The I-Spy Murders

by David W Robinson

  “One cannot understand the attitude of the police,” she declared. “It’s perfectly obvious that my son would never hurt a fly, and to think they imagined he would be mixed up with this trollop. It’s disgusting. If they knew anything at all about police work, we wouldn’t be in this ridiculous position.”

  Joe opened his mouth to argue, but he was not fast enough.

  “And who are you?” she demanded. “You’re not a policeman. Why are you asking questions?”

  Again Joe opened his mouth to speak, but she beat him to it.

  “What gives you the right to harangue my son like this? He’s done nothing wrong.”

  “That’s as may be,” Joe replied, relieved at last to get a word in. “And who am I? I’m a private individual helping the police clear my friend’s name, that’s who I am.”

  “Friend?” ranted Mrs Ulrich. “One of those strumpets, I suppose.”

  “Mother. Please,” Marc begged, his ears turning bright red.

  “My friend is also my employee,” Joe insisted, “and whoever killed Ursula was male.”

  “Well, it was not Marc.”

  Joe elected to ignore her and concentrated on the man. “Marc, you complained on Thursday that the cord to your dressing gown, the one used to hang Ursula, was missing. Can I ask, what were you doing with a dressing gown, anyway?”

  “What an absurd question.” Marc’s mother raged. “Everyone wears a robe when they’re getting ready for bed or when they’ve just got up.”

  “Not in my world they don’t,” Joe argued, “and not when it’s hot as hell like it has been the last month or two.”

  “We are not of the lower classes.” Sonya barked.

  Forcing his patience, Joe let out an exasperated sigh. Now he understood why Marc had brought the robe with him. “You met Ursula once in the Romping Room, didn’t you? Brenda tells me you said nothing happened –”

  “Of course nothing happened,” the mother interrupted again. “What on earth do you take Marc for?”

  Joe rounded on her. “You know, Mrs Ulrich, I usually find being rude to people very easy, but right now, I’m on my best behaviour, so I would appreciate it if, just for once, you shut your mouth and let Marc answer me. I’m the only one standing between him and a murder charge, so do me a favour and button it.”

  Sonya gaped and Marc blushed a deeper crimson.

  “I’ve never been spoken to like that in all my life.”

  “Then you should get out amongst the lower classes a bit more.” Joe fumed for a moment and then confronted Marc again. “No one’s accusing you of anything, and you don’t have to go into any gory details, but what happened with Ursula in that room?”

  “Nothing.” Marc was almost pleading. His eyes darted from Joe to his mother and back again. “I swear to you nothing happened.”

  Joe wondered who he was trying to convince and decided it was his mother.

  “We just talked… well, she talked and I listened most of the time.” Marc fidgeted with his glass of lager. “She asked where I came from, what I did for a living, was I married, the usual stuff. And that was it.”

  “But then she belittled you as a lover,” Joe said.

  “Well, not in so many words,” Marc disagreed.

  Joe shook his head. “I’ve seen the video. She may not have come right out and said it, but it’s what she meant. What I want to know, Marc, is how that made you feel. Angry?”

  “Well. Er, irritated I suppose.”

  “Irritated enough to strangle her later that night.”

  Sonya, who had been bursting to interrupt, leapt to her son’s defence. “How dare you? How dare you sit there and accuse him of this crime?”

  “It actually takes less guts than you might think,” Joe told her. “And I didn’t accuse him. I asked.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, Mr Murray,” Marc said, “but you’re wrong. I never moved from my bed on Thursday night.”

  “Neither did anyone else to look at the videos,” Joe said, “but we know they’ve been rigged.”

  “I had nothing to do with Ursula’s death,” Marc insisted. “We had dinner together, all eight of us. Afterward we sat around chatting and suddenly, I felt very sleepy. I went to bed. And I wasn’t alone. I think Ben was there when I got to the dorm. I washed, brushed my teeth, and got into bed. The next thing I knew it was Friday morning and everyone was getting up.”

  “And there was nothing odd about Friday morning? Apart from Ursula not being in the living room, I mean?”

