The I-Spy Murders

by David W Robinson

  Stubbing out his cigarette under a rhododendron bush, Joe fiddled with his cigarette lighter. “So what’s this stuff you learned overnight that’s so important?”

  “That’s the reason I wanted to see you. We’ve been looking into Ursula Kenney, and it turns out that little miss viper was even less of an angel than she made herself appear,” the policeman explained.

  “That,” Joe observed, “would be difficult considering her performance this week.”

  “Precisely. Let me tell you the tale. Twenty years ago, when she was about eighteen, there was an, er, incident. A man named Victor Prentiss was found dead in Hogshead Wood, about five miles from here. It’s part of the Delamere Forest. Prentiss was seen with Ursula Kenney and another, unidentified women, in and around a Chester nightclub in the week leading up to his death, and according to the pathologist at the time, he’d been dead about three days before his body was found.”

  Excitement beginning to grip him, Joe took out his tobacco tin and rolled a fresh cigarette. “Was Ursula questioned?”

  “She was,” Hoad nodded. “She admitted being with the man at the nightclub, but it was four days before he was found, not three. She seemed to think that would finalise her innocence, but, of course, pathology can be quite hazy on such matters, so she was brought in for questioning. Although Prentiss’ death was not natural, there was nothing suspicious about it, either. He had a leather belt wrapped around his throat and he died of asphyxiation. The coroner’s verdict speculated that he was indulging in auto-erotic asphyxiation. I don’t know how much you know about the practice, but basically it involves…”

  “Oxygen deprivation to heighten orgasm,” Joe cut in. “It’s also known as scarfing.” He smiled thinly at Hoad’s suspicious surprise. “Don’t look at me like that. I may live alone but I’m not suicidal, and I don’t indulge, but I do know about it.”

  “Yes, well, Prentiss’ friends all told the police that he did indulge in it, which is how come the coroner reached his verdict.”

  “So, what does this have to do with Ursula Kenney?” Joe asked. “If she insists that she was with the guy but left alone, was there any evidence to the contrary?”

  “Regarding Ursula, no,” Hoad admitted. “But there was plenty of evidence to suggest that Prentiss wasn’t alone when he died. His body had been quite badly dressed. Shirt buttons done up wrong. And the body was found half buried under leaves and branches in the woods. It had been there about three days when it was found. Secondly, one of those branches had recent blood on it. It wasn’t Prentiss’ and it wasn’t Ursula’s.”

  “So where is all this leading?” Joe asked.

  “The investigating officer’s notes indicated that he was never entirely happy with Ursula’s story. He said she was nervous and fidgety throughout the interview, even though there was never any suggestion that she was involved in Prentiss’ death. There were no traces of her ever having been to his place, and nobody ever suggested that she had. Questioning her was purely a matter of routine, in order to establish what had happened in the hours leading up to his death. The feeling was that Prentiss choked to death getting his jollies, and the woman, or women who were with him, moved his body to make sure they could never be linked to him. So it begged the question: why was Ursula so jittery at interview?”

  “The police have that effect on some people,” Joe pointed out.

  “True, but you don’t know the whole story yet. Y’see, Prentiss was a film producer and at the time, Ursula was a struggling actress.” The chief inspector shrugged. “You see how easy it would be to put a scenario together?”

  Joe was already ahead of the game. “Prentiss is putting together a movie, Ursula wants a part in it, so she uses her best attributes, like free-fall knickers, to try and land the part. Prentiss insists he can only get off by scarfing, it goes wrong and Ursula moves his body to this wood.”

  “But not alone,” Hoad insisted. “She was barely eighteen years old, and the DVLC tell us she didn’t even have a driver’s licence at the time. If Ursula was involved, she had to have an accomplice. But like I say, there was absolutely no evidence to implicate her other than the fact that she had been seen with him a few days before he was found. So that leaves us looking for an accomplice.”

  “The mystery woman or women from the nightclub?”

  “Neither of whom ever came forward and who, so she insisted, Ursula knew nothing about.” Hoad, too, lit a cigarette. “Tempting, isn’t it?”

