The Filey Connection

by David W Robinson

  The car wove its way through the morning traffic and the crowds of people making for the beach or Coble Landing, disappeared for a moment, hidden by the white, stone walls of the Beachside, the reappeared, turning into the drive.

  Flowers cranked the handbrake on, and he and Cummins got out. The constable greeted Sarah cheerily, Cummins ignored her, and both men passed into the hotel, to emerge a few moments later from the bar, out onto the terrace, where they joined Joe and his companions.

  “Well?” Joe asked.

  Cummins nodded grimly. “You were right about everything, Joe. But we still have no proof.”

  “Let’s see if we can get it, eh?” he looked down the drive and raised his voice. “Sarah? Would you join us, please?”

  Slightly surprised, she put down her watering can and strode up the drive to them.

  “What can I do for you, Mr Murray?” she asked.

  “You can tell us why you murdered Eddie Pennig,” Joe said.

  Her initial reaction was stunned shock, quickly recovering to anger. “Forgive me, but have you taken leave of your senses?”

  “No. I came to them this morning when our coach driver dropped me off on the corner of West Avenue and Murray Street. That’s where you were when you dialled 999 about the death of Nicola Leach.”

  Sarah opened her mouth to protest, but Joe talked right on, suppressing her words before they could get out.

  “You were using an unregistered phone, but the emergency operator would need a name, so you had to think of one quickly: Coral Beauty Products advertised right next door to Harrison’s Carpet Centre. But the ‘L’ on the end of Coral is faded. To me it looked like an exclamation mark, but in the dark it would be near invisible and the word would look like the name Cora. Add that to Harrison and you have the name of the mystery woman who rang 999 to report Nicola’s death. And if Chief Inspector Cummins compares the recording I have of the vehicle engine to the sound of your Billy’s van, they’ll sound the same.”

  Sarah sat down heavily and clutched her forehead. “What is this madness?”

  Joe ignored the dramatics. “What I can’t work out is why you bothered to ring 999 at all. Why didn’t Eddie just drive away and forget it? Someone would have found Nicola.”

  “I, er, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Joe shook his head and lit his cigarette. “Still denying it. Y’see, Sarah, between you, you and Billy made too many mistakes.” Joe switched the focus of his attention. “Constable Flowers, would you pass me my netbook from in there.” He pointed into the lounge bar.

  While Flowers went to collect it, Joe pressed on. “I’m sure we’ll find out that money is behind all this, as I suspected all along. A large amount of money. An amount of money equal to the value of the Beachside Hotel. One of the things I noticed when we first arrived was the age of the fixtures and fittings in my room. This place looks very grand on the outside, but it needs some refurbishment on the inside. That costs. At a thousand pounds a room, Sarah is looking at fifty thousand. A lot of money.”

  Flowers returned with the netbook, Joe switched it on and while he waited for it to go through its boot routine, he continued with his tale. “What you’ll hear is a story of deception, and if it hadn’t been for Sheila and Brenda’s well intentioned tearing apart of my theory, I may have got there twenty-four hours earlier.”

  “Thank you, Joe,” said Brenda. “That’s the kind of support we enjoy.”

  “It’s not a criticism, really,” he said to her. “I might have got there yesterday, but I’d have been coming at it from the wrong angle, and it would probably have fallen apart.” With the computer now working, Joe opened up the file on Nicola and Eddie. “Wherever we go, whenever we get involved in any puzzle like this, I make lots of notes, and amongst those notes are two things that lead me straight to you, Sarah. A woman with black hair and a delivery driver who talks too much.”

  Puzzlement crossed the faces of those around him.

  “One of the earliest notes I made on this case happened back in Sanford, when a woman with extraordinary black hair and a pasty white face came into my café.”

  “I remember her,” Sheila said.

  “It was one of her black hairs that you got on your T-Shirt that morning,” Joe told her, and briefly explained to the others how both Sheila and Brenda had complained about the state of his car. “That woman had black hair, a face lathered in white makeup, and large sunglasses for a reason,” he went on. “To prevent me recognising her when we got to Filey.” Now he fired an accusing glance at Sarah. “It was you.”

  “I deny it,” she said. “I have never been to Sanford.”