  “No… wait. Yes there was. I was ill… well not ill, but I had a raging thirst.”

  “I’m not surprised,” said Sonya. “Unsanitary, that’s what it is, all those men sleeping in the same room.”

  Joe disagreed again. “No, Mrs Ulrich. It was unusual, but it had nothing to do with sanitation.” He got to his feet and finished his soft drink. “That’s all I need to know for the time being, Marc, but remember the police may need to speak to you again. I’ll bid you good day.”

  From the Ferry Path, Joe drove back into Chester and a boarding house on the river’s edge where he met with Greg and Dylan. Both told him similar tales to Marc. Ben Oakley, too, echoed the story.

  Joe left Ben’s digs at half past four, drove the car back to the rental company, and then sat by the river bank, enjoying the lazy afternoon heat and sunshine while he smoked a cigarette and stared across at the Victoria Hotel.

  Sunday afternoon and most of the shops were now shut. Joe was certain that his two closest friends would be back there now and despite her public face of caution-to-the-wind jollity, Joe knew without retail therapy to distract her, Brenda would be worried sick. He knew that she was not the murderer. He knew that the murderer was, had to be, a man. And one of those men had lied to him. One of them had feigned drowsiness, one of them had arranged for the stock feeds to cut in, one of them had crept along to the Romping Room, strangled Ursula, then hung her to make it look like suicide.

  But which one?

  After finishing his cigarette, he ambled along the riverside, beneath older city walls, up a shallow incline and turned left over the old Dee Bridge towards Handbridge. The bridge, a triple arch crossing the river west of the weir, was also a single track road controlled by traffic lights at either end. A stone wall bordered the right as Joe crossed, but railings stood on the left, the side with the pedestrian footpath. Both sides were recessed every so often. Joe moved into the centre recess and leaned on the railing looking out over the river, deep in thought.

  The Dee flowed only slowly, but fifty yards away, the water tripped and tumbled over the weir, frothed and eddied briefly, before settling again. It seemed to Joe that it mimicked his thought processes; jumping, bubbling, tumbling here and there, then settling for a long, slow journey to the truth, before hitting another weir and falling all over themselves again.

  Looking further along the river, at the bank from which he had just walked, one of the pleasure boats was making a sweeping turn, bringing its passengers back from their excursion.

  Why couldn’t the Gibraltar Hall investigation behave like that boat? Know where it was going, and simply get there.

  Earlier, he had persuaded himself that Marc Ulrich was the killer. Now, having met the formidable Mother Ulrich, he was not so sure, and the other men, with the possible exception of Dylan, had some motive for killing her. He needed something to tie one of the male Housies to a crew member, and maybe then he could avoid the weir and follow the pleasure boats.

  He detached himself from the railings and moved on, asking himself what of Dan Wellesley? Why had he chosen to wait before seeing Joe? Would he have been alive still if Joe had seen him Saturday night?

  “I need to check my facts, first.”

  What did he mean by that? If he knew something, he must have known it for twenty years or more. Why did he need to “check… facts” now?

  Twenty minutes later, feeling hot, uncomfortable and grimy, he stepped into reception and the clerk handed him hi
s key.

  “Oh, Mr Murray, Detective Sergeant Rahman stopped by earlier and left this for you.” The clerk handed over a laptop computer. “He said it belonged to the young woman who was killed at Gibraltar Hall.”

  “Right. Thanks.” Joe took the laptop and made his way to the lifts.

  Maybe this would provide some clues.

  ***

  With the time coming up to seven o’clock, Joe, showered, shaved and ready for dinner at eight, sat at the table beneath his window, and connected his netbook to the hotel wi-fi.

  Opening the browser, he went straight to Dan Wellesley’s website and the page concerning Victor Prentiss.

  “You wanna know about the killer, Joe, you’ve got to look at the victim,” he reminded himself, while he waited for the page to appear.

  Error 404: page not found.

  With a curse, Joe refreshed the page, but got the same message. He tried simplifying the URL to take him back to the site homepage, and when that did not work, he Googled Dan Wellesley’s name and tried to access the site from there.

