The Cat That Played The Tombola

by Fiona Snyckers

  “Sure. I just don’t think he’s a murderer. There’ll be an investigation into where his Arsenicum came from and whether he knew about it, but my feeling is that the poisoning was accidental and had nothing to do with Mrs. Saville’s murder. The poor lady started taking it for an upset stomach and just got sicker and sicker.”

  “And all the while Malkin was telling her that the pain was the disease leaving her body. You can see why I’m not too broken up at the thought of him leaving the island.”

  “This simplifies things,” said Fay, putting pieces of the puzzle together in her mind. “It never made sense to me why someone would go to all the trouble of poisoning her over weeks, and then just when she was on the brink of becoming irreversibly ill, they shot her. It wasn’t logical. Now I think I understand.”

  “Do you know who did it? Do you know who pulled that trigger?”

  “Yes. I think I do.”

  He gave her a look of deep suspicion. “I know that expression. I hope you don’t have some hare-brained scheme in mind for trapping this person.”

  Fay smiled. “As a matter of fact …”

  The door to the laboratory flew open and Laetitia walked in, startling them both.

  “Laetitia …”

  “You told me you were working tonight.”

  “And so I am. I’ve been testing medication found at the home of the woman I autopsied earlier this week.”

  “What is she doing here?”

  “Do you mean Fay? She’s helping me. Laetitia, why do you sound so …?”

  “I’ll be off now,” said Fay. “Thanks for your help, David. Nice to see you again, Laetitia. Bye now.”

  She sidestepped Laetitia and speed-walked out of the surgery.

  “Fay! Wait a second.” David sounded harassed. “I said don’t do anything crazy …”

  Fay smiled again. Crazy was exactly what she had in mind.

  Chapter 26

  Fay pulled the dress over her head and slid her arms through the delicate cap sleeves. It was a bias-cut wrap dress in cherry red. It fell to just above her knees with a flounced hem.

  It was Fay’s summertime first-date dress. This was the first time she was wearing it on Bluebell Island. She took her hair out of its customary ponytail and brushed it into waves over her shoulders. Then she slipped her feet into a pair of strappy heels and added a slick of lipgloss.

  “Wish me luck, guys,” she said to the puddle of kittens that were sleeping in their basket.

  She closed her bedroom door and descended the staircase just as Morwen was coming up, clutching a bedtime mug of cocoa.

  “Wow.” Morwen stopped dead. “Look at you. Where’s the ball, Cinderella?”

  “Nothing so glamorous, unfortunately. I’m off to do a spot of rat-catching.”

  “Well, I like your rat-catching outfit. It seems a shame to waste it on a rat.”

  Fay smoothed the dress over her hips. “I hear you. I’d rather be wearing it to a party or a gallery opening, but I needed to bait my trap.”

  “What are you going to do if the rat turns nasty?”

  Fay opened her clutch purse. It seemed too big for such a delicate dress. She tilted it to show Morwen the gun inside.

  “I have my trusty sidearm here to protect me.”

  Morwen’s eyes widened. “Is that your service weapon?”

  “No. I had to hand that back when I resigned from the force. But it’s the same make and model – a Smith & Wesson 5906. I got used to it and now nothing else will do.”

  “I can’t tell you how much I hope you won’t have to use it.”

  “Me too,” said Fay, and she meant it.

  “If you’re not back by midnight, I’m calling the police station.”

  “Sure, Mom. But try texting me first. I might be wrapping things up.”

  Fay said goodbye to Morwen and went on her way. Part of her wished that she was also retiring to bed with a mug of cocoa and a good murder mystery. But this had been going on long enough. It was time to bring it to an end.

  She parked the Volvo two blocks from her destination. The engine had a distinctive growl and she didn’t want to tip her quarry off that she was coming.

  She walked the rest of the way, regretting the high, skinny heels of her shoes with every step. When she reached a small, shabby house with peeling paint on the front door, she stopped and knocked.

  For a moment it seemed as though there was no one home. Fay was about to knock again when she heard footsteps approaching. The door swung open and she found herself looking into the surprised face of the local vet.

  “You.”

  “Hello, Martin. Can I come in?”

  He peered over her shoulder. “Are you alone? Is there something wrong with your cats?”

  “I’m all alone and this has nothing to do with the cats. It’s a personal matter, not a professional one. Please let me in. I’m freezing to death out here.”

