“Perhaps he never found anyone as special as Donna,” Jeanne said, “or he never found anyone as wonderful as Mabel. She was the standard by which he judged all women, of course. She was pretty amazing, maybe he could never find anyone who measured up to her.”
“Marilyn seems to think he knows more about Mabel’s death than he’s ever admitted,” Fenella said cautiously.
“She’s been saying that for fifty years,” Jeanne laughed. “She also always insisted that Mabel was seeing someone behind all of our backs. I always thought she made that up to make it seem as if she were Mabel’s closest friend. That would have garnered her even more sympathy, you see.”
“So you don’t think Clyde is hiding anything?”
“He might be, I suppose. As I said, we all drifted apart after Mabel’s death. I don’t know that I spoke to him more than once or twice after the funeral.”
“The fight at the funeral wasn’t to do with him hiding anything, was it?”
Jeanne sat back and shut her eyes. After a long silence, she shook her head. “I truly don’t remember much about the funeral. We started drinking as soon as the church service was over. Donna had a bottle of wine in her car and the three of us drank the whole bottle on our way to Mabel’s parents’ house. Alcohol flowed pretty freely there, too. The whole day is really something of a blur.”
“Was Mabel seeing someone secretly?”
“Not as far as I knew, but I wasn’t always privy to all of her secrets. We worked together and spent a lot of time together, but sometimes that seemed to make her less inclined to tell me things. She didn’t want me to nag or tease her at work, I suppose.”
“If she were seeing someone, who might it have been?”
“That’s an impossible question,” Jeanne laughed. “It wouldn’t have been anyone I knew, I don’t suppose. She mentioned once that Mr. Neil, the advocate that we worked for, had asked her to go away for a weekend. When he asked me the same thing, I threatened to tell his wife.”
“But the third woman in your office went along with him.”
Jeanne laughed again. “Helen was a few years older and worried about becoming an old maid. To be fair to her, though, she and Mr. Neil stayed together for the rest of his life, so maybe she did truly care about him.”
The pair fell silent for a minute. Fenella wasn’t sure what Jeanne was thinking. Fenella was trying to work out how to bring the conversation around to Howard and Patricia Quinn.
“Did Mabel ever tell you that Howard Quinn had made a similar suggestion?” she asked eventually.
Jeanne looked startled and then shook her head. “Did someone tell you that or are you just speculating?” she demanded.
“No one has said anything to me to suggest that he did anything inappropriate,” Fenella said quickly. “It was just something that crossed my mind.”
“They live here, you know. I saw you talking to them earlier, actually. Did you know who they were then?”
“They introduced themselves. Howard doesn’t like to talk about Mabel.”
“He didn’t like to talk about her when she was alive. He wanted to sell the house, but Patricia wouldn’t agree. Since she was so determined to rent it out, he went out of his way to find a tenant that he knew Patricia wouldn’t approve of in the slightest. They put poor Mabel right in the middle of their marriage’s power struggle.”
“How unpleasant for Mabel.”
“She put up with it because the house was nice and it was affordable. Patricia used to drop in unannounced at all sorts of odd times. I’m not certain what she thought she was going to find, but no doubt she was hoping to find something that would have allowed her to throw Mabel out of the house.”
“Someone else mentioned her visits to me,” Fenella told her.
“She’d come in the middle of the month and demand the rent payment, too. Sometimes Mabel would pay Howard, but he wouldn’t tell Patricia and then she’d insist that Mabel give her more money. When she first moved in, Mabel thought the whole thing was going to be friendly since the Quinns knew her parents so well, but before long she found that she had to get receipts for the rent every time she paid it and that getting things repaired was always an issue.”
“Someone told me that Howard handled all of the repairs himself.”
“He did, and he wasn’t very good at them. I think he repaired the same bathroom tap about six times in three weeks, and I’m sure Mabel was still complaining about it after that. If Patricia had been a little bit nicer, I might have almost felt sorry for her, really.”
“But she wasn’t nice?”
“She was horrible. She didn’t approve of women living on their own. The house was hers and she seemed to be terrified that Mabel might accidentally knock down a wall or start tearing doors off of hinges or something. As I said, she used to visit all the time. I’m sure she’d have been even more upset to find Mabel alone in the house with a man than if Mabel had actually knocked down a wall, though.”
“Presumably Mabel was alone in the house with Howard, though,” Fenella said thoughtfully.
Jeanne raised an eyebrow. “You aren’t suggesting that Mabel had an affair with Howard, are you?”
“Why not?”
“He was older and very married. Mabel could be impulsive and even deliberately shocking, but I can’t see her taking up with the man who co-owned the house where she was living. There were plenty of other married men around, after all.”
“Including Mr. Neil, although he was older, too, wasn’t he?”
“Much older, maybe thirty-five or even forty. At the time that seemed old, anyway. I suppose Howard was only around thirty, but he seemed older. He and Patricia were friends with Mabel’s parents, after all. It felt as if they belonged to that generation rather than ours.”
“Do you ever speak to them?” Fenella wondered.
