The Cat That Played The Tombola

by Fiona Snyckers

  It took nearly an hour before the kittens slowed down and began to yawn. A bank of clouds swept across the sun and a light drizzle started up. Fay scooped the babies into the cat carrier and took them inside. She deposited them in her bedroom where they curled up in a basket with Smudge and Olive for a well-earned nap. It had been lovely watching them play outside and they had enjoyed it. Fay made up her mind to give them some outside time every day from now on.

  She checked the time. It was eleven o’clock. Doc Dyer would be in the middle of his morning consultations. She wouldn’t see him until after five.

  But perhaps he would respond to a text.

  Fay: Morning, Doc. Morwen tells me you’re a member of the Rotary Club. Were you there when Mrs. Saville attended her first meeting? I’ve heard rumors that she might have met someone that night - someone she started a relationship with. Do you have any idea who it could have been?

  She didn’t expect a reply right away. He probably wouldn’t look at his phone while he was consulting. She went to the kitchen to bake a batch of brownies for tea. It was only when she was pulling these out of the oven that the reply arrived.

  Doc Dyer: I’m afraid I wasn’t paying attention. I hesitate to speak ill of the dead, but I never found Mrs. Saville particularly likeable. There’s a Rotary Club meeting tonight, though. You can come along as my guest and see if you can figure out who Mrs. Saville’s mystery suitor might have been.

  Fay sent a message accepting the invitation. She had a feeling it would turn out to be a fruitful lead.

  After lunch, she walked down to the village to see what she could find out about the murder weapon.

  She knew she would have to speak to Lady Chadwick eventually, but she was hoping to put that off. Lady Chadwick combined an imperious manner with some strange ideas about how the world worked. This made it difficult to have a conversation with her. She might have been the legal owner of the gun that killed Mrs. Saville, but Fay was more interested in talking to the people who had borrowed it for the night of the fair.

  This meant paying a visit to the Playhouse Theater – the island’s local center of performing arts. It was also the headquarters of the local amateur dramatic society who called themselves the Bluebell Players. They were the ones who had presented the Little Red Riding Hood pantomime on the day of the fair. The gun had been officially in their care.

  The theater was on the High Street, sandwiched between the Royal Hotel and the town hall. It was an attractive, neoclassical building with Doric columns at the front and a Grecian pediment above. Fay had been to a couple of productions performed at the Playhouse and had been impressed by the high standard of their performances. Considering how small the island was and the fact that half the cast were usually members of the local high school, they did a pretty good job.

  The person Fay wanted to speak to was the theatrical director, Raymond Garver. He was a larger-than-life character. In England he was known as a luvvie. Fay hadn’t understood the term the first time she’d heard it, so Morwen explained that people in show business in England were often referred to as luvvies because they called everyone ‘love’ or ‘lovey’, often to conceal the fact that they didn’t remember your name.

  Fay was pleased to find the door to the playhouse standing open, although the lights were off, and the box office was deserted. The only sign of life was the sound of muffled voices coming from inside the theatre. She tried the doors that led to the stalls, but they were locked.

  As she listened, trying to trace the voices to their source, Fay noticed the tone of the voices getting louder and angrier.

  Were they rehearsing for a play or was this a real argument?

  Following the noise, she walked past the restrooms and down a long corridor that ran along the side of the theatre towards the stage. The voices were getting louder, and not just because the people were shouting at each other. She was getting closer to the source.

  The corridor ended at a door, and there was nowhere to go except through it. It opened easily. The voices were now even louder. Fay climbed a flight of stairs and found herself standing in the wings of the backstage area. If she positioned herself just right, she could see what was happening. A man and a woman were standing on stage having a heated argument. This was no play they were rehearsing. This was the real thing.

  She recognized the man as theatrical director, Raymond Garver. She didn’t know the woman’s name but knew she was the actress who had played Little Red Riding Hood in the pantomime.

