Christmas Crackers

by David W Robinson

  “Tell me again why we’re here, Joe,” Sheila insisted as he led the way up the iron steps.

  “Gemma showed me a list of Helmsley’s possessions,” he explained, “and you know what was missing? Keys.”

  “Keys?”

  “Keys,” Joe repeated. “They had his car keys, but when I looked at the photographs, they were all I could see hung on the ring. No sign of his house keys or his office keys.”

  “They could have been in his car,” Sheila observed.

  “You’re as bad as Gemma,” Joe said, shaking his head. “Do you leave your house keys in the car? No way. Do you lock them in your briefcase? Do you hell as like. If someone nicks the car or your briefcase or both, you’re deep in the poop. You carry them with you. My guess is that whoever killed Helmsley, took his keys and that means there’s something important either here at his office or at his home… assuming the two are different addresses.”

  Joe reached the landing and stepped into a narrow hallway. A door stood to the right. When he tried it, he found it locked. A small plaque in chocolate brown, with faded white lettering announced ‘Manningley toys’. He moved further along, Sheila right behind him. At the end, another corridor ran crossways. Before Joe reached the junction, a beige top and dark blue lower half hurtled from the left, making for the exit, and collided with him.

  “Help me, help,” she wailed. “He’s dead.”

  ***

  She was a little taller than Joe’s 5’6”, with a head of pure blonde hair, and tanned skin. Dressed in a pale beige T-Shirt and blue denims, her baby blue eyes were flooded with tears.

  “Take it easy, luv,” Joe urged. “Just calm down.”

  She shook in his arms. “I got fed up of waiting, so I came here to see what he wanted and now he’s… He’s dead.” The accent was pure, classless English, and Joe reasoned that she was not a local girl.

  She began to cry again.

  “Who’s dead?” Joe asked.

  “Lew. My friend. He’s in… in there.” She waved vaguely back the way she had come.

  “All right, all right. You stay here with Sheila. I’ll take a look.”

  Leaving the two women, Joe pressed on and turned left at the end of the corridor. Just a few yards down, he came upon the open door of Vic Helmsley’s office.

  Easing it open, he stepped in and immediately saw what the girl was talking about. Slumped over a desk, was the body a man perhaps thirty years old, a shower of blood smeared from a gaping wound in his neck.

  Joe found himself shaking as he stepped nearer and gingerly put a finger to the non-bloodied side of the neck. No pulse.

  He backed off and looked around. There was nothing of any significance in the place. A door ran off to the right, leading only to a small kitchen and toilet. A kettle stood on the worktop. Joe felt it. Cold. Realisation shot through him. He hurried back into the office and felt the dead man’s neck again. No pulse, definitely dead, but not cold. Still shaking he hurried back out into the narrow corridor and along to the exit. Sheila and the other woman were not there. Momentarily worried, he rushed along to the exit and out into the bright, chilly day.

  Looking down from the fire escape platform, he saw Sheila and the young woman across the road by the river’s edge, Sheila standing helplessly by while the young woman vomited into a tissue.

  Joe hurried down the fire escape, fishing into his shirt for his mobile phone. By the time he made the grassy river bank, he was through to the police.

  “Yes, that’s right, I said a murder. We need you guys here fast… no, no, that’s all right. I’ll wait here… right, yeah, sure.” He cut the connection and concentrated on Sheila. “He’s not been dead long. Nobody passed you while I was in there?”

  She shook her head and glanced over at the other woman. “She’s badly shaken up,” she said.

  “I can understand why. Do we know who she is, yet?”

  “All I got out of her was Toni, with an I, Fitzpatrick.”

  Returning to the yard, Joe unlocked his car. Sheila sat in one side, leaving the door open, her feet still on the ground. By the river, Toni threw her tissues into the muddy water. Joe ambled across to her, and crouched before her. “It’s okay, Toni. The cops are on their way. You feel like talking yet?”

  She nodded dumbly.

  “Why not come to my car and we can wait for the police there?” He offered his hand, she took it and he led her over to the estate car, opened the rear door and let her in before moving round to the driver’s side, where he sat with the door open, and turned in his seat to face her.

