“Anyway, we haven’t seen you since January so we thought it might be nice to meet you for dinner in Reading at that Italian you like. Bring your American.”
“He’s not my American,” I protested feebly, but promised I would ask, and if he couldn’t make it because of work, we’d arrange something else. I did love Bella Roma, the restaurant my mum mentioned. Their home-made cheesecake was gorgeous. I promised to let them know
The knock on the door startled me, just as I was unbuttoning my blouse, and I quickly tucked it back into my trousers and walked to the door. It never occurred to me to get a chain or a peep hole, as living in Adlebury all my life, I’d always felt safe. I opened the door, half of me hoping it was Garrett.
The sobbing woman holding a limp cat wasn’t at all what I expected.
“Goodness, come in. What’s happened?” I stepped back so she could follow me inside. It didn’t happen often, but on occasion I did get people who brought injured animals to me. The other downside of living in a village I guessed. “Lay her, him? On the table.”
“I need to borrow your phone. I stupidly went out without my mobile.”
I glanced up from where she followed me to the kitchen. “Of course, you can borrow my phone,” I soothed, picking up one of Sherlock’s blankets to make the table softer and then put some newspaper over it. The cat seemed to be wrapped in an old car blanket.
“It just darted out, and I clipped it. I need to call the police, and a vet.”
I looked up from where I was unfolding the blanket gently, comprehension dawning. “You ran over the cat?”
Another round of sobs. “Yes. I was visiting a friend in the village and I’m on my way home.”
I let her words run over me while I concentrated on the cat. She was obviously a stray. Thin, malnourished, and plenty of battle scars, but I couldn’t see any immediate signs of injury. Still her sunken eyes and decreased skin elasticity told me she was dehydrated. Odd for a stray that could access water easily. I put my hand under her left armpit and looked at my phone counting for fifteen seconds. Her heartbeat was approximately 230 beats per minute and that was on the high side as well, another sign of dehydration.
She needed an I.V. and an x-ray to make sure there were no injuries I couldn’t see, and I smoothed my hand gently over her head. When I heard the soft purr, my throat tightened. Poor baby.
“Do you know anyone I can call?”
I glanced at the woman. “My name’s Dr. Knight, and I’m a veterinary surgeon.”
Her hands flew to her mouth and fresh tears welled up. “I don’t believe it.”
Neither did I, to be honest. She would have had to drive past four houses before she got to mine. I wondered if this wasn’t her own cat that had been injured and she was trying to find it some free vet care. “Where did you say it happened?”
“At the bottom of the hill. You were the only one with the lights on. Well, I tried next door first, but the TV was really loud, so they didn’t hear me.”
It was possible. Lily would have been engrossed in Coronation Street, or maybe one of her other shows. “That was fortunate, because she needs an x-ray to make sure she hasn’t got any internal injuries and she’s very dehydrated.”
“Well, I suppose that’s because she’s a stray.” She said it an off-hand manner, casually.
I paused. I had her figured as a stray, but how did she know? She seemed to have jumped pretty quickly to conclusions if she’d just hit the poor old girl. “Actually, any stray around here would have plenty of access to water.” I went to the chair where I had dumped my jacket and pulled it on, picking up my car keys with a sigh.
“So, you’re the local vet? Sorry,” she added hurriedly. “How lucky to meet you, even if it’s under these circumstances.” She smiled, but still didn’t seem to be moving, so I bent down to the cat.
“Could you open the door for me?”
“Of course,” she hurried apologetically, and opened the door. Then she took the keys I handed her and locked my front door as I came out and rushed to open the car.
“You realize I’ll have to find this cat a home after she gets back on her feet a bit?”
She looked completely unconcerned. “Yes, that’s fine.”
So much for my theory that this might be her own cat. Or at least, if it was her cat, she wanted to get rid of it. Still it seemed a strange way to do it.
“Can you find your way home okay?” She wasn’t familiar with the area, according to what she’d said, and she said she’d forgotten her mobile.
“Oh yes,” she waved her hand to the Ford parked a little way off. “To be honest I was visiting a friend in the village, and she’s been trying to get me to move here for ages. It’s getting a little busier where I live and this all looks so quiet.”
I chuckled and slid the cat and blanket in the cat carrier I kept in the car for just such emergencies. I sometimes thought I’d like it to be a bit quieter around here. “Well, it’s quite a busy village, but there are some more rural properties.”
She nodded. “I like neighbors, just not the ones that play loud music and have no respect for other people’s property.”
I wasn’t sure what to say so I made a sympathetic noise and got in and started the engine. I waved as she was just getting into her car, realizing that I’d never gotten her name.
Chapter Fourteen
Garrett
This was ridiculous. It wasn’t junior prom and I wasn’t seventeen, but I was just as nervous.
Nope, make that more nervous. At junior prom the parents weren’t with us all the time. Then I’d only had to suffer the photographs and the grilling from my date Micky’s—Michelle’s—dad. No one would have dared call her Micky in front of Captain Cartwright. He wasn’t a police captain. In fact, he hadn’t served on the force at all.
