The Missing Sapphire of Zangrabar Read online

  The Missing Sapphire of Zangrabar

  A Patricia Fisher Mystery

  Book 1

  Steve Higgs

  Text Copyright © 2019 Steven J Higgs

  Publisher: Steve Higgs

  The right of Steve Higgs to be identified as author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved.

  The book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  ‘The Missing Sapphire of Zangrabar’ is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living, dead or undead, events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  Dedication

  To Teresa Daw for her inspiration.

  This book came about when the lady that works the reception at my office asked how I come up with ideas for my stories. Paused on my way out the door, I spent the next five minutes inventing a main character, giving her an event that would cause change in her life and then throwing in a curve ball that would become a story arc. The idea simmered for six months and grew in its potential until I just had to write it. The adventures you are about to read could never have been if lovely Teresa hadn’t asked that question.

  Note from the Author:

  Hi there,

  Firstly, thank you for purchasing this book. I hope that you enjoy reading it anywhere near as much as I enjoyed writing it. Patricia Fisher is a character that came about quite by accident as you might have read in the dedication. I have come to love her quite dearly; she is so tenacious though she possesses almost no skills pertinent to the situations I put her in.

  This is the first of many books in Patricia’s series and she will face adventure and peril in each of them. Join her now as she finds out all about The Missing Sapphire of Zangrabar and look out for her other adventures.

  This is not my first series though; there are many other books already waiting for you. So, if you enjoy Patricia’s adventures, you may wish to check out Tempest Michaels and Amanda Harper. Like Patricia, they both solve mysteries and their stories are written to make you laugh and keep you turning pages when you really ought to be going to sleep.

  Finally, there is a secret Patricia Fisher story that you can only get your hands on by signing up to my newsletter service. Killer Cocktail cannot be bought anywhere but the link below will get you it for FREE. If you subscribe to my newsletter, I will email you a couple of times a month with bargains, discounts, free stuff and competitions where you can get your name in the dedication of a book. No spam, I promise, just lots of fun.

  Yes! Send me my FREE Patricia Fisher story!

  Patricia Fisher Mysteries

  The Missing Sapphire of Zangrabar

  The Kidnapped Bride

  The Director’s Cut

  Blue Moon Investigations

  Paranormal Nonsense

  The Phantom of Barker Mill

  The Klowns of Kent

  Dead Pirates of Cawsand

  The Witches of East Malling

  Whispers in the Rigging

  Bloodlust Blonde – a short story

  A Typo, a Werewolf, and Two Dopey Dachshunds – an Origin Story

  Paws of the Yeti

  The Harper Files

  Spooky Shopping Mall

  In the Doodoo With Voodoo with short story Guys and Dolls

  Crop Circles, Cows and Crazy Aliens

  Table of Contents:

  Surprise

  Southampton

  The Aurelia

  Exploring

  Missing Jewels

  Jack Langley

  The Suspect

  Fitness and Diet

  House Arrest

  Sneaking About

  Mystery Man

  Evening

  Madeira

  Murder

  No Alibi

  Barbara Berkeley

  The Killer

  The Jewel Thief

  Confrontation

  The Big Reveal

  Unexpected Bonus

  Reunited?

  Extract from The Kidnapped Bride

  Surprise

  Mostly I was dumbfounded. At myself that is. How had I not known? How had I not seen any signs? They had tried to deny it, but it was all too obvious.

  My husband was sleeping with my best friend.

  Even thinking the sentence in my head was too much to bear. I was driving on autopilot and going far too fast. A blast of horn as I whipped around a corner and nearly took off the front of a van as it crept cautiously from a junction, broke my reverie.

  I sniffed loudly and gulped back the awful pain in my throat. I wanted to cry and howl and wail, but the tears wouldn’t come yet; I was still too stunned. As I slowed my car to a pace more likely to ensure I arrived at my destination in one piece, I replayed the scene in my head.

  A diary mix up on my part was what had caused today’s revelation. How long would it have gone on if serendipity hadn’t intervened? I thought Maggie and I were getting our hair done today. I didn’t yet know if I was right or she was, but she clearly had a different day planned; one which involved having sex with my husband.

  Maggie and I had attended school together many years ago, meeting on our very first day and had been firm friends ever since. Our lives diverged as adults when we pursued different careers, but I met Charlie when I was nineteen and that had curtailed any thoughts of a career of my own. In contrast, Maggie had moved to the city and made her fortune, landing a job in publishing which turned into a great career and then a business as she opened her own firm at thirty-nine. Now she worked mostly from home, going to the office maybe once a week to oversee what was happening.

  Her own husbands, there had been three, had all left her and she hadn’t visibly grieved about any of them. She just opened a bottle of wine with a shrug each time and kept moving. She had always been a bit of a man-eater, but I had never imagined she was capable of this.

