The Cat That Wasn't There Page 2

  “Evening, David,” said Fay. “Evening, Doc.”

  “Fay, love!” Doc Dyer gave her a hug.

  His son gave her a sideways look and a nod. “Fay.”

  “Where’s Sergeant Jones?”

  “I don’t know. This is getting ridiculous. David phoned him half an hour ago.” Doc Dyer took out his phone and jabbed at the number for the police station. “No answer,” he said after it had rung several times.

  “This is probably them now.” David pointed to a set of headlights that appeared over the hill.

  A police van pulled up on the grass next to them, and Sergeant Jones and Constable Chegwin hopped out.

  “Look at that,” Doc Dyer muttered. “Destroying evidence at the crime scene with their great big vehicle. Twits.”

  Fay snapped photographs of the body with her phone camera. Doc Dyer was right. This crime scene would shortly be contaminated beyond redemption.

  Sergeant Jones caught sight of the body and let out a snort of surprise. “Looks like I owe you a tenner, Ron,” he said to Constable Chegwin.

  “A tenner?” said Doc.

  “We had a bet that this would turn out to be a hoax. Or somebody’s old jacket lying in the grass. Turns out it was real. Who would have thought?” He caught sight of Fay. “Fay, love. I didn’t see you over there. You were the one who called it in?”

  “That’s right. It was around eight o’clock. I brought a carload of guests to watch the lighthouse turn on as part of our sunset tour. I didn’t show them the body or the whole thing would have turned into a circus.”

  “Very wise. Imagine all those civilians tramping around the crime scene.” Sergeant Jones finished the potato chips he was eating and tossed the bag into the grass.

  “Just imagine.” David bent to pick up the bag.

  “So, Docs.” Constable Chegwin examined the body in the illumination of the van’s headlights. “What have we here?”

  “An elderly lady of around the age of seventy,” said Doc Dyer. “She seems to have fallen from the viewing platform at the top of the lighthouse. David will do the autopsy to determine cause of death, but impact with the ground would have done it. I’d say she’s been here around six or seven hours. With your permission, Sergeant, we could roll her over and try to establish her identity.”

  “Morwen thinks she might have been one of the volunteers who works at the museum here on a rotating basis,” said Fay.

  “That’s not a bad guess.”

  David got the nod from Sergeant Jones and rolled the body over. “She looks familiar, but I can’t remember her name. How about you, Dad?”

  “It looks like Morwen was right,” said Doc Dyer. “This is Tabitha Trott. She was definitely on the Museums and Heritage Sites committee. I know because I’m on it myself. It’s a fair bet that she was one of the people who looked after the lighthouse museum. The last time I saw her, she seemed a little shaky. As though she had flu or something.”

  “Poor lady,” said David, looking up. “I wonder if it was an accident. The rail on that walkway looks rickety.”

  Everyone looked up, but it was now too dark to see much, even with the great beam of the lighthouse sweeping back and forth.

  “Look over here,” called Fay. “I’ve found a pair of eyeglasses.”

  She had been searching the surrounding grass with the flashlight on her phone.

  As Sergeant Jones came up to look, she picked them up using the sleeve of her jacket to cover her fingers.

  “Well, I never. A pair of spectacles.” He held out his hand for them.

  Fay hesitated. “Maybe we should slip them into an evidence bag without either of us touching them.”

  He slapped his forehead. “Evidence bags! I didn’t think of that. There should be some in the car.”

  When he came back with a bag, Fay dropped the spectacles into it.

  “They must have fallen off when she fell,” said Sergeant Jones. “Or they might have been knocked off by the impact. We should look for any other items lying around.”

  Fay checked the distance between the body and where the spectacles had been found. It was at least twenty yards. She looked up and met David’s eye. He also seemed to be measuring the distance in his mind.

  The policemen tramped around in the grass, sweeping their flashlights up and down, as they searched for more items. They came up with one cigarette butt and one sweet wrapper, both of which seemed to have been there for much longer than six hours.

