The Diamond Cat Read online

  As long as that was all he disposed of. He was being terribly free with his information—as though it didn’t matter how much they knew. Bettina met Zoe’s worried eyes and realized that she was thinking the same thing.

  “What happened to Sylvia?” Bettina demanded abruptly.

  “Nothing, so far as I know,” Graeme said. “She’s moved back in with her father for the time being. His house is just a couple of miles from here, as the crow flies—and the pigeon ought to have flown. I think the old boy is still hoping his precious bird will flutter into the loft, as originally planned. Sylvia will be doing her best to smooth the old boy’s ruffled feathers, but I’m afraid he’ll never loan us one of his pigeons again. Ah, well, we’re not likely to need one again.”

  “Then Sylvia never went to Edinburgh? She never intended to go to Edinburgh? She’s in this with you?”

  “All the way. She’s the one who set it up so that we would disappear from here with no questions asked.” Again he grinned at Bettina. “You wouldn’t be surprised, would you, if I moved out after discovering that my loving wife had run away with another man, having first blackened my name all over the neighbourhood? The house is far too big for me to manage on my own—quite apart from the unhappy memories it holds.”

  “It might have worked,” Bettina said slowly. “Except that now we know all about it.”

  “Sh!” Zoe hissed sharply, looking agonized.

  “Ah, but who would believe you?” Graeme looked from one to the other. “Without the diamonds and the pigeon, you have no evidence. It would simply be my word against yours. And you, forgive me, are two ladies of a Certain Age, who have recently suffered a great shock and may have lost control over your imaginations.”

  “You’d never get away with that!” Zoe was stung into tactlessness herself.

  “On the other hand,” he said cheerfully, “I might tell everyone that you had made unwelcome advances to me, either separately or together, and were now taking revenge by lying about me because I spurned your fair bodies. Yes, that would be better. People are always willing to believe the worst about their neighbours. You’d be a laughing stock—and you wouldn’t like that, would you?”

  Shocked into silence, Bettina realized that he might effectively have silenced them permanently—and bloodlessly. Even though their friends would never believe such a thing of them, some mud must stick and there would be a lifetime of hidden jeers, jokes and sidelong glances.

  “I knew you’d take my point.” Graeme smiled at the expression on her face. “So this will be our little secret, won’t it?”

  Zoe slapped a plastic bag down on the table with a controlled fury that betrayed her helplessness.

  “What about the victim?” Bettina said. “Can you guarantee silence there, too?”

  “Victim?” Graeme looked honestly amazed. “What victim?”

  “The kidnap victim. You said the diamonds were a ransom.”

  “No, no!” Graeme was injured. “How could you think such a thing? Don’t you know this is the Technological Age? All I ‘kidnapped’ was a bit of equipment. The owners have come up with the ransom and I’ll return their property now. No fuss, no muss, no bother. It was the perfect crime: a victimless crime.”

  “Victimless!” The back door had opened silently and Vivien Smythe-Forrest stood in the doorway like an avenging angel. “What about me? My work! Where is it?”

  “Vivien!” Graeme shrank back. “What are you doing here? How did you find this place?”

  “We planted a signalling device in the bird, of course,” Vivien said. “Did you really imagine we’d load it with diamonds and send it off into the blue without trying to keep in contact in some way?”

  Zoe met Bettina’s eye and nodded—just what she had said. And that, Bettina realized, was why Huntley Forrest had asked to use the telephone. What she had taken to be a mobile phone had really been the frequency detector for the bug they had planted in the pigeon.

  Bettina spared a moment of pity for the pigeon. Two directional signalling devices inside him and a cylinder of diamonds on his leg! It was surprising that the poor bird had been able to take to the sky at all, less so that he had had trouble staying airborne.

  “You little swine!” Vivien’s fury impelled her forward. “To think I trusted you! Made you my assistant!”

  “No, stay there!” Graeme remembered his gun and waved it at her. “Don’t come any closer.”

  “I wouldn’t want to get any closer to you! I couldn’t believe anyone I knew would have done such a thing to me. Not until I saw you outside this house last night. Then I knew something was wrong. This isn’t the address we have for you on our records.”

  “The address you have is correct,” Graeme said. “We just had to rent it out because of negative equity problems. We’ve been camping out in the house over here for the past couple of years.”

  “I don’t care about that!” Vivien advanced into the room. She did not appear to notice that Pasha had followed her and was close by her feet. “Where are my disks? Where is my programme?”

  “In the house,” Graeme said.

  “Which house?” Vivien snapped.

  “Number twenty-seven—the best in the road.” Graeme grinned. “Sylvia insisted on it. Since you’ve paid the ransom …” He tossed a key on the table. “… there you are. You can go in and pick them up right now, if you like. You’ll find everything in the top drawer of the dressing table in the master bedroom. Don’t worry about returning the key. I won’t be going back there.”

  “And …” He hesitated momentarily. “… I suppose you can consider this my resignation.”

  “You’re fired!” Vivien snapped. “Retroactively. You were fired the moment you took those disks. Huntley will settle the score with you later.”

