Merry Murders Everyone

by David W Robinson

  He leapt from the car and a security attendant waylaid him. “Hey, you can’t park there.”

  Taking a leaf from Lee’s book, Joe shouldered him out of the way and rushed into the hospital, weaving through crowds of staff, visitors and patients, hurrying to the A & E Department, where many amazed eyes turned on him.

  He burst into the anteroom, where Les and Sylvia were still waiting.

  “Martin. Have you seen him?”

  Both frowned in puzzlement. “No.”

  Joe rushed back out, and looked both ways along the corridor. It was punctuated with doors here and there, and he had no clue where Sheila was.

  He sensed Les behind him, but he could not wait. When a nurse appeared from one room, he collared her. “Mrs Riley… I mean, Mrs Naylor. Where is she?”

  “I beg your pardon. Who are you?”

  “I don’t have time to faff about, girl. She’s in danger. Where is she?”

  “I really don’t think—”

  “I’m not asking you to think. Just tell me where she is.”

  His urgency permeated her regimented approach, and she pointed along the corridor. “Room sixty-seven. She’s very ill.”

  Joe was already running. “If I don’t get a move on, she’ll be dead.”

  ***

  “Sheila.”

  The voice was soft, tender, loving. A man’s voice drifting in from somewhere far away. Peter? Was she to be reunited with her beloved husband after all these years?

  From somewhere in the distance the sound of celebratory music reached her. She recognised it right away. Hark the Herald Angels Sing. One of her favourite carols.

  Christmas. That special time of year: special to her, special to the Rileys as a family. The joy of giving, the joy of receiving, the joy of watching the two boys excitedly opening their presents after a visit from Santa.

  Strange, amorphous visions came to her. Peter’s smiling face, melding, blending quickly to the wizened, angry features of Joe Murray, and then to Brenda’s laughing features as she knocked back a slug of Campari. There was another man, a smiling, good looking gentleman, and Sheila knew she should know him, but his name escaped her confused memory. Marlin? Marvin? No. Martin. That was it. Martin. Why was Martin there? If Peter saw the lusty way he was looking at her, there would be an argument.

  “Come on, Sheila. Wake up. I’ve some medicine for you.”

  Peter was a policeman not a doctor. How could he have medicine for her? Then she remembered. Peter had taken so many health and safety courses that he knew instinctively what was wrong with her and would know which medicine would be right.

  “Wakey-wakey, sleepy-head. Time for your medicine.”

  She felt her lips crease into a generous smile. It was definitely Peter, repeating the very words she had said so many times to Peter Jnr and Aaron when they were children.

  Her eyes flickered open, and blurred reality greeted her. Peter was gone, but there was another special man here to take his place. Her smile softened, filling slowly with the glow of love. Real memories emerged from the depths of her mind. How could Joe Murray and Brenda Jump really imagine this wonderful man would do her any harm?

  Martin reached an arm behind her pillow, brought her forward into a half-sitting position.

  “The doctors gave me some medicine for you, Sheila.” He brought a glass phial towards her lips. “You have to drink it.”

  Anything. Anything to take away the pains, settle the internal mess that was her gastric system. She parted her lips. No matter how awful it tasted, if it helped…

  And then she saw it.

  It was nothing tangible, nothing anyone could get hold of and examine. Nothing a scientist, doctor, pathologist could analyse. It was something only a woman in love would notice. A gleam in his usually calm, adoring eyes. A hint of determination, of triumph, of victory… of madness.

  Through the drug-induced haze of prescription medicines, the logic circuits of her mind began to mesh. She was in hospital. Doctors and nurses did not give medicines for relatives to administer.

  And with that, the awful realisation struck her. Her closest friends, two of the people in this world dearest to her, two people she had castigated and disowned, had been right. This man did not love her. He craved only that which he could get his hands on when she was no more.

  As the clear liquid came close to her lips, she raised an arm, and pushed his away. “No.” She was weak. Her strength was gone, and the effort almost drained her completely. The voice sounded not like hers, but someone else, someone far away.

