The Cat That Got the Cream
Fiona Snyckers
Fiona Snyckers
Copyright © 2019 Fiona Snyckers
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without prior written permission of the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Produced in South Africa
Contents
Untitled
A note on the text
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Epilogue
More From Fiona Snyckers
The Cat’s Paw Cozy Mysteries
The Eulalie Park Mystery Series
About the Author
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A note on the text
This novel uses American spelling and idiom, conforming to Standard American English.
Chapter 1
Fay Penrose adjusted the focus on her binoculars. Then she used the sleeve of her jacket to wipe away a smudge on the lens.
When she looked through the eyepiece again, she jumped so violently that she jabbed herself in the eye. A human skull was staring back at her. Its lipless grin looked like a snarl and its empty eye sockets seemed to glare at her.
It took Fay half a second to realize that she was looking at a Halloween decoration.
If it hadn’t been four o’clock in the morning at the end of a long, sleep-deprived week, she wouldn’t have been fooled for a moment. She had spent hours of the previous day decorating her own house with skulls that looked remarkably like this one. Also bats, witches’ hats, spiderwebs, and any number of frightening creatures. Penrose House was the family home she had inherited from her grandmother and was currently running as the Cat’s Paw B&B.
With Halloween fast approaching, Fay had been all fired up to get Penrose House into the swing of things. Her groundsman and gardener Pen grumbled about how things weren’t done like that in his day, but he was in a minority of one. Fay had been surprised to see how enthusiastically Bluebell Island – that tiny dot in the Atlantic off the coast of Cornwall – had embraced the traditions of an American Halloween. Her housekeeper Morwen assured her that this was a recent development, driven mainly by the children of the island who loved dressing up and going trick-or-treating just as much as their American counterparts.
She shifted her binoculars away from the skulls decorating the gateposts at the entrance to the Cracked Spine Bookshop and B&B and scanned the road in front of it. This was her fourth morning of keeping watch like this and she would be the first to admit that it was getting a little old. On Monday, she had started her watch at five-thirty. On Tuesday and Wednesday, she had got up even earlier to be in position at five o’clock. Both times, there had been no delivery that she could see. Either it hadn’t happened at all or it had taken place much earlier in the morning.
Today, Fay had taken up her position just before four o’clock in the morning. There was nothing pleasant about this at the end of October on Bluebell Island. A brisk onshore breeze was turning Fay’s nose into an ice block and freezing her hands right through her gloves. If she were moving around, it would have been a different story. But keeping still like this with her elbows resting on a low stone wall was torture. There was so much mist around that it felt as though she were sitting in the middle of a chilly rain cloud.
At least it wasn’t snowing. The first snows usually arrived on Bluebell Island just in time for Christmas.
As Fay watched, a piece of shadow seemed to detach itself from the gloom at the foot of the left gatepost and strolled out onto the sidewalk. Fay blinked twice before she recognized it as Nella Harcourt’s black cat, Isis. Nella was the seventy-year-old owner of the Cracked Spine.
For the first time in four days, Fay felt hopeful that this vigil of hers might actually bear fruit. Unless she was much mistaken, Isis had the air of a cat who was waiting for something.
Sure enough, Fay caught the sound of a distant engine. The cat had obviously heard it too. It seemed to be coming from the north-east. She trained her binoculars in the direction of Mountain View Road and managed to spot a set of headlights indicating a vehicle winding its way down Tintagel Mountain.
The highest point on the island, Tintagel Mountain was permanently crowned in snow. In the recent warm summer, that snowy crown had shrunk to a tiny cap, but it had never entirely disappeared. Recently, the cap had been growing and growing.
Mountain View Road led to several high-lying farms and small holdings – a fact that seemed significant to Fay just at that moment.
The vehicle reached the bottom of Mountain View Road and turned left into the High Street. It was either going somewhere else entirely, or…
As the car appeared a few blocks up from the Cracked Spine it cut its headlights and switched off its engine, using momentum to glide the rest of the way down the street and come to a silent halt in front of Nella’s gate. The cat was excitedly rubbing its flanks against the gatepost.
Hardly daring to breathe, Fay watched through her binoculars as the driver’s door opened and a female figure emerged. The vehicle was not so much a car as a small panel van. The woman bent to scratch Isis’s head before opening the doors at the back of the van and removing two silver milk-pails.
Fay exhaled slowly. She was right. She had been right all along.