“No, although I don’t go out of my way to avoid them, either. In spite of appearances today, very few of us actually spend much time in the residents’ lounge here. We all have our own flats and we tend to come and go much as we did when we lived in houses elsewhere on the island. Aaron and I were quite happy in our little house in Onchan, but the garden was becoming more and more of a struggle. Our youngest daughter was the one who finally convinced us to move here, and we don’t regret the decision, at least not yet.”
“I wonder why Howard and Patricia are here.”
“Perhaps Patricia grew tired of always having leaky taps,” Jeanne suggested. “We have maintenance staff on call here all the time. When we need something repairing, we only have to ring and someone comes and takes care of it within hours. Everything we’ve had done has been done right the first time, too.”
“There was another name that came up when I was talking about Mabel with someone. Do you remember Stanley Middleburgh?”
“It will have been Donna who brought him up,” Jeanne said with a laugh. “She was rather obsessed with the poor man.”
“Really?”
“Poor man is altogether the wrong way to put things, though. Stanley was incredibly wealthy, but equally, incredibly odd. He lived in the house next door to Mabel’s and he used to sit outside and stare at all of us when we were visiting. I always thought he was just a rather sad and lonely man who needed some friends, but Donna thought he was creepy.”
“Do you know what happened to him?”
“He moved to Canada right after Mabel died. I think it was Canada, anyway. It might have been Australia. It was somewhere quite far away, anyway.”
“Was he a suspect in the murder investigation? The papers never mentioned his name.”
“I’m sure his parents paid handsomely on a regular basis to keep his name out of the papers. As I said, I always thought he was harmless, but he did behave oddly from time to time.”
“Oddly?”
“He used to go to ShopFast and fill his trolley with just one type of thing, maybe biscuits, for example. He’d fill a trolley completely full with packets of biscuits and then push
it to the front of the store. Sometimes he’d pay for everything and then pass out the bags full of biscuits to random people walking past. Other times, he’d abandon the trolley and wander off without paying. I remember one day when I was there he handed me a bag full of cereal boxes. When I got home, I found I had five boxes of the same cereal. It took me ages to get through them all.”
“That is rather unusual behavior,” Fenella said wondering what doctors might diagnose the man with if they had him as a patient today.
“I sometimes thought that he was just bored. His father wouldn’t or couldn’t employ him and I believe he’d left school at sixteen. I don’t know what he did all day long, really, but he seemed to spend most of his evenings sitting outside watching Mabel and the rest of us.”
“Was he home the night of the murder?”
“I wish I knew the answer to that. The police would never say and I never saw him again after Mabel died. If he was home, he must have seen the killer coming or going, though.”
“You don’t think he might have killed her himself?”
“I can’t imagine any motive for him. As far as I know, he never even tried to speak to Mabel. He certainly never tried to speak to me, not even when I waved to him on my way in or out of Mabel’s house.”
“Could he have been the man Mabel was seeing in secret?”
“There wasn’t any man,” Jeanne said firmly. “Anyway, if she had started a relationship with Stanley, she would have told everyone. He was odd, but he was very wealthy. She’d have been bragging everywhere and showing off expensive presents, I’m sure.”
“I think we need to start gathering up kittens,” Crystal said in Fenella’s ear.
Fenella nodded and then slowly got to her feet. “I’m going to have to take her back as well,” she told Jeanne, gesturing toward the mother cat.
“Did someone say they were all available for adoption?” she asked. “We could keep her, couldn’t we?” she asked Aaron.
He looked startled and then stared at the cat for a moment. “I’m not sure we want another animal,” he said after a minute. “I thought we both agreed that once the children were grown we weren’t going to have any more dogs or cats.”
“But look how adorable she is,” Jeanne cooed.
Aaron looked at Fenella and then winked at her. “We’ll talk about it,” he said. “I’m not making any promises, though.”
Jeanne gave the cat a hug and then handed her to Fenella. “It was nice talking to you,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting the trip down memory lane, but after talking to the police yesterday, I’m starting to feel more comfortable with the subject.”
“You should think about getting together with the others again,” Fenella urged her. “It might be awkward, but I think you’d all benefit.”
Jeanne shrugged. “I’ll think about it, but like Aaron, I’m not making any promises.”
Fenella decided to be happy with that for now. She carried the cat to her carrier and put her inside. Three of the kittens had already been located, and it didn’t take long for the fourth to turn up, as one of the residents slid her foot into her shoes and nearly stepped on the hidden animal.
“Thank you again for your visit,” Crystal told her as she walked Fenella and the animals out. “I think we’ll have homes for all of the kittens by the time they’re ready to leave their mother.”
“The woman I was speaking with might want the mother cat,” Fenella told her.
“I’m going to ring Mr. Stone later today, once I’ve spoken to a few of the residents in more depth. If the kittens will be ready to leave their mother next week, maybe you could bring them over on Tuesday?”
“Have Mr. Stone let me know what you need me to do,” Fenella told her.
“I will do,” Crystal promised.
Fenella climbed into her car and drove slowly away. “Did you hear that? You all might have new homes,” she told the cats, trying to ignore the rush of sadness that accompanied her words. She was happy the kittens were going to get good homes, but she was also going to miss them. No matter how difficult they were to look after, they were also sweet, and part of her wished she could keep them all.
