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 employedGraham 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 thenight 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 confusethe 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.”
