The Cat That Wasn't There Read online

  Fay took the parcel from him. “Understood. I wouldn’t want to get in the way of his claws either.”

  Postman Pat, as he was known, walked back to his van humming to himself.

  Fay was embarrassed to remember how many months it had taken her to understand his nickname. Postman Pat was a beloved children’s cartoon character in England. He had a black and white cat that accompanied him everywhere, which was ironic when you considered that Pat McEvoy’s nemesis was a black and white cat who tried to claw his fingers off every morning.

  The morning’s mail consisted mostly of bills. Fay laid them on the reception desk to attend to later. The parcel appeared more personal. The address had been written by hand in an old-fashioned script, using a fountain pen. Unlike most of the other mail, it wasn’t addressed to F. Penrose, The Cat’s Paw B&B. It was addressed to Fay Penrose of Penrose House.

  A quick glance at the post office date stamp told Fay that it had been mailed the previous morning from Bluebell Village Post Office. She laid it down with the rest of the mail and resumed her dash up the stairs to serve coffee and tea.

  Chapter 4

  It was only when breakfast was over, and Fay was sitting in the garden watching the kittens play that she remembered the parcel.

  Asking her gardener and groundsman to keep an eye on the babies for her, she popped inside to fetch it.

  “Thanks, Pen,” she said as she returned to the walled garden that was the kittens’ favorite playground. “Are they all present and accounted for?”

  Pen inclined his head. “Any day now and they’ll be over that there wall. The big one can already climb trees.”

  They were sitting in a Garden of Remembrance that an earlier Penrose had built to commemorate those members of the family that had died in battle.

  “I know,” said Fay. “It’s high time they went to their permanent homes. I’m taking them for their vaccinations very soon.”

  “Is Maggie’s mum still interested, then?”

  “Definitely. She’s coming to see them after work this afternoon. She thinks she wants a female, but she’s not sure.”

  “Her old cat was a female, so maybe she will.” Pen nodded at the parcel Fay was turning over in her hands. “Did you order something?”

  “Not that I can remember. Someone seems to have sent it to me. I’m intrigued.”

  Pen was less intrigued. He went back to his roses before Fay could open the parcel. She stuck her finger under the seal and tore the packaging.

  A book fell onto her lap.

  It was covered in padded fabric, which gave no clue as to its contents. Fay checked inside the envelope for a note, but there was none. There was also no return address on the back. Opening the book, she saw that it was a journal, filled with handwritten daily entries.

  She opened the journal at random and held it side by side with the envelope. The careful, old-fashioned handwriting in the journal matched that on the envelope. Each entry was dated, but unsigned, except for the letter ‘T’ written with a flourish.

  The journal was current, dating from that year. The last entry was from two days earlier. It ended with a reminder from the writer to his or herself to “check the shipping schedules”.

  The writer seemed to have added an entry virtually every day of that year, including weekends, detailing what they had done on that day. It was cramped and closely written, making it difficult to read in parts. The first entry was from 1 January of that year.

  Misty and Momo hate the fireworks. They can feel the vibrations and it disturbs them. I tried to tell Nella, but she laughed at me. Some people can be callous where pets are concerned. I stayed up and tried to comfort them, but to no avail. I think it helped them to know I was there, and to sense that I cared. Everything is closed today, so I’m not working. And tomorrow is Sunday. Two idle days in a row. The hours can be long and lonely. I’m looking forward to Monday when real life will resume. Happy New Year – I hope!

  Fay didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but she suspected that this was a woman. In her experience, women were more likely to keep a daily journal than men. Maybe that wasn’t true in the days of the great diarists like Samuel Pepys and Lewis Carroll, but it certainly was now. She seemed to be somebody who lived alone, judging by the way she found the holidays long and lonely.

  She had two pets – Misty and Momo. Fay imagined them as fluffy dogs. Maltese poodles, perhaps. Or even cats. But dogs were more likely to be disturbed by fireworks. It was strange that the dogs were disturbed by the vibrations from fireworks, but perhaps they were old and deaf.

