“Calm down, Seth,” Elaine said impatiently, putting a hand on his hairy forearm. “Pattie was about to tell us.”
“I found O’Malley in a tent in the festival camping grounds. I think he was drawn there by the smell of food.”
“That bloody festival!” Seth roared. “Well, tell me which of those unwashed hoodlums has him and I’ll go and fetch him back!”
“Don’t worry,” said Pattie, “I know where he is, and I’ll go to collect him for you. Cats wander sometimes; it’s in their nature. He’s probably already sick of all the noise and getting his paws muddy.”
“Not likely,” Seth grumbled. “He’s a typical farm cat.”
“Please allow me,” Pattie said sweetly. “He’ll be home safe in sound in time for lunch.”
She left the farm happy to have the opportunity to reunite a roaming tom with his family. She took her time walking back along the farm paths and then crossing the road to the festival grounds. There was a rare break in the music and she was enjoying the peaceful walk. But she hadn’t gotten far when her mobile phone rang in her pocket. It took her a moment to figure out what it was; she’d never owned a mobile, and this had been a birthday gift from Elliott. He liked to text her photos of the pets that people sometimes brought him, his unofficial out-of-hours patients.
“Hello?” asked Pattie, hoping she’d pressed the right button to answer the call. “Patricia Lansbury speaking.”
“Mrs Lansbury? It’s D.C. Downey.” The officer always used his title when he talked to Pattie on official business. Any other time he was just ‘Thomas’.
“Hello, D.C. Downey. How may I help you?”
“It’s just an update. Juliette – Um, Constable Palmer – went to get statements from the four men in plot 369. Well, there was only three there when she arrived. Harry Widmore’s done a runner.”
“His friends don’t know where he’s gone?” she asked.
“If they do, they aren’t sharing. Constable Palmer’s just taking their statements now.”
“As it happens, I’m about to pay them a visit to discuss a cat. I’ll give her a hand.”
“A cat…?”
“I’ll let you have an update once I have something to share. Thanks for calling, Thomas!”
Chapter 9
Pattie arrived back at the large tent by the white van. The meadow was getting muddier and muddier, and was now carpeted with litter and the occasional sleeping reveller. At any one time there were two or more stages with musicians playing.
James Farrell and Toby Draper seemed pretty irritated that they were missing out on the show. They stood arguing with Constable Palmer with their arms crossed.
“Listen, gentlemen: this is a murder investigation. Either you can give me your statements now, or I can have some of my friends come to help to take you to the station, and we can do it there. I think you’re likely to miss a lot more of the show that way, don’t you?”
“I don’t know why you think we have anything to do with it, lady,” said James. “It was Harry that fancied that woman, not us. What’s the point in talking more to us?”
“I won’t know what the point is until I talk to you, will I?” Constable Palmer said patiently. “This is just how these things go. A man was found murdered, gentlemen. I should think you’d want to play along just to be on the safe side?”
The two men groaned.
Pattie made her presence known. “Can I help, officer?”
“Morning, Mrs Lansbury. I could use your help interviewing these two. And their friend Timothy, wherever he’s gone.”
“What’s she got to do with it?” asked Toby. “She’s not a copper.”
“Look, if we interview each of you at the same time, that means you’re free to run off to the nearest stage that much quicker, doesn’t it? You, come with me. James, please give your statement to Mrs Lansbury. If you’re honest and don’t mess us around, we can be done in twenty minutes. Let’s go.”
Pattie took Toby inside the tent, where they sat on plastic chairs amidst clutter and refuse. The young man had a belligerent attitude, slumping in his chair with his arms crossed over his chest. Pattie swore that he even stuck out his bottom lip a little.
“Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?” Pattie suggested, taking out her notepad. “What can you tell me about Mister Widmore’s relationship with Ms Carter?”
“I dunno. Nothing, really.”
“Had they grown close?”
“It’d only been like a day. So not really.”