Nella Harcourt had a secret supply of cream that she used to make her legendary clotted cream. English scones with jam and clotted cream were one of the delicacies of the island, and indeed the whole of the west country. Fay’s own B&B served a delicious cream tea from time to time, but it was not the best on the island. That honor belonged to the Cracked Spine. Fay had come right out and asked Nella who her supplier was, but Nella had just laughed at her.
“We’ll see who’s laughing now,” Fay muttered as the woman carried the pails of cream up the path to the Cracked Spine. As she walked, some cream slopped over the edge of the pails and spilled onto the path. Isis followed eagerly in her wake, licking up every drop of the spilled cream. It seemed to Fay that the woman was spilling more cream than absolutely necessary, just so that the cat could lick it up.
The front door of the Cracked Spine opened as though by magic as the woman approached. She and the cat went inside, and the door closed firmly behind them.
“Well, well,” said Fay, feeling pleased with herself. “Well, well, well!”
A few minutes later, the woman came out alone. Her pails were clearly empty as they swung loosely in her fingers. She got into her panel van and drove away. Fay used her phone camera to zoom in on the retreating van and take a photograph of it. The van was unmarked by any logo, but Fay was fairly sure she had recogni
zed the woman. Her dream of contacting the supplier of the best clotted cream on the island had moved one step closer to becoming a reality.
She stood up from her cramped position, stretching out her stiff and frozen limbs and rubbing her hands together to restore circulation. She slung her binoculars around her neck and got ready to leave her lookout point.
Just then, she heard the approach of another vehicle. But whereas the cream-delivery lady had been trying to keep her approach quiet, this one was gunning the engine.
Fay stopped in her tracks as a car came barreling down the road, travelling from the same direction as the cream lady. She had probably just passed him on her way back.
The car screeched to a halt diagonally opposite the Cracked Spine and a figure jumped out of the driver’s side. The person was thickly bundled in a jacket and overcoat, with a watch cap pulled low over its forehead. Fay couldn’t be sure if she was looking at a man or a woman. As the figure circled around the car to pop open the trunk, some instinct had Fay scrabbling for her phone. Her gloved fingers made her clumsy and she almost dropped it.
With an exclamation of annoyance, she tore off the gloves and flung them aside. Then she activated her camera, zoomed in on the figure, and began to take photographs.
The figure froze and looked around. Fay ducked behind the low wall again. The person couldn’t possibly have heard the click of her phone. She was too far away.
As she watched, the figure turned back to the car. He or she scooped something large and heavy out of the trunk, using both arms. The object was long and cylindrical and had been wrapped up in a rug. The way the item folded in the person’s grasp made Fay start forward with a shout.
“Stop!”
The person hesitated - their face turned in Fay’s direction. Then he or she dumped the rug-covered object on the side of the road, hopped back in the car, and drove off with a squeal of tires.
Fay found that she was running towards the car. She had leaped forward as soon as she saw the shape of the object. Now the car was gone, but the object was still there. She tried to tell herself that it wasn’t what she thought it was. It could be anything – an old piece of carpeting, a large animal such as a dog, or even a bundle of laundry. Those things were all possible, but somehow, she knew exactly what she would find when she reached it.
It was lying at the side of the road, almost in the gutter. She turned on her phone’s flashlight, so she could see what she was doing. The rug had been tied up in three places by pieces of old rope. Fay picked fruitlessly at one of the knots. It tore at the skin of her fingers and wouldn’t yield an inch.
Instead, she pulled apart the edges of the rug and shone her torch inside.
It was a human body.
Fay froze for no more than a second.
She reached into the rug and touched the man’s cheek with the backs of her fingers. She was pleased to see that her hand was quite steady because her heart was going a million beats a minute.
The unnatural coldness of the man’s skin told her that he was beyond the reach of human aid. Still steady as a rock, she took out her phone for the third time that morning and made two calls. The first was to the private cellphone number of Sergeant Jones, the head of Bluebell Island’s police force, such as it was. The second was to Dr. David Dyer, physician and general surgeon of Bluebell Island. Together with his father, he represented the island’s medical fraternity.
The first to arrive by several minutes was David.
It had taken a lot of convincing to get Sergeant Jones out of bed at all. He seemed to think that Fay was asleep and dreaming. No sooner did she manage to convince him that she was wide awake than he tried to persuade her that she was actually looking at a pile of old curtains or a sack of garbage, or something else that he apparently believed could be confused with a human body. It was only when she threatened to call his superiors on the mainland in Truro that Fay finally heard him heaving himself out of bed.