  “Okay, Toni, I’m Joe Murray and this is my friend, Sheila Riley. Can you tell me exactly what happened?”

  Toni’s breathing was shaky as she replied. “Lew and I are old friends from university. I was in the area on business, I rang him and asked if I could come out and see him. He’s from Selby, by the way. He told me that as it happened, he was coming over to Leeds. Apparently he’d had a call from a private investigator, Victor Helmsley, who told Lew that his father had died and he’d come into a fortune. He asked Lew to come here to this office to see him so they could verify that he was the Lew Murray they were seeking.”

  Joe almost jumped out of his seat. “His name was Lew Murray?”

  Toni nodded. “Lewis Murray, to be precise. He was born in Melbourne, Australia, but his mother left his father and came back to England when Lew was less than a month old.”

  Joe and Sheila exchanged stares. “Go on, Toni,” Sheila invited.

  “Anyway, Lew had arranged to see Helmsley this morning and since I was already in Leeds, it was a great chance for us to get together. We met at the bus station, as arranged, had a coffee and a chat and then we parted company. He even suggested I come with him, but when he told me where he was going—” Toni waved at the barren yard and buildings, “I told him no, and we arranged to meet later. That was at half past ten. I was getting a little worried when he didn’t turn up and I had this feeling that he might be in trouble. So I got a taxi here, found the door on the fire escape open, went up there to see what he was up to and I found him just like that. This Helmsley character has murdered him, and I don’t know why and I don’t know where Helmsley is and I don’t know what to do.”

  She broke down, her body racking with sobs.

  Sheila reached over the seat and took her hand. “It’s all right, Toni. We understand.” With a tsk, she picked a dark thread from Toni’s shirt and threw it out through her open door. “I do wish you’d clean this car more often, Joe.”

  “Never mind the car,” Joe replied, and tried to encourage Toni. “I know it’s difficult, but try to think positively. If you’d been in there with him, you could have been dead, too.” He paused a moment. “So Lew is from Selby, huh? But you’re not. Not with an accent like that.”

  Toni shook her head. “I’m from Guildford. Surrey.”

  “Lovely area of the country,” Sheila said. “Not that I know it well. I’ve passed through a time or two, usually on the way to places like Chichester and Bognor Regis. What do you do for a living, Toni?”

  She smiled wanly, and a slight blush came to her cheeks. “I’m, er, between jobs. I was a senior nursing manager for a large, private medical consortium, but I had a disagreement with the board and, by mutual arrangement, I left. It’s difficult being out of work these days, especially when you have skills like mine. Too much time on my hands.”

  “And you thought your old university pal may be able to help?” Joe asked.

  “You’re very perceptive, Mr Murray,” Toni observed. “I don’t know that I thought Lew might be able to help, but I was certainly considering a move up here, and I wondered if he might be able to help on the accommodation front. I’m staying at a local hotel for the time being.”

  Joe frowned. “So was Vic Helmsley.”

  ***

  Detective Chief Inspector James Stell was the model of efficiency when he arrived and listened to Joe’s account of events. While he and his s
ergeant entered the building, uniformed men stood sentry on the yard gates and a team of forensic officers, who turned up in an unmarked, white van, began to don their overalls. When Stell and his sergeant came out, the scientific support team went in.

  “Right, Mr Murray, Mrs Riley, Ms Fitzpatrick, I’m going to have to ask you all to come along to the station with us where we can take statements.”

  “I’ll follow you,” Joe volunteered.

  “No, Mr Murray, you’ll leave your car here. I’ll make sure you’re brought back to it, later.” Stell paused to give his next words more effect. “Provided there are no charges to answer.”

  There was a brief debate, which Joe lost and, at length, he, Sheila and Toni were escorted into two separate cars for the drive into the city.

  Although only a journey of about a mile, the midday rush of traffic complicated matters and it took the better part of twenty minutes before the patrol car drifted off the main roads and into a back street where the left hand side was taken up with an unimposing, functional, four-storey office block, while on the left, through gaps in the walls, they could see the famed Kirkgate open market, its stalls already lit in the poor December light, crowds of shoppers tussling their way along.

