Page 22

Phyllis

Phyllis sat on the sofa, an embroidery needle motionless in her hand, her eyes fixed on the telephone. The vet had said he’d call her landline with an update this morning, and so Phyllis had been sitting by the telephone since five a.m. She was gasping for a cup of tea and her bladder was uncomfortably full, but she wouldn’t, couldn’t, dare move in case the phone rang while she was out of the room.

Phyllis had never been so aware of the deafening silence of her home. She may have lived here her entire life, but for the first sixty-five years she’d had her mother as a companion, a woman who either prayed loudly or complained loudly from the moment she woke to the moment she went to sleep. Even on her deathbed, Eliza Hudson had barely drawn breath between criticizing Phyllis and demanding water. When she finally passed away, Phyllis had spent a week echoing round the empty cottage, and then the day after her mother’s funeral, she’d gone to the dog shelter and found a small, neglected English bulldog puppy. Phyllis had been accompanied by Craddock’s wheezes, snorts and farts ever since. But today, the only sound was the agonizing tick of the carriage clock on the mantelpiece, tormenting Phyllis with its slow progress.

The clock said it was 10:35. This was well and truly midmorning so why hadn’t the vet rung yet? Was the fact he hadn’t bad news? Did that mean…

Phyllis closed her eyes to try and block out the questions, but that was no help. All she could see was Craddock yesterday: his labored, ragged breaths, the tremors that shook his whole body and the convulsions as he vomited. Phyllis opened her eyes and returned her attention to the mutinous phone.

There was a ringing sound, piercing the silence, and Phyllis’s hand shot out to grab the handset.

“Hello?”

Her word was met with the dead tone of the phone line. Then the ring sounded again and she groaned. It was the damn doorbell, not the phone. For a moment, Phyllis considered ignoring it, but what if it was the vet, coming to tell her the bad news in person? She got to her feet and hurried to the front door. Through the frosted glass she could make out a single dark silhouette on the other side. Her hand was shaking so much she could barely pull back the chain and turn the lock. She took a deep breath, bracing herself for the moment when the bottom fell out of her world. But when she pulled the door back, she saw not the fresh-faced young vet, but the weathered mug of Arthur Robinson.

“What do you want?” Even in the midst of her grief, Phyllis knew that wasn’t a particularly polite welcome, but she didn’t have time for social callers right now.

“Morning, Phyllis,” Arthur said. “I was wondering if I could pop in and—”

“Now’s not a good time.” Phyllis stepped back and shut the door in his face. The phone was still silent, but it could ring at any moment and what if she didn’t get there in time?

“It’s about Nova,” Arthur called through the glass. “She’s been arrested.”

Phyllis paused in the hallway. Her eyes flicked toward the living room, but then she turned and pulled the door open again. “What are you talking about, man?”

“Just now, at the community center. Sandy was attacked last night, and the police think Nova did it.”

“What? That girl’s terrified of her own shadow; she couldn’t hurt a fly. Why do the cops think it was her?”

“Someone wearing a red coat was seen outside Sandy’s house around the time of the attack. Nova said I needed to speak to you. She said, ‘Tell Phyllis her theory might be right.’?”

“Of course I’m bloody right,” Phyllis muttered. “Okay, you’d better come in. But take your shoes off, I don’t want your filthy boots all over my carpet.”

Phyllis hurried back to the phone. Arthur was so large that he had to stoop to get through her door, and then he stood in the middle of the room, his eyes surveying the ancient furniture and bare walls, with nothing but a large wooden crucifix as decoration. Phyllis’s mother had made no secret of the fact she regretted getting married and having a child as opposed to becoming a nun, which she believed was her true calling, and so she’d decorated her home as if it were a particularly austere convent.

“It’s a…lovely place you have here,” Arthur mumbled.

“It does me fine.”

Phyllis supposed she could have redecorated after her mother died, but given she never had visitors, she’d not seen the point.

“You can take a seat.”

Arthur began to move toward the chair by the gas fire that Craddock liked to sleep in.

“Not that one!”

Arthur nodded and came to sit next to her on the hard sofa. Phyllis shuffled along so she didn’t have to touch him.

“I’m sorry to hear about Craddock,” he said gruffly.

Phyllis looked away so he wouldn’t see the anguish that she knew was creasing her face at that name.

“Is he still with the vet?”

“Yes.”

“Nova told me you thought Cynthia Watkins might have something to do with it.”

Phyllis turned back to look at Arthur. “That woman poisoned him. I saw her at the community center, and the minute she left, Craddock got ill.”

She waited for Arthur to tell her she was being paranoid, as the vet and Nova had done yesterday, but he just shook his head. “It isn’t right, hurting a defenseless animal like that. Craddock never did anyone any harm.”

“I told Nova that Cynthia was sending me a message to back off and stop investigating. I told her she had to be careful, that Cynthia would come after her too. And now look what’s happened.”

Arthur nodded, taking it in, and as he did, Phyllis remembered his mission yesterday.

“What happened with the private investigator?”

She listened as Arthur told her about his meeting and Ash finding the Michael file on the computer, and despite her grief over Craddock, Phyllis couldn’t help but feel a flicker of excitement about the latest evidence. Surely this proved that Cynthia had employed Graham Pierce to investigate Michael, and potentially even more than that?