The reason the kids called him Captain Cartwright was because he was in charge of the neighborhood watch.
And when I say “in charge” I mean he ran the community I lived in like a battleship. To be fair the crime rates were pretty good. No one would have dared do anything else.
“Garrett,” Ella’s mom Davinia Knight—Dave to her friends—fixed me with a smile and started her version of twenty questions as I snapped right back to the present. “Lily is so happy you’re here.”
I put down my water and nodded. “I’m sorry it took me this long. I should have visited much earlier.”
“It’s a huge undertaking though,” William “Bill” Knight added. “Moving, that is.”
“But isn’t that what you did, sir?”
“Bill, please.” Ella’s dad clapped me on the shoulder. “I’m sure Petronella’s told you, but after being very forcibly reminded that working seventy hours a week wasn’t any way to live, we decided to do something different. We didn’t move to an entirely new country though. That’s a little bit too much of an adventure, even for me.”
Ella’s mom reached out and clasped Bill’s hand. “Fortune favors the brave my darling.” I glanced at Ella who beamed at me, and decided it most certainly did.
“I remember your mum,” Dave said after tsking when I called her ma’am and insisting on being called by her first name. “She was maybe two years behind me at school.”
“Really?”
“She ran the British Parliamentary Club.” I was at a loss for a second—“The Debate Team,” Dave explained. “Did you know she once got in a fight at school? Actually drew blood and everything.”
I gaped. “No.”
Dave chuckled. “Claire Sullivan thought she was God. Her family had money, and she lived in this huge mausoleum of a house complete with maids and a butler. She even had a chauffeur bring her to school every morning in a Bentley. I think personally she was lonely, but unfortunately that just came out as surrounding herself with followers, rather than real friends. She and her cronies collared a girl in the bathroom, and of course your mum wasn’t a little bit scared of her, and it ended with two bloody noses, and quit
e a few bruises.”
We paused while the server set down our appetizers. I was having the vegetable soup and it smelled delicious.
“Anyway,” Dave continued as she spread her salmon pate on the toast, “Miss Rahija caught her, and the debate team was her punishment.
“Wow!” Ella said. “Why didn’t I ever have any teachers like that?”
Dave eyed her daughter. “You did. You were just too busy hating school at that point to notice.” Ella just stuck her tongue out at her mom playfully and laughed.
“It was clever,” Bill said, buttering his bread. He’d also chosen the soup. “Teach them to talk about their differences and debate them rather than fight over them.”
“And mom ran it?” I pressed.
Dave nodded. “Very successfully. I’m not sure the teachers knew what they were unleashing, but your mum began to be quite the political campaigner from that point.
I grinned. That much I knew. I glanced at Ella. “And you hated school?”
“She didn’t hate school,” Bill said. “She just hated the fact we went through a couple of years where she had to knuckle down.”
Ella arched an eyebrow. “I hated Mr. Smith.”
“Who was Mr. Smith?”
“A lazy idiot, who despite dyslexia being recognized as early as 1939, thought it was simply a case of inattentiveness,” Bill said.
“No,” Ella shook her head. “He was jealous, because dad got a job he went for.”
Dave nodded. “And decided to take it out on Petronella. Odious man.”
Bill reached over the table and patted Ella’s hand. “But we showed him, huh?”
Ella squeezed her dad’s hand, and I missed mine just then with a ferocity that silenced me for a moment. But then the server came back, so I had a minute to get myself together.
“So…when’s the wedding?” Bill asked abruptly when the server put down our steaks and pasta. I was just swallowing some water, which I inhaled, choked on, and nearly—I was certain—drowned.
“Are you okay?” Ella very firmly slapped me on the back. I nodded, grabbing my napkin and wiping my streaming eyes.
“You really shouldn’t tease him, Bill,” Ella’s mom reproved.
“What?” Bill asked innocently. “No, I meant tomorrow.”
“It’s three o’clock, as you well know,” Dave said.
I liked Dave, and Ella—bless her—changed the subject, telling them both all about the problems Maisie was having, the murder, and the attack on Roberta.
Dave was fascinated, but Bill asked so many questions, I could see where Ella got her curiosity from.
“What I’d like to know is how come such an awful philanderer managed to snag Maisie,” Bill said at last. “Eric stood up with me when we got married. Maisie is as honest as the day is long, and I refuse to believe she would do anything like that.”
“And why was your constable hit by a car, Garrett?” Dave asked. “Or are you thinking it was a driver who had a little too much of the wine? I glanced up at her saw the twinkle in her eye and took the teasing good naturedly.
“No. Roberta told me she remembered hearing the engine revving.”
“Are you thinking the crazy ex-girlfriend theory might not be as mad as you thought?” Ella prompted me.
I glanced at her. “We need to do some digging. Maybe look at school records.”
“It still wouldn’t explain your constable though, would it? And won’t this Wainwright chap be on that, though?” Bill asked.
“Well, a lot of people saw Roger Battersley flirting and talking with Roberta at the pub the night of his death. In fact, it made Maisie a bit angry and she sent him outside to his car to sleep it off a bit. As for Roberta being struck by the car…”
Ella told her dad about Maisie being held up at the pub and then getting stuck behind a tractor.
