The I-Spy Murders

by David W Robinson

  Back on the terrace of the Victoria Hotel, Joe had explained what he had in mind, and Tanner had come dressed for the purpose. He wore a pair of denims, and a thick, army jumper, its green wool would allow him to blend almost perfectly with much of the surrounding foliage.

  “Then why did you dress for the part?”

  “To impress the police,” Tanner reported and tapped the three pips on his left shoulder.

  “So you’re happy to let Brenda sweat it out?”

  Tanner sighed. “Emotional blackmail. I never thought you’d sink that low.”

  Joe reached for the electronic entry-call button on the back gate. “Trust me, I can go a whole lot lower.”

  ***

  Hoad, when they met him in the production control room, was a good deal less than enthusiastic. “Who are you again?” he demanded of Tanner.

  “Captain Leslie Tanner, Yorkshire Regiment. And I’ll thank you to address me as sir, young man.”

  “I’m not sure that you actually outrank me,” the policeman replied. “Forgetting the formalities, are you saying to me that it’s possible for someone to get into the grounds without being seen?”

  “That is my opinion, Chief Inspector,” Tanner agreed. “What’s more, I’m prepared to demonstrate it.”

  Hoad looked even more doubtful. “You’re, er, a little old for such games, aren’t you, sir?”

  Tanner tutted and Joe, for once, agreed with him. “What is it with you people that makes you think age equals deadweight? Let him have a go.”

  Hoad shook his head. “Sorry. I can’t take responsibility…”

  “No one is asking you to take responsibility, Chief Inspector,” Tanner interrupted. “Nothing will go wrong, but if Murray is right, it’ll prove that someone other than the inmates could have broken in to kill this young woman.”

  Joe frowned. “Inmates? This is a TV show, Les, not a prison.”

  “No,” Tanner argued. “It’s a zoo. Perhaps ‘inmates’ was the wrong word. Let’s call them exhibits.”

  “I don’t care what you call them,” Hoad grumbled. “Murray, you were the one who insisted that Ursula Kenney couldn’t have committed suicide. Even if they could get over the wall like General Incompetence here insists, they still couldn’t get into the house to kill the woman. There were security men on duty.”

  “And none of the animals could have done it,” Joe retorted, picking up on Les’s zoo theme. “They couldn’t get past the cameras out of the dorms. You’ve seen that for yourself. It had to be someone outside.”

  “Or suicide,” Rahman said. “I understand your objections, Mr Murray, but it still seems the only obvious conclusion.”

  “Not so,” Tanner disagreed. “And if Chief Inspector Plod will permit, I’ll demonstrate.”

  “Can we stop trading childish insults?” Hoad asked.

  “You started it,” Joe pointed out. “Look, Hoad, let Les show you what we’re talking about. He needs to be on the outside and in the control room, not at the crime scene or anywhere the Housies go. Like I said earlier, he won’t interfere with any of your forensic work.”

  With an exasperated sigh, Hoad yielded. “What is it you want?”

  “I need to see the multiple screens in the TV and security control centres,” Tanner told him, “After that I need to see the rear garden. Then I’ll need a little while to plan my approach. Beyond that, I’ll show you how it’s done.”

  “All right,” Hoad agreed. “I want a waiver. If you injure yourself, it’s your own fault.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Tanner smiled. “Glad you weren’t leading the troops in Normandy.”

  ***

  “Why is there a delay between the movement of east and west cameras at the rear of the house?” Tanner asked.

  “Manual override,” Scott Naughton explained. “Those two cameras belong to security, not us. They’re not on our main feed, but we do use the eastern ones for mid shots when Housies are in their garden.” He gestured at two separate monitors to one side of the control bank. “Katy explained to Murray earlier. We have them here so we can monitor them during the day, and the security people have them in their office for night duty. Like all our cameras the feeds can be altered manually. Under normal circumstances, the cameras would turn left, then right, and scan through their preset arc, but if the security guys, or one of us sees something suspicious beyond the walls, we can override the movement of either camera and focus on it.”