  It was also strange that she described ‘Nella’ as laughing at her concerns about her pets and the fireworks. There was only one Nella on the island that Fay knew of, and that was Nella Harcourt who owned the Cracked Spine B&B, bookshop, and coffee shop. She was one of the great ladies of the island and had been instrumental in trying to make firework displays safer for the local pets. She seemed like the last person who would make light of a pet owner’s concerns. She had a cat named Isis that she was devoted to.

  Whose journal was this and why had it been sent to Fay?

  The letter ‘T’ made her wonder if it could have belonged to Tabitha Trott. The tone was certainly appropriate for an elderly lady. Even the handwriting seemed to belong to a different era.

  Fay looked up as a plaintive mew caught her attention.

  Cinnamon was halfway up a lemon tree in the middle of the walled garden. She balanced on a skinny branch and mewed pitifully.

  “Oh, you’re stuck, are you?” Fay went to the rescue. “Maybe you should have thought of that before you climbed so high.”

  This lemon tree was a particularly thorny variety.

  Fay inserted her hand gingerly into the branches and scooped up Cinnamon. Luckily, she didn’t wriggle. Fay was able to draw her out of the branches without either of them getting scratched.

  “There you go.” She deposited her on the pathway. “Go and play with your sister.”

  Fay sat on the bench and resumed her perusal of the journal. It consisted of page after page of the writer’s daily doings described in the minutest detail. It was hard to see the wood for the trees. One moment she was describing the oats she had cooked for breakfast, and the next, it was a chance encounter with someone in the street.

  Fay was more convinced than ever that the writer was a woman.

  What made it even more confusing was the fact that she used abbreviations and often referred to people by the first initial of their names only.

  I ran into H at Pappa’s this morning. He was buying the fancy new coffee beans V has just got in. He obviously thinks he’s too good for regular old instant coffee these days. “It’s far from imported Italian coffee beans you were reared,” I said to him. He left without a word, but I could tell by the consciousness on his face that my words had hit home.

  Fay couldn’t even begin to guess who H was. She looked up again as there was more distressed mewing.

  “Oh, for goodness sake.” Cinnamon was back up the lemon tree, even higher this time, and wailing as if she were being murdered. “You are a very silly girl.”

  This time she had to stand on tiptoe to rescue the kitten.

  “I feel like you’re doing this on purpose now.”

  Cinnamon gave a huge yawn in Fay’s hands. She looked around and saw that the other kittens were slowing down too. They were ready for their mid-morning naps. She bundled them into the carrier and took them back inside, taking care to tuck the journal into her jacket pocket.

  Leaving the kittens snoozing in her bedroom, Fay set off in the Land Rover.

  She was curious to read more of the journal, but she wanted to take advantage of the few hours she had free before she was due for lunch at the surgery. Her goal was Bluff Lighthouse. She hoped to find it taped off with crime-scene tape but wasn’t too surprised to find that it wasn’t.

  Murder was somewhat above Sergeant Jones’s pay grade, as he would be the first to admit. When
it came to the ordinary business of policing the island, Jones and Chegwin were both good at their jobs. Even Sergeant Jones’ mother made a good receptionist in the ordinary course of things. Most islanders who phoned up the police station were happy to swap gossip with Mrs. Jones for a few minutes before getting down to business.

  Cats getting stuck up trees, dogs fouling the sidewalk, neighborly feuds about tree branches growing over each other’s walls, the occasional drunk and disorderly – these were the bread and butter of keeping law and order in the village. Further out in the farming community, there might be a dispute over a sheep that had wandered onto someone else’s land or a collapsed bit of fencing between properties, but seldom more than that.

  This was where Jones and Chegwin shone. They knew the village and its people intimately. They knew how to be diplomatic and how to settle a dispute in such a way that everyone felt like a winner. They knew the history behind every argument and understood the characters of the disputants. They knew who had a short temper and who didn’t.

