The I-Spy Murders

by David W Robinson

  His toothy smile vanished. “No. She’s dead.”

  Brenda blushed. “Oh, I’m sorry. That was tactless.”

  He shrugged but his smile did not return. “Been dead, like, twenty years, now. Happened when I was a nipper, but I still miss her.”

  Brenda told them she was a widow and there followed a brief, over-animated conversation on the subject of deceased family, before Dylan meandered off to talk with Ursula.

  “Bit of a cow, that one,” Greg commented.

  Brenda picked up Ursula’s fluttering eyes and generous smile while she talked with Dylan. “She’s making no bones about what she has for sale, either.”

  Greg laughed and Brenda smiled.

  Since their confrontation in the dormitory, Brenda had been careful to avoid the woman. She had not come this far to be drawn into arguments with a 40-year old who, on the face of it, was little short of an arrogant and ignorant tart.

  Congregating in the living room, waiting for the Master Spy to announce him (or her) self, Brenda found her mind meandering around mental images of her friends and family back in Sanford, wondering what they would be doing at this hour on a Saturday afternoon. Shopping, cricket, even football if the new season had begun. Sheila, she was certain, would have urged Joe to get a move on so she could be home to watch the programme launch and if she had not persuaded Joe to stay and watch with her, he would be back at the Lazy Luncheonette counting the day’s takings.

  Tonight they would meet in the Miner’s Arms for the regular, unofficial Sanford 3rd Age Club get-together, and they would insist the landlord tune the TV to I-Spy to watch their friend and companion at…

  At what?

  For the first time since she applied to take part in the programme, Brenda began to question her motives. It had seemed liked a fun idea. Something different. But here she was ensconced in a sealed-off environment with seven strangers, no television, no pub, no drink even, and she did not know what she was supposed to be doing.

  Master Spy seemed to read her mind.

  “Most of you will be wondering what you’re supposed to be doing. Act naturally, is the only advice I can give. Do whatever it is you do best.”

  ***

  In the control room, Scott Naughton’s eyes darted around the half dozen monitors carrying images from the living room, and he periodically barked orders to his assistants when he wanted to shift the view.

  “Look at her,” Helen Catterick said, pointing at the main view currently feeding to the live transmission.

  Irritated by the interruption, Naughton followed Helen’s pointing finger to the right of the screen where Ursula Kenney had insinuated herself on the second sofa, between Dylan Yorke and Ben Oakley.

  “Unusual,” he agreed, and the barked, “Switch to 12.”

  Sat alongside him, Katy carried out the instruction and the view on the main monitor switched to pick up the four men and Ursula crammed onto the three-seater sofa.

  “She’s making her bed,” Helen went on. “How long does it usually take before we have a gender mix? Five or six hours at least. She’s been in the house less than two hours and already she’s chasing studs.”

  “Go to 10,” Naughton ordered as the Master Spy made small talk with the Housies. There were several actresses on call for the role of Master Spy, and when on duty, the individual was enclosed in a sound booth two rooms away.

  The view switched again, taking in the three women on the other sofa.

  Naughton allowed the shot to run while Master Spy spoke with Anne Willis.

  “Go back to 12. Master Spy, pick up on Ursula sitting with the men.”

  He listened into Master Spy’s comment.

  “I wonder, Ursula, why you’re sitting with the men. Do you always prefer male company?”

  Ursula’s response was accompanied with a large grin. “Isn’t that what life’s about? Men and women getting together?”

  “Tart,” Helen grumbled.

  Naughton chuckled. “I dunno. I thought she had a point.”

  “I’ll take side bets on who’s first to the Romping Room this week,” Katy laughed. “Heavy betting on little miss loose legs.”

  “Jealous?” Naughton asked. “And switch back to 8.”

  “Jealous? Of these losers?” Katy laughed again. “Action on 12,” she said. “Dylan is stroking her thigh.”

  “Go to 12,” Naughton ordered and studied the view. “At least his hand is where we can see it.”

  “They are not losers, Katy,” Helen assured her. “They are simply gregarious people, eager to make something of themselves.”