  “So what you’re saying is that someone, at some point overrode the automatic movement of the cameras and that’s why their movement is no longer co-ordinated?” Joe asked.

  Naughton nodded. “When that happens, the whole system needs to be reset. A couple of buttons and the cameras will return to their azimuth position, then start to scan again.” He reached for the console.

  “Don’t do that,” Tanner barked and Naughton backed off as if he had received a shock from it.

  “If someone had stopped the automatic movement of the cameras, would that be logged somewhere?” Joe asked.

  “Yes,” Naughton agreed. “And I can assure you we don’t have it on our log. I keep it and no one asked me for it yesterday, nor this morning. Security officers may have logged it, but if so we haven’t been informed.” He smiled wanly. “Mind you, we’ve all been busy with other matters since first thing this morning.”

  “Hang on a minute here,” Hoad interjected. “I asked you earlier if anyone could have dodged the cameras and got into the grounds, and you said no. Are you telling us now that they could have done?”

  Naughton shook his head. “If one camera was stopped, the other would still be scanning. But even if they did get over the wall and into the garden, where are they gonna go? The garden is covered from the house and they wouldn’t get past security.”

  “But the house cameras, like the wall cameras, are rotating, aren’t they?” Tanner asked.

  “At night when the house is closed up, yes. During the day when the Housies could be out in the garden, we control the feed, and I personally zeroed both cameras yesterday evening before I left.” Naughton appealed to Hoad. “Chief Inspector, I know what you’re driving at and I tell you it’s impossible. No one could get into the grounds or the house during the night. Without being detected, that is.”

  Hoad jerked his thumb at Joe and Tanner. “Sherlock Bones and the chocolate soldier disagree.”

  “I’ll thank you to have a little more respect, Chief Inspector,” Tanner insisted. To Naughton, he said, “Show me the garden feeds on automatic scan.”

  They moved across the room to the main bank of I-Spy monitors. Naughton spoke briefly to his technician who flipped a few switches. The director turned his attention to two monitors set to the right hand side. “Okay, you’re watching the cameras mounted on the house in security mode.”

  Joe watched as the cameras swung through their respective arcs, his eye darting from one screen to the other covering the whole of the garden from the rear of the house, a steeply angled view, to the rear wall.

  “There’s a big discrepancy between the scans,” he noted. “They’re covering the same areas together for long periods.”

  “Up to five seconds,” Les agreed with an eye on the sweep hand of his wristwatch.

  “They’ve been altered during the night,” Naughton said. “They must have been. We can reset them any time we want, but it’s not been necessary. Want me to do it now?”

  “No,” Tanner replied. “I want everything as it would have been last night… or the early hours of this morning.”

  The room fell silent, Joe following Tanner’s eyes as he watched the scene from the garden. Areas appeared and disappeared on the two monitors: the duck, the ballerina, the elephant, the fountain. At one point the fountain and the duck were visible on both screens before the scans parted and went their separate ways.

  Tanner followed them for a long time before finally nodding his satisfaction. “I think it can be done, Murray. In fact, I’m su
re it can. I’ll need a small pair of field glasses and a little time to get ready at the rear of the house. I’ll need you to record what happens from the cameras, Mr Naughton.”

  The director shrugged. “No problem. What are you going to do?”

  Tanner smiled. “Get into the house without your cameras seeing me.”

  ***

  While Detective Sergeant Rahman waited at the rear gate, Joe and Tanner had made their way to the entertainment field, and from there, dismissing the protest of a steward, over a waist-high fence into the woods.

  Joe was surprised that the field was still so busy. Thousands of people were crowded in there, singers and dancers still occupied the stage, but the giant screens now showed the stage action instead of views from the I-Spy house.

  He was initially glad to be out of the field, into the wood. It muffled much of the noise, and as they made their way further in, so the sounds faded even further.

  That was the upside. The downside was fighting their way through the riot of trees and bushes.

  “How the hell do you know where we’re going?” Joe complained once more. “I can’t even see the sky.”

