Murder and a Song (A Pattie Lansbury Cat Cozy Mystery Series Book 2)
Read Murder and a Song (A Pattie Lansbury Cat Cozy Mystery Series Book 2) Online
Authors: Nancy C. Davis
Tags: #Amateur Sleuth, #cozy mystery, #woman sleuth, #cat, #cats, #mysteries, #detective
Nancy C. Davis
©2015 Nancy C. Davis
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It was June in the West Yorkshire
village of Little Hamilton, and that meant trouble. Every year Patricia Lansbury ended up taking
a tour of the village to appease all her neighbours, who got unseasonably
irritable. She couldn’t blame them. June was the month of the YorkFest music
festival, the English North’s answer to Glastonbury, and it always caused major
disruption.
Pattie
thought that she was prepared this year.
She had been training her houseguests to become comfortable with loud
music. Every meal time she would turn up
the radio and watch their ears twitch.
Cats were not fond of sudden loud noises.
For
the last five years, Pattie’s house had been a luxury “Feline Retirement Home”,
and it was home to no less than thirteen rescues, strays and
foster-kitties. Pattie was fifty-six and
a widow, and her two sons had long since left home. It had been time that she did something for
herself, for a change!
That
morning she laid out thirteen bowls of food for thirteen cats, all to their particular
tastes. She had no objection to letting
her cats roam outdoors, but for the next ten days she wanted to keep them
safely inside, away from the chaos and noise of the festival.
Pattie
cleaned her spectacles, checked that all the windows were closed, and then set
off into the village.
The
weather was cool and the air felt crisp and clean. She loved days like these, where she could
walk for miles breathing in the country air, which reinvigorated her body and sharpened
her mind. It had been a while since
she’d had to properly exercise her mental faculties. The daily crossword just wasn’t good enough
sometimes. The last true test of her
wits had been a double murder case that winter, and she certainly didn’t want
to hope for another crime like that in Little Hamilton! The police had been thoughtful enough to ask
her to consult, considering how her son had once been a Detective with
them. The only good thing to come out of
that whole debacle is that she inherited another cat for her meowing brood,
Macy, who had belonged to her now-deceased neighbour Mister Mosby.
Pattie
checked on her elderly neighbour, Mrs Lancaster, and her cat Fiddles. Mrs Lancaster was complaining about all the
litter in the village since the festival-goers had started pouring in from
across the country. Why couldn’t they
clean up after themselves?
Pattie
visited Mrs Atkinson, who wasn’t her favourite person, but she owned the only
Persian in the village and Pattie just couldn’t resist running her fingers
through that long white fur. “The sooner that silly YorkFest finishes, the
sooner we’ll have our village back to ourselves!” Mrs Atkinson said, tutting.
“I
see no reason we can’t share,” Pattie told her kindly. “After all, it’s only
for a few days.”
“A
few days too many!” Mrs Atkinson replied.
All
of Pattie’s neighbours seemed to have something to complain about when it came
to the festival. Robert Fredrikson
wasn’t looking forward to the loud, thumping music from dawn until midnight. Betty Partridge and her husband were
obsessing over the state of the countryside, which would inevitably be left as
a muddy pit that would take all year to repair itself – just in time for next
year’s festival. The only people who
were happy were Benjamin Rosswell and his wife Clara, who owned the general
store as well as the B&B upstairs.
Festival time was their busiest month of the year.
Pattie
made her way to the rise near Hawthorn Crescent, the highest point of the
village at the top of the valley. From
there she could look down over the valley and across the wide fields, split
here and there by the streams and hedgerows.
The festival grounds had been set up.
600 acres of green meadow had been encircled by fences, serviced by
2,000 Portaloos, and dominated by two dozen floodlit stages. It was a big event, and the majority of the
grassy area was already populated by thousands of tents, small and large,
around which swarmed the countless ticket-holders of all ages.
Already
music was belting out across the countryside, everything from heavy rock to
country & western. There was
something for every music lover – provided they didn’t mind slumming it inside
tents in a churned-up field. It was not
Pattie’s cup of tea.
Speaking
of which, she’d intended to drop in on her good friend Elliott Knight, the man
who ran the doctor’s surgery single-handedly.