“So, are you saying this Wainwright chap will probably think it was Maisie who struck the constable with her car? Because Maisie was jealous over some flirting at the pub?” Bill frowned. “It seems a little farfetched even if you didn’t know Maisie.”
“No, Bill,” Dave jumped in. “Don’t you remember that professor of health sociology from the University of Leeds? Peter Morrall I think his name is. He says all possible motives for murder are lust, love, loathing or loot.” I smiled to myself. Maybe Ella was more like her mom.
“I remember reading about that,” Ella agreed. “But you have to take serial killers out of it.”
We all nodded sagely, and I was beginning to think this was the weirdest first date I’d ever been on. Date? Neither of us had actually said it was a date, and we’d been out together lots of times, but this felt a little different. And I certainly wasn’t complaining.
“So, you think your constable was attacked because she’d been overly friendly with Roger?” Dave pressed.
“And Roberta’s new to the area,” Ella said. “Besides, they were just talking.”
“But that would mean it was someone in the pub that saw them.” Bill pointed out.
“Actually, it wouldn’t,” I admitted. “Roberta told me Roger followed her outside when she left. Tried to grab her and she told him no.”
“So, it could have been someone outside? In the car park? We know they have a car obviously,” Dave said. The server came back and smiled delightedly at our four empty plates, took them, and left the dessert menu for us to look at.
I still don’t understand what Maisie saw in him,” Ella admitted.
“Loneliness, and from what you’ve said if he’s some sort of conspiracy theorist, he might be a relief from boredom,” Dave answered.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Because after Maisie’s mum died, Eric went to pieces. In three months the pub went from the busiest place in the village to the emptiest. Maisie had just gotten promoted and was running a department. She was coming home as much as she could, but London would have been an impossible daily commute, so she gave the job up to come home, look after Eric and run the pub.”
No wonder she had called me and given me grief over Nan. She knew what she was talking about, and my respect for her went up. And I appreciated what Ella’s mom meant. Running a department in London then going to managing a village pub were very different lifestyles.
“And she was engaged,” Ella sighed. “But her boyfriend wasn’t interested in moving to a ‘backwater.’” I assumed from Ella’s finger quotes she was repeating what Maisie had told her.
“The most sensible thing to do would be to compile a list of suspects,” Bill mused.
Ella brightened at the validation, and I tried not to groan, and told them the theories Roger kept in his notebook.
“You seem to be quite the crime-solving team,” Dave remarked as her coffee and Baileys arrived.
Ella flushed, but she seemed pleased. I was coming to the conclusion that the best way of keeping her safe was making sure I knew what she was up to. It was becoming an impossible situation though. And I was only skirting confidentiality, because I wasn’t officially working the case.
“What I’d really like to see is this notebook,” Ella mused.
“Who told you it exists?” Bill asked.
“Maisie initially, but then Nigel confirmed it.”
“So your main culprits are some sort of gang or an ex-girlfriend?”
“Not just,” I said. “There is motive for Nigel Battersley to have killed his brother. The brothers were in a court battle over a will.”
“But what possible motive could Nigel have for pinning the murder on Maisie?” Dave asked.
“Convenience maybe?” I said. “Or even that Maisie heard or saw something that she doesn’t know the significance of.” I’d come across that before, and glanced at Ella. “Did you believe what Stella Battersley said about Nigel fighting the will, because he wants to sponsor one of those breast screening vans in his mom’s memory?”
“Nigel Battersley?” Bill scoffed. “I doubt that. I doubt that very much.
”
“Do you know him, dad?” Ella asked.
“No,” Dave interrupted. “But we knew his mom, and it wasn’t just her husband that took all her cash. Roger never knew, but Nigel works in a pharmacy?”
“He keeps their books,” Ella said.
“Well, he got into trouble at work in one pharmacy in Newbury years ago. I’m not sure what,” Dave paused, “But I do know his mom gave him ten thousand pounds to go to Australia with. And it’s quite significant that suddenly they have a change of heart and come home?”
I blew out a breath. I’d just decided I liked Nigel a little more for the crime. So much for instincts. I wondered if Wainwright had checked into Nigel’s background.
“What about the old girlfriend?”
I shrugged. “Nothing yet.”
“Actually,” Ella sent me an apologetic look. “Mary Appleby told me that her last name was Ainsworth. And that she might have moved to Bristol.”
“Ainsworth?” Bill mused. “Darling, do you remember an Ainsworth?” Dave shook her head. “Did you ask Lily?”
Ella shook her head. “I was going to ask her, but the woman and the cat totally put it out of my head.” She looked over at me. “It was Wednesday. Katie and I had gone to the Duck for lunch and Mary Appleby was there.”
“With a cat?” I queried, though why I should think that was odd in this village I had no idea.
Ella chuckled. “No this was before the cat. She told me that a few years ago Roger was going out with this Ainsworth girl, and she caught him with someone else. They had a huge fight and later the family moved to Bristol. I don’t know anything else.”
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