  “Go to 13,” Naughton ordered. “Ben has his arm around Ursula’s back.”

  “Ursula is keen to make something of Dylan,” Katy observed. “A mattress sandwich, I reckon.”

  Naughton laughed. “Maybe she could go for Dylan and Ben at the same time and turn it into an MFM mattress sandwich… Go back to 8.”

  “Don’t be disgusting,” Helen admonished him.

  “We never know what goes on in the Romping Room, Helen.”

  Katy laughed lasciviously. “We could get the techs to set up a pinhead camera when they throw fresh linen in through the hatch.”

  “Put the result up on YouTube?” Naughton grinned.

  “YouTube would ban it in less than a minute,” Katy observed, “but I know plenty of other sites where it would stay forever.”

  “Will you two kindly concentrate on your jobs, and stop this twittering,” Helen rebuked them.

  “Twitter is no good, Helen,” Naughton told her. “It’s text only.” He laughed at her grimace, switched his attention back to the main feed, and checked the clock. “Cut to 10, and Master Spy start bringing the opening session to a close. Let’s leave them to show the world their sad little lives.”

  The voice of Master Spy filled the control room. “That’s all for the moment, Housies. Don’t forget to get your chores scheduled. I’ll be back later to see how you’re getting on.”

  Chapter Four

  “There’s nowhere to sit,” one of the dray men complained.

  “Tell some of your pals to hutch up a bit,” Joe replied, and pushed a beaker of tea across the counter. Passing the order though the hatch into the kitchen, he said, “Full English and tea, call it six fifty for cash.” He took a ten pound note, rang it up, handed over change and watched as the unhappy dray man headed for table 13 beneath the wall-mounted TV.

  “You coulda put a telly on the other side,” the driver complained.

  “This is a café, not a bloody drive in movie. And you lot should be out delivering beer by this time. I’ve had your boss on the phone complaining about the time you spend here.”

  “He’s not complaining about all the extra beer we’re selling to the pubs while Brenda’s on I-Spy,” one dray man retorted.

  Ignoring him, Joe glowered at the next customer. “What do you want?”

  “I suppose a tenner out of the till is a non-starter?”

  It was Wednesday and although the promised filling of seats had materialised, the extra income had not matched it, for the simple reason that people were spending more time in the café, but spending the same money at the till.

  Without one of the mainstays of the business – Brenda – Joe’s irritation had hit new heights. He carped constantly at Sheila, Lee, and Lee’s wife, Cheryl, who was deputising for Brenda. They took it in their stride and as always the café muddled through from day to day, with the staff determined to pass as much time watching TV as the customers, causing Joe’s anger to reach even greater peaks.

  “I’ll be glad when it’s Friday and you lot take Uncle Joe to Chester,” Cheryl had said to Sheila on Tuesday afternoon. And she made sure Joe was within earshot when she said it.

  He, too, had been captivated by the antics of Brenda and her fellow Housies. While publicly decrying the programme as inane and purposely intrusive, he nevertheless found his attention straying to the screen during slack periods and, upstairs, in his priva
te apartment, he had his smaller TV permanently tuned to the station.

  Four full days into the week, it was obvious that Ursula Kenney was going all out to make a major mark on I-Spy, and he felt sorry for the other three female Housies, Brenda included. Whatever they did, wherever they were, Ursula was not far behind, determined to wrest the limelight from them.

  The men were all over Ursula, and when he tabulated the number and types of visit to the Romping Room, Joe guessed why.

  Anne Willis and Tanya Drake had gone there alone, Tanya twice. Brenda had never even ventured into the place. Of the men, Greg, Ben and Marc had each gone there alone, and they had also visited when Ursula was known to be there. Dylan, on the other hand had not gone there alone, but he had been in there four times with Ursula.

  Their performance in going to the Romping Room amused Joe. It was usually late at night, when everyone else was asleep. One or other of them would make their way out of the dorm, along the landing into the room, eyes everywhere, checking ahead and behind in case they were observed. The other would soon follow suit and follow the same, furtive procedure.