  “But hard to prove at the time and after twenty years, you’d never do it,” Joe said. “What’s more, with Ursula dead, you’re no nearer knowing who the second woman was and you’ll never find her.”

  “Not necessarily,” Hoad suggested. “You see, back then, Ursula wasn’t working under her real name. She had a stage name. Xavier Armandez, and she appeared in one or two minor roles with another actress named Margaret Billingham, better known these days as Marlene Caldbeck.”

  Joe’s eyebrows rose. “Now that is interesting. But Marlene would have been so obvious even then, with that false leg.”

  “Would she?” the chief inspector asked. “Let me paint you another picture, Joe. Suppose Marlene didn’t have that missing limb then. Suppose she and Ursula were working this guy in the nightclub. They went back to his place, got it on, his lights went out instead of burning a bit brighter, the two girls panicked and decided to shift his body twenty miles away. While they’re hiding him in Hogshead Wood, Marlene slices her leg open on a stray branch, septicaemia sets in and she loses her lower leg.”

  Joe considered the possibility. “Everything is hunky-dory for twenty years, then suddenly, out of the blue, Ursula turns up on I-Spy under her real name and puts the screws on Marlene.”

  “Ursula is still unknown,” Hoad agreed, “but Marlene is a household name. Ursula isn’t blackmailing her for money. Instead she’s insisting on the I-Spy prize. Twenty-five grand. If Marlene can’t swing it, Ursula goes to the papers with all the gory details of Prentiss’ death, and how she and Marlene covered it up.”

  “I can see one immediate problem,” Joe said. “We’re pretty sure that the killer got in over the rear wall. Marlene only has one leg. How the hell did she do it?”

  “Well, it was you who pointed that out, but there again, you did say you didn’t see it on telly.”

  Toying with his Zippo lighter, Joe shook his head. “I’d rather pull my fingernails out with pliers than watch TV. It’s more entertaining. What are you getting at?”

  Hoad smiled. “You speak as a man who isn’t married. I don’t watch telly myself, but the missus and kids have the damn thing on all the time. Anyway, that doesn’t matter. I didn’t know about it until you mentioned it the other day, and this morning, I checked up on it. You said Marlene Caldbeck appeared on a reality programme with the Paras. Not quite right, Joe.” The chief inspector leaned forward to stress his next point. “Two years ago, Marlene appeared on a reality programme called Commando. She was put through a training regime with the Royal Marines, not the Parachute Regiment. Disabled or not, she cracked their assault course in record time for a civvy. And she could climb like Spiderman.” The chief inspector leaned back again. “She plays on her disability, Joe, but her performance on Commando proves that it doesn’t hold her back half as much as she makes out.”

  Joe pursed his lips to demonstrate he was impressed. “So what are you going to do?”

  “She told us she didn’t know Ursula Kenney, she told the crew here, that Helen Catterick woman, that she didn’t know Ursula. It was a lie. Rahman is on his way over to the entertainment field right now. I’m bringing her back here for questioning. Because it’s a formal interview, ten to one she’ll call her brief, and he won’t let you sit in on it. But the live feed will be on so you can watch it all from the control room. We can discuss it afterwards… assuming we don’t get a confession, that is.”

  Now Joe shook his head. “If she set fire to hell, she’d deny it with the devil as her witness.
No way will you get through that ego.”

  ***

  “Ms Caldbeck, we’ve called you back today because there are certain, er, anomalies in the statement you gave us yesterday,” Hoad explained, “and I’d like to clear them up.”

  “If I can help.” She smiled, but Hoad could not help mistaking it for the grin of a hyena stumbling across the remains of a dead zebra.

  “Your current working name is Marlene Caldbeck, but your real name is Margaret Billingham. Is that correct?”

  Marlene checked with her solicitor who nodded. “That’s right,” she said. “There’s nothing illegal about that. I file my tax returns under my real name. Marlene Caldbeck is purely a stage name, nothing else.”

  “Of course,” Hoad agreed. “When we questioned you yesterday, you told us you had never met Ursula Kenney and you did not know her. Do you remember saying that?”