  His eyes flicked over her outfit. “You’re not exactly appropriately dressed for a night in May. I suppose you’d better come in, although I can’t imagine why you’d want to. You made it perfectly clear that we have nothing personal to say to each other.”

  He led her to a small living room where he had obviously been playing on his X-Box.

  “That was then,” said Fay. “This is now. You were a different person then. Or rather, I didn’t know what you had the potential to become.”

  He flung himself into an armchair and gave her a sarcastic look. “You mean I’ve got money now, so suddenly you’re interested.”

  Fay glanced at her phone and tapped the RECORD button. Then she placed it face down on the table between them.

  “It has nothing to do with that, although money’s always nice. But I happen to have plenty of my own. It’s more about having a certain quality – a certain, what is the word, ruthlessness?”

  “Is that so?” He folded his arms and looked at her.

  “It is. You must understand how you appeared to me back then, Martin. A small-time village vet, barely scraping by, unable to cope with a large-animal practice, lacking the ambition to move on. You weren’t a very admirable figure, were you?”

  “If I’m such a loser, what are you doing here?”

  “You’ve changed, Martin. Look at you now. You’re a man of substance. You can afford to move away from this two-bit village and live the life you deserve. I can’t help but admire that.”

  “I didn’t do anything to deserve it. It was just luck – pure good fortune.” He interrupted himself. “I mean, bad fortune, of course. Mrs. Saville’s death was a tragedy and I’m sorry to have profited by it. But we meant so much to each other. It’s special that she remembered me in her will.”

  Fay smirked. “Yes, I feel the same way about my grandmother. It’s so special that she left me everything in her will. You might even call it convenient.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, come on. I was sure you had figured it out. You know what really happened.”

  There was an arrested look in his eyes, but he seemed reluctant to commit himself. “You’re talking about …?”

  “My grandmother. You don’t really think she passed away in her sleep, do you? You don’t think she had a little help?”

  He gaped at her. “But you weren’t even on the island.”

  “Let’s rather say that no one knew I was on the island. A private chartered boat under cover of darkness. Another chartered boat back to the mainland. It’s not that complicated.”

  “Are you telling me that you …?”

  “My grandmother was old.” Fay spread her arms wide and shrugged. “It was her time. No one wants to live forever. Especially when there’s a new generation waiting to take over.”

  As she held his eyes with a hard, amused gaze, Fay mentally apologized to her grandmother. It hurt her to say such things, even with the goal of catching a very bad man.

  “I can’t believe this. I had no idea.”

  “I come from New
York City, Martin. We do things differently there. Violence doesn’t shock me. Not when it’s a tool to get what I want.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “I’m trusting you with my secret. You could ruin me with this information. You could have me arrested like that.” She snapped her fingers.

  “What makes you so sure I won’t?”

  “Because we’re the same, you and I. That’s why we belong together. I didn’t see it at first, but now I do. I didn’t realize what you were capable of. You did exactly the same thing as I did, and I can’t help but admire that.”

  “I’m not admitting anything,” said Martin. “But what made you figure it out?”

  “You told me that you had no idea of how much money Mrs. Saville was worth, but later you mentioned her husband’s full name and revealed that you knew all about his property business and who he had left his money to.”

  Martin’s lips tightened. “That’s not much to go on.”

  Fay took a shot in the dark.

  “I found the empty ammunition box inside the tombola barrel. It has your fingerprints on it.”

  There was a long silence.

  “That’s … unexpected,” he said slowly. “I thought it wouldn’t be found for another year or more.”

  “The part I don’t get is how you managed to get the key to the prop room at the theatre. Raymond Garver had one copy of the key, and there was another hanging in the front office of the theatre. That office is kept locked most of the time.”

  “I made a copy of the prop room key weeks ago. Right after I took the ammunition from Lady Chadwick’s display cabinet.”

  Fay clapped her hands in glee. “I knew that was you.”

  Martin held up a key with no tag attached. “Here it is.”

  “You are so clever.”

  Afterwards, Fay couldn’t be sure why he had done what he did next. Something in her act must have stuck him as false. One moment he was dangling the key in front of her and grinning, and the next he lunged forward to grab her phone off the table and look at the screen.

  “I knew it,” he said. “I knew you were faking. Look at this – you’ve been recording me.”

