Marigold sighed. “So much for cooperation.” She picked up her purse and left the library with an air of dejection.
“You’re giving me a headache,” complained Doc Dyer. He clutched his head in his hands to make a point. “Are you telling me the third beast is not the sphinx?”
“That’s right.” Fay offered him a Tylenol from her bag, but he waved it away. “It was the only way I could think of to separate the murderer from everyone else. The murderer already knew all three beasts. That information was contained in the book that Desmond Pinkerton discovered in the library. The murderer saw him looking at the book and picked up the candlestick on impulse to hit him. The intention was probably only to stun him but because of the way he fell forward onto the bookshelf and then landed on the floor he ended up dead.”
“If the murderer has known what the three beasts were since Friday, why hasn’t he or she cracked the code and found the dowry?”
“Because he didn’t have one crucial part of the clue,” said Fay.
“He, is it?” Doc raised his eyebrows. “So, it’s not Marigold then?”
“No. It’s not Marigold.”
Doc Dyer stopped to knock his pipe out against the sidewalk. It was after five o’clock. They were strolling up and down the road in front of the surgery while she brought him up to date.
“The clue he didn’t have was that the three animals represent three points of a triangle with the cat and the roc at the bottom and the third creature at the apex. All six of them think they have the pieces of the puzzle, but the five who are innocent think the third creature is a sphinx. And it isn’t. Only the murderer has the correct information. He knew I was wrong about the sphinx but said nothing. The society has broken apart, probably forever. It’s every man for himself now. They’re not even pretending to cooperate.”
“So, five of them will solve the wrong clue and head off to some unknown location thinking they’ll find the dowry there, while the murderer will solve it and go to the right location?”
“That’s what I was hoping. There’s a lot that can go wrong. How long do you think it will take him to solve the clue?”
“Longer than it will take us, I hope. If he didn’t figure out that the animals represented a triangle, he can’t be all that sharp.”
Fay gave him a hopeful look. “You’ll do it then? You’ll help me solve the final riddle?”
Doc Dyer ushered her into the surgery with a sweep of his hand. “Just try and keep me away from it.”
It took him nearly an hour. Fay was getting restless, imagining the murderer solving the clue and heading off to where the dowry was supposedly hidden before she could follow him.
For what it was worth, she tried to solve the riddle herself. But as usual, her brain turned to mush when confronted by cryptic clues.
“Got it,” said Doc at last.
“Tell me.”
“It’s rather complicated. It has to do with the properties of a triangle. The sum of the angles of a triangle is a hundred and eighty. And Pythagoras’ theorem states that the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. I solved the rest of the riddle using the trigonometry of Hipparchus.”
“Trigonometry? How did you jump to that?”
“Well, trigonometry is the science of triangles. Part of the riddle lies in the words, ‘the sign of the queen’. Even in Old English, it’s a pun on the word ‘sine’, which is a formula for calculating trigonometric equations.”
“Clever.”
“So, here’s what I’ve got.” He showed her his final calculations. “The answer is in two parts – minus-five and forty-nine.”
Fay stared at the page. “I’m none the wiser. What does that mean?”
“I’m not sure, but I know those are the correct figures.”
Fay turned the page so that it faced her. The numbers reminded her of something, although she wasn’t sure what.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “What about longitude and latitude? Or hadn’t that been discovered in the Middle Ages?”
“On the contrary, longitude and latitude were first used by the ancient Greeks. These could very well be coordinates. Minus 5 degrees west and 49 degrees north. Why, that’s right here on Bluebell Island. Somewhere to the west of us, I’d say.”
“Then we’ve got him. Once we’ve plotted these coordinates, all we need to do is wait for him to arrive.”
“You’re not planning on confronting him alone?”
“What else? Unless you want to join me?”
“No, thanks. The cold night air plays havoc with my joints. I was going to suggest that David accompanies you.”
“The Tireless Two strike again.”
Even in the dark, Fay could see him raising his eyebrows. “The Tireless Two?”
“That’s our team name for when we go on these nighttime expeditions. One night it’s a root cellar, the next night it’s a secret cave.”
“We don’t even know if the caves are what we’re looking for. The coordinates weren’t precise enough.”
“True, but it’s the best we’ve got. And if the coordinates led us here, you can bet they will have led him here too.”
They had taken the jeep out to the west side of the island. Fay let David take the wheel because she didn’t know the back roads well enough. He drove them to the wildest part of the island where craggy cliffs were battered by the Atlantic, and the roads disappeared amid piles of rocks and coastal scrub.
He drove as far off the road as the jeep would take them and then stopped, pulling up behind an overhang of rock that would screen the car from sight, particularly in the dark.
“If he does come, we don’t want him to know anyone got here before him.”
“Definitely.” Fay looked around. “Where are these caves your father was talking about?”
“There’s a part of the coastline where the cliffs slope gently down to the sea. At low tide, it is possible to walk down to the sea, although you have to be careful. The local fishermen sometimes come here to scrape mussels and oysters off the rocks. But it’s considered dangerous. There are several natural caves set into the rocks. At high tide they are flooded with seawater. The idea that anything in there could have survived for eight-hundred years is laughable.”