  “That seems to be that,” said Sergeant Jones when they had finished. “We should get this body loaded up and off to the surgery for David to take a look at it.”

  “Don’t you want to examine the viewing platform?” asked Doc Dyer.

  Constable Chegwin strode across the grass to the heavy oak door that was set into the base of the lighthouse.

  “Locked,” he said after trying it. “I’m not sure we could bash it down either. It seems pretty solid.”

  “That door has stood for centuries,” said David. “I reckon it would withstand our efforts. You can check it out in the morning. I wonder what time it opens.”

  “Ten o’clock,” said Fay. “I have a schedule of all the museum openings. My guests are always asking about that.”

  Jones and Chegwin loaded the body into the van and drove off in the direction of the village.

  “We’d better get going too, Dad,” said David. “We’ll need to be there to let them in.”

  “You go ahead, lad. I’ll catch a lift with Fay. Can’t have her driving back at night all on her own.”

  David gave him a skeptical look but raised no objection. He followed the police van in his Range Rover.

  “Out with it,” said Fay as Doc Dyer climbed into her car next to her. “Why did you want to drive back with me? And don’t say it was to protect me from the perils of the dark. This is Bluebell Island. There are no perils. Unless you lean too far over the railings of the lighthouse, apparently.”

  “I wanted to tell you that she’s gone.”

  “She? She who?”

  “The she-devil,” Doc Dyer said with relish. “Dr. Laetitia Poynter, that’s who.”

  “And where has she gone?” Fay spoke as though the whereabouts of David’s high-flying, Harvard-educated physician girlfriend were of minimal interest to her.

  “Back to the States. I thought she’d never leave. Honestly, has that woman not got a job to get back to? I started dropping hints about how her practice would suffer if she was never there. Something obviously got through because she finally left yesterday.”

  “I’m sure you made her feel wanted.”

  “Oh, come on. You’re pleased she’s gone too. Admit it.”

  “My feelings are irrelevant. The question is whether or not David is pleased. He’s probably missing her.”

  “That’s the thing,” said David’s father. “He doesn’t seem to be. I heard him singing in the shower this morning for the first time in weeks.”

  Chapter 3

  Fay gave Doc Dyer a look.

  “You’re reading too much into it.”

  “Maybe. He’s certainly not ready to admit that he is happier when his girlfriend is in a different country.”

  “I don’t get that. If a relationship isn’t working, you break up and move on. I don’t see the point in investing time and energy in something that isn’t making you happy.”

  “My son is very loyal,” said Doc Dyer. “He and Laetitia have been jogging along in this unsatisfactory way for more than a year now. It’s as though he feels promised to her in some way. I think I told you once that she will have to be the one to end it, not him.”

  “And that’s not very likely, is it? Laetitia seems to have decided that David is the man for her.”

  Doc frowned. “He’s not though. David loves living here on the island. He’s never happier than when he’s hatching some scheme to bring better medical treatment to the village and make us more independent. Laetitia breaks out in hives if she has to s
pend more than a few days here. She still thinks she’s going to wean him off Bluebell Island and persuade him to move to a big city in America.”

  “And he still thinks she’ll learn to love the island?”

  “They are both deluded. Even if one of them wins the battle, they’re going to make the other one miserable. David has spent years in big cities. He knows he doesn’t want to live in one. And Laetitia isn’t suddenly going to be happy in a tiny village with no Barney’s, or Macy’s, or Saks Fifth Avenue.”

  They had stopped at the bottom of the road that led up to the surgery. It was a pedestrianized street, so Doc Dyer would have to walk the rest of the way.

  Fay shook her head.

  “Everything you say is true, Doc, but there’s nothing we can do about it. We can’t interfere.”

  “I just hate to see someone making a huge mistake, especially when it’s the person I love most in the world. But you’re right – we can’t interfere. Just promise me that you will spend some time with him as a friend over the next few days. Being with you cheers him up, Fay. He is never more animated and engaged than when he is helping you solve some mystery or other.”