  Charlie had gone to work this morning or at least that was the ruse I fell for. As he went out the door, I received my perfunctory kiss on the cheek then settled in front of the TV to watch last night’s Dancing on Ice final. Our hair appointment was listed in my diary at eleven o’clock so at half past ten I had swiped on a dab of makeup to hide the bags under my eyes - bags that had appeared literally the morning after my fiftieth birthday - then snagged my keys from the hook by the door and left the house.

  Maggie lived in the next village just a couple of miles away. We had both grown up in East Malling and I still lived there but Maggie had swapped her houses like her husbands, each time moving into a bigger and swankier place so she now had a six bedroom oast house on the outskirts of sister village West Malling. Goodness knows why she wanted so much space, it was huge for one person, but I suppose it wasn’t as if she had to clean it, she had a cleaner for that and a gardener for the garden and an odd-job man to boot.

  It was almost laughable that when I pulled onto her expansive driveway, my first thought was that the car parked next to her house was “Just like my Charlie’s”. It was only once I was out of the car that my brain caught up with me: It was Charlie’s car.

  Even then,
my innocent brain told me that the two of them must be colluding on something for my birthday in two weeks’ time.

  Silly Patricia.

  I didn’t want to spoil whatever surprise they were planning, but I was super curious to discover what they might be up to. At the front door, I rang the bell and waited. I had to ring it again before it was answered, but it wasn’t Maggie at the door, or my husband, Charlie. It was her cleaner, a young woman whose name I could not remember. She looked like a mum with young kids in need of an income that fitted around school hours. She had a duster and cloth in one hand and wore yellow marigold gloves that contrasted almost violently with her all-black leggings, baggy t-shirt and trainers outfit. I was a cleaner myself, a job I had started twenty years ago when my dreams of having children had been finally and irrevocably dashed. It wasn’t a glamorous job, but I got to keep my own hours, I was my own boss and I sort of liked peeking into other people’s lives.

  The young lady was looking at me expectantly, ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I’m Patricia, Maggie’s friend. She’s expecting me.’

  The woman just nodded her head and moved away from the door so I could come in and shut it behind me. She had headphones on, the kind that go right over the ear that are popular again now, and I could hear the music coming from them though I couldn’t make out what it was. It was clear that speaking to her was pointless unless I shouted.

  As she drifted away, I put my bag down and called out, ‘Maggie. We are going to be late.’

  She was somewhere in the house, but while it was large, it wasn’t so vast that my voice wouldn’t carry to wherever she was. I kept quiet about Charlie being here. If they were planning a surprise for me, I didn’t want to ruin it, so I played along, pretending that I hadn’t seen his car.

  ‘Maggie,’ I called again when I got no response, but then I heard movement upstairs. It sounded hurried, flustered, and the first tendrils of doubt crept into my head.

  Why would they be upstairs?

  Curious, I walked through the house to the foot of her winding spiral staircase. It was at the back of the house inside one of the two oast towers. By the time I arrived, I could hear Maggie on the landing above me.

  ‘Maggie?’ I called out. ‘What’s going on?’

  Looking up, I saw her face as she came down the stairs. Her hair was a mess and she was wearing a dressing gown. Her eyes were wide with panic, at least that’s what I took it for.

  ‘Maggie?’ I prompted again when she didn’t answer.

  ‘Patricia what are you doing here?’ she asked. Now halfway down the stairs, she was still tying her dressing gown around her waist.

  Automatically, I said, ‘We have a hair appointment.’

  She paused to check her mental calendar. ‘No, that’s next Monday. The 11th at four o’clock. Don’t you remember? We forgot to book it and that was the soonest she could fit us in.’

  I had written the 4th at eleven o’clock by mistake. I shook my head to clear it. ‘Where’s Charlie?’ I demanded, remembering suddenly that my husband was here and not at work and there were a lot of clues lining up that I didn’t like the theme of.

  ‘Charlie?’ she started. Looking back now I think she was trying to find a lie that might work, but I was advancing on her now, little mousy Patricia starting to storm up her stairs. ‘Charlie, he’s ah… he just popped around to…’

  She didn’t get to finish the sentence because I shoved by her on the wide stair and carried on up to the top floor.

  ‘Charlie,’ I yelled, the sense of rage overtaking me. Conflicting emotions telling me I was about to make a giant fool of myself because of course he wasn’t here having sex with my friend. There would be a perfectly rational explanation for his presence, and I would look like an idiot while also feeling relieved.

  My first assumption had been right though. As I rounded her bedroom door, he was hastily trying to get his belt back through the loops on his trousers. His jacket was on a hanger hanging from the knob of a wardrobe and his shoes were placed side by side neatly beneath it. Not only had he just been having sex with my best friend, it had been going on so long that the passionate fumbling to get each other’s clothes off had diminished to the point that they neatly hung their clothes before getting down to it.

  I had no words.

