The I-Spy Murders

by David W Robinson

  “Departure Day, Joe.”

  The trill of the doorbell prevented Brenda answering. Looking up, Joe’s eyes fell on Captain Les Tanner.

  “And talking of D-Day, look who it isn’t,” Joe said cheerfully.

  Tanner stood over six feet tall. A slender man, maintaining the upright bearing which went with his rank, he had never seen military service other than with the Territorial Army Volunteers, but it was a role he took just as seriously as any full-time, professional soldier. An administrative manager with Sanford Borough Council during the week, a member of the Sanford 3rd Age Club from the earliest days, he was also one of Joe’s fiercest critics.

  Joe, Chair of STAC, delighted in their head to heads. It allowed him to deal with any irritation which had not found another channel, and he was secure in the knowledge that he was more popular than Tanner.

  It was rare for Tanner to visit the Lazy Luncheonette. Old fashioned Lyons or ABC Tearooms were more the Captain’s preference.

  With a broad grin, Joe embellished his previous goad. “Les Tanner, honouring us with his presence. If you’ve come chasing last month’s rates, they’ve been paid.”

  “I’m taking an occasional day, Murray,” Tanner retorted, “and I was passing so I thought I might drop in and rub some salt in the wound.”

  Joe got to his feet, moved behind the counter and poured a beaker of tea for Tanner. Returning to the table, waving the Captain into the seat opposite, he asked, “Wound? What wound?”

  “About the only thing you’re good for, Murray. Making tea.” He sipped from the beaker and grimaced. “And you’re not very good at that.” He dug into the inner pockets of his business suit and came out with an A4 sheet of paper. Dropping it on the table, he said, “I found that pinned to our notice board the other day, I suspect George Robson put it there. He’s the only other council employee I can think of who’s a member of the 3rd Age Club.”

  Brenda read it and cackled.

  “What?” Joe growled. “Come on. Let us all in on the joke.”

  Still laughing, Brenda handed the sheet over, and Joe read it.

  It was the last page of the monthly newsletter. Emailed to most members, Joe posted Xeroxed copies to those members who did not have access to a computer. This one was dated just a few days earlier.

  The final words had been circled in red ink.

  STAC is your club. Be prod of your member.

  “Even without the prod, the member would pique my interest,” Brenda laughed.

  Tanner frowned his disapproval. Joe grunted. “It’s a couple of typos, that’s all. It should say be proud of your membership.”

  “It’s what I’ve come to expect of you,” the Captain said, taking another drink of tea. “Slipshod, haphazard, downright inefficient.”

  Joe appealed to Brenda. “He comes in here, gets a free beaker of tea and still has the brass nerve to criticise me when he works for the most inefficient organisation in town: the council.”

  “I’m not responsible for the inefficiencies in the town hall,” Tanner replied. “Only those in my department, and I come down hard on them. As for being outspoken, you’re one of the worst, and at least my language is an improvement on yours.” He turned his attention to Brenda. “Are you looking forward to your week of potential fame, dear?”

  “Yes, thanks, Les.”

  “Don’t approve of it, myself, but Sylvia and I will be there with the rest of the club to welcome you back next Saturday.” His gimlet eye fell on Joe again. “Always assuming our chairman has managed to order the bus for Chester and not Chelmsford.” He drank his tea.

  “Miner’s Arms, next Friday morning, eight o’clock,” Joe told him. “You can find your way to the Miner’s Arms, can you? Or would you like me to draw you a map?”

  Les smiled. “Kind of you, Murray, but knowing you, it would probably show me the way to the Bull’s Head.” He beamed on Brenda again. “So, you’re getting excited about the prospect?”

  “And how,” Brenda enthused. “A week away from the slave driver, here.”

  “I saw the application form,” Joe chuckled. “It looks like someone from your department put it together, Les. They wanted to know everything, right down to the day she hangs her washing out.”

  “Really?” Tanner sounded as if he approved.

  “Not really,” Brenda replied. “Mind you, I’m cooking a special dinner for the Housies next Thursday, and they wanted a full list of ingredients and how I actually go about preparing and cooking it.”