  Inside the station, they were held in separate interview rooms for the next hour while detailed statements were taken. Finally, Joe and Sheila were brought back together with Stell.

  What good humour the inspector may have had, there was no sign of it as he confronted them. “So, Mr Murray, Mrs Riley, what we appear to have is a young woman who stumbled across the body of an old friend and two nosy parkers from Sanford determined to clear a younger relative of murder.” He looked over the rim of his glasses at them. “What brought you to Leeds?”

  “Helmsley came from Leeds,” Joe declared, “or didn’t you notice it was his office?”

  “Yes, and I know Vic Helmsley… well, I knew him. Not a spectacularly successful man. A bad debt and will chaser. If your nephew murdered him, he probably did the people of Leeds a favour, but be that as it may…”

  “Lee did not murder him,” Sheila interrupted. “Lee wouldn’t.”

  “Mrs Riley, as the widow of a police inspector, you should know that anyone can kill given the right, or more precisely the wrong, circumstances.”

  “Not Lee,” Joe declared. “He might knock someone by accident and bounce them under a bus, but there is no way he would deliberately kill anyone. So we came here trying to find out why Helmsley had contacted Lee.”

  “But according to your statement, you knew why he contacted Lee.”

  “He was talking to the wrong man when he came to Sanford,” Joe insisted. “Or didn’t your constable write that bit down?”

  Stell peered through his glasses at the statement. “No, he didn’t. And you didn’t spot it when you signed it?”

  “You think I read it word for word?” Joe demanded. “I’m like everyone else. I skim through documents like that because I assume the other person wrote it down correctly… unless it contains figures that have a pound sign in front of them, then I check ’em carefully.”

  “Yes, well, in future, Mr Murray, I’d suggest that you do so when you’re reading police statements.” Stell spent a few moments making amendments in ink. And then passed the statement to Joe. “If you’d like to initial the corrections I’ve made, you and Mrs Riley can go.”

  Joe scrawled his initials next to the comments. “Go? You don’t want to know what we think?”

  “No, I don’t.” Stell yawned. “It’s Christmas, Mr Murray. Coming up to two o’clock, and before the day’s out, I’ll have a queue of shoplifters, bag-snatchers and muggers to deal with, and I have a home to go to. There’s obviously no connection between the death of the man in Helmsley’s office and Helmsley’s own demise, unless Helmsley killed him before going to Sanford, so I don’t think we need detain you any further. If we do need to get in touch, we’ll contact the Sanford police and they’ll come to see you.”

  Sheila gaped and Joe could barely believe his ears. “No connection? How can you say that?”

  “The Sanford police already have Helmsley’s killer in custody. He couldn’t have been here to kill this other man, could he? I therefore assume that someone else killed Lewis Murray. That someone else was probably Vic Helmsley before he left for Sanford yesterday.”

  “The body was still warm when we got there,” Joe growled. “I touched him. He hadn’t been dead long.”

  “You’re a doctor as well, are you?” Stell demanded. With enforced patience, he said, “The pathologist will give us a time of death. If you’re right, it means we’ll be looking for another killer, but it won’t be the same man who shuffled Vic Helmsley off the slag heaps of Sanford.”

  Joe clucked. “My nephew, Lee Murray, is innocent, and the chances are whoever killed Helmsley also killed Lewis Murray. That should be obvious even to you.”

  “It’s a theory, not a fact, and you’d have to prove it. For now, just get out from under my feet. I’ll have a car run you back to the riverside. Good day to you.”

  “Now listen…”

  “I said good day, Mr Murray.”

  ***

  The email from Arthur arrived in the middle of the night. Joe studied it, printed it out, and once the morning rush was over, and he could take a break, he showed it to Sheila and Brenda.

  It was a news item taken from the Herald Sun, one of the major newspapers in the Melbourne and Victoria areas.