  “Oh, come now.” Graeme seemed amused rather than worried by the threat. “You’ve got your disks back. And you know you’ll manage to claim the money for the ransom back from the insurance company—one way or another. You haven’t been harmed at all.”

  “Unlike my mother,” Zoe said quietly.

  “And mine,” Bettina added.

  “No! No, I had nothing to do with that.” Graeme frowned uneasily, his self-image as benevolent Master Criminal wavering. “You said so yourself. Some intruder broke in.”

  “The only intruders in this neighbourhood were looking for that pigeon,” Bettina said. “You’re responsible for it being here and that makes you responsible for the intruders. The alleged workmen. Who were they—your backup team?”

  “I had nothing to do with them,” Graeme said quickly. “This may be the Technological Age, but there are still a lot of Neanderthals around—and leave it to my father-in-law to find them. They’re his friends. We needed someone who wouldn’t be recognized to deliver the pigeon to Viv and Hunt. Sylvia’s father volunteered his friends. We didn’t tell them anything, but Alf and Len knew something was going on. They hung around and, when the pigeon was released, they followed it in the van by visual sighting with binoculars. Obviously, they hoped that it would make a landing before it reached home and they could get a look at what it carried. They were pretty sure it must be something valuable—and they were curious.”

  “They were also violent,” Bettina said. “I don’t believe that man in the puddle died accidentally. I’d seen them quarrelling several times. What happened? Thieves falling out?”

  “I haven’t got to the bottom of that yet,” Graeme said. “They both had filthy tempers, especially Alf—the survivor. A real nasty bit of work. I wouldn’t put it past him to have bashed Len over the head with something if they had any kind of disagreement. The fact that they were both wet and cold and miserable would only have made his temper worse. Alf is a right bullyboy—I wouldn’t have trusted him an inch myself. If he started to question anyone and didn’t like the answers he was getting—or wasn’t getting, he—” Graeme broke off, suddenly realizing how much he was admitting he knew—or suspected.

  �
��Trust!” Vivien spat. “You talk about trust! That’s rich!”

  Pasha moved out from behind her ankles and also spat at Graeme. If Vivien wanted a cat fight with Graeme, he was on her side. He’d always known Graeme was a rotter and his friend was showing her impeccable taste by hating him too.

  “Oh, God! That beast again!” Graeme’s foot drew back.

  “Don’t you dare!” Vivien snapped.

  “Having trouble?” a voice inquired smoothly from the back doorway.

  Everyone froze into a silent tableau.

  “Or should I say, ‘Evening, all’?” Inspector Hughes strolled into the room, looking around with interest.

  “Inspector Hughes,” Bettina said thankfully. “How nice to see you.”

  “Wonderful!” Zoe agreed enthusiastically.

  “Come in, come in.” Graeme waved him in expansively. Somehow the gun had disappeared from his hand.

  “Anything wrong?” Inspector Hughes had assessed the atmosphere expertly. He looked from one to the other, seeking clarification.

  “No, no, I was just leaving. The ladies—” —Graeme leered at them—“were just trying to press me to stay and join in a little orgy, but I promised them another time.”

  “You must excuse Graeme,” Zoe said sullenly. “He has a rotten sense of humour.”

  “Terrible.” Bettina also caved in under the implied threat. Inspector Hughes was the last person in the world she wanted to have a bad opinion of her.

  “Then I’ll say goodnight.” Graeme started for the front door.

  “What about Pasha?” Zoe asked. Hearing his name, Pasha came forward and spat at Graeme again.

  “As far as I’m concerned”—Graeme looked down at the cat viciously—“you can strangle the little sod and dump him in the nearest river!”

  Pasha spat again—that went double in spades for him

  “You don’t want him?” Vivien asked incredulously.

  “Hell, no! If you do”—Graeme looked at her speculatively—“take him. You’re welcome to him. A little bonus for a nice little girl. A nice quiet little girl.”

  “Come to Mummy, darling!” Vivien swooped and picked up Pasha, setting him on the table and fussing over him. Somehow, the key to Graeme’s house disappeared from the table.

  “But he’s not your cat,” Zoe protested. “He’s Sylvia’s.”

  “Believe me, she doesn’t want him now. Besides, we’re going to be doing a lot of travelling. Good luck, Viv. Just don’t try to breed him,” Graeme added with a snigger. “He’s not as good as he looks.”

  “Neither are you!” Vivien retorted, but her only answer was the slam of the front door.

  “Care to tell me what’s going on?” Inspector Hughes seemed to ask without a great deal of hope.

  “Not right now,” Zoe said. “I told you we’d have company, Bettina. Let’s break out those bottles.”

  “Yes, but—” Bettina looked at Inspector Hughes. “Are you on duty? The policewoman said you’d be around with more questions.”

  “Not tonight,” he said. “I’ve heard about your mother. This is just a private condolence call.”

  “In that case”—Bettina gathered up the bottles—“let’s move next door to my place.” She looked at the spot on the floor where they had found Mrs. Rome, then looked at Inspector Hughes. “Please.”

  “Let me help you with those bottles,” he said gallantly.