  “Fire regulations.” Tanner diagnosed.

  “That’s what I told her,” Joe butted in. “Pains in the backside, all these petty rules.”

  “They’re a necessity, Murray,” Tanner argued. “They’re designed to prevent people like you burning the place down and killing off your staff.”

  “Gar,” Joe growled. “Over forty years I’ve worked in this place, and never had a fire yet. And Brenda isn’t gonna burn the place to the ground, is she? Nanny state. That’s what it is.”

  “Life saving, you mean.” Tanner nodded smartly to them both and left.

  “I think Les won that round on points,” Brenda commented.

  “I have to let him win now and again. So you were telling me what you’re going to do with the prize money if you win.”

  “I don’t know, Joe. Probably stick it in the bank for my old age. But the chances of me winning are pretty slim. It’s a popularity contest, isn’t it? Decided by a phone vote. Oh,” she added as an afterthought, “You do remember you and Sheila are running me there tomorrow? Have you arranged cover for the café?”

  Joe shook his head. “It’s done. What time do you have to be there?”

  “Eleven thirty.”

  “So if we leave about nine-ish we’ll be in plenty of time. It’s only two hours on the motorway…”

  “No, Joe,” Brenda interrupted. “We have to leave earlier. We’ve got to find the place. Let’s leave at eight.”

  Joe fumed at the ceiling. “And she calls me a slave driver.”

  ***

  Marlene Caldbeck limped into the room, disregarding the angry stares of the other team members, and took her seat next to co-host Ryan Rivers.

  In Scott Naughton’s humble opinion, the pair were the worst possible combination for a show like I-Spy, and of the two, Marlene was the most difficult to work with. Carrying a prosthetic lower limb which had hampered her acting career, she had never been very good, relying a little too much on wiggling her bosom and backside at the cameras, but she had had the good fortune to land a role in a long-running soap, and the good sense to get out of it after five years, before the character, a self-serving bitch not unlike the real-life Marlene, became stale. At the age of 38, her head of dark hair swept majestically around her pear drop face, hiding any hint of cosmetic surgery, her behind had not yet spread, while the bosom was just as big, just as wiggly and just as camera greedy. With media clout behind her, she knew how to make the production crew jump to her every demand, and it was rumoured, although Naughton could not confirm it because that side of the business was outside his brief, that she had nailed the company to the wall for a ludicrously high salary on I-Spy.

  Rivers, too, could be a pain. As a stand-up comic his observational improvisations had been good in his early days, but his singing voice had never been much better than a quality karaoke singer’s, and eventually, as seemed to happen with many such comics, he had found himself sidelined onto comedy panel shows showing on satellite and cable TV. Now aged 31, a string of nationwide tours over the last five years, had seen him garner a reputation as a womaniser. He picked up and dropped women like some millionaire playboy, even though he was almost broke… allegedly. But he was still smartly turned out, and his ability to ad-lib, a natural consequence of his improv’ act, made him the ideal candidate to front a show like I-Spy. As long as they could keep him away from the booze and the babes, and he didn’t try to hit on the notoriously fickle Marlene.

  Coming,
as he did, from a military background, Naughton, the director on I-Spy, would have given anything to have the pair of them in uniform under his command.

  Unlike other, similar programmes, I-Spy did not have a permanent home. Instead, the locations were different for each week-long series. Over the past four years, during which it had built up a dedicated following, it had travelled around the country as far afield as Fort William in northern Scotland and Exmoor in Devon. The programme had utilised old farm buildings, a closed down infant’s school, even a defunct army base near Bedford, and now it had come to Gibraltar Hall, a manor house ten miles east of Chester.

  The construction and technical team had moved into the hall a month previously and along with producer Helen Catterick, Naughton, whose job it would be to decide the shots for transmission, had little choice but to be there. It was boring work. Sat in the control room hour after hour, day after day, his trained eye concentrated on a bank of monitors, studying the feeds, working out whether camera 90 needed to be two feet to the left in order to counter early morning sunlight coming in through the windows, and whether camera 67 would be too intrusive set so high up in the women’s dorm.