  Fay smiled. “Laetitia disapproves of our mystery solving exploits.”

  “Laetitia can go and jump in a lake. She doesn’t control him.”

  “Does she know that?”

  Doc pulled a face. “Probably not. Thanks for the lift, Fay love. Come for lunch at the surgery tomorrow. You can hear the results of the autopsy on poor Tabitha. We’re having lamb chops. You’ll like our cook’s way of preparing them.”

  He hopped out of the car with a spryness that belied his sixty years. With a wave, he strode up the road towards the surgery.

  Fay woke at five-thirty the next morning to go for her usual three-mile run.

  The air was chilly at that time of the morning, with more than a hint of dampness. It had obviously rained during the night. She was glad that Tabitha Trott’s body had been discovered and taken into safe-keeping the night before. Hours of soaking rain would have destroyed every scrap of evidence on the scene.

  Swathes of sea mist still hung in the air as Fay ran along the boardwalk. They hovered like ghostly handkerchiefs, and she took a childlike pleasure from running through them and watching them get torn to shreds by her body.

  The sky was hazy, but there was a bright quality to the light that promised a beautiful morning later on. Fay remembered her mid-winter runs earlier in the year in pitch darkness, punctuated only by the old-fashioned lamps that illuminated the boardwalk. Now she could see quite far out to sea, even spotting the dark shadows of ships plying the Atlantic through the mist.

  At the mile-and-a-half mark, she turned back, reaching home just after six o’clock. A pale beam of early morning sunlight was striking the seaward side of Penrose House as she summited the cliff steps. It turned the pale-grey west-country stone to gold. The house had stood there for four hundred years, always under the ownership of an unbroken line of Penroses. Now it was Fay’s turn.

  Even though she had been born and brought up on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, this was her heritage. It was a great privilege to be a Penrose of Penrose House, but it was a responsibility too. Fay’s grandmother had been the one who’d had the idea of converting the old house into a B&B. The expensive conversions were almost complete when she had passed away unexpectedly in her sleep, leaving the house to Fay.

  Old Mrs. Penrose had been determined to transform Penrose House from a money pit into a money earner that could not only support itself but turn a profit too. Fay shared her vision and felt as though she were getting closer to attaining her grandmother’s dream every day.

  She went in through the kitchen door and ran upstairs to shower and dress for the day. She fed the kittens, promising them a long playtime in the garden when breakfast service was over.

  Then she trotted downstairs to join Morwen in the kitchen.

  Morwen had just started heating her skillets to fry sausages and bacon when Fay walked in.

  “Morning, Fay love.”

  “Morning, Morwen. Looks like it’s shaping up to be a beautiful day.”

  “A beautiful morning, anyway. You know how quickly the afternoons can change around here.”

  Fay took her home-made muffin batter out of the fridge, stirred it up, poured it into paper muffin cases, and put it in the oven. Then she took a tray of frosted lemon squares out of the freezer and set them on the counter to defrost.

  She opened a recipe book and started assembling the ingredients for chocolate banana bread. The guests of the Cat’s Paw would have three choices of baked goods with their breakfast that morning.

  “What do you have in mind for tea today?” asked Morwen.

  “I baked a batch of brownies with white chocolate drizzle last night after I got back from the lighthouse.”

  Morwen snapped her fingers. “That reminds me. I think I know who the victim might have been.”

  “What does the grapevine say?”

  Morwen was on about four different island WhatsApp groups, which meant that she always had the latest news, gossip, and rumors at her fingertips.

  “I hear Tabitha Trott hasn’t been seen since her shift at the Bluff Lighthouse museum yesterday afternoon. Her neighbors say the lights didn’t come on at her cottage last night and that there’s a bottle of milk still sitting on her doorstep. She normally meets the milkman at the door and takes it straight inside.”