Because Little Hamilton had no vet, he also helped out Pattie with any
treatment for her furry lodgers in an emergency. They had come to know each other rather well
over the last few years.
The
walk had given Pattie several hours of exercise. On the way back through the village, she
stopped off at home to feed herself and over a dozen fuzzy little faces, then
took off down Shepherd’s Street towards Doc Knight’s practice with a packed
lunch and thermos of his favourite Darjeeling.
When
the Doctor had seen his last patient of the morning, Pattie took in their
picnic with a smile. “Good afternoon, Elliott.
A busy day for you?”
“Hello,
Patricia! It has been, rather.” The kind
white-haired gentleman accepted the hot tea that she poured for him and smiled
at the unexpected lunch. “I’m always grateful for your visits, Patricia!”
“And
I’m always grateful for the company.”
They
didn’t have long to catch up before the phone rang. Elliott answered it and glanced at
Pattie. After a few short words he said,
“Of course. I’ll ask her to go right
over. Goodbye.”
He
put down the phone. “Is there a problem?” enquired Pattie.
“That
was Detective Constable Downey. He says
he’s holding a woman named Blossom Carter at the police station, and this woman
has asked for you. He wants to know if
you’ll oblige her by going down to the station.”
“Well,
of course, even if it is a bit unusual,” said Pattie, wiping her hands on a
napkin. “What has this Carter woman been charged with?”
Elliott
looked her in the eye. “Murder.”
Detective Constable Tom Downey met her
outside the station, where he was having a discreet cigarette.
“Thomas!”
she said, appalled. “I thought you’d quit those nasty things years ago!”
“I’m
sorry, Mrs Lansbury,” he replied. He
stubbed out the cigarette on a nearby dustbin. “I’ve had a rough few
weeks. Isabelle and I are getting a
divorce.”
“Really? Oh, my dear, I’m so sorry.” Pattie’s son Andrew
had grown up with Tom, and they’d both been in the police academy together, so
when Tom was hurt, Pattie felt it. Over
the years he had almost become a surrogate son after Andrew had been driven out
of town after a scandal.
D.C.
Downey smiled and unwrapped some mint gum. “How are the cats?”
“All
very well, thank you. Archie’s been off
his food lately, but he’s always had funny habits. My newest, Macy, has really settled in with
the others.”
“I’m
glad to hear it. Are you ready to go
inside?”
“Yes. Could you fill me in on what’s happened?”
They
walked and talked. The D.C. said, “A
pair of out-of-towners arrived two days ago for the festival. Blossom Carter and her partner Daryl Hardy,
both 46 years of age – folk music fans, apparently, and you can tell from the
look of them. They were sharing a tent
in the meadow.”
“Were?”
“A
few hours ago, Mr Hardy was found dead.
Ms Carter claims to have woken up beside him in their tent and seen a
knife protruding from his back. He was
long gone. She screamed the place down,
eventually someone took notice, and we went out to the scene.”
“Was
there any evidence at the scene?” asked Pattie.
“Just
a lot of junk food wrappers and a couple of empty beer bottles. We’ve got forensics working on the body and
the knife, but there was nothing near the tent. The whole ground is already churned up. We decided not to put a stop to the festival:
there’s sixty thousand people on that site, and we’re expecting another twenty
more thousand by tomorrow.”
They
had arrived at the interview room. The
door was open and the room was empty, just a table with recording equipment and
a few chairs. The Detective Constable’s
partner, D.C. in training Juliette Palmer, arrived to hand Pattie the case
file.
“Strictly
speaking, we’re not asking you to consult on this one,” explained Constable
Palmer. “The current position is that Ms Carter is our prime suspect and we
have no reason to believe otherwise, but Ms Carter asked if there were any
private investigators in the county and of course we thought of you. She is maintaining her innocence.”
“And
why don’t you believe her?” asked Pattie, taking the file.
“Because
the knife that was buried in her boyfriend’s back…? It was hers.”
After Pattie had a chance to catch up
on the details of the case, the suspect was brought to the interview room in
handcuffs.
“Hello,
Ms Carter. If you have a lawyer, then I
advise you to have them present,” said Pattie. “I’m not a licensed detective,
although I’m often used as a consultant in certain cases.”