  The Captain pointed down at the flattened mosses over which they were walking. “Someone has been this way before. Many times.”

  After what seemed like eternity, the trees began to thin a little and Joe could make out the rear wall of Gibraltar Hall, with the ungainly partition fence strutting high into the sky the other side of it.

  “You join the policeman,” Tanner whispered to Joe. “I need to observe the cameras from here.”

  Joe checked and sure enough, above the wall, he could see the house-mounted cameras swinging back and forth through their arcs.

  He stepped out, taking Sergeant Rahman by surprise. “Almost arrested you there, sir.”

  “Sorry, son. Les is playing hide and seek in there.” He pointed into the woods. “Shouldn’t be long now.” Joe rolled a cigarette and lit it. “You don’t mind me asking, Azi, but how come you’re CID when your eyesight is so bad?”

  “They couldn’t put me in an office, Mr Murray, because I can’t see well enough to concentrate on a computer screen for long. And they daren’t pension me off, so they assigned me to CID,” Rahman replied. “It’s difficult, obviously, and I’m no use on, say, fingertip searches, so most of the time, all I do is question witnesses and take statements.” He shrugged. “It’s all a bit politically correct, if you know what I mean.”

  “I take your point. But you’re a hero apparently, and you’re right to milk it for all it’s worth.”

  With a speed and agility that took Joe and Rahman by surprise, Tanner suddenly burst from the bushes, rushed forward and threw himself at the wall. In less than a second he was gone. Over the top and into the garden.

  “How do you do it, you silly old sod?” Joe muttered. “Come on, Azi. We need to be inside.” He led the sergeant through the rear gate and along the path to the rear entrance. Several times he looked around, seeking sight of Tanner but there was no sign of him.

  When they arrived in the control room, it was to find Chief Inspector Hoad and Scott Naughton studying the monitors.

  “When is he gonna show?” Naughton asked.

  “He left about two or three minutes ago,” Joe reported. “Over the wall like an Olympic pole-vaulter… without the pole. And he was in the garden before us.”

  Naughton buried his surprise, but not before Joe had noticed it. The director gestured at the monitors. “No sign of him here.”

  “And you obviously didn’t get him on the rear wall cameras.”

  Naughton shook his head.

  “Even if he makes it, Murray, he would still have to get past security,” Hoad pointed out.

  “Let’s worry about that when he makes the back door, huh?” Joe suggested. “But I will say this. You’d better call the two night security people and get them down here. We’ll need to talk to them.”

  He had barely got the words out when all hell broke loose from beyond the control room. Naughton leapt from his seat and hurried out, with Joe, Rahman and Hoad on his heels.

  They emerged into the rear of the house to find a security officer wrestling with Tanner.

  “Will you tell this moron to let me go,” Tanner demanded.

  “It’s all right, Ray,” Scott ordered. “We know about him.”

  “Sorry, Mr Naughton, but we don’t even know how he got in.”

  “That was the point of the exercise, you blithering idiot,” Tanner snapped.

  Muttering apologies, Ray released the irate Tanner, who then stared triumphantly at Hoad.

  “Still think I’m too old for the game?”

  ***

  “I’m impressed, Les,” Joe said as he and Tanner sat down in the control room with a cup of tea. “I never thought you could do it.”

  “It still doesn’t get Brenda out of here, does it?”

  “She’ll be out by teatime,” Joe promised. “You have my word on that.”

  Tanner grinned. “I think you’re a complete waste of space most of the time, Murray. You’re irritable, offensive and thoroughly inefficient, but I have to say you’re persistent and your insight does you credit.”

  “Careful, Les or we may end up as friends.”

  Tanner laughed. “I hardly think so.” He sipped at his tea. “So what now? You’ve proved that someone could have got in from the outside, but you haven’t got them past security and into the house.”

  “That’s the easy bit,” Joe assured him. “Hoad is on the blower to the night security folk right now. They’re going to be brought in for questioning. You go back to Sylvia and Sheila, and make sure you get a bill from the taxi driver. I’ll reimburse you from club funds. I’ll bring you up to speed at the hotel tonight.”