  Eventually, with a cynical smile, he gave up.

  “So what’s going on?” Sheila asked an hour later when they settled down to their evening meal?

  After such a large lunch, the Victoria put on a carvery for Sunday evening. Joe had chosen various cold meats and supplemented them with salad vegetables. His two companions had also chosen salads, but slightly less conventional than Joe. Sheila had opted for nothing but vegetables, and Brenda had chosen a slice of quiche to go with hers.

  “Someone stole the computer hard drive when they murdered Wellesley in the early hours of this morning,” Joe explained while he chewed on his cold cuts. “They’ve been busy wiping out the site.”

  “Don’t you need passwords and stuff for that?” Brenda asked.

  “Wellesley was a smart man once over,” Joe said. “He must have been or he wouldn’t have made his money. But he was also an old man and the internet is a comparatively new phenomenon. He was savvy enough to build the site, but where would he store his passwords?”

  “Not on the computer, surely?” Sheila said.

  “Not directly, no,” Joe agreed. “But any computer can store your login details for any site. And he will have stored them there. That way, when he visited the site, it would come up with his user name and his password would be a line of dots in the box beneath it. All our killer had to do was click on the ‘OK’ button and he’d have access to Wellesley’s entire site. It would allow him to delete the lot in a matter of minutes.”

  “Do you know who it is?” Brenda asked.

  “No. Fortunately, I made a few notes when I was checking Wellesley’s site yesterday, and I downloaded a few photographs, so that may guide us, but I’m hoping there may be a clue here.” He reached down and patted Ursula Kenney’s laptop.

  “Which is why you brought it to dinner,” Sheila observed.

  “It ain’t leaving my side until I’ve had a good look at it,” he promised them.

  “You surely don’t imagine the killer could simply walk into this hotel and steal it, do you?” Brenda asked.

  “No, but how do we know the killer isn’t staying at this hotel?” Joe gestured across the dining room where Helen Catterick, Scott Naughton and Katy Flitt were dining.

  “It seems unlikely,” Sheila said.

  “Why?” Joe wanted to know. “Listen to me for a minute. Ursula’s murder has its roots in the past. Twenty years ago. Don’t look at those three as they are now, think about them as they were two decades back. That Helen, she’d have been, how old? Thirtyish? Naughton would have been in his teens, and Katy would be…”

  “About seven.” Brenda interrupted, “and that lets her out.”

  “Does it?” Joe asked. “Think about the tale Wellesley told on his website of some young kid who got pregnant and later committed suicide. How would that child feel if all that came bubbling to the surface again? Especially if Ursula were threatening blackmail with the story. How would you feel if someone tried to drag Colin’s name through the mud?” He swung his attention on Sheila. “Or someone threatened to expose Peter for something that was not his fault?”

  “Angry, certainly,” Sheila agreed, “but not angry enough to commit murder.”

  “That’s because you’re you,” Joe pointed out. “We’re not the murdering kind, are we? But does that apply to Helen, Katy, Scott? We don’t know and until we’re sure, this laptop stays with me.”

  Brenda pushed her plate away, gulped down a mouthful of white wine, and smacked her lips. Casting her eyes towards the carvery, she said, “They have a rather delicious looking lemon tart with a meringue topping, and it’s calling to me.”

  “What’s it saying, dear?” Sheila asked.

  “Take me and eat me.” Brenda grinned. “You want some, Sheila? Joe?”

  “Just a little fruit cocktail for me, please,” Sheila said.

  “I’ll pass,” Joe replied. “An infusion of nicotine is what I need.”

  “Back in a jiff,” Brenda said and wove her way through the tables to the self service queue.

  “More like the old Brenda,” Joe smiled after her.

  “She’s coming back to her usual self, Joe,” Sheila agreed. She sipped from her wine glass. “And she has you to thank for it. She’s had a lot to put up with over the last week, and especially over these last three days, but she never doubted that you would get to the bottom of it.”

  Taking out his tobacco tin, Joe began to roll a cigarette. “I’m doing what I always do,” he said with a frown. “Trouble is, this is a tough little cookie. I’ve worked out most of it, and I think I know why, but I still don’t know who and there are still one or two questions on how.”