  Marlene did not bother checking with her a lawyer. “It’s true.”

  “We’ll see about that in a moment,” Hoad warned her. “Have you ever heard of a man named Victor Prentiss?”

  Again she wasted no time checking with her solicitor. “No.”

  “He died about twenty years ago,” Hoad told her. “Autoerotic asphyxiation.”

  Marlene laughed. “Strangled himself getting off? What does that have to do with me?”

  “He was a film producer,” Hoad told her. “He was a local man and, of course, you’re from this area, aren’t you?”

  “More Manchester,” Marlene replied. “But I still don’t see what he has to do with me.”

  “He had a habit of bedding young actresses.”

  The change in her attitude was as rapid and abrupt as it was unsurprising. Her face twisted into a mask of pure anger, and her tones matched it. “He didn’t bed this actress.”

  “That’s something else we’ll discuss in a moment,” Hoad advised. “Let’s come back to Ursula Kenney. You say you’d never met her, and yet according to our information, you and she appeared in a BBC drama production together. That, too, was about twenty years ago. A few months before Victor Prentiss died, as a matter of fact.”

  Marlene shrugged. “If you say so. I don’t remember every part I’ve played. And anyway, even if we were cast in this thing, there’s nothing to say that we actually met. We may not have been in the same scenes.”

  “You were,” Hoad told her. “We checked. She wasn’t called Ursula Kenney then. Like you, she had a stage name. Xavier Armandez. She played your sister in a drama production entitled Happy Families.” He glared at Marlene. “Now do you remember her?”

  Marlene’s features drained of colour. She looked at her solicitor and he merely shrugged. Her eyes blazed at him, and he sat forward.

  “Chief Inspector, may we ask where this is leading?”

  “It’s leading, Mr Underwood, to the murder of Ursula Kenney. A woman who, we believe, knew a secret about a member of the production team here, and was blackmailing that person.” Hoad’s stare swung back to Marlene. “When we looked into you, Ms Caldbeck, we found several, er, shall we say explanations, for your disability. A childhood disease, a car accident when you were aged about ten, a car accident when you were in your twenties. And yet, when we looked at footage from that production of Happy Families, your leg appeared to be intact. I’d like to know right now, when and how you lost your lower leg and unlike the paparazzi, I want the truth.”

  “Well you can sod off,” she snapped. “I’m telling you nothing.” She nudged Underwood. “Tell him.”

  Underwood sighed. “What relevance does this have?”

  “It’s relevant,” Hoad assured him. “You see, Mr Underwood, we believe that Victor Prentiss died when he was playing bedroom games with two actresses. We’re pretty sure that one of them was Ursula Kenney, known then as Xavier Armandez. The identity of the other has always been a mystery, but we believe it may have been your client.”

  Marlene’s mouth fell open in outraged astonishment. Before she could speak, her lawyer spoke for her.

  “I still don’t see the relevance of my client’s disability.”

  “You wouldn’t,” Hoad agreed. “No one ever suggested that Victor Prentiss was murdered. He had a penchant for these kinds of games. His death was, in all probability, accidental. However, the two actresses with him decided that they could very well be implicated in the matter, and that would mean the end of their budding careers. So they chose to move his body about twenty miles and half buried it in the Delamere Forest, probably hoping it wouldn’t be found for years. Unfortunately for them, it was discovered after only a few days. Other evidence at the scene indicated that your client could have lost her lower limb as a result of an accident while helping to conceal the body.” Hoad’s powerful stare rested, again, on Marlene. “We also believe the Ursula Kenney was blackmailing your client because of it.”

  Marlene leapt to her feet. “You’re out of your mind, and I’m out of here.”

  “Sit down, Ms Caldbeck,” Hoad ordered.

  “Go to hell.”

  “Sit down or I’ll have you arrested.”

  She leaned across the desk, towering above him. “You can’t speak to me like this. I’m…”

  “Sit down,” Hoad ordered, his tones now the stern rebuke of a headmaster. He waited, maintaining eye contact refusing to look away.