  “Now, come on, Sheila. Don’t argue. This is for your own good. It’ll take away all your pain.”

  He brought the phial to her again, and she gripped his wrist, pushing it away. The little strength she had was fading, and the outcome was inevitable. She began to cry, calling out for help in a voice so feeble that it barely reached her ears.

  And the deadly liquid came closer and closer.

  ***

  Joe’s heart pounded in his chest. Hurtling along the corridor, he looked into every private room, desperately praying that he would be in time. Old men, old women, not so old women, young men, children, families… Where was she?

  He almost shot past the room. He could see a doctor helping a patient, trying to feed her medicine. It was only as he ran by the door that he realised the patient was Sheila, and the doctor was no doctor.

  He burst into the room. The glass phial was within inches of Sheila’s lips. She was putting up a fight, but she had no strength.

  Joe Murray was not known for his fighting skill, but he had never lacked courage. His flat cap flying from his head, he hurled himself across the bed, landed on Sheila’s legs. She whimpered feebly. Joe had no time to worry about her. Stretching out his arm, he knocked the bottle away. It flew from Martin’s hand, struck the far wall down, near the skirting board, and shattered. The smell of household bleach reached Joe’s nostrils.

  Staggering back away from the bedside, Martin recovered quickly.

  “Why can’t you learn to mind your own business, Murray?” The normally pleasant tones of his voice were gone, replaced by frustrated anger.

  Joe was wriggling to get off the bed, telegraphing an apology to Sheila with his eyes. Landing on her like that caused her frail features to twist in agony.

  Before he could get to his feet, however, Martin grasped him by the shoulders and flung him against the far wall. Joe crashed into the bare plaster and his shoulder screamed at him. He ignored it.

  “The cops are on their way, Naylor. You won’t get out of here.”

  “In that case, I’ll send you and her to Valhalla before they get me.”

  Joe looked frantically around for a weapon. Nothing. Not quite nothing. On the bedside cabinet was a plastic jug, half full of water. He picked it up and threw it at the approaching menace.

  It had little effect. Somewhere in mid-air, the lid flew off, and Martin was drenched, but it did not stop him coming forward.

  And suddenly, Joe knew the fear of imminent annihilation. In the distance, he could hear the wah-wah sound of emergency vehicle sirens. Police rather than an ambulance, he hoped. They could not possibly make it in time to save him or Sheila. He drew in as deep a breath as his tortured lungs would allow, and mentally consoled himself with the thought that at least he had stopped this maniac murdering any more innocent men and women.

  He closed his eyes expecting nothing but death… and without warning, the cavalry arrived.

  With a loud crash and rattle, the door flew open. Brenda burst in, accompanied by the security guard who had warned Joe against parking by the Hospital entrance. Brenda kicked and connected with Martin’s shin. He yelped and backed off half a yard. As he did so, the security guard leapt on him and brought him crashing to the floor.

  There came the sound of running feet along the corridor. Doctors, nurses, and somewhere behind them, uniformed police officers, crowded into the room. Out in the corridor, Les Tanner, his face
creased with concern, and Sylvia Goodson, a hand held to her open mouth, watched the chaotic scene unfold.

  Somewhere amongst the melee, Joe was knocked to the floor, and sat in the corner, his back against the wall. Medics skirted the bed, their attention on Sheila, and the spilled liquid on the floor.

  The police wrestled furiously with Martin, pressed him face down to the composition floor tiles, and handcuffed him.

  Brenda helped Joe to his feet, and they watched the efforts of the nurses trying to calm their patient. Struggling to regain her breath, her senses clearing, Sheila shooed them away, and turned fearful eyes on her two oldest friends. Like an injured puppy or cub seeking the security of the pack, she reached out her arms.

  Brenda hugged her, and as she held the weeping woman, she smiled up at Joe. “From now on, we’ll have to call you just-in-time Joe.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  It was a tired and sore Joe Murray who crawled out of bed (in his own apartment) at five o’clock the following morning.