  Arthur Murphy, who died last week at the age of 78, was a Ten Pound Pom made good. He first came to Australia from Keighley, UK in 1954 aged only 22, and began work as a sheep shearer on the farms of New South Wales.

  By 1965 he had his own team and from that base moved first into trucking and later began buying up small manufacturing plants. By 1980 he controlled a small empire in the Melbourne area.

  In the 1990s he began to diversify his interests further afield, branching into media by capitalising on the growth of cable and later, satellite TV.

  Little is known of his personal life other than he was married, but his wife, Ann, another Ten Pound Pom, divorced him in 1979 shortly before the birth of his son, and she went back to England along with the boy.

  A charismatic figure, he ruled his business empire with an iron hand, demanded 110% from his employees and where he did not get it, he wielded the axe without hesitation.

  Little is known of his private life, although there have been uncorroborated tales of womanising, and at least one woman, Leone Patrick, a former housekeeper, claims that she was fired after she became pregnant by Murphy and refused to abort the child.

  Murphy leaves a fortune estimated at one hundred million dollars, which his son, who is believed resident somewhere in England, will inherit.

  Murphy’s secretary told the Herald, “I received a note from Mr Murphy’s nurse indicating that he was in his final hours and he has asked that we engage a team of British lawyers to find the boy. All we know at the moment is that he lives somewhere in England under the name of Lee Murray.”

  “His name was Arthur Murphy, not Murray,” Joe said, “so how come the kid is called Lee Murray?”

  Brenda shrugged at the question while Sheila chewed thoughtfully on a diet bar.

  “Is it possible that Lewis’ mother changed his name when she got him back to this country?” Sheila asked. “Remember Toni told us that she hated Arthur Murray – sorry, Murphy.”

  Joe shook his head. “No way. Just for once in your life, get greedy.”

  “Like you,” Brenda commented.

  Joe scowled. “Like me.” He sipped his tea. “This was 1979. According to the newspaper report, Murphy is worth a fortune. Ann decides she’s had enough and wants out, so she walks. Put yourself in their house the night she decides she’s going. There’s a blazing row, she says, ‘I’m off’, he says, ‘I’ll cut you off without a penny’. How does she react?”

  “She tells him where to stick his money,” Brenda said. />
  Joe frowned. “You think so?”

  “I know so,” Brenda retorted. “Joe, not everyone is obsessed by money, and there are times when even you admit that it’s not everything. She’s unhappy. She wants out and away. He may have tried to bribe her to stay or, as you suggest, cut her off without a bean, but it doesn’t matter. She wouldn’t be interested.”

  Joe considered this probability for a moment. “All right, so Ann may not have cared about the money. But she came back to a different England. One where Mrs Thatcher was taking over, one where the mines were about to close down, where greed was the order of the day…”

  “Where Joe Murray was rubbing his hands at the prospect of making a fortune,” Sheila teased.

  “Don’t you start, too,” Joe niggled. “I’m trying to get my nephew off the hook here. Ann Murphy may not care about the money, but her boy will one day be entitled to everything… or at least a share of everything. Why would she change his name?”

  “It sounds as if she let her ex-husband know,” Sheila said. “He ordered his secretary to find Lee Murray.”

  “He did,” Joe agreed, “but he still got the name wrong. He told her to find Lee and it should have been Lew. Why? How?”

  “The only person who would know would be his doctor,” Sheila speculated.

  “Or his nurse,” Brenda said. When they turned upon her, she pointed out, “It was the nurse who passed the message to the secretary according to the Herald report.”

  “It was,” Joe said.

  “Do we know the nurse’s name?” Sheila asked.

  “No but our Arthur…”

  Joe trailed off as Stell and Gemma entered the café. His niece appeared bright and cheerful, Stell anything but.

  “Morning, Uncle Joe,” Gemma greeted.

  Stell scowled at her. “You didn’t tell me he was your uncle.”

  “By marriage,” Joe insisted. “What do you want, Stell? And make it snappy, I’m a busy man.”

  “Damn right you’re busy. I want to know where you and your girlfriend went yesterday after you left Leeds.”