  They were relaxing in the living room with their drinks. Vivien, with a self-mocking grimace at Bettina, had reclaimed the armchair she had been so interested in earlier. Inspector Hughes was in the other armchair, still watchful and wary, straining to interpret the nuances of the conversation.

  Bettina and Zoe were on the sofa. The cats, having been invited to join in the drinks, were clustered round a large soup bowl filled with cod-liver oil.

  “My mother used to tell me, ‘Some day all will be explained,’” Inspector Hughes said. “I hope she was right.”

  “Perhaps”—Zoe glanced at her watch—“in about another twenty-four hours. Or forty-eight,” she added for good measure.

  “There’s no evidence, of course,” Vivien said. She had excused herself earlier on the pretext of getting something from her car. From the smug expression on her face when she returned, Bettina knew that the treasured hard disks were safely in the depths of her shoulder bag. “And no one will press charges. That’s the trouble with computer crimes: the computer companies don’t dare admit how easily they can be taken. It has to be hushed up.”

  “Doubtless some accommodation could be made.” Inspector Hughes stretched out his legs casually, only the faint tautness of his jaw suggesting that this was the first he had heard about computers. “But it’s up to the Crown to press charges in a murder case.”

  “Yes,” Zoe said grimly. “We’ll want that to go ahead. But it doesn’t directly involve Gr—”

  “Let me freshen your drinks!” Bettina jumped up noisily, making a great production of it. “And the cats shall have more cod-liver oil, too. Oh—” She upended the bottle over the soup bowl. “Oh, that’s all there is. Pasha is fresh out of cod-liver oil.”

  “I’ll get more in the morning,” Vivien said. “I’ll get a gallon jug. He shall have all he wants.”

  “That isn’t a good idea,” Inspector Hughes said mildly. “Cod-liver oil is the kind of treat that should be strictly rationed. For his own good.”

  “Oh, but he loves it so.”

  “Yes, but it doesn’t love him.” Inspector Hughes looked rather uncomfortable, his ears went red at the edges. “You mustn’t give a cat too much cod-liver oil. An overdose of Vitamin A can render them sterile. We had a case at the local cat club—”

  “What?” Bettina and Zoe looked at each other.

  “As soon as she stopped overdosing the cat with cod-liver oil, he reverted to normal in just a few—” He stopped, drowned out by the shrieks of laughter.

  “Oh, wait till Sylvia hears this!” Bettina gasped. “It will kill!”

  “I hope so!” Zoe whooped. “I hope so!”

  Inspector Hughes stayed behind after the others had left. Bettina tried to convince herself that it wasn’t because he considered her the weakest link in the chain of silence.

  Adolf sat happily in front of the fire; the other cats had been carried away and he now reigned as Only Cat, a situation completely to his liking. Bettina was glad that he was willing to settle down where she could keep an eye on him. She had checked his cage when she let him out and it was pristine. How long could he hold out? Or hold on?

  The hour was late, the drinks were strong, the company was congenial—and Inspector Hughes was a very sneaky questioner.

  Bettina found herself telling him the story.

  “I don’t really see that there’s much the police can do about it,” she finished. “Although it seems a shame to let Graeme and Sylvia get away with it, even if the Forrests won’t testify.”

  “It sounds as though the Martins will be out of the country by now, but they’ll be back eventually. The murders are more important and, even though it might be argued that the Martins are morally responsible, the law will settle for the actual perpetrator. Alf sounds as though he has form and it shouldn’t take long to nail him. The autopsy report on his friend, Len, shows that he not only received a severe blow to the head, but there’s mud and bruising to suggest a foot placed on the back of his neck to hold him face down in the water until he died. We’ll collect Alf’s footwear and turn Forensics loose on it. There should be enough for a conviction on that charge and they’ll probably find traces of blood from Mrs. Rome—” He broke off as Bettina shuddered against him.

  “It’s so awful,” she said.

  “Have another drink …” He plied her with liquor expertly and went back to the less emotive subject.

  “As for Graeme and Sylvia Martin, with no one willing to press charges or testify and with no hard evidence …”

  “Hard disks …” He must have judged the
amount correctly, for she giggled.

  “And no diamonds …”

  “Oh, there’s one diamond left.” She giggled again. “A nice, big emerald-cut diamond.”

  “What?” Inspector Hughes sat up straight, sending her flying. “There’s a piece of real evidence? Good girl! We might be able to do something if you’ve still got a diamond up your sleeve.”

  “Ummm … well …” She gave Adolf a long thoughtful look. Adolf stared inscrutably back at her.

  “It’s not exactly … up my sleeve,” she said.

  About the Author

  Marian Babson, born Ruth Stenstreem, is an American mystery writer. Her first published work was Cover-Up Story (1971), and she has written over forty-five mysteries. Babson served as secretary of the Crime Writers’ Association and was awarded the CWA Dagger in the Library in 1996.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1994 by Marian Babson

  Cover design by Amanda Shaffer

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-5857-5

  This edition published in 2019 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

  180 Maiden Lane

  New York, NY 10038

  www.openroadmedia.com

  MARIAN BABSON

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