  Joe remained equally defiant. “Eddie Pennig was in the café early that morning. You were there a couple of hours later. Why? Because Eddie ran Nicola Leach down the night before. He wanted a seat on the Filey bus. That was theonly reason Nicola was killed.” Joe jabbed his forefinger into the table top to emphasise his point. “Eddie was in my place pestering Sheila at half past seven. What he really wanted to know was whether we’d heard of Nicola’s death. He couldn’t nag me for her seat until we knew about her, because to do so before would implicate him. I gave Sheila short shrift, and Eddie cleared off, but they still needed to know, so you, Sarah, came back and sat in the Lazy Luncheonette until my niece, Detective Sergeant Craddock turned up. The moment she told us of Nicola’s death, you left and told Eddie that the coast was clear, that he could get his seat on the bus.”

  “This is utter drivel,” Sarah protested.

  “We’ll see,” Joe countered. “Let’s bring us to Filey, and see what we can learn. You introduced yourself as the joint owner of the Beachside, along with your brother, Billy, and Kieran as your son, Billy’s nephew. But I was speaking to the driver from Scarborough Gases before we left for the Abba show on Saturday night. We were talking about scuba diving gases, and he said, and I quote, ‘Billy and his lad, Kieran are members of the local club’. Billy and his lad? You and Billy made a mistake, Sarah. You forgot that I’m in catering, too. The delivery drivers who come to my place are all regulars. They know me, they know Sheila and Brenda, and they know my nephew, Lee. None of them would describe Lee as ‘my lad’. They might say, ‘your Lee’, but not ‘your lad, Lee’. The gas driver had to be a regular or he wouldn’t have been able to reel off your names so easily. That means he knows you well. Kieran is not Billy’s nephew, he’s his son, and Billy is not your brother. He’s your husband. Your second husband. And before you deny it, Chief Inspector Cummins has already checked on this. You divorced your first husband,Edward Pennig twenty-three years ago, just before Kieran’s birth.”

  Sheila and Brenda both gasped. Billy stepped from the lounge, carrying a cup of tea. He placed it in front of Sarah.

  “We’re not going to deny it, Murray,” Billy said. His overt, friendly approach was gone. He was now the fierce protector of his wife. “We’ve been man and wife these last twenty-two years.”

  “We know,” Cummins said.

  Sarah picked up her cup with shaking hands and drank from it. “All right, so Billy and I are man and wife. So I was married to Eddie. It was a long time ago. What does this prove?”

  “Nothing,” Joe agreed, “but Chief Inspector Cummins has a voice recording of the 999 call made by Cora Harrison. I haven’t heard it, but I know it’s you, Sarah. And if there’s any doubt about it, Cummins will run a voice pattern check. But you didn’t make the call from Sanford. You made it right here in Filey using an unregistered mobile, and the police never had a GPS track on it because they don’t. Now to make that call from Filey means you were in contact with Eddie. He told you everything, described the area so you could tell the police.”

  Joe studied the trembling woman opposite and gained in confidence.

  “And there’s one more point,” he pressed on. “Last night, your husband said to me, and again I quote, ‘If anyone was going to smash your mate’s head in, it’s Ivan Irwin’. Who told him that Eddie’s
head had been caved in? Neither constable Flowers nor Chief Inspector Cummins mentioned it while you were within earshot yesterday, none of us has spoken about it, so how did Billy know?” With great satisfaction, Joe answered his own question. “Because he was there when it happened.”

  Tears formed in Sarah’s eyes. Brenda offered her a tissue. She took it and dabbed her eyes. Looking straight at Joe, she said, “I swear this was not how it was supposed to turn out.”

  Cummins nudged Flowers who took out his pocketbook and began to make notes.

  “You’re a clever man, Joe Murray,” Sarah said, “but your reputation goes before you. None of us had ever heard of you but when Eddie moved to Sanford, your name was everywhere. A brilliant private detective. Eddie became worried. He was frightened that you’d ask too many questions, so we decided to keep a close eye on you while you were here.”

  “And to do that you pretended Billy was your brother. That way you could offer to take your knickers off for me and I wouldn’t be any the wiser.”