“It doesn’t need to have survived. All that matters is that our suspect thinks it might have.”
“You’re sure that only one of them is going to turn up here? We’ll look silly if all six arrive for this ridiculous treasure hunt.”
“Five of them believe that the third creature is a sphinx. That changes the calculation completely. According to your father, the coordinates they will have come up with are in the vicinity of Windsor Castle. They are probably on the ferry right now making their way to London. I doubt they’ll get a sympathetic reception from the castle guards. The only one who would have come up with the same coordinates as us was the person who knew all along what the three creatures were. He discovered the identity of the third creature when he hit Desmond Pinkerton over the head and took the book he had been looking at.”
They stopped walking as the ground fell away beneath their feet. David shone his flashlight down the steep slope of the cliff that seemed to Fay’s eyes to tumble down to the angry sea boiling below them.
“I thought you said this was a gentle slope.”
“It’s a lot better than a vertical drop, which is what you’d get everywhere else along here. This is perfectly climbable. You just have to be careful.”
“You sound as though you’ve done this before.”
“Maybe once or twice as a teenager. We thought we were being daring, ignoring our parents’ warnings. But of course, we were just being stupid. Luckily none of us slipped and fell. I don’t imagine we would have survived.”
Fay swept her flashlight briefly across him, noting his unsmiling face.
“Are you telling me there isn’t even a tiny part of you that’s enjoying
this? What about that young boy who tried to get into root cellars and climbed dangerous cliffs? Are you telling me he isn’t having a great time right now?”
David smiled reluctantly. “Maybe a little.”
“I knew it.”
They set off down the cliff, moving slowly and carefully. There wasn’t anything that could be described as a path. Fay was relieved when David called a halt after about twenty treacherous minutes.
“There’s no point in going further. As I say, the lower caves are flooded with seawater most of the time. It’s low tide now, but we don’t want to get trapped in a cave when the sea starts coming in. We can wait for him here. If he’s coming, he’ll have to come past us. There’s nowhere else for him to go.”
He showed her a deep indentation in the cliff face where they could wait. It was hardly big enough to be called a cave, but they could both fit inside and be completely out of sight.
They sat cross-legged on the rocks. It had started to rain.
“Isn’t this cozy?” said Fay.
David couldn’t bear it another moment.
He stood up and shook out his legs to get rid of the kinks. He rubbed his hands together and blew on them. He rolled his shoulders and swung his arms over his head. Then he looked down at Fay, annoyed by her immobile, upright figure.
“How do you do it? How do you sit there like a Zen master or something for hour after hour? Aren’t you cold? Aren’t you uncomfortable? Aren’t you bored?”
“This is a stakeout. I’m used to it. If you’d ever done a ten-hour stakeout in a dodgy neighborhood with only carrot sticks and water to sustain you, you’d know what boredom feels like. You can’t even scroll through your phone because you’re supposed to be watching whatever it is you’re supposed to be watching. This has barely been two hours. I’m just getting comfortable.”
She had to laugh at his expression.
“He’s not coming,” he said. “This was a crazy idea from the start. Who’s to say my father’s calculations are even correct? His coordinates could be out by a thousand miles – two thousand miles.”
“No, he’s right. I can feel it in my bones.”
“The only thing my bones are feeling right now is the cold, hard rock in this stupid cave.” David stamped around to restore circulation in his feet.
“Tell me about Laetitia,” she said to distract him. “Has she forgiven you for standing her up yet?”
“She has, yes. Once she calmed down she realized it was just a minor slip-up. She also agreed to take a break. She won’t be sending me information on surgical posts in America anymore.”
“You’re taking a break?”
He looked puzzled. “What do you mean? Oh, I see. No, I just meant that she’s taking a break from trying to persuade me to move back to America. We’re going to do the long-distance thing for now. We’ll see how that works out.”
“Long distance isn’t easy. I hope you get your happy ending.”
He opened his mouth to thank her when she held up a hand for quiet.
“Hush. Do you hear that?”
They strained their ears. In the distance there was a sound that could have been a car.
“Someone’s coming.” Fay stood up and took her gun out of its holster. She held it two-handed in the total-contact, thumbs-forward grip. Her feet were shoulder-width apart and braced. She kept her weapon pointed at the mouth of the cave. David stood to one side, taking care not to get in her way.
By now they could clearly hear that someone was approaching. There was a crunch of hard-soled boots on the loose rock of the cliff. A shadow fell across the entrance to the cave.
“Come in, Mr. Leblanc,” said Fay. “We’ve been expecting you.”
The dark figure jumped convulsively. Then it disappeared, and they heard footsteps thudding against the rocks.
Fay sighed. “Why do they always run? I hate it when they run.”
David shrugged off his jacket and gave it to Fay to hold. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
Fay couldn’t resist going outside the cave to watch. Paul Leblanc had got a head start but David caught up to him easily. Just as they rounded the top of the cliff, David launched himself forward and tackled Leblanc around his knees. He fell heavily to the ground.