“Did any one of you have any altercation with Daryl Hardy? What about Mister Widmore? Did they have any reason to be angry with one another?”
“Harry? I dunno. Not that I noticed.”
Pattie sighed inwardly. This was going to take longer than she thought.
Another twenty minutes later, she hadn’t gotten any new information from Toby. Pattie was a great believer that if you took three people and put them in separate rooms, their stories would soon start to diverge. But Toby had little to say on the matter and remained obstinate.
“Where do you think Mister Widmore could have gone to?” asked Pattie.
“I dunno. I’m not his keeper. He was gone by early this morning. Didn’t take any of his stuff. Didn’t take the van. If he’d gone to wash he would have been back by now, and he wouldn’t have gone to one of the stages without asking us first. We talked over the festival schedule last night and agreed there was nothing we were bothered about seeing until ten o’clock. Which was half an hour ago – thanks for that.”
“I’m only assisting with the investigation, not in charge of it,” Pattie replied curtly. If there’s one thing that rubbed her up the wrong way, it was sarcasm. “Had Mister Widmore ever committed a crime? Did he ever get violent?”
“No more than the rest of us,” Toby replied flatly.
“Do you think that he was capable of murder?” she asked.
Toby shrugged. “No more than the rest of us. Can I go now? Are we finished?”
Pattie could see that she was getting nowhere. She stifled a sigh and took out the Polaroid of the farmer’s cat. “Where’s the kitty?”
“I dunno. It didn’t come back this morning. I guess it found somewhere else to get fed.”
Chapter 10
“Get anything out of them?” asked D.C. Downey over the phone.
Pattie swapped the mobile to her good ear. “Nothing useful. Constable Palmer says the other two were less than co-operative too. I’m not sure what else to do with them. Perhaps a grilling down at the station?”
“We’ve got their home addresses, and they seem more concerned about their stupid festival than anything else. Let’s see if our man Harry Widmore turns up again. If not, we know where to find the others.”
“Alright. Please keep me informed, Thomas. This one is going to keep me awake.”
“You bet, Mrs Lansbury. Stay safe.”
Pattie had just come back from another visit to Seth MacGowan’s farm. She’d spoken to Elaine and persuaded her to part with one of O’Malley’s favourite toys. Pattie had an idea.
When she got home, she put the kettle on and greeted Simba, who purred and butted her until the kettle began to whistle. Pattie might have given in and gotten a mobile phone, but she’d never stop using the stove to warm her water. She made herself some Lady Grey tea and sat in the lounge waiting for Tyson to show up.
Tyson was a handsome stripy blue moggy that she’d adopted three years ago from a policeman friend of her son’s. This friend had come from a nearby town where they had a bit of a problem. They had a special precinct where they trained police Alsatians for the whole of Yorkshire: sniffer dogs to detect drugs and explosives. Pattie had joked that they should borrow her cat Jasper, who could ‘smell’ when someone was lying, to give them some extra training. Her visitor hadn’t believed her, of course (more fool him), but he’d said, on the topic of cats, perhaps he could help her? For a long time, a stray cat had been wandering into their do
g compound and eating their food and distracting them from their training. Curiously, the cat wasn’t the least bit afraid of the dogs, and the dogs didn’t mind the cat either. It was as though the cat thought it was a dog itself.
Recently however, the precinct had taken on a wider catchment area and inherited another dozen dogs. These were far less tolerant of a strange animal in their midst, and the cat was causing chaos. Maybe Pattie was the perfect person to take the moggy off their hands?
Pattie had obliged, and was delighted to see the smart-looking, silvery tom jump out of the carrier that D.C. Downey had brought him in. The people at the station had named him ‘Tyson’, for his fearless attitude, and he responded to the name.
That wasn’t all. Tyson seemed as well trained as any Alsatian: Pattie found that he was incredibly good at sniffing out treats. Pattie occasionally secreted cat treats around the house to keep the cats entertained. She eventually had to keep Tyson locked in the bedroom with a bowl of kitten milk to give the others a sporting chance at getting there first, otherwise he would dash around the house and snap up every one of them inside of two minutes. It transpired that Tyson was a first rate tracker.