  Charlie stared at me, his eyes like a rabbit caught in headlights, able to see the onrushing danger but powerless to do anything about it. He was frozen in time, his belt half-on as he waited for me to say something or perhaps wracking his brain for the credible lie that might get him off the hook. Before he could assure me that it wasn’t what it looked like, I turned around and left. I was lost, bewildered, confused and even though I was moving my feet, I had no sense of purpose. I passed Maggie in the upper hallway without sparing her a glance and found myself back in my car without noticing how I got from A to B.

  I had stayed that way, locked inside my own disbelieving head until the horn blast had jolted me back to reality. I was nearly home but I had no idea what I was going to do when I got there. Did I open the gin? Maybe. Did I cut up all his clothes and throw him out? Tempting.

  Part of my problem was that Maggie was the person I had turned to my entire life whenever I had a problem. I had suffered several miscarriages, the worst one at five months. They were distant memories now, the most recent almost two decades behind me, but it had always been Maggie that I went to. Even back in our school days, it had been Maggie that was my shoulder to cry on over boys or that terrible day when the Bay City Rollers split up. Now I had the worst thing I had ever faced, and I had no one to turn to.

  I have other friends of course, but not ones that I felt comfortable going to with this. Had it not been Maggie he was cheating with, I would have packed a bag and turned up on her doorstep begging to be taken in. She would have let me in and told me I could stay as long as I needed to.

  As that thought echoed in my head and I pulled my car onto the driveway on my own house, I realised that I couldn’t stay here. I had to get away. It was a small village, and everyone knew me. The humiliation was one thing and I didn’t want to face it, but I couldn’t stay because this was our home. I stared at it through the windshield of my car now, feeling nothing but revulsion. We had built the home together. Charlie had a good job even when we met. He had trained as an actuary and worked in London at a big firm. He was twenty-four when we married and bringing home a great wage but he said at the time we needed to borrow all we could and buy the biggest place we could barely afford rather than play it safe and move again a few years later. He believed the house prices were about to boom and had been right. If we had waited, we might never have afforded it.

  Now it represented betrayal. I squeezed my eyes shut willing the tears to come.

  After ten seconds I gave up. All I had was anger and the vague start of an idea.

  Cutting up his clothes or breaking his precious record collection wouldn’t hurt him. Taking his bank account away would though. Charlie did accountancy work all day long so one might expect that he would do the house finances as well. He refused to though. He always had, complaining that he didn’t want to look at books and numbers at home as well. The housekeeping, the money in savings, it had always been my responsibility. They were joint accounts but I doubted Charlie even knew where I kept the passwords for the online login. He might not even know how much was in there.

  I nodded to myself as my plan took form, undid my seat belt and went into the house. I opened my laptop and hit the power button as I flicked the kettle on. Then I changed my mind about the cup of tea and went to the drink’s cabinet for gin.

  I cannot tell you where the calm, dispassionate approach came from, but in the next thirty minutes I had packed three suitcases with more than half of the things I owned and a stack of books I had been meaning to read and had transferred all of the money – a whopping ninety seven thousand four hundred and twelve pounds and eighteen pence out of the various accounts and into my own current account.
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  The banking apps had kept asking me if I was sure and pointing out that I would get no interest on the funds if I removed them from the high-yield savings accounts, but I steam-rollered straight over their advice. I knew what I was doing.

  With two fast and strong gin and tonics in me and breakfast a distant memory, I decided that a third was a bad idea. There would be plenty of time for gin soon enough.

  I was going on a cruise.

  Southampton

  I had been trying to get Charlie to come on a cruise with me for as long as I could remember. In the beginning, he had laughed it off as something we couldn’t afford even though we both knew we could. Then he had started on the excuses, reasons we shouldn’t go such as we might not like the other people on the boat, we might not like the boat, and it wasn’t like we could get off once we were at sea. In the end, he had admitted that he just didn’t like the idea of being on a boat. I think he actually had a phobia of the ocean or something.

  He liked Cornwall. We went to Cornwall every year, apart from once when I stamped my foot and made him take me to Spain. Spain had been awful though, the weather had been unseasonably hot, there had been a plague of little biting flies and we had both got a tummy bug resulting in everything we ate going straight through us. He had held it over me ever since, so we went to Cornwall every year. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Cornwall, I loved the place. It was quaint and romantic and there were so many forgotten little fishing villages tucked into the cliffs where they had barely changed in hundreds of years.

  There was more to the world than Cornwall though. So much more. I saw it in travel magazines and on TV shows. My friends went away. My father had been conscripted into the Army when he was younger but stayed in uniform beyond the two years he was required to serve and, in his words, had travelled the world. Everyone was getting more from life than me. I had been accepting my lot for long enough, and now, with no reason to stay and every reason to go, I was on my way to Southampton where the cruise liners all stopped, and I was going to hop on the first one available.