  Tedious, but necessary work which had to be carried out before the start of every I-Spy week. And now that the arrival of the Housies was less than twenty-four hours away, it was time for the final meeting to ensure that, as far as possible, everything was tickety, if not boo.

  Marlene arriving late (deliberately in Naughton’s opinion) did nothing to help what was already a dour atmosphere.

  “Now that we’re all here,” producer Helen Catterick began with a steely eye on Marlene, “let’s see if we can make some progress.” She shuffled her papers on the table. “We were talking about the contestants and the things we know in advance. Things we need to press in on, but particularly the things we need to avoid.”

  “If they have sensitive issues, why are they taking part?” Marlene asked.

  “You’ve been in the public eye for the last, how long? Seven or eight years?” Naughton asked with unbridled malevolence. “Are there areas of your early life you’d rather not discuss?”

  “I don’t go on reality TV to air them,” Marlene retorted.

  “No. You just sue the Sunday papers when they air them,” Naughton complained.

  Marlene gave him a smile laced with acid. “You should be careful, Scott, or I may be tempted to ask which of us is the more important to the show.”

  “No contest in my opinion,” Naughton said. “If I had any say, I’d drop you in a second.”

  Marlene was about to bite back when Helen rapped her pen on the table. “Can we have a bit of order, please? The Housies are due in at noon tomorrow, and I’d like to get through this today.” She rounded on Marlene. “We know about your ego, but this gig is going out on a tight budget… again. Don’t run off with the idea that you’re indispensible.” She turned her fire on Naughton. “And you, stop working out your angst on the front team. We’re all in this together.”

  Helen allowed a moment’s silence to let the rising tempers cool. “Right. As I was saying, there are those issues in the background that we do not confront. Brenda Jump, for instance, is a widow. We do not ask her to go into details of her marriage and the death of her husband. Dylan Yorke’s mother committed suicide when he was a child, so let’s not get into that. You all have photographs of the Housies in front of you, and you know the drill. Familiarise yourself with them. I’ll just run through them.” Slipping on her reading glasses, Helen concentrated on her top sheet. “First, the women: Tanya Drake, a nurse, Brenda Jump, a waitress, Ursula Kenney an estate agent, Anne Willis, a receptionist. And now the men…” Helen trailed off, her eyes on Marlene. “Is there something wrong?”

  “No, no,” Marlene assured her. “I thought I recognised one of them, that’s all. I was wrong.”

  “Fine time to tell us,” Helen complained. “We were all shown photographs and asked whether we knew any of the Housies. That was weeks ago. Now is not the time to recognise someone.”

  “I said I was wrong,” Marlene grumbled.

  “Right. The men: Greg Innis, pub singer, Ben Oakley, former teacher and now a market trader, Marc Ulrich, an accountant, and Dylan Yorke, a mechanic. Let me ask you all, right now. Do any of you know any of these eight people?”

  Silence prevailed. Helen reached down and scratched her leg. “Is everyone familiar with the procedure tomorrow?” She eyed her director. “Scott?”

  “The Housies arrive no later than half past eleven in time for a pre-launch meeting at twelve noon. Caldbeck and Rivers will meet them informally before they shoot off to start the warm up…”

  “Mr Rivers,” if you don’t mind,” the comedian interrupted.

  “And it’s Ms Caldbeck.”

  “Why don’t you two get together and disappear up your own egos?” Naughton retorted. After a pause, he went on to the rest of the room. “From there, Helen and Katy read the Housies the riot act, spelling out the dos and don’ts of I-Spy, and take them on a tour of the house while our two celebrities…” He laid sour eyes on the pair, “… I use the word in its loosest possible sense, keep the viewers entertained. After the tour, we hand them over, they’ll be introduced one by one to their adoring fans by our emcees, and then enter the house.”