  His shoulder was bruised where Martin had thrown him against the wall, and the tussle had aggravated the slight injury to his ankle he’d sustained in Sheila’s back garden the previous Friday. But it was fatigue more than pain that troubled him the most. It was nine o’clock in evening by the time he and Brenda were through talking to the police and hospital authorities. They managed a bite to eat at the hospital cafeteria, after which, he dropped her at home, and then came back to his flat.

  From then, the telephone had hardly stopped ringing. First it was Les Tanner, congratulating him on his ‘fortitude’ and letting him know that he had already informed many of the 3rd Age Club members. Soon after, those members began to ring. George and Owen from the public bar of the Miner’s Arms, Alec Staines talking to Joe while his wife, Julia, was on another phone to Brenda, then Howard calling from home to thank him for his efforts on his Aunt Sheila’s behalf, and finally, sometime around eleven o’clock, it was the editor of the Sanford Gazette, Ian Lofthouse, asking for the full story. Joe gave him no more than an overview, and finally crawled into bed around half past eleven.

  He had little choice but to put the night’s events behind him. It was Christmas Eve. The draymen would be in for breakfast, and beyond them there would be a constant stream of customers until they closed the café’s doors, which, as was customary, would be around noon so they could get away by two in the afternoon, allowing the staff time to get to Sanford for those last-minute Christmas bits and pieces. The very thought reminded Joe that he had not yet bought anything for Gemma or Howard, and like it or not, he would have to make yet another journey into town to deal with it.

  When he got to The Lazy Luncheonette a little after six, Lee had already opened up, and he was in awe of his uncle.

  “You’re a hero, Uncle Joe. You stopped this toe rag from topping Auntie Sheila. You should get a medal.”

  “It was something and nothing, Lee. Now, can we get on with breakfast? The brewery bananas’ll be here in an hour, we’d all like to knock off early today.”

  There was more to come. Brenda arrived just before seven o’clock, and greeted him with a grateful kiss. “My hero,” she said.

  She had no more news from the hospital, and Joe had not yet heard from the police.

  The biggest surprise of the morning came when the draymen began to arrive, and Joe learned that he was, indeed, lauded as a hero. Ian Lofthouse had already run the story on the Gazette’s website, and it had been picked up by Radio Sanford, who as well as detailing a statement from the police, named Joe as the hero of the hour. It led to plaudits from the draymen, and more than one cynically humorous comment to the effect that Joe would probably increase his prices on the back of his fame.

  As the morning progressed, more and more people congratulated him to such a degree that he began to tire of it. Brenda rang the hospital at half past ten, to be told that Mrs Naylor – now insisting that her name was Riley – had been sedated, had spent a comfortable night, and was recovering from whatever toxins Martin Naylor had fed her over the last few days.

  Half an hour later, Gemma rang, and after offering her congratulations to her uncle, told him that Naylor had been seen by a doctor, was declared fit to be interviewed. They were waiting for both the duty solicitor to turn up, and Chief Inspector Roy Vickers to get to Sanford from Wakefield, where he had planned nothing more than an idle final day before Christmas.

  “We’ll be interviewing him at three o’clock this afternoon, Uncle Joe,” Gemma concluded, “and Chief Superintendent Oughton says you’re welcome to sit in the observation room with him, if you wish.”

  “I’ll be there,” Joe promised.

  At twelve noon, he locked up, and an hour later, after cleaning down and ensuring everything was secure for the next two days, he paid his staff, and the casuals, a twenty-pound Christmas bonus each, bagged up the takings, and everyone finally left, making an early start to the Christmas break.

  “I’m going home first,” Brenda said. “Then I’ll be going to the hospital. I’ll be there when you’re finished at the police station, if you wanna catch up with me.” There was a wistful note to her voice. “I think Sheila’s going to need a lot of help to get over this.”

  “I’ll give it a coat of thinking about while I’m in Sanford, and catch you later.”

