A Murder for Christmas
A Sanford 3rd Age Club Mystery (#4)
David W Robinson
Copyright © 2017 by David W Robinson
Cover Photography by Adobe Stock © DiViArts
Design by soqoqo
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or Crooked Cat Books except for brief quotations used for promotion or in reviews. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.
Printed in the United Kingdom
First Black Line Edition, Crooked Cat Books. 2017
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The Author
David Robinson is a Yorkshireman now living in Manchester. Driven by a huge, cynical sense of humour, he’s been a writer for over thirty years having begun with magazine articles before moving on to novels and TV scripts.
He has little to do with his life other than write, as a consequence of which his output is prodigious. Thankfully most of it is never seen by the great reading public of the world.
He has worked closely with Crooked Cat Books since 2012, when The Filey Connection, the very first Sanford 3rd Age Club Mystery, was published.
Describing himself as the Doyen of Domestic Disasters he can be found blogging at www.dwrob.com and he appears frequently on video (written, produced and starring himself) dispensing his mocking humour at www.youtube.com/user/Dwrob96/videos
By the same author
The STAC Mystery series:
1. The Filey Connection
2. The I-Spy Murders
3. A Halloween Homicide
4. A Murder for Christmas
5. Murder at the Murder Mystery Weekend
6. My Deadly Valentine
7. The Chocolate Egg Murders
8. The Summer Wedding Murder
9. Costa del Murder
10. Christmas Crackers
11. Death in Distribution
12. A Killing in the Family
13. A Theatrical Murder
14. Trial by Fire
15. Peril in Palmanova
The SPOOKIES Mystery series
The Haunting of Melmerby Manor
The Man in Black
A Murder for Christmas
A Sanford 3rd Age Club Mystery (#4)
Chapter One
“The bus will be here in a few minutes, Uncle Joe,” Christine said. “Now just go and enjoy yourself. We’ll see to everything.”
Joe Murray looked round his café and chewed at his lip. Half past eight, Saturday morning and already the place was heaving. The Lazy Luncheonette was busy every day of the week, thanks to the hands from the factories on the other side of Doncaster Road. Saturdays were normally quiet until 9:30–10:00 when the shoppers turned out in force, but this was not just any Saturday; this was Christmas Eve and the place was packed.
Haggard-looking men, irritable women, and excited children tucked into the festive fare on offer (some of it store-bought rather than home-produced). Tables were awash with cups, plates and cutlery, the Formica tops smeared with spilled tea, coffee and soft drinks. Half-eaten mince pies and slices of Christmas cake littered the place, and the general clatter and chatter was deafening.
Joe’s casebooks, those booklets he produced detailing the mysteries and crimes he had solved, and which could normally be found racked neatly on shelves around the café, were now in the hands of customers, and he wondered irritably how many he would have to reprint after being smeared or dog-eared by grubby, infant mitts.
“It’s one of the busiest days of the year,” he complained to Christine. “I shouldn’t be leaving you two alone.”
“We’ll cope,” his nephew’s wife assured him. She craned her head back into the kitchen. “Lee, will you tell him to stop worrying.”
“Nothing to worry about, Uncle Joe,” Lee called from the kitchen and promptly dropped two plates on the tiled floor.
“Nothing to worry about, huh?” Joe whined. “How many is that this week, Lee?”
“He won’t break any more,” Christine promised. “We’ve got Thelma, my neighbour’s mum, coming in at nine to help out. You’ve been planning this for months, so get your bags and get out before you miss the bus.”
Joe reached to the floor for his suitcase. His fingers closed around the handle and he released it again, straightening up to look into Christine’s amused eyes. “I’m only in Leeds. It’s less than twenty miles away. I can be back in half an hour by taxi if I have to. Just promise me –”
Busy serving customers while trying to calm his worries, Christine laughed. “Pick up your case and clear off,” she said, “and have a good time.” She turned back to the customer. “What can I do you for, luv?”
Hands shaking, Joe collected his bag and stepped from behind the counter. He took two paces, stopped and turned around. “If anything goes wrong, you could ruin me.”
The customer, a middle-aged woman wearing a heavy, quilted coat, glared at him. “If I don’t get my toast soon, I’ll bloody ruin you. Why don’t you clear off and let the girl get on with it?”
Joe glowered back. “I have a reputation, you know.”
“Yes,” agreed the customer. “As a tight-fisted, miserable old sod. Do like the girl says. Clear off and give us all some peace.”
With a grimace and matching growl, Joe stepped out into the bitter December morning.
Leaden cloud, heavy with snow, hung over Sanford. On the opposite side of the road, the factories stood dormant, their doors closed for the Christmas break. A hundred yards to the left, strung across the entrance to Doncaster Road Retail Park, fairy lights danced in the blustery air and a tall Christmas tree swayed in rhythm to the gusts. A long queue of cars stood at traffic lights, waiting to get into the mall, forcing through-traffic into the offside lane. There were thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people waiting to unload the weight in their wallets.
There were plenty of eateries in the mall, overpriced and over-hyped joints out to make a killing. Joe would benefit from the overspill and his coffers, too, would swell. When customers tired of paying exorbitant prices for plastic food, some would come to the Lazy Luncheonette to take in real, home-cooked fare (notwithstanding the mass-produced mince pies and cakes).