David pulled up at the side of the road in his distinctive late-model Range Rover. He hopped out of the car with a springy leap that gave no indication that he had just been asleep. The only suggestion that he had dressed in a hurry was that he was wearing a pair of over-washed Levi jeans, scuffed Dr. Marten boots, and a long-sleeve T-shirt that his mother, if she had still been alive, would no doubt have thrown away on the grounds that it was now too small for his muscular torso.
Fay reminded herself that this was a serious matter and forced herself to look him in the eye.
“Morning, Fay.” His eyes rested on her face for no more than a second before his attention was claimed by the rolled-up bundle at her feet. “What do you have there?”
“Let’s see,” she said. “Did you bring that knife I asked for?”
He produced a pocketknife from the leather jacket he had shrugged himself into and began to slice through the ropes. It didn’t surprise him that Fay photographed every one of his actions. He knew she had been a homicide detective with the NYPD for eight years, and a uniformed police officer for four years before that. Documenting the scene of a crime came as naturally to her as breathing.
When he had cut through all the ropes, David gently rolled the rug away from the body. As Fay shone her flashlight onto the man’s face, David made a discovery.
“Wait a moment,” he said. “I know him.”
Chapter 2
Fay looked at the face revealed by the opened rug. It was a man who seemed to be in his late fifties or early sixties. The cause of death was not immediately apparent.
“Who is he?” she asked.
“I can’t remember his name, but I’ve met him once. He came to see me about a case of bursitis in his right elbow late last week.”
“Tennis elbow? Had he been playing sport?”
“Yes, but he was rather vague about what kind. I prescribed him a course of mild anti-inflammatories and suggested that he rest his arm for a few days. I’m just thinking that he must have filled out a patient card, so his details will be at the practice. Isobel would have filed them with the out of town patients.”
“So, he definitely wasn’t a local?”
“No. He said he was from …” David frowned as he tried to remember. “Exeter, I think it was.”
“Did he say what he was doing here? Did he seem like a tourist to you?”
David shook his head. “Apart from the sport, he gave no indication of what he was doing here. I remember that he seemed put out when I said he would have to rest his arm. He said that he wasn’t finished yet and that resting wasn’t possible. He asked me if I was sure it was bursitis and what would happen if he carried on with his sporting activities for the next few days.”
Fay smiled to herself as she bent over the man to take a photograph of his face. David did not enjoy having his diagnoses second-guessed by his patients. “And what did you say to that?”
“I told him his elbow would become more swollen and painful if he ignored my recommendations. When he left, I got the feeling that he had no intention of taking my advice.” He shrugged. “It happens that way with patients sometimes. There’s not much you can do about it.”
“Well, this man didn’t die of a sore elbow.”
“Definitely not. But I’m reluctant to investigate further until the police get here and give me the go-ahead. I presume you called them?”
“I phoned Sergeant Jones,” said Fay. “It took a while to persuade him that I wasn’t mistaking a pile of laundry for a dead body. As you can see, he didn’t exactly rush over here. I called him before I called you.”
David raised his head at the sound of an approaching engine. “I rather think this is him now.”
It wasn’t quite five o’clock. The morning was still as dark as midnight, without even a glimmer of the approaching dawn. The temperature had plummeted, as it always did just before sunrise on the island. Fay stamped her feet to try to restore circulation inside her thick boots. Sergeant Jones’s patrol car pulled up next to them.
�
��Well, I never.” He smothered a yawn and adjusted his coat as he came towards them. “I thought you were pulling my leg, Fay love. I mean to say, a body outside the Cracked Spine? It doesn’t seem likely somehow, does it? But here we are.”
“Here we are,” Fay agreed.
Sergeant Jones shook hands with David. “Morning, Doctor. What do you make of this then?”
“Not much at the moment. I was waiting for your go-ahead before moving the body. I thought you might like to document the scene first.”
Sergeant Jones reached unhurriedly into his coat pocket and pulled out an old-fashioned camera. “Right you are.”
He took photographs of the body from various angles before nodding to David to carry on.
Fay used her phone camera to video the unwrapping of the burrito that was David’s former patient. The cause of death soon became apparent, even in the uncertain light of the streetlamps.
“Is that … a bullet wound?” Sergeant Jones adjusted his spectacles and peered at the man’s abdomen.
“I don’t think a bullet did that.” David sounded equally puzzled. “It looks to me like it was caused by a knife of some kind. Maybe a dagger.”
Fay turned off her video and switched to photograph mode. She snapped pictures of the wound from every angle.
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