  Fay was frequently impressed by the masterly fashion with which they kept the peace on the island.

  It was only when something unusual occurred that they quickly got out of their depths.

  Tabitha Trott’s death definitely counted as something unusual. Jones’s style of low-key policing was not up to the job of investigating a suspicious death. As a former homicide detective and a generally nosy person, Fay knew she could help. Fortunately, Jones and Chegwin never seemed to mind her sniffing around in matters that didn’t concern her.

  It was nearly eleven o’clock by the time Fay arrived at the lighthouse. There were a surprising number of cars parked on the grass outside. Bluff Lighthouse was a moderately popular tourist attraction, but four or five groups of visitors a day was the average. Now it seemed as though five groups had all turned up at once – six, if you counted Fay.

  No doubt, news of Tabitha Trott’s death had spread through the village, and people were there to discover what gossip they might pick up. Fay couldn’t bring herself to be too harsh on the nosy villagers, seeing as she was there for the same purpose.

  As she parked the car, she had a quick look around for the cat she had seen the night before, but there was no sign of it. The door to the lighthouse was standing open, with the opening times of the museum printed on it. She could hear voices coming from inside.

  Fay had visited the lighthouse museum only once before, a few months earlier. She tried to visit as many of the island’s attractions as she could, so she could speak knowledgeably about them to her guests. She knew that the lighthouse had been preserved to look as it would have in the mid-eighteen-hundreds because that was the era that the museum committee had the most artefacts from.

  The lower level of the lighthouse was occupied by an old-fashioned kitchen. The lighthouse keeper’s wife – if he’d had one – would have prepared meals for her family here. A flight of stairs took you up to a bedroom, which was furnished to house three children. Another flight of stairs took you up to the main bedroom where the lighthouse keeper and his wife would have slept. The final flight of stairs took you to the top of the building where the light would have worked by burning solid fuel, paraffin, or gas, depending on the era.

  These days, it was operated by a combination of electricity and clockwork. Remnants of the old light, with its surprisingly complicated system of prisms and mirrors, were still on display.

  As Fay walked into the kitchen, she heard a voice opining loudly.

  “Do you want to know what killed Tabitha Trott? I’ll tell you.”

  Chapter 5

  Fay ventured further into the kitchen, peering around the old iron range.

  Near the staircase that led up to the next level, a wooden desk had been set up. This was usually manned by a volunteer from the Museums and Historical Sites committee. Entrance to the museum was free, but you could buy an informative pamphlet about the history of the lighthouse for one pound or hire an audio guide for two pounds. There was a wooden donation box into which visitors were strongly encouraged to pop a pound or two. And there was a visitor’s book that you could sign.

  The desk was currently occupied by a lady of about Tabitha’s own age. She had a halo of soft, white hair, and a pair of round spectacles through which she surveyed the world with an air of mild surprise.

  Fay knew her by sight. She had an idea that her name was Betsy.

  The person she was speaking to was about ten years younger than her and much more robust looking. He wore linen pants and a sports jacket, and carried himself in a way that made Fay wonder if he had ever been in the military. He was a familiar figure from around the village, but she couldn’t remember his name. It was he who had been speaking when she walked in.

  The two of them turned to look at Fay.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  “Good morning, dear,” said Betsy. “It’s Fay Penrose, isn’t it? I’m Betsy McCloud from the Museums committee.”

  “I’m pleased to meet you. This must be a difficult time for all of you.”

  The military man made a harrumphing noise. “I warned Tabitha how it would be, but would she listen to me? No, she would not.” He stared at Fay from under a pair of bushy eyebrows. “Martha’s girl, are you? You have the look of her. You were the one who found poor Tabitha. I’m Colonel Trengove, by the way.”