  For the umpteenth time that week, Joe battled with the traffic, making his way into Sanford and the multi-storey car park in Galleries. He’d had plenty to eat during the day, and was happy to ignore the fare on offer at the mall’s cafés. Instead, he visited one or two department stores, collected a moderately expensive bottle of perfume for Gemma, and a slightly cheaper aftershave for Howard, treated himself to a couple of CDs and DVDs, and with the time coming up to half past two, made his way across Gale Street to the police station.

  Vickers greeted him with a slight air of consternation (they had never seen eye to eye) but nevertheless offered his thanks for Joe’s intervention the previous night, and stressed that while Joe was welcome to observe, he would not be allowed to intervene in the interrogation process.

  “You think he’s gonna cough?” Joe asked.

  “We think he’ll plead diminished responsibility,” Gemma replied. “It won’t make much difference. If we can get everything out of him, he’ll go down for the rest of his life.”

  Joe smiled broadly. “And there’s me thinking Santa Claus was just a fairy tale.”

  ***

  “My real name is Maxim Anatoly Nikolayev. Officially, I’m Russian. I was born in Moscow, but my father was a member of the Soviet trade mission to Great Britain, and I came to this country when I was just a few months old. My birth certificate and passport are, as you’ve worked out, expensive, high quality forgeries. And that, Inspector, is why you were never able to trace me properly.”

  With his solicitor alongside him, Martin faced the determined Vickers, who had charitably allowed Gemma to lead the early questioning.

  “You told us you were born in York,” Gemma protested.

  “No. I told you York was my hometown, which it was. It’s where I made my base.”

  In the observation room, sat alongside Don Oughton, Joe seethed. “Does he expect us to believe that a baby could have escaped the Russians back then?”

  It was almost as if Martin could hear him.

  “I was less than a year old when my father decided he’d had enough of the Soviet Union, and he defected, bringing my mother and me into the care of the Foreign Office. He didn’t have any great state secrets to hand over to the British or the Americans, and when they learned that, the Yanks lost interest. but the British accepted his defection, and for his own safety they gave him a new identity – Jonathan Naylor – and moved him to Northern Ireland, which is where I grew up… in abject poverty.”

  Martin’s colour rose as if the memories were causing him a great deal of anger.

  “The authorities were happy to change his and my mother’s details, but because I was sti
ll a baby, they forgot me, and I grew up as Max. As a young man on the streets of Belfast, I learned how to fight, I learned how to cheat, and I learned that if you want anything in this world, you have to take it. Forged papers were easy to come by and comparatively cheap. When I was twenty, I came to England and did three years of university – under my freshly assumed name of Martin Naylor, the name written on my degree certificate. Although, I assume that after all this, my qualifications will be null and void. I landed my first teaching post in York and that’s when it became my hometown.”

  There was a considerable pause while he drank from a cup of water and gathered his thoughts. Watching through the two-way glass, Joe could not help but be impressed by Gemma’s patience, and that of the chief inspector. Everyone knew that Roy Vickers was not the most tolerant man in the West Yorkshire division, and for his part, Joe was already anxious to get through the tale. Had he been in the interview room, he would have been badgering Martin to get on with the story.

  “I married virtually straight from university, and as you’re aware, my first wife passed away. And she did die of natural causes, by the way. It was nothing to do with me. But I came into a considerable sum of money from her insurers. Enough to afford a high quality, forged passport and birth certificate. After the funeral, after selling the house, and tidying up all the loose ends, I took off on an extended holiday to the Dordogne, which is where I met Francine. I brought her back to England, moved up to Darlington, and as you know, we were married – as Mr and Mrs Nellis.” He laughed cynically at the memory. “Dear God, she was expensive. You can talk all you like about high maintenance; it didn’t come any higher than Frankie. Fights were regular, and it wasn’t long before the neighbours began to complain. And then, somewhere along the line, I remembered the money I’d come into after Gillian’s death. I had Frankie insured for fifty thousand, and it wouldn’t be too great a problem to be rid of her. Odds and sods of household chemicals mixed into her food and drink, just to give her a history of gastric problems, and then a final dose of something strong enough to kill her. I’d be rid of a liability and so much wealthier for it.”