  “That could have been me!” said Raymond, his voice just below a yell.

  “But it wasn’t you, Ray. Look at you, standing there as large as life and twice as irritating.”

  “Oh, really? It sounds as though you wish it was me that got hit by the bullet. Are you really trying to tell me I’m more irritating than Mrs. Saville?”

  “It’s close. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “Do you even remember how she used to come around here all the time telling us how to do our jobs? She interfered constantly.”

  “At least I didn’t have to work with her,” said the woman. “At least she wasn’t undermining every decision I made.”

  “So, you admit that you wish it was me who was on the receiving end of that bullet?”

  The woman crossed her arms and spun away from him in a gesture of impatience. “Don’t be ridiculous, Ray. You know perfectly well I don’t want anyone to be shot or hurt. I’m a pacifist. You’re the one who fetched that gun from Lady Chadwick. It was in your possession. You had the most opportunity to load it. Don’t you think if I wanted you dead, I would have shot you during the play? Or at rehearsals. I could have pretended that I didn’t know it was loaded.”

  Ray laughed. “I don’t think there’s a single person who would have believed you. Everyone at the playhouse knows how much you hate me and how jealous you are of me. You’d love to take over my job. Admit it.”

  “I’m not the only one who would like me to take over your job. They won’t say it to your face, but the rest of the Players feel the same way as I do. You’re a dinosaur, Ray. We need to move with the times. The world has moved on without you and you don’t even realize it. We need to be hip and happening.”

  “I’m hip!” screamed Ray. “I’m happening! Just because I don’t want to …”

  They were now standing so close together, bellowing in each other’s faces, that Fay feared violence.

  She ran lightly down the stairs and opened the door at the bottom. Then she slammed it hard and tramped up the stairs with a heavy tread.

  The voices stopped.

  “Who is that?” Ray’s voice was sharp.

  Fay stepped out of the wings and onto the stage. “It’s only me.”

  Chapter 8

  Raymond Garver and the woman stared at Fay, the anger slowly draining out of their faces.

  Raymond recovered first. Fixing a smile on his face, he surged forward with his arms outstretched.

  “It’s Miss Penrose, isn’t it? I’m Raymond Garver, the theatrical director of this modest establishment. Please call me Ray. How are you, luvvie?”

  He put his hands on Fay’s shoulders and kissed her on both cheeks.

  “Nice to meet you, Ray. I’m Fay. We rhyme.”

  He gave a delighted laugh. “Fay Penrose, this is Pippa Brand, my second-in-command and all-round brilliant actress and director.”

  Fay shook hands with Pippa. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  “Fay Penrose?” said Pippa. “You must be the granddaughter of the late Mrs. Penrose. She was a great patron of the arts. She always supported us. She even left us money in her will to set up a grant.”

  “My grandmother loved coming to watch your productions. I remember her bringing me to see them as a child.”

  “What can we do for you, Fay?” asked Raymond.

  “You probably know that Mrs. Saville was killed on my property at the spring fair the other night. I saw her go down, but I didn’t see who did it. I was
the one who found the murder weapon. The police have already questioned me about it.”

  Fay found that this was a good way to get people to open up to her. If they believed that she was under suspicion for a crime, they saw her as someone with a legitimate right to ask questions, rather than a busybody.

  “I thought the gun looked familiar,” Fay went on. “It looked like the one that had been used in the pantomime earlier that afternoon.”

  “That’s right,” said Raymond. “Pippa here, or rather Little Red Riding Hood, used it to shoot me - the big bad wolf - during our production.”

  “The gun actually belongs to Lady Chadwick,” said Pippa. “It has been in her family for years. I don’t know what era it is from originally, but I believe it’s an antique. It’s a revolver with silver mountings all over the barrel. It looks great on stage, which is why we always borrow it for our productions. Lady Chadwick told me she doesn’t like to see her family’s treasures permanently behind glass in a cabinet. She likes to get it out a few times a year so that it can be enjoyed by the wider community. It is very effective as a stage prop.”