  Brenda stared. “You jumped her, Joe? You randy old sod.”

  “Shut up, Brenda,” Joe ordered. “Sarah?”

  Sarah nodded dumbly. “I will do anything to protect my hotel, even if that means prostituting myself with men like you.”

  “Because while you’re taking them to heaven, men will talk,” Joe suggested, and Sarah nodded again. “It would have been the most natural thing in the world for me to tell you all about my cases, including the progress I was, or wasn’t making on Eddie’s murder. That way you could either sleep easy, or, if I was getting too close, arrange for me to have an accident like Nicola.”

  Again she nodded. “I didn’t bank on you being gay,” she said.

  Brenda laughed raucously. “Joe? Gay? He’s not gay.”

  “He turned me down,” Sarah insisted.

  “That doesn’t make him gay,” Sheila said. “Merely cautious, and we know Joe well enough to know how cautious, don’t we, Brenda?”

  “Especially when he’s looking after his wallet,” Brenda agreed.

  Diverting the levity, Cummins suggested, “Please go on with your story, Mrs Pringle.”

  Standing behind Sarah, a comforting hand on her shoulder, Billy said, “None of this was her doing.”

  “Shut up,” Sarah snapped. “Do you really believe that they’ll think you have the gumption to carry this off?” Her hands shaking she sipped some tea, and put the cup down. “Eddie Pennig was my husband, yes. We were married for less than five years. The hotel belonged to my parents, but it was losing money, so Eddie borrowed from his father and we bought it out and invested heavily in it. That was twenty-seven years ago.” She glared at Joe. “You’ve been clever to learn the things you have, but what did you learn about Eddie? Nothing. You don’t know that he was a drinker. When we took over the Beachside, it was perfect for him. His very own bar where he could drink himself into a total stupor every night. And when he was sober, his hangover made him violent. I lost count of the times I had to wear pancake makeup and dark glasses to hide the bruises. That was why it was so easy for me to disguise myself in your café.” Sarah raised a hand to her shoulder and clasped Billy’s. “Billy was our barman and he was more than a match for Eddie. He helped me over the worst of it and naturally, we had an affair. Kieran was the result. Eddie threatened all sorts of retaliation, but before he could make any moves, I learned of his affair with Ivan Irwin’s wife.”

  “Stalemate,” Joe said.

  “Not quite,” Sarah disagreed. “Difficult but not impossible. Ivan was after his blood and he needed to get out of Filey, so we came to an arrangement. He would divorce me, I would keep the hotel, but he would become a sleeping partner. He left and the next thing I heard, he had joined the navy. That was perfect for me. Peace, at last. I married the man I loved, and I kept the hotel I loved. I paid Eddie’s share of the spoils into the bank every quarter, and he hid them away in an offshore account or something. It was an ideal world.”

  “So what went wrong?” Brenda asked.

  “Eddie came out of the navy,” Sarah replied. “Worse than that, the tax man caught up with him. He had never declared the money I paid to him over the years and he owed a fortune in back taxes. Since he’d spent the money, probably on drink, the taxman took his pension lump sum and all he had was his monthly payout. He was broke when he came back to Filey earlier this year. He asked me for money, I told him to go to hell, he demanded to be reinstated as a full partner, and I told him where he could go. He threatened legal action, so we had to find a compromise again.”

  “He was heavily insured, wasn’t he?” Joe asked.

  She nodded. “He’d arranged the early mortgages on the hotel, and I had him insured to cover them. Two hundred and fifty thousand pounds; the value of the Beachside when we took the insurances out. Of course, the mortgages on the Beachside were paid off some years ago, but the insurances were not a part of the loan deals. They were separate and still in place. Due to administrative lethargy, I’d been paying the premiums on them.”

  “You mean you should have cancelled them but never got around to it?” Cummins asked.

  “Correct,” Sarah said. “By the time I realised we should be no longer paying them, I’d already handed over a fortune to the insurance companies, so I thought it best to leave them there. Eddie would die one day and I would reap the benefit of those policies. When we were trying to come to an agreement on the hotel, I saw a way we could all come out of it as winners. If Eddie were to ‘die’ – inverted commas – the insurances would pay out and I would give him half.”