  “The grapevine is correct, as usual. Doc Dyer recognized her. Did you know her at all?”

  “Of course. She was always one for volunteering. She worked as an administrator in real estate her whole adult life. Then she retired about ten years ago. She was one of those people who couldn’t settle down to retirement. She liked being active, so she started volunteer work.”

  “Doc Dyer said something about the Museums committee.”

  “The Museums and Heritage Sites committee. That’s where she found her calling.”

  “Kept her busy, did it?”

  “It did. She could babysit a different museum every day of the week. She’s been doing it for years now. Although…”

  “Although?” Fay asked as Morwen hesitated.

  “It’s probably nothing, but I’ve heard some funny rumors about Tabitha recently.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well … that she was getting a bit past it. People said she was starting to make mistakes.”

  Fay finished mashing her overripe bananas and added them to the batter. She stirred thoroughly and poured the mixture into two loaf tins.

  “How old was she, would you say?”

  “She must have been about seventy-five. I know she retired at sixty-five and she’s been working as a volunteer for at least ten years.”

  “Then maybe she was becoming forgetful. It’s natural enough at that age.”

  Morwen flipped the bacon carefully, taking care to avoid the spitting fat. “Maybe. She seemed fine to me when I saw her in the flower shop the other day. Maybe a little flustered and upset, but certainly sharp enough.”

  “Getting upset can happen when someone suspects that their mind isn’t as acute as it used to be.”

  “True. That’s the way it was with my grandmother. Either way, I’m really sorry she’s dead. I hear she might have fallen from the top - lost her footing on the walkway and tumbled over that old rail. Poor lady.”

  Fay slid the tins of banana bread into the oven and closed the door. “Yes. Poor lady.”

  She went to set out the fresh fruit, yoghurts, cereals, cold meats, and cheeses on the buffet in the breakfast room. Even with her large, catering-sized trays, it took several trips. Morwen had started on the scrambled eggs. If any of the guests wanted their eggs in another style, they could order them and Morwen would make them fresh. Her Eggs Benedict were particularly popular.

  The Cat’s Paw breakfasts were gaining traction on Bluebell Island in a way that Fay had not expected. She had thought that s
he and Morwen would always be able to calculate quantities according to the number of guests they had staying in the B&B at any one time. They hadn’t expected that the locals would start turning up, hoping for a table at breakfast time. But that was exactly what had been happening.

  Fay and Morwen soon decided that they could no longer take walk-ins for breakfast - not during the summer months. Guests had to make a booking at least twelve hours in advance or they would be turned away.

  This morning they had a full contingent of residents to cater for, plus two tables of six that had booked the afternoon before.

  Breakfast was served between seven and ten, which meant that Fay was run off her feet getting the buffet ready for seven o’clock. She could see herself having to hire a part-time waiter soon.

  It was close to nine when Fay came barreling up the stairs with a pot of coffee in one hand and a tea tray in the other. She noticed her black and white cat Whisky standing at the front door watching the brass flap intently.

  That usually meant that the mailman was approaching. Whisky liked to grab the letters out of the mailman’s hands as he pushed them through the flap. It was his hobby.

  His other hobby was stealing bright and shiny objects from anyone who happened to be staying at the B&B. Whisky liked to keep busy.

  The mailman, one Patrick McEvoy, had got used to pulling his fingers out of the way smartly as he pushed the letters through the flap.

  Fay paused, expecting to see a pile of mail land on the doormat.

  She was not disappointed.

  Whisky reared up on his hind legs just as the flap opened. He grabbed the mail and pulled it onto the mat. But instead of walking away whistling as usual, Patrick knocked at the door.

  Fay set her tray and coffee pot down on the reception desk and opened the front door.

  “Morning, Pat.”

  “Morning, Fay love. Parcel for you. It might have fitted through the flap, but I didn’t fancy trying to nudge it through with that mad cat of yours grabbing at my fingers.”