  “It made quite a bang when you fired it on stage. How do you get that sound effect?”

  “I’m afraid we’re low-tech around here. We just play a recording of a gun being fired. The biggest challenge is always coordinating my action of pretending to fire the gun with the sound of the recording. It looks silly if you get it wrong.”

  “Do you actually pull the trigger? Do you dry-fire the gun?”

  Pippa glanced at Raymond who took over.

  “We do, yes. It’s one of those details that the audience can see from their seats. It looks more authentic for the actor to pull the trigger, so that’s the way we’ve always done it.”

  “You must have had safety precautions in place? It’s a real gun, after all, not just a prop.”

  “I’ll admit it’s something that we’ve allowed to slide over the years. We stopped seeing it as a real revolver – as a potential weapon. It is so old and comical looking that we didn’t take it seriously. Whenever we went to collect it from Lady Chadwick, she would break it open to show us that it was unloaded. Then when we started using it in rehearsals, Pippa and I would break it open to show the cast that it was empty. And after that we wouldn’t think about it again.”

  “Do you know if Lady Chadwick keeps her guns in working order?”

  “I can answer that,” said Pippa. “The rest of Chadwick Manor might be falling to pieces, but Lady Chadwick keeps her weapons in perfect order. She gets an expert in from the mainland once a year to clean and oil all her guns. I don’t know if he goes as far as test-firing each one, but he certainly keeps them in good condition. The thing with the revolver is that no one knew whether it still worked or not. Lady Chadwick thought it probably didn’t.”

  “When last would the expert have been at Chadwick Manor?”

  Raymond and Pippa were unable to answer this.

  “And when you fired the gun on stage during the fair,” Fay asked Pippa. “You didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing at all. It didn’t feel heavier than usual. The trigger made its usual click. Nothing went wrong. I remember feeling pleased that I had coordinated my firing action perfectly with the sound of the recorded gunshot. And that was it. I had no suspicion that anything was amiss.”

  “And what about you, Raymond? Was it just another day at the office for you?”

  “To be honest, yes. I noticed nothing different about the gun or the way Pippa was handling it. I was the one who brought it out of the prop room for her. There didn’t seem to be anything odd about it.”

  “What happened to it after the pantomime?”

  “I took it back to the prop room myself. It was easily the most valuable item there, so I locked the room. We’re all nervous about having Lady Chadwick’s family heirloom disappear. We were planning to return it to her the next day. The pantomime we do at the spring fair is a mini version of the production we do at Christmas. We would have borrowed the gun again from her for the Christmas show.”

  “So, you left the prop room locked?”

  “Definitely. It’s quite a distance from Penrose House to the theatre. I wasn’t going to walk all that way only to leave the prop room unlocked. I locked it and it was still locked later that night after the fair. I checked it as soon as I heard the rumor that our silver revolver had been used to shoot Mrs. Saville. The prop room was still locked, but the gun was gone. I’ve already told the police this.”

  “Who else had a key to the prop room?”

  Raymond and Pippa exchanged glances again. For two people who had been fighting like cat and dog, they seemed quite in tune with each other.

  “I have one,” said Pippa. “As far as I know it was in my possession the whole time on Sunday. I checked after Raymond told me what happened on Sunday night. There it was – on my keyring, just as it should have been. The trouble is, there’s a third key. We keep it hanging on a hook in the office, which is sometimes locked and sometimes not. That might sound like poor security, but we’ve never regarded ourselves as having anything of value to steal. Also, this is Bluebell Island where people don’t even lock their front doors never mind the prop room of the amateur dramatic society.”

  “Pippa and I are not here all the time. We have to leave the keys available to any members of the players who might be rehearsing here. The idea of locking the prop room is to keep the props safe from the public, not from the players themselves.”