  “Why are you bothering?” Joe said to the TV screen. “There are cameras watching your every move… except the obvious ones.”

  Ursula’s effect on the men was especially puzzling in the case of Greg. He was married with a family. During one session in the men’s dorm, he had reached across to his bedside shelf and held up a photograph of a blonde woman and two fair-haired children, declaring, “Those are my precious angels. All three of them.”

  Not to be outdone, Dylan had then held up a photograph of his deceased mother similarly close to the camera, saying, “And this is my mum. With the angels.”

  Disregarding Dylan’s obvious obsession with his mother, Joe had wondered about Greg’s actions. If he was so captivated with his wife and kids, what the hell was he doing in the Romping Room with Ursula?

  A few of the Housies had declared in advance their intention to make special meals for their fellows. Indeed Brenda had told him in advance that she had ordered the ingredients for a meat and potato pie, which she would prepare on Thursday night. Hadn’t he seen the application form and spoken with Les Tanner about it the day before Brenda went to Chester?

  Joe watched these culinary efforts with cynical interest, denouncing a vegetarian lasagne as tasteless Mediterranean tripe, and a beef goulash as a glorified pan of Scouse.

  Uncharacteristically, it was the genial Lee, whose training as a chef Joe had financed, who took him to task on the issue the morning after the broadcast. “It didn’t look nowt like Scouse, Uncle Joe.”

  “All right,” Joe argued, “so it looked like a glorified Lancashire hotpot. Trust me, boy, Brenda will win in the cookery stakes. You can’t beat one of her homemade meat and taters.”

  Joe’s sympathy and support lay with Brenda, as did most of the town’s judging by the coverage she was getting in the Sanford Gazette, but he noticed that she was not her usual garrulous, jovial self.

  “I told you she’d be all right without drink, and she has been,” Sheila told him when he confided in her after the Wednesday morning rush had died off. “But you are right. She’s a fish out of water, and I have to wonder if she’s not regretting going in for it.”

  “It looks to me like she’d love to have a real go at that Ursula. And it would probably do her good. Get it off her chest.” Joe waved at the café. “It’s how she deals with everything here.”

  “But she’s not here, Joe. Like I said, she’s out of her natural environment and it’s making her retreat into her shell a little. I’m sure she’ll be fine when she comes back to us on Saturday.”

  “I hope so. The last thing I need is Brenda brooding on a bad week.”

  Sheila giggled. “Oh dear, what are we going to do with you, Joe? How do you cope when Brenda and I go away on holiday together?”

  “The same way I cope when you’re here. I manage the staff. And talking of holidays, you’re going away soon, aren’t you? Maybe that will help Brenda get over this fiasco.” This time he waved at the TV screen where Brenda and accountant Marc Ulrich, sat out in the gardens, were debating the glorious summer weather.

  “That’s not until the first week in October,” Sheila replied. “Another six weeks. Can you handle a depressed Brenda for the next month and a half?”

  Joe shook his head. “I’ll give George Robson a call. He’ll cheer her up.”

  She laughed again. “She and George haven’t been ‘an item’ for months now. You’ll have to do better than that, boss.”

  ***

  Joe and Sheila were only partly right about Brenda’s state of mind. She did wish she had never entered, and she was homesick, missing her friends, and there were so many aspects to I-Spy she had been unaware of before coming onto the show: the wearing of a radio-mike, for instance, and the constant need to replace the battery pack.

  Even though it had been explained in the induction as necessary to ensure that their audio delivery would be properly picked up, Brenda (and one or two others if they were to be believed) had complained about it. At varying times during the day or evening, Master Spy would call each of the Housies to the video room for a one to one, and the replacement battery pack was waiting there for them (Brenda did not know how they got there, but assumed there must be an access panel as there was for bed linen and other ‘necessities’ in the dorms.

  However, Master Spy, monitored telemetry from the packs and there was occasional need to change them during the day, if and when the battery alarm signalled low power. At such times, the Housies were expected to drop whatever they were doing to attend to the matter.