  “Fraud,” Cummins said flatly.

  “A difficult one to pin down, Chief Inspector, if Eddie really disappeared,” Sarah argued. “And doesn’t everyone defraud their insurers?”

  “Not to the tune of £250,000 they don’t,” Cummins retorted.

  “You should spend less time in your office and more time reading the newspapers, Terry,” Joe suggested. “There have been any number of cases over recent years. Go on, Sarah.”

  “Putting the details together was troublesome,” Sarah admitted, “but when your booking came in, it was a godsend and we were able to put it all together. Eddie would move to Sanford as Eddie Dobson, his mother’s maiden name, join your silly little club and come back to Filey where he would then fall into the sea off the Brigg and drown. Kieran and Billy are both experienced scuba divers. They would be waiting for him under the water and they’d get him back to shore.” Sarah glared at Joe. “But he couldn’t get on your outing, could he? It was full.”

  “So he ran Nicola down,” Brenda gasped. “The rotten –”

  “He was supposed to hurt her, not kill her,” Sarah interrupted. “As usual, he got it all wrong. He’d been sleeping with her, so he knew her habits. He knew she would come out of some pub, drunk out of her mind.”

  “The Foundry Inn,” Sheila commented.

  “That’s the one” Sarah agreed. “He would drive at her, clip her and break a few bones. Enough to stop her joining you on the outing. But he didn’t, did he? He’d been drinking, too, and he hit her full on and killed her, the bloody fool. He rang me from Sanford in a panic. I told him to calm down. He said he’d have to go to the police, hand himself in. I wasn’t having that, so I told him I would deal with it.”

  “And that’s when you dialled 999?”

  Sarah nodded. “Eddie gave me a good description of the pub and the hotel nearby. I got the name, as you suggested, from the carpet centre here in Filey, and the pharmacy next door, dialled 999 and gave them the gist of what had happened before ringing off.”

  “Then you made your way to Sanford on Tuesday night to calm him down again?” Joe said.

  Sarah nodded. “Billy and I got there about two in the morning. Billy and Eddie worked on the Land Rover during Wednesday to repair it. I, as you know, came to your place to listen for you learning of Nicola’s death, and Billy and I came away again at lunchtime. But I left Eddie some instructions.”<
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  “He was to see me, get himself on the Filey trip, then come to Filey to get rid of the Land Rover,” Joe guessed. “Not necessarily in that order.”

  Again Sarah nodded. “Billy took him back to Sanford, which is why he was so late getting to you on Thursday.”

  Silence fell for a moment.

  “I’ll tell you what I don’t understand,” Sheila said. “Why describe the vehicle that hit Nicola so perfectly. You told the police it was a Land Rover. Why not lie about it? Tell them it was a van or it was too dark to see?”

  “I think I can answer that,” Joe said. “It was all about having a go at Ivan and Jonny Irwin, wasn’t it?” He did not wait for Sarah to confirm, but went on, “Terry, you told me Jonny Irwin got done for VAT fraud, and that Ivan had been prosecuted for a fuel fiddle. I know the tax people. When they go to town, they don’t pull punches, unless there’s something in it for them. I guess the only way they stayed out of jail was by shopping Eddie and his secret income.”

  Sarah agreed again. “In many ways, Jonny and Ivan were responsible for the position we found ourselves in. Brutal, arrogant men, both of them, who think they own the town. When Eddie rang me after knocking your friend down, I saw a way I could get Eddie out of a spot and give the Irwin brothers a metaphorical kick between the legs. I had a word with Ivan on Wednesday, the day after the accident, and told him Eddie was back and needed to be rid of a Land Rover that had been involved in a hit and run. He would get it for next to nothing if he played his cards right. He hated Eddie and he jumped at the chance.”

  “So Eddie drove over on the Thursday as instructed,” Joe said, “concluded his business with Ivan and then Billy took him back to Sanford.”

  “All according to plan,” Sarah admitted. “With your reputation in mind, if the Land Rover was traced, the death of Nicola Leach would be dropped at Ivan’s feet.” She glared defiance once more. “And it couldn’t happen to a nicer pair of brothers.”