  Chapter Ten

  “Sit you down, Ms Driscoll.”

  Joe guessed security officer, Rebecca Driscoll’s age to be a shade under 40. Her dark hair was neatly styled into place above a lean, angular face. The slender shoulders and rough hands spoke of a woman who had worked all her life, and her confident stride and assured posture probably meant she had seen time in the forces. It was an impression borne out by the darting way her eyes shifted around the makeshift interview room.

  With the time pushing 3:30, the strain of the day’s events, a long and tiresome journey from Sanford, all the hassle of taxis back and forth between Chester and Gibraltar Hall, the constant round of arguments and debates with both police and the backroom staff, were beginning to take their toll on Joe. He needed to be back at the Victoria Hotel to sleep some of it off before dinner, but he could not leave Brenda in this hell hole for one more night.

  “This is Joe Murray,” Hoad was saying to the security woman. “He’s not a police officer, but he is a specialist investigator, and he helps the police all over the country when needed.”

  Joe allowed the lie with only a smile.

  “You’re not obliged to answer any of Joe’s questions,” Hoad insisted, “but you are obliged to answer mine, and I have to advise you, if you don’t answer him, I’ll ask exactly the same question. You understand?”

  Rebecca nodded and cleared her throat. “Am I under arrest?”

  “No,” Hoad said. “You’re merely helping us with our inquiries.”

  “Over the bimbo what topped herself?”

  “Interesting,” Joe said.

  Rebecca eyed him with even deeper suspicion. “What?”

  “You seem convinced that Ursula hung herself. We’re not so sure.”

  The security officer shrugged. “Couldna been anyone else, could it. They’d have been on camera.”

  “Not if they knew how to run stock feeds,” Joe argued. “And we know they could have got in through the back door.”

  A visible shock ran across her features. A widening of the eyes, creasing her forehead. It was only fleeting and she was quick to suppress it, but Joe noticed it.

  “Not possible,” she declared. “They mig
ht get past old Bexley, but no way would they make it past me.”

  “Oh yes they would,” Joe retorted, “especially during the time you weren’t there.”

  There was no mistaking the surprise this time. “I work here all night, every night,” Rebecca insisted.

  “Then how come I saw you in the bar of the Victoria Hotel at half past eleven last night?”

  The security guard shook her head. “No way. No way was I in the Victoria Hotel last night. You’ve got me mixed up with someone else.”

  Joe leaned back in his seat. “It was you. I wouldn’t know you from Adam, but I know that uniform. I watched you leave the Victoria Hotel last night at just after half past eleven… oh, my mistake. It wasn’t half past eleven. It was half past twelve. That’s right. I was in my room, which overlooks the car park and I saw you getting into your car.”

  “Try again,” Rebecca challenged. “I was nowhere near the Victoria Hotel last night. I was here.”

  “Joe and I both know that’s not true, Ms Driscoll,” Hoad insisted. “Now it could be that Joe was mistaken. And he didn’t see you at the Victoria Hotel. But I don’t believe he is. I believe he saw you there. If you weren’t there, tell us where you were.”

  “I told you. I was here.”

  “That’s not what your pal Bexley says,” Joe lied. “He says you slipped out for an hour or two.”

  Her face flushed with frustration. “The bloody idiot. I told him to keep quiet or he’d drop us both in it.”

  Joe’s relaxation was less forced this time. “Tell us what the arrangement was.”

  The security officer sighed. “It was private, right? Between me and him. He’s a tired bugger, Bexley. Getting too old for nights. Has a habit of nodding off, and last night I had what I thought was an emergency, so we came to an agreement. He’d keep an eye on everything while I nipped home to sort it. I swear I was gone no longer than an hour.”

  “What was this emergency?” Hoad demanded.

  “I got a call after midnight. One of my kids had been injured in an accident at home. I rang the house and got no answer. I was in a panic. I had to get home to sort it out.”