glass, and was so frightened he wouldn’t look at his reflection again!’ That was in Claude the Conceited Cat.”
“My son loved those books when he was a bairn,” Rex reminisced aloud. “Not sure it cured him of mirrors, though. He is pretty vain.”
Roger barked out a laugh. “Aren’t we all! Well, Archie’s nine lives are well and truly over now, poor bugger. But at least his were blessed. And he made it to one hundred and twenty-six in human years! That I should be so lucky. Thank God it’s a closed casket. Frankly, I find the whole thing frightfully gruesome. So much more pleasant if we could all be playing croquet on the lawn. Oh, there’s Noel sitting on his own. Excuse me while I go say hello. I don’t want him to think I’m avoiding him.”
He wandered off, to Rex’s disappointment. Roger had a penchant for gossip, which might come in useful. And he appeared to be perceptive. Perhaps with his artist’s eye he could see behind the subject at hand. Certainly, Rex would not have wanted to be on the receiving end of his acerbic wit.
“This is Faye,” Patricia announced out of the blue, practically dragging a young woman over to Rex’s chair. A rather delicate name for such a chunk of girl, Rex thought. Her appearance was slovenly, her dun hair loosely bound in a ponytail, her frock a size too big on her large frame.
“I ‘do’ for Mrs. Forsythe,” she explained in a broad Sussex accent. Her slightly crossed eyes made her look slow-witted or else sly. “I didn’t miss it, did I?” she asked her employer. “I wouldn’t want to miss poor Archie’s burial, only me mum needed me. I’ve so many younger brothers and sisters, you wouldn’t believe!” she told Rex, who smiled at her candour. “I almost missed the bus.”
“You’re just in time,” Patricia assured her.
Rex recalled that in the event of the cat surviving Patricia, the will provided that Faye should live at the Poplars and take care of him until his natural death, whereupon she was to receive a sizeable amount of money to start again somewhere, and the house would then go to Connie and Charles. In the reverse event, Faye would receive a gratuity of three thousand pounds, a substantial amount for a girl of her means.
Patricia moved off, muttering something about making sure everything was in place for the ceremony. Rex inferred he was meant to speak to the girl and find out what he could.
“This is very hard on her,” she said, gazing after Patricia. “She was bonkers about Archie. He was the perfect nap cat-lap cat. Just a big softie, really.”
“Hard on you too, she told me.” Aside from being saddened by Archie’s death, Faye must be disappointed not to benefit from the more generous terms of the will. But perhaps she was fonder of Patricia than Archie…
Faye plopped down on Roger’s chair. Dot had finished sewing his button on his cardigan and went to present it to him. Charles was limping around the tea table, so no one was within earshot as Rex prepared to glean what information he could from Patricia’s fortnightly help.
“I understand that Patricia holds you in such high regard that she entrusted you with the care of her cat and also the house in the event of her demise.”
Faye nodded solemnly. “I would’ve stayed here fulltime to take care of the place and Archie, if it had been the other way round than what happened, and been more than glad to do it. But I never really expected Archie to outlive Mrs. F. I mean, he was a cat. He was getting on in years, and she’s as fit as a fiddle. It was just in case she was run over by a bus or something, I s’ppose. She couldn’t bear the idea of him being homeless, and she didn’t want him put with a family that might mistreat him, or him put back in a cat shelter. He didn’t really like other cats.”
“Or dogs,” Dot remarked, returning to resume her knitting.
“What aboot Connie or Charles?” Rex asked Faye over the clatter of needles. “Couldn’t they have taken care of him?”
“Miss Connie is too busy with her kids. And Mr. Charles has got only a small flat in London. Archie would’ve been miserable there. I think Miss Connie would like to live at the Poplars. Without her mum, I mean. It’s great for kids here. Nice and safe.”
“Do you know if she left you something in her will in the current situation?” Rex enquired disingenuously, knowing the answer and taking the opportunity of Dot being in conversation with a new arrival standing over her chair, a man in Wellington boots who had a loud blustering voice.
“I’m sure I don’t.” The young woman blushed all over her plain face, though made significantly less plain by comparison with all the older guests. “I’m only part-time, but I been coming here going on four years.”
So she would know the family quite well, Rex deduced from that. “If Connie or Charles could not have taken Archie in, could one of them not have moved back here?”
Faye’s crossed eyes widened as she appeared to wonder at all his questions. But not for long. “Like I said, Miss Connie’s got enough on her plate already what with being a single mum, and Archie did demand quite a bit of attention. And Mr. Charles isn’t partial to cats. Mrs. F. wanted to keep Archie in his ‘accustomed habitat,’ is what she said, and,” here Faye flushed again, “she confided to me that she didn’t want Miss Connie’s two kids what she called ‘terrorizing’ poor Archie.”
Patricia interrupted to introduce the large man in wellies, who was holding, somewhat incongruously, a delicate china tea cup and saucer. “Reginald, I’d like you to meet Doug Strange. He’s the local veterinarian. He can’t stay long.” She seemed anxious for him to talk to the vet, and took herself off again, leading Faye away with her on the pretext of
needing her help.
“I dropped by to see how Patricia was getting on,” the vet told Rex. He had a neatly clipped greying moustache that ran along the length of his top lip and put Rex in mind of a broom brush. “I was delivering a calf at the Parridge farm. I understand she plans a small ceremony here in the garden with a marble plaque to mark the spot. ‘In loving memory of Archie,’ sort of thing. ‘May the wicked be avenged.’ That bit is probably not part of the engraving, but I’m sure it’s implied.” Dr. Strange winked with complicity. “She’s on a crusade to find out who killed her cat, as you know. Though she told everybody he had simply eaten some foxglove.”
“I’m not sure of the details of the ceremony. But, aye, Patricia got me down here to look into Archie’s possible murder.”
“Presumably she thought you, being a barrister, could get to the bottom of it?”
“Something like that.” No point going into his hobby of solving murder cases, which he undertook in his spare time. These had never involved an animal before. “She told me Archie had been poisoned.”
The vet nodded. “Toxicosis. I found digitalis in his stomach. Patricia insisted I look for poison, having found some bits of purple petal in his vomit. Given the symptoms and evidence, I was able to narrow it down. Shame. Nice animal and a good patient. Didn’t try to claw me up like a lot of cats when I examined him in the past. He seemed to understand it was for his own good.”
“Would he have had many good years left?”
“Hard to say. Cats are among the most resilient of creatures, and very stoic. Sometimes it’s hard to know how much they’re suffering. Archie was slowing down, like the rest of us, but he still had quality of life. He was very alert, and, of course, brought Patricia so much comfort in her old age.”
“No question about the poison, then?”
“None.”
“Could he have eaten it accidentally?”
“Cats have more sense. Dogs, on the other hand, get into all sorts of things. In any case, I found the foxglove diced up in the contents of his stomach. Couldn’t have done that himself. Stitched him back together, though, good as new. Patricia insisted.”
SAY GOODBYE TO ARCHIE: A Rex Graves Mini-Mystery Page 4