By the time Pattie had finished her tea and eaten a Kit Kat, she heard the familiar thud of Tyson coming into the house from the upstairs window. He usually kept himself to himself, and abhorred the company of other cats, so made his entrance and exit via the discreet opening above the fence. Pattie went upstairs to greet and feed him. Once he’d devoured his small meal, she gave him half an hour to become interested in something other than sleeping, then offered him O’Malley’s toy, which she’d gotten from Elaine MacGowan. Tyson sniffed it, then recoiled, repulsed by the smell of another cat. Pattie fed him a crunchy treat, which he wolfed down. Then she offered him the toy again.
She had worked out the best way to make use of his skills a while ago. It had taken over two years of experimentation, but now she knew how to persuade Tyson to track with his advanced nose. A cat’s sense of smell was only a fraction of that of a dog’s – still fourteen times that of a human – but Tyson was an exceptional case.
She had never tried an experiment on this scale though. If a cat could smell something from miles away, then perhaps this would work…
Pattie rattled the box of cat treats. Tyson turned his silver face to her expectantly. When she proffered the cat toy instead and opened the window, Tyson gave her one last hopefully look, then leaped outside.
Excited, Pattie dashed downstairs, put on her boots, and scoured the front lawn for Tyson’s long, stripy body. There he was! She scampered after him, across the garden and onto the street. Tyson trotted casually down Shepherd’s Street with his nose to the ground, waited patiently at the street corner, then safely crossed the road. It seemed to be working, but then Tyson stopped and turned around. He came right back to Pattie and meowed for a treat.
Pattie sighed and let him follow her back to the house. So much for that idea!
Then her mobile began to trill. This time she recognised the number. It was D.C. Downey.
“Mrs Lansbury?”
“Yes?”
“Can you come to join me at the river, near the stone bridge? Harry Widmore turned up … He’s been murdered.”
Chapter 11
A tributary of the river Ouse ran along the bottom of the valley. In late winter, when the snows melted, it was a powerful stream, almost too fast to wade across. In the summer it was shallow but rapid, bouncing over its stone bed along an ancient course that, historians said, had been diverted by the Normans to support the hamlets.
Its route was a regular fixture on most countryside walks in the area. Pattie was especially fond of walking along the high bank in the Autumn, when she could see through the trees and the waters were shallow enough that she could spot the trout swimming there, motionless brown bodies letting the river bring their food to them.
Pattie took the low bank past the festival grounds and farms and into the valley’s crease. In summer there were tall elms and beeches that leaned over the river, the canopies from either side almost touching in the middle. A narrow strip of sparkling water, where the sunlight could reach, glistened along the length of the river until it reached the stone bridge. Pattie had seen signs of the police presence long before then. A couple of officers in boots trudged back towards the village had given her a wary nod.
Beside the bridge were D.C. Downey and Constable Palmer, along with a forensics team. Constable Palmer was trying to convince a reporter to leave the crime scene and call the station for a press release in four hours.
“Listen, if you want a story, you’re going to have to clear it with the Chief, okay? We don’t have the manpower to be giving out press interviews right now.”
“Could you at least confirm the facts?” pushed the reporter. Pattie recognised her as the popular Laura Conrad, who scouted newsworthy stories for the TV news broadcasts. “People will want to know what’s going on here.”
“We both know that it’s your job to make people think they want to know about all this,” Constable Palmer said irritably.
“But a murder during a festival? That’s big news, Constable!”
“I don’t care if it has global significance; right now you’re interfering with my investigation, so if you don’t leave I’ll have an officer escort you away!”
Pattie spotted D.C. Downey speaking into his recorder nearby and joined him under the dappling shadows. She saw the body of Harry Widmore lying face-up beside the river on a tarpaulin.