  Her fist clenched, then unclenched. The fury worked at her slim features. The small room held its collective breath waiting to see who would win in this battle of wills.

  “Sit… down.” Hoad punctuated his words with a long gap.

  Marlene checked with her solicitor who again nodded and she slowly resumed her seat.

  The chief inspector pointed a warning finger at her. “I’m not interested in your reputation, lady. I don’t care who you are or who you think you are. Mess with me and I’ll throw your arse in a cell so fast, your knickers will come off.” He swung on the solicitor. “Now, Mr Underwood, I demand that your client answer the question.”

  “Tell him,” Underwood instructed.

  “No. I won’t. It’s part of the mystique that…”

  “Marlene, tell him,” Underwood interrupted.

  She huffed out her breath and looked away. There was a long silence. Hoad noticed the sparkle of tears in her eyes, but remembered that she was an actress. These people, he reminded himself, could turn emotions on and off at the flick of an internal switch.

  At length she turned back, removed an ostentatious gold and sapphire ring from her finger and began to play with it.

  “I was filming in Australia about fifteen years ago. I was swimming in the shallows off Bondi Beach. I was at the southern end, where the surfers congregate, and that’s where it happened. A surfer came in, I saw him too late and ducked to avoid him. He hit my leg and came off his board. He was furious with me, but I was in too much pain to care. My lower leg was totally mangled, and the surgeons took it off.”

  “And you were held responsible?” Hoad demanded.

  She nodded. “I shouldn’t have been swimming there. The film company were up in arms, too. They had to strike me out of the movie and reshoot.” She sighed. “They needed a woman with both legs intact.”

  “Nudity?” Hoad asked, and again she nodded. “I’ll need to confirm this.”

  “Listen, you idiot, I’ve told you the truth. It’s a story we’ve been keen to suppress ever since I made my name. I can’t have this getting out now.”

  “This interview is confidential, Ms Caldbeck,” Hoad assured her, “and no details will be released to the media unless charges follow.”

  “Well, whatever, I had nothing to do with Victor Prentiss’ death.”

  “But you did know him and you did know Ursula Kenney under her stage name?”

  “Yesss,” she hissed.

  “Then why did you deny it yesterday?”

  Another sigh. “According to the terms of our contract, if we know any of the Housies, we’re supposed to say so. The Housies would not be removed,
but we would. That includes me, Ryan, and the production crew, including Helen and Scott Naughton. Times are tough, Mr policeman, for all of us. I needed this gig. When I saw the lists of Housies, her name meant nothing, but when I saw her photograph, it registered right away and I thought, why should I lose the fees, the kudos of presenting I-Spy, just because I worked with the uptight little tart twenty odd years ago? She couldn’t act then and if this week has proved anything she hasn’t improved over the years. So I kept quiet. When you asked me yesterday, I maintained that silence. If I opened up about it, you could get me into all sorts of trouble with I-Spy.”

  “The same goes for failing to report a death, twenty odd years ago,” Hoad retorted. “And even if we learn that you did lose your leg as you say you did, it doesn’t alter anything. Until I prove otherwise, you are still in the frame for covering up Victor Prentiss’ death and for murdering Ursula Kenney in order to keep it under wraps.”

  Marlene let loose a string of invective.

  “That kind of language won’t get you anywhere, Ms Caldbeck,” Rahman told her.

  “I’m talking to the butcher, not the block,” Marlene snapped.

  “Haranguing a police officer won’t do you many favours, either,” Hoad told her. “Detective Sergeant Rahman is a long serving, highly respected officer. If you’d had to work half as hard as he to get where you are, you would probably appreciate him.”

  “He’s a…”

  “Don’t add racism to the possible charges,” Hoad cut her off.

  “I was going to say, he’s a lackey,” she replied. “A gopher, a jobsworth, and I don’t answer to gophers.”

  His anger barely subdued, Hoad told her, “You disgust me. You and everyone else like you. You think your fame and your money can buy you anything, get you out of anything. Well right now, little miss fortune, you are under caution. Rahman, tell her ladyship her rights.”