  They were merely niggles. Brenda’s major problem was anger, directed exclusively at Ursula Kenney.

  When talking to the men, Ursula had unashamedly sucked up to them within hours of entering the house, but when dealing with her three female fellow Housies, she was never less than catty, often spiteful, clearly vindictive, and the confrontational approach which had manifested in the induction interview room on Saturday, was played out to the full before the cameras.

  Everything about her annoyed Brenda. She complained that the cameras did not pan low enough to let her show her figure when she was in the shower, she whined when having to carry out her share of the daily chores, and even taking pills at bedtime was carried out with a showy, theatrical air.

  “I need them for my pain,” she had said on the first night. “I suffer terrible pain day and night and these are the only relief I get.”

  But she had never spelled out what the pain was or how it had come about.

  The daily video interview with Master Spy provided an inadequate channel for the frustration. There were monitors all over the ground floor of the hall, where Housies could watch the same transmission as the viewing audience, but the one-to-one with Master Spy was the exception. None of the other Housies saw or heard the exchange, and it granted each of them the opportunity to be candid about their compatriots. A firm believer in never speaking ill of anyone she did not know well, Brenda lowered that strict standard when it came to discussing Ursula’s antics.

  “In a post-apocalyptic society, Ursula is the kind of woman who would be burned at the stake for her bitchiness,” she said in one such interview. “And quite frankly, I’d be happy to light the bonfire.”

  Master Spy’s response was typically unemotional. “Is this envy, Brenda? Is it because you fear that Ursula’s popularity is higher than yours?”

  “Not envy,” Brenda replied. “Anger. She is manipulative with the men, scathing and autocratic with the women. If it goes on, I cannot guarantee to hold my tongue.”

  “The I-Spy house is a free environment, Brenda. You are at liberty to say what you feel, so long as you are not overtly abusive.”

  “What’s she if not abusive?” Brenda demanded. “And she’s not quiet about it, either.”

  “Your popularity has remained stable so far, Brenda. Are you afraid that if you were to
try putting Ursula in her place, that popularity may nose dive?”

  “Nothing of the kind. I’m so far gone I really don’t care what the viewers think of me anymore. I’m simply concerned with not making a total fool of myself by letting that bloody woman get to me.”

  “We will watch developments with interest, Brenda. Thank you for your video thoughts.”

  Brenda was not the only one entertaining angry thoughts about Ursula. Tanya and Anne had both confessed their fury with the woman, and so too had the men.

  Greg Ingham, a former street entertainer and pub singer, had told her, “Ursula is such a slut. She’s screwing Dylan for all he’s worth, and still coming onto me and the other two men. She lured me into the Romping Room once, and then did nothing but talk about her.”

  “I’m surprised you went for it, Greg,” Brenda commented. “Especially as you’re married.”

  He had laughed easily. “If she’d dropped her knickers and said, ‘come on, do your worst’, I’d have turned her down. I went there because she said she wanted to talk to me, in private.” He had laughed a second time. “Talk to me? Talk to me about her, more like.”

  Brenda had had no serious conversation with the carefree Dylan (although she did privately wonder if his freewheeling, good-humoured approach was a front generated by association with his Christian name) but both Marc Ulrich and Ben Oakley had admitted their dissatisfaction with Ursula’s outrageous behaviour.

  Marc, an accountant from Coventry, a man with an almost obsessive interest in the gardens at Gibraltar Hall, had admitted to Brenda that he had “visited the Romping Room with Ursula,” but it was not something he was particularly proud of, and he wished he hadn’t done it. Even though, like Greg, he had insisted nothing happened, Ursula had taken to referring to “big men” in his presence. “Men who know how to make it big.”

  Marc confessed he could not decide whether Ursula was referring to his physical attributes or his lack of ambition. At the age of 34, he was one amongst a team of accountants working for a large practice, and even to Brenda, it appeared that he was in no hurry to branch out alone, or even pursue a full partnership with his present employers. He preferred the ‘safe’ option of a regular salary.