It was time for lunch, and she was starving, but she had to take the cats home before she could think about food. After letting them out of their carriers and giving them all some food, Fenella headed back to the car. She’d stop home to see Katie and then order pizza, she thought. Maybe she should grab Chinese on her way to her apartment. With her thoughts focused on food, she slid behind the steering wheel. When someone knocked on the driver’s door window, she jumped.
“How many of my witnesses did you meet today, then?” Daniel asked her.
“Howard and Patricia Quinn and Jeanne Reese,” Fenella replied.
He shook his head. “Want to get lunch at the pub around the corner?” he asked.
Fenella thought about her answer for half a second and then nodded. “Sure, why not?”
12
As the pub was only a short distance away, the pair decided to walk rather than drive there.
“How are the kittens?” Daniel asked as they strolled down the sidewalk.
“They’re good. I’m pretty sure one of them knows how to get in and out of the playpen and maybe even up the stairs, but it hasn’t caused too much trouble, so I’m not worrying about it.”
Daniel laughed. “Famous last words.”
“I know, I’m tempting fate. I may have homes for them, anyway.” She told Daniel about the nursing home visits. “I only need each place to take two kittens and I’m done,” she concluded happily. “I’m pretty sure Jeanne is going to take the mother cat, but if she doesn’t, I’m hoping they’ll have her at the Tale and Tail.”
“I never thought about that. Maybe they’d take the kittens, too.”
“I’ve never seen kittens there, but if the nursing homes decide against taking them, I may have to ask.”
The pub was quiet as they walked into the main dining room. Daniel went to the bar to order their soft drinks while Fenella read through the menu. By the time he was back, her stomach was rumbling.
“Today’s special is steak and kidney pudding,” he told her as he handed her a glass.
She shook her head. “Chicken casserole,” she said firmly. “It was the first thing on the menu that caught my eye and now I can’t think about anything else.”
Daniel went back to the bar to order as Fenella sat back in her seat. There were only a few other occupied tables scattered around the large room. She didn’t recognize anyone.
“Tell me about your day, then,” Daniel said when he’d rejoined her. “You told me how things went for the kittens. Now I want to hear what the various witnesses had to say.”
Fenella nodded. “I met Howard and Patricia first,” she began. The food arrived as she switched to talking about Jeanne. They were both done eating by the time she’d finished talking.
“Interesting,” was that Daniel said. “What about pudding?”
Fenella glanced at the menu and then nodded. “The warm brownie with ice cream sounds like exactly what I need.”
While Daniel was at the bar, Fenella checked her phone. She’d missed a call from Shelly, who’d left a voice mail message.
“I was just wondering when you were going to visit Katie today. I’m having lunch with Tim, but I should be home after two,” the message said.
A glance at her watch showed Fenella that she still had a few minutes before Shelly would be home. That would give her time to enjoy her pudding, then. The walk back to her car was definitely slower than the walk the other way had been.
“What are your plans for the rest of the day?” Daniel asked when they finally reached Fenella’s house.
“I’m going to pop home and visit with Katie for a while. That’s about all I have planned,” she replied, feeling like a friendless loser.
“I have to work until six. Do you want to meet me at the Tale and Tail around half six? You could talk to th
em about the mother cat and the kittens and we could have a drink together.”
“I’d like that, but I won’t be drinking, not when I have to drive afterward.”
Daniel nodded. “Why don’t I collect you here at half six, then? I can drive us both and that way you can have a drink.”
“You don’t mind not drinking?”
“I’m on call tonight anyway. I can’t even have a drink at home.”
“In that case, I’ll see you here around six-thirty,” Fenella agreed happily. It had been a long time since she and Daniel had gone out together. Maybe tonight would be a new beginning in their romantic relationship.
“Make sure you invite Shelly along,” he added as she climbed into her car. “She always has interesting insights into my cases.”
Fenella forced herself to keep smiling as she slowly backed out of the driveway and drove away. As she stopped at the stop sign on the corner, she sighed deeply. So much for a romantic evening. Daniel just wanted to talk about the case and he wanted Shelly’s perspective.
She let herself into her apartment and then called Shelly. “Do you want to bring Katie and Smokey over here for a change of scenery?” she invited.
“That sounds good,” Shelly agreed. The trio was at her door a minute later.
Mona settled into a chair and smiled at Fenella. “This is better. The flat feels empty without you here.”
Fenella only just managed to stop herself from replying. Shelly couldn’t see or hear Mona and Fenella wasn’t ready to tell anyone else about her ghostly roommate.
“Daniel asked me to invite you to join us at the pub tonight,” she told Shelly after a brief chat. “He said you always have interesting insights into his cases.”
“Do I? I didn’t realize. I haven’t been to the pub since you’ve been staying on Poppy Drive. I’d love to come along if I won’t be in the way.”
“Daniel told me to invite you.”
Mona laughed. “You’re avoiding the question,” she told Fenella.
Shelly narrowed her eyes at Fenella. “But are you okay with that?”
“You know I love spending time with you.”
Kittens and Killers Page 18