  Rubbing at her leg again, Helen dipped into her handbag and came out with a bottle of pills. “Painkillers,” she explained in response to Naughton’s interested stare. “Arthritis,” she went on. “Don’t worry, Scott, you’ll get there in a few years.” Cracking the cap on her water bottle, she swallowed a single pill. “Scott has just laid out the bare bones, which, I have to say, we should all be familiar with by now. Beyond their introduction to the viewers, the Housies are on their own. Now can we get back to their unmentionables?”

  Chapter Two

  Leaving Sanford just after eight o’clock on Saturday morning, they stopped at a motorway café at the junction of the M6 and M56 near Lymm, where Joe grumbled at the standards of food and service.

  “You’re always the same,” Sheila told him. “If it’s not the Lazy Luncheonette, they’re not doing it right.”

  “I take a pride in my work is all,” Joe countered.

  “And so do these people,” Sheila retorted.

  Throughout the meal, Brenda kept an eye on the clock, worrying that they may have difficulty finding the I-Spy house.

  “Will you quit fretting,” Joe advised. “It’s not even a quarter to ten, and we’ve less than twenty miles to the place.”

  “I like to be early, Joe. You know I do.”

  “It’s a pity you’re never early when we’re opening up of a morning, then.”

  From Lymm, Joe cut onto the M56 and, following the prompts of his satnav, came off again almost immediately, taking the A49 to the south. After crossing the River Weaver, the noise of the car engine resounding from the iron trusses above and either side of them, Joe gloated, “Only another seven miles. We’ll be there in no time.”

  Three miles further on, he turned right at a set of traffic lights, heading west on the A556 and almost immediately ground to a halt in a long queue of traffic.

  “Maybe some kind of accident,” he speculated. “Or roadworks.” He leaned to his right in an attempt to peer round the car ahead. “No sign of any temporary lights, though.”

  “It’ll be the sightseers heading for the public show area for I-Spy,” Sheila suggested.

  Her comment only increased Brenda’s anxiety. “We’re going to be late.”

  Joe glanced at the dashboard clock. “Relax. It’s only five past ten. We’ve plenty of time…”

  With the clock reading five minutes to eleven and Brenda in a state of near panic, a police officer waved them into a field on the right, where thousands of other vehicles were already parked, and hundreds more coming from east and west, waited to get in.

  Indicating Brenda in the rear seat, Joe protested, “She’s a contestant.”

  “Tel
l it to the parking stewards, mate,” the officer replied and pointing again, urged Joe to get moving.

  With an audible, “Tsk,” Joe turned into the field and stopped again as a steward approached him.

  Wearing a fluorescent, yellow vest, a cloth cap keeping the sun off his head, he held out his hand. “Fiver.”

  Joe frowned. “What?”

  “You heard, mate. Five quid.”

  “A fiver? What for?”

  “Parking charge.”

  “No, no, you don’t understand,” Joe said. “She’s one of the contestants.” Again he jerked a thumb at Brenda in the rear seat.

  The steward was unmoved. “I don’t care if she owns the TV company. If you’re parking in this field, it’s a fiver.”

  Joe scowled. “Didn’t I see you in Parliament last week explaining why you’re hiking the taxes on small businessmen?”

  “Now listen, pal…”

  Joe cut him off. “No, you listen, you dipstick. She, Mrs Brenda Jump, is one of the contestants in this farce.”

  “Then you should have gone to the contestants’ entrance on Gibraltar Hall Lane. Now either pay up or clear off.”

  Joe slotted the car into gear. “Where is this Gibraltar Hall Lane?”

  “Joe, for god’s sake, just pay him the fiver,” Brenda urged from the back seat. “I’m going to be late.”

  “Yes, but…”

  “PAY HIM!” Brenda yelled.

  Joe dug into his pocket and fished out five pounds. “I won’t forget your face,” he warned as he handed it over.

  The steward took his money and pointed towards the far corner of the field. “If you drive over there, one of the lads will tell you where to park.”

  Joe looked over. It was at least five hundred yards away, and there was a queue of vehicles waiting to park. Bringing his gaze closer to them, Joe spotted gaps in the nearest lines of vehicles. “Why can’t I park there?”

  “Reserved,” the steward said.

  “You’re expecting the Queen?”

  “For crying out loud, Joe…”