  Thinking fast, Fay leaned forward in her chair, bracing herself with one hand on her purse.

  “Just hedging my bets. I’ve trusted you with a lot of information tonight. I needed to be sure I had insurance.”

  He jumped to his feet and loomed over her.

  “I don’t believe you. I think you wanted to trick me into confessing. You said I was a violent man, and you weren’t wrong about that. Now you’re going to find out exactly what that means.”

  Fay sat frozen into place. Her purse was under her right hand. She could feel the outline of her gun through the fabric. But this wasn’t the plan. She had not wanted to use it. One of her personal rules of gun ownership was that you didn’t carry a weapon unless you were prepared to use it. She had come here prepared to use it, but she had very much hoped that it wouldn’t be necessary.

  “You’ve got this all wrong.” She put a quaver in her voice.

  “Oh, so now you’re scared? Maybe you should have thought of that before you came into my home and recorded our private conversation.”

  He drew his hand back in what she knew was going to be an attempt to hit her.

  “I’m combat-trained, you know.”

  He sneered. “I don’t care. Any man can beat any woman in a fight, no matter what training she might have.”

  Before Fay could show him how mistaken he was about that, a sound of hammering at the front door made them jump.

  “Open up! Police! Open up.”

  Martin’s eyes darted around the room. He was a cornered creature, looking for escape.

  The next moment, the door burst open and Sergeant Jones and David Dyer almost fell into the room.

  “How did you figure out where I was?”

  Sergeant Jones and Constable Chegwin loaded Martin into the back of the police van. His hands were cuffed behind his back because he had attempted to resist arrest.

  David and Fay watched as they drove off with their lights flashing but no siren.

  “What was that?” David turned to her as they walked down the High Street to where she had left her car. “Oh, how I found you. There were a couple of false starts. Once I managed to escape from …” He stopped and tried again. “Once I had said goodnight to Laetitia, I drove all over the village looking for you. I was worried that you were doing something crazy, and it turns out I was right.”

  “I wouldn’t say it was crazy.”

  “I would. What else would you call confronting a murderer on your own and trying to trap him into confessing?”

  “A good plan?”

  David snorted. “An insane plan. If Sergeant Jones and I hadn’t come in when we did, he was going to attack you.”

  “He would have discovered that I’m not nearly as easy to attack as he thought. You and Sergeant Jones didn’t rescue me. I was all set to rescue myself.”

  He smiled and shook his head.

  “I was,” she insisted. “Although, I will admit it was a very welcome interruption. Any altercation I might have had with him would have complicated matters.”

  “I would have got there sooner, but first I visited Penrose House to see what Mrs. Saville’s daughter was doing, and then I went to the theatre to see if you were in the middle of a confrontation with Raymond and Pippa. Then I went looking for Martin – the last suspect. I just hope there’s enough evidence to convict him.”

  “There’s my recording of our conversation during which he can clearly be heard confessing. There’s his copy of the key to the prop room that he had in his possession. And from the way he reacted when I mentioned it, I’m pretty sure his fingerprints will be found on the stolen box of ammunition. Also, I think that when Sergeant Jones examines his internet search history, he will find that he did considerable research into the Saville family and how much money Mrs. Saville owned.”

  “Good. I’d hate to think of him getting away with this.”

  They had arrived at Fay’s car.

  “Would you like a lift to the surgery?”

  David groaned. “I didn’t bring my own car. I came here in the police van with Jones and Chegwin. I think I’d rather walk.”

  Fay’s eyes challenged him. “Afraid to be alone with me, David?”

  “Afraid of this rattletrap car, more like,” he grumbled.

  Then he smiled his rare smile and climbed in beside her.

  The Cat’s Paw Cozy Mysteries Will Return

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  Look out for THE CAT THAT WASN’T THERE, Book Four of The Cat’s Paw Cozy Mystery series, releasing in January 2019 on Amazon Kindle.

  About the Author

  Fiona Snyckers is the author of the Trinity series of young adult novels, the Eulalie Park Mysteries series, as well as the suspense novel Now Following You and the high-concept thriller Spire. She has published various short stories in magazines and collections. The Cat’s Paw Cozy Mysteries is her latest series of murder-mystery novels. Fiona has been nominated four times for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize. She lives in Johannesburg, South Africa, with her family.

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