  “I thought you had that solved,” Sheila asked as Brenda came back towards them.

  “Most of it, yes. It was a two-handed job. Hoad told me there was no way any crew member came into the Housies’ area the night Ursula was murdered. That means it was one of the Housies. But the Housies did not have access to the control room, so it means one of the crew switched in the stock feeds allowing the Housies to move without being detected. You with me so far?”

  Brenda rejoined them and passed a dish of fruit cocktail to Sheila. Tucking into her lemon tart, she invited, “go on, we’re listening.”

  “There was no sign of any struggle, so we assume whoever it was, Ursula was expecting him, and that means it was a man.”

  “Not guaranteed, Joe,” Brenda said. “Tanya sits on the other side of the fence, you know, and we don’t know if Ursula could bat for both sides.”

  “She’d shown no such inclination all week,” Joe pointed out, “but fair comment. Let’s just say it’s more likely to be a man.” He completed the cigarette and tucked it into his shirt pocket for later consumption. “Now, how did the killer know it was safe to move? How did he – or she – know that the stock feeds were running?” He shook his head and dropped his tobacco tin in the pocket of his gilet. “I keep coming back to this same problem. How did the killer and the crew member communicate? Answer me that, and we’ll probably find the killer, and once we have him –” He cast a defeatist eye on Sheila “– or her, we’ll have the accomplice.”

  “Perhaps they didn’t communicate,” Sheila suggested. “Perhaps they worked out the timings beforehand.”

  Joe shook his head. “Leaves too much to chance. Suppose Bexley, the security guard was still awake? Suppose the crew member secretly coming in, got caught out and didn’t make it? The killer would move on a preset schedule, but he would then be caught on film. No, the accomplice had to let him know that he was good to go. They had to have some method of communicating, and what’s more it had to be completely silent. Any noise, like a mobile phone ringing, or a pager alert would register on the sound pickups in the men’s dorm.”

  “Or the women’s dorm,” Sheila said and smiled sweetly.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “However they did it, it can’t have b
een with a mobile phone,” Brenda said.

  From the podium in the Victoria Hotel’s function room, Joe surveyed the scene with satisfaction. Frankie Vaughan blared from the speakers, singing Tower of Strength and the members of the Sanford 3rd Age Club danced and jived like the reborn teenagers Joe often called them.

  He, Sheila and Brenda were seated before his laptop from which he drove the disco and karaoke. Alongside him, on the floor, part hidden under the table he had commandeered, lay Ursula’s laptop. He had promised himself a look at it the next time he took a smoke break.

  “Why can’t it have been a mobile?” he asked.

  “Because none of the Housies were carrying one,” Brenda said. “They went through our bags seven ways from Sunday, Joe. They were worse than the customs people at Leeds & Bradford Airport. They opened them, searched through them, and then put them through a scanner to look for hidden compartments.”

  “Did they search you?” Joe asked.

  Brenda ran her hands down her body from waist to knee. “Pat down. Not a strip search.” She laughed. “I’d expect a lot more than a search from any man stripping me.”

  Joe grunted at Sheila. “You were right. She’s coming back to her old self.”

  “Have you two been talking about me?” Brenda demanded.

  “Of course we’ve been talking about you,” Joe replied. “Who would you expect us to talk about when your back’s turned? Margaret Thatcher?”

  Sheila laughed and took Brenda’s hand. “We’ve been worried about you, dear. That’s all. We’re just glad to see you more like the Brenda we know and love.”

  “And while you’ve got all that money we wanna make sure we’re mentioned in your will.” Joe winked at her.

  The victim of his badinage took it in good part, swallowed a healthy slug of Campari and soda, and abruptly changed the subject. “Leaving aside the communication difficulties, who do you think it is, Joe?”

  “Ask me another.” He frowned. “Scott Naughton is ex-army. He’d get over that wall no problem, and he has a chip on his shoulder the size of a hundredweight sack of spuds. Katy is young and frustrated…”