“We have to find out what’s in that file,” she said when Arthur had finished. “It could contain the evidence we need to show Cynthia’s a murderer and a kidnapper.”

Arthur wrinkled his nose. “Graham Pierce struck me as more of a sitting-in-the-car, taking-photos-and-eating-KitKats kind of private investigator, as opposed to a murdering-and-kidnapping one. My guess is Cynthia employed him to find out about Michael’s lover. But I agree we need to get into the file, and if we can find out where this mistress lives, I reckon we might be able to find Michael too.”

Phyllis snorted. “How many times do I have to tell you, Michael’s not with his mistress! There’s not a scrap of evidence to suggest a lover exists; that was just Cynthia trying to frame him for the murder.”

“But there’s no real evidence to back up your theory either,” Arthur said. “I know you want to prove Cynthia’s a murderer, but do you think, perhaps, you’ve got a bit carried away with it all?”

Phyllis let out a long sigh. More than ever, she now knew how Miss Marple must have felt when people repeatedly underestimated her, dismissing her theories as mere gossip and conjecture. But dear Jane knew that if you had a theory that fits every fact, then it must be the correct one.

“Let’s look at the facts again, shall we? Fact one: we know that Michael was in huge debt and had been forced to sell their house and move in with his mother, something that can’t have delighted Cynthia. Fact two: we know that Cynthia’s been having an affair with a man she’s planning on leaving the country with.”

“I told you it always comes down to love,” Arthur muttered.

“Fact three: we know that she lied about being at her sister’s the night her mother-in-law was killed. Fact four: we now know, thanks to you and Ash, that she’d employed the services of a private investigator who has a folder dedicated to Michael on his computer, and now Michael has gone missing and maybe even worse. Fact five: we know that, after discovering me at the wake, Cynthia threatened to ‘deal with me later,’ and within twenty-four hours Craddock was poisoned.”

“Did she really say that?”

“And fact six: we know that Cynthia was given confirmation by Sandy that Nova was her employee at the community center, and that same day, Sandy was brutally attacked by a person wearing a coat like Nova’s. All of these things are concrete facts, and they all suggest that Cynthia is behind the recent series of crimes.”

Phyllis leaned back on the sofa, waiting for Arthur to finally admit defeat and tell her she was correct. But the man was still frowning.

“One thing I don’t understand is how the missing money fits into it all.”

Phyllis bit her lip; she’d been wondering the same thing, and she had a theory, even if there were no facts to back it up. Yet.

“I think the theft of the money might be the only part of the whole affair that wasn’t planned and executed by Cynthia. It’s my suspicion that the text Michael received during our book club meeting was somehow alerting him to the fact that Cynthia had killed his mother and she or Graham Pierce were coming after him, and so Michael decided to run away. As he was leaving the center, he saw the office door was unlocked, took a chance and grabbed the petty cash tin, hoping it would contain some money to help him escape. Unfortunately, that wasn’t to be. Whether Graham and Cynthia captured him in St. Tredock and then dumped his car in Bodmin to confuse the police, or whether Michael made it as far as the moor before they caught up with him, I don’t know. But either way, I think if we’re to have any chance of recovering that money, we have to work out where Michael is.”

It was a moment before Arthur spoke again, and Phyllis could see him processing everything she’d just said.

“Suppose you’re correct,” he said eventually. “Suppose Cynthia did commit all the other crimes, including attacking Sandy and—”

Arthur didn’t get any further as he was interrupted by a shrill ring. This time Phyllis knew it was the phone and she snatched the handset up. “Hello?”

“Hi Phyllis, this is Sheldon from Port Pets.”

“How is he? What’s the news?” The words tumbled out of her.

“I’m pleased to say Craddock’s doing much better; he’s more alert this morning and has eaten breakfast.”

“Really?” Phyllis heard herself gasp.

“We got the toxicology report back and it confirmed my suspicion. Craddock must have eaten chocolate, possibly with caffeine in it, too, and he had theobromine poisoning. But thanks to your quick reactions in getting him here so fast, we managed to treat him before there was any permanent damage. He’s a very lucky dog.”

Phyllis hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath, and she released it slowly. “Thank you.”

“I want to keep him in for a bit longer, until he’s had a normal bowel movement, but you should be able to collect him at the end of the day.”

“End of day…okay…Bye.”

Phyllis hung up the phone. Her heart was racing at one hundred miles an hour and she closed her eyes.

“Phyllis?”

She startled and opened her eyes to see Arthur looking at her with concern.

“He’s going to be all right,” she said, her voice a whisper. “The vet says he’s going to be okay.”

“Oh, Phyllis, I’m so relieved.”

She felt a tear sting the corner of her eye and squeezed them shut again. Phyllis was not a crier. She hadn’t cried when her mother died, or at the woman’s funeral. In fact, the last time she’d cried was almost sixty years ago, on the day she—

“It’s all right, Phyllis. You can let it out.”

Arthur’s voice was soft, and she felt more tears pressing behind her eyelids. She lifted her hand to her face and found her cheeks were wet. For a moment, she considered shouting at Arthur, demanding he leave her alone and never come back. But instead, Phyllis leaned forward and allowed herself to sob.