Still holding her weapon Fay picked her way carefully up the steep slope. The two men were breathing hard but apparently unharmed. Leblanc’s face was contorted with indignation.
“How did you know it was me? How?”
“This is hardly the time.”
“No. I want to know. Tell me.”
David pulled him to his feet and kept a grip on his arm as Fay covered him with her pistol in the uncertain light of the moon.
“Fine,” she said. “It was a couple of things. On the day Desmond Pinkerton was killed I came downstairs to the basement of the library and saw you looking at a piece of paper with a sketch of a dragon on it. I thought it was part of a children’s storybook, but now I realize you had drawn it yourself because you had just discovered the identity of the third beast in the riddle. It puzzled me that the book Desmond had been looking at only disappeared the next day. Who else had the opportunity to remove the book at their leisure and study it?”
Leblanc made a snarling noise but subsided when David’s grip on his shoulder tightened.
“Then there was the fact that you claimed not to recognize the dead man. But earlier this afternoon Cecil Travis mentioned that you’d had several meetings with him. That’s when I knew for sure.”
Leblanc struggled against David’s hand. “It’s not fair. I deserve that dowry. I worked harder than any of them to get it. Desmond just got lucky.”
“I don’t think there’s anything lucky about ending up dead.”
“I didn’t mean to kill him. I just wanted to stun him long enough to get that book away from him. He would never have known it was me. I came up behind him. The idiot fell badly and broke his neck. It wasn’t my fault.”
“I think a judge might disagree with you there. You might not have intended to kill him, but you made no effort to help him or to call emergency services. You went down to your basement and started doodling dragons. You might not be convicted of murder, Mr. Leblanc, but you’re going to jail for a long time.”
“It’s not fair!” He almost sobbed with fury. “They wouldn’t let me in their stupid society, but I knew more about the dowry than the rest of them put together. I deserve that dowry. I earned it.”
“Did you also deserve the manuscripts you stole from Pinkerton’s bookshop?” asked Fay. “I hope you still have them because two officers from the Met in London are hot on your trail. That’s property belonging to the queen you stole.”
Paul shrugged. “How was I to know that? It was worth it to get closer to the dowry.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake.” David gave him a shake. “You don’t really believe there’s anything left down there, do you? After eight hundred years of storms and spring tides and floods and oystermen walking up and down? Let’s go and look at this precious dowry of yours.”
He frog-marched Leblanc down the steep slope, passing the cave he and Fay had waited in. She trotted behind them, trying to keep up, and gasping as her feet slid against the slippery rocks.
“You’ll agree that there’s no point in looking at the lower caves?” said David. “They are permanently flooded with seawater.”
Leblanc nodded grudgingly. “I suppose not.”
“Fay and I can attest to the fact that the cave we were waiting in is empty. So, let’s go lower.”
They explored several empty caves, getting lower and lower, until they could hardly hear each other over the roar of the water.
“We should go back,” yelled Fay. “The tide is coming in.”
“One more,” insisted Paul. “Just one more. I have to know for sure.”
And so, they went lower still. The last navigable cave was already ankle-deep in seawater. As David shone his light into it, Leblanc gave a great cr
y.
“The dowry!” He pulled away from David’s grip and fell forward on his knees. Fay shone her flashlight to see what he was crooning over.
It was an old metal trunk that had once been strapped up with leather. All that remained of those straps was a pair of blackened, corroded buckles with wisps of leather still clinging to them.
The trunk was standing open, encrusted with mud and overgrown with barnacles. It was as empty as the hollow dreams of this man who had taken the life of another in his pursuit of a fairytale.
THE CAT THAT PLAYED THE TOMBOLA
Chapter 1
“Roll up! Roll up! Try your luck on the tombola. Hundreds of prizes to be won! Only two pounds a ticket. The more you play, the more you win. Roll up now and try the tombola.”
Fay Penrose put down her megaphone and mopped her brow with a damp cloth. It was a glorious spring day - perfect weather for Bluebell Island’s annual spring fair. Fay would have thoroughly enjoyed the mild warmth of the sun if only she had been wearing a cotton sundress like all the other women.
Instead, she was dressed in a three-piece suit. It weighed about a ton and was made of thick layers of scratchy nylon. It was certainly an eye-catching outfit. The waistcoat was pink, the pants orange, and the jacket with its long tails was candy-striped.
Fay looked like a cross between a candy cane and a carnival barker, which was presumably the intention. The suit had been made for someone much bigger than her – her grandfather or great-grandfather, perhaps. Fay’s friend and colleague, Morwen, had shortened the pants so they didn’t look completely ridiculous, but they still had a tendency to drag on the grass however tightly she belted them at the waist.
Fay straightened when she saw a family of four approaching. They were probably coming to buy tickets for the kids only, but she would see if she could charm them into spending more money.
After all, it was all for a good cause.
“Good afternoon to you!” she swept off her striped top hat and bowed with a flourish. “Have you come to try out our special family discount?”
The Cat's Paw Cozy Mysteries Page 32