“He was drowned,” said D.C. Downey. “A dog-walker found him with his face in the water. The rest of him is bone dry, so I suppose he was held under by someone.”
Pattie looked at the body with sadness. “Could he have banged his head and fallen into the river that way? Or fainted for some reason?”
“It’s possible, but that’s pretty unlikely…”
Pattie nodded in agreement. This was murder.
“Any signs of struggle?” she asked.
“There’s a small tear in the seam of his shirt over the shoulder. That could be from when he was being held down. The way the mud is smeared on his front suggests he was moving around before he drowned. I think that’s fairly conclusive. And there’s this…”
He took out an evidence bag with something inside. It was a green flea collar for a cat.
“May I see that?” asked Pattie, taking the bag. She pulled the Polaroid photo of Seth MacGowan’s cat out of her pocket and compared them. In the photo, the cat was wearing a green flea collar with a silver diamond-shaped tag, just like the one in the evidence bag. “This collar belonged to the cat that had been in Harry Widmore’s tent the last couple of days – Seth and Elaine MacGowan’s cat, O’Malley.”
“O’Malley, like in that Disney film?”
“What Disney film? Anyway, there’s some strange connection between the MacGowans and those young men. I just can’t figure out what it could be. Seth and Elaine have alibis for the time of the murder. Then our prime suspect, Blossom’s love interest, shows up murdered! What on Earth is going on?”
D.C. Downey took back the evidence and put it in a tray, along with his notebook and some scrapings from the victim’s clothes and body. “My main questions right now are, who killed Harry Widmore, and why?”
Juliette Palmer joined them, dusting her hands. She’d finally gotten the reporter to leave. “Do you think that somehow Ms Carter arranged it, as revenge for Daryl’s murder?”
“She hardly seemed certain that he was the killer,” Pattie pointed out. “The only thing she was sure about was that she was innocent. Besides, I don’t believe there are many contract killers in the Little Hamilton phone book. And she didn’t seem the murdery type.”
“You’re right. This didn’t happen by accident, though. But who has a motive?”
Just then, one of the other officers asked for D.C. Downey. “Sir, we just got a call. The Carter woman wants to change her statement.”
; Chapter 12
Back at the police station, Pattie excused herself and went to the petrol station across the road to buy herself a sandwich and cup of tea. The tea was weak and burnt, but the sandwich stopped her trembling at least. Too often during arduous cases like this one she forgot to take care of herself. It was funny how her thoughts were always on the little residents of the Feline Retirement Home, but she barely remembered to eat some lunch.
D.C. Downey found her sitting on a bench in one of the station’s hallways, quietly finishing off the sandwich. He sat down beside her. “I’m glad that you’re involved in this one, Mrs Lansbury. It’s giving me a headache.”
“How many times have I asked you to call me Patricia, young man?” Pattie replied playfully. “I used to put you to bed during sleepovers, remember? If you can’t be informal with me now, I don’t know when you ever will!”
He laughed softly. “Old habits die hard, I suppose. So … have you heard from Andy, lately? It’s been so long since he was last in town.”
Pattie’s son Andrew was not her favourite topic. “And good riddance. He was not entirely to blame for what happened, but he was a Detective, like you. He should have known better. So, no, I haven’t heard from him in a long while. He always found a way to look after himself, so I’m sure he’s fine.”
D.C. Downey nodded without saying a word.
Pattie folded up the sandwich wrapper and binned it. “More importantly, how are you, Thomas? How are you coping with single life?”
“To be honest, Mrs Lansbury, things between Isabelle and I had been poor for a very long time. I’m glad that I finally found the courage to end it. She always used to remind me what a coward I was.”
“Well, she probably regrets seeing your brave side now,” said Pattie. “It’s her loss, Thomas. You’re still young. If you want to share your life with someone, you’ve plenty of time to find her.”
Murder and a Song (A Pattie Lansbury Cat Cozy Mystery Series Book 2) Page 3