  Fay shook hands. “Nice to meet you too, Colonel. Yes, I found the body when I brought a group of guests from my B&B here yesterday evening. But you were saying something when I came in, Colonel? Something about knowing what killed Tabitha.”

  “That’s correct, and I’m right about it too. She was getting too frail and forgetful for this job. I knew she would have an accident one of these days, and so I told her. I thought the most likely thing was that she would fall down the stairs. It’s a very steep spiral staircase, you see.”

  “Now, Colonel,” tutted Betsy. “I’m not saying she wasn’t frail, because who among us doesn’t get a little shaky in the legs after seventy-five? But there was nothing wrong with her mind – nothing at all. I should know. I was her friend.”

  Betsy pulled out a lace-edged handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed at her eyes.

  Colonel Trengove’s voice softened. “I know you were, Betsy, and that’s part of the problem. You were too close to her to notice the gradual deterioration. Also, I think you turned a blind eye to it. Remember what happened to the filing system here?”

  “There was never any proof that Tabitha was responsible for that.”

  “Who else could it have been? She was the only one here that day.”

  “What happened to the filing system?” asked Fay.

  “We keep records of all incoming money here at the lighthouse,” explained the Colonel. “Whether it’s a donation, or a purchase, or an audio-guide rental, we keep records so we can make sure that the amount of money in the box tallies with what should be there at the end of each day. One day, Gertie – that’s the head of the Museums committee – came to work and found that the previous day’s records had been completely misfiled. It’s a simple alphabetical filing system, but everything was in the wrong place. Tabitha was the one who had worked here the day before and she was utterly unaware that she had done anything wrong. I mean, I have every sympathy for her, but she should really have resigned after that.”

  A stubborn look crept into Betsy’s face as she shook her head.

  “We’ll agree to disagree about that, Colonel. Tabitha maintained that the files were in perfect order when she left the museum, and I for one believe her. I just wish she hadn’t been so in love with the view from the top of the lighthouse.”

  “Oh?’ said Fay. “Was that a favorite place of hers?”

  “It certainly was. I could never understand it. I hate going up there because I suffer from vertigo, but Tabitha just loved it. I asked her why she couldn’t look out the window of the top bedroom. One can see perfectly well from there. I know that whenever I wan
t to admire the view, I just look out that window. But she said it wasn’t the same. She liked to feel the sea breeze on her face.”

  “I get a little dizzy up at the top myself,” admitted the Colonel. “If Gertie warned Tabitha once about going up there, she must have warned her a dozen times. But, oh no – she loved to feel the wind buffeting her cheeks and to taste the spray of the ocean on her lips. Most ill-advised for a woman of her age.”

  “Indeed,” said Betsy. “And if I warned Gertie once to replace that rickety old railing up there, I warned her a dozen times. She kept insisting there wasn’t money in the budget for it, and maybe they could manage it next year. And now see what came of that.”

  Betsy folded her arms and clamped her lips together.

  “You think it was an accident?” Fay looked at the staircase that led upwards at a precipitous angle. “You think she lost her balance and fell?”

  “It’s the only thing that makes sense,” said the Colonel. “It seems to have been a slow day here at the museum yesterday. She took in only sixteen pounds the whole morning. So, unless some tourist stayed behind after closing time and pushed her off the top, I don’t see how else it could have happened.”

  “An attempted robbery, perhaps?” suggested Fay.

  “There was nearly three hundred pounds sitting out in the open in an unlocked cash box when we let ourselves in this morning. It hadn’t been emptied in a while. If this was the act of some desperate criminal, why did they leave that amount of money sitting there?”

  “Well, I call it murder.” The stubborn look in Betsy’s eye hardened. “When you know you have an unsafe railing at your museum, you should do something about it. Let’s face it, we are an elderly and vulnerable group of volunteers. We work here on a daily basis. Gertie was criminally negligent not to have it fixed. If that railing had been more secure, my friend would still be alive today.” She dabbed at her eyes again.