  “So, anyone could have unlocked the prop room and taken out the gun after about three o’clock on Sunday afternoon?” said Fay. “Anyone who knew that there was a key to the prop room hanging in the office.”

  “It was closer to four o’clock when I brought the gun back, but yes. I’d agree with that.”

  There was a pause as Fay marshalled her thoughts. She needed to be diplomatic.

  “Forgive me, but I couldn’t help noticing when I walked in that the two of you were engaged in a heated argument. It seemed to be about this very subject – in other words, who loaded the gun and when it was loaded.”

  Raymond and Pippa drew closer together. They physically closed the gap between them by leaning into each other’s space. The effect was one of closeness and solidarity.

  “We’re theatre types,” said Raymond. “We love a bit of drama. If there is no drama, we’ll create it. This is the first time in ages that we’ve had some real-life drama at the playhouse. I wouldn’t take it too seriously.”

  Pippa nodded. “Ray and I work well together. But we’re both actors, and as he says we’re addicted to drama. I think it rattled him to realize that I had pointed that gun at him and fired it on stage just hours before Mrs. Saville was killed. To tell the truth, I get cold shivers thinking about it myself.”

  “That’s exactly it. I could be dead right now. Who knows when that gun was loaded. If there was already a single bullet in there when we performed the pantomime, Pippa could have shot me dead. I’ve been crabby and paranoid ever since Sunday just thinking about it. I know I lashed out at Pippa. But do I really think she was trying to kill me? Of course not.” He laid a hand over Pippa’s and squeezed. She shot him a smile. “I was just blowing off steam.”

  “Same here. I don’t really think that Ray loaded the gun and shot Mrs. Saville because she was irritating. I think it was someone unconnected to the playhouse - someone who knew that we would be using Lady Chadwick’s antique revolver in our production.”

  Which was basically the whole island.

  Fay thanked them for their help and left the theatre. It would soon be time to get back to the Cat’s Paw to help with tea. Teatime was a good opportunity for her interact with the guests. It was her chance to listen to their grievances, and to form personal relationships that could lead to repeat business. Morwen did a great job as innkeeper, but the guests liked to know that the owner was paying attention too.

  She decided sh
e had time to pop into the doctors’ surgery first, seeing as it was on her way home. It wasn’t one of the doctors she wanted to speak to. They wouldn’t be available at this time of day. She wanted to talk to their receptionist, Isobel.

  The waiting room was full of people. The phone was ringing, a patient was demanding attention, and Isobel’s computer was pinging with incoming emails. As usual, Isobel looked cool and collected, taking it all in her stride. Fay suspected that having two toddlers at home was good practice for coping with chaos while remaining calm.

  She waited until the rush had cleared and then greeted the receptionist.

  “I don’t know how you do it, Izzy. You must have the patience of a saint. I’ve heard how people shout at you in here sometimes, but you never seem to get rattled.”

  “They’re patients,” said Isobel. “Some of them are sick and scared, and they all believe that their problems should take priority. I feel sorry for them, poor things.”

  “And then they have to see David who is grumpy enough to put anyone in a bad mood,” said Fay.

  “You’d think so, but actually they worship the ground he walks on. ‘Young Dr. Dyer’ can do no wrong, according to his patients. I used to think they loved his father, but young Dr. Dyer is all they can talk about.”

  “Huh. Weird.” Fay shook her head. “Anyway, I wanted to ask you something. Let’s say there was someone on the island who really didn’t believe in doctors. Where would that person go if they got sick?”

  Chapter 9

  Isobel gave it some thought.

  “Are you sure this person doesn’t have a doctor on the mainland that they prefer to consult? We have a few people like that. They have a doctor that they like and have been seeing for years, and they’re reluctant to change to a new practice when they move to the island. Most of them soon discover that it’s not convenient to have to hop on a ferry every time you’re sick, and end up registering here anyway. But there are always a few hold-outs.”