By straining his eyes to his right, he could see the Miners Arms half a mile away and on the car park, the coach where members of the Sanford Third Age Club would be boarding for their Christmas Weekend in Leeds. Joe would normally be there in his role of club chairman, ticking off the members’ names as they arrived, but he’d arranged for Sheila and Brenda to deputise so that he could ensure everything at the Lazy Luncheonette was running smoothly before he left.
Wearing a thick winter coat, a scarf wrapped around his thin neck, flat cap covering his curly head of hair, Joe still shivered in the near-zero temperatures: a far cry from the warm September sunshine when he and his two assistants had first planned the jaunt.
Planning was Joe’s forte. To his acute and logical brain, organising a three-day trip, arranging buses, booking hotels, was easier than guesstimating bread, bacon and pie requirements for a workman’s café; a task he carried out every day of the week. The negotiating skills were similar. Grind the price down as low as you could before the supplier got ready to cut and run, but never skimp on quality. It was all meat and two veg’ to him … literally, in the case of the Lazy Luncheonette.
Joe had found
himself painted into a corner by the reservations desk at the Regency Hotel in Leeds. The price was the price, and they would charge him for three days and nights even if he didn’t show up until Christmas Day. At that point, Joe almost scotched the entire plan, but his two assistants were just as obdurate and refused to hear his business concerns.
“I can’t not open on Christmas Eve,” he told Sheila and Brenda. “It’s one of the busiest days of the year. I’d lose a fortune.”
Seated at the table nearest the counter, during a lull in morning trade, Sheila had said, “Lee can run the place.” She immediately backed off as a stack of cups hit the tiled floor in the kitchen. “Christine can come in and run the place. Lee will do the cooking like he always does, and I’m sure you can get someone in casual to help out with the washing up.”
“Oh, come on,” Joe grumbled. “You guys have worked for me for five years or more. You know what it’s like on Christmas Eve. Lee is a brilliant cook. He should be. I sent him to that fancy college, and taught him the best of the rest myself. But he couldn’t run a marathon on a pushbike, and it’ll need more than Christine and one other hand. I can’t do it. I need to be here and I need you two here.”
“And miss out on shopping in Leeds?” Brenda sounded convincingly shocked and winked at Sheila to show that she was winding Joe up. “I have plans for December twenty-fourth, Joe,” she went on. “Me, you, a bottle of shampoo, and a secluded little room in a four star hotel, and –”
“Shampoo?” Joe cut her off. “You’re gonna spend Christmas Eve washing your hair?”
“Yes,” Brenda agreed. “In Bottinger.”
“I think you mean Bollinger,” Sheila corrected.
Ignoring their innate skill at delivering jocular misinformation to sidetrack him, Joe went on the attack. “Look, I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he offered. “We’re only going to Leeds. It’s half an hour on the motorway. We’ll work here, shut the doors at half past two, give the place a quick clean down and I’ll get Lee to run us to the Regency in my car.”
Sheila’s stern eye sent out a clear refusal. “Joe, you and Brenda and I are taking the day off. It’s that simple. All you have to do is organise it.”
Brenda came out in support of her best friend. “We want a day in Leeds, then Christmas Day and Boxing Day filled with entertainment at the Regency. End of story.”
Joe argued. Forced into a partial retreat, he made the booking but still argued. He spent three months applying pressure on his assistants, individually and jointly, but it was all to no avail.
And he had to admit that the Regency promised a good programme for the festive season. A disco on Christmas Eve, then breakfast, a traditional Christmas lunch and evening meal on the 25th, with live entertainment afternoon and evening, and to round off the weekend, a different but equally varied programme on Boxing Day. There would be no need for any of the guests to venture out of the Regency until they checked out after breakfast on the morning of the 27th. It was tempting. More than that, it was mouth-watering.
But it would mean leaving his precious Lazy Luncheonette in the hands of others for Christmas Eve and longer. Joe’s final, desperate excuse that the factories would be open again on Tuesday the 27th fell flat.
“It’s a public holiday,” Sheila retorted. “Christmas Day falls on a Sunday.”
Joe resigned himself to the inevitable. For the first time in living memory, the Lazy Luncheonette would be under the control of inexperienced family members on the busiest shopping day of the year. And with that depressing, almost frightening thought, Joe knew he could never enjoy the weekend.
In the distance, the bus pulled off the Miners Arms car park, into the queue of traffic, and Joe fulminated in silence.
Why couldn’t these people see sense? Why couldn’t they understand that business was business and took priority over everything?
Watching the bus crawl its way towards him, he understood that his obsession with the Lazy Luncheonette, his reluctance to leave the place, was a reflection on his sad life. Aside from the Sanford Third Age Club, his short writings on the mysteries, puzzles and crimes he had cracked in his 55 years, he had no life beyond the café. It had even been the deciding factor when Alison, his wife of less than 10 years, left him.
“I need more than a cheap diner and a skinflint husband,” she had told him on the day the separation became official. Joe had watched her walk out of his life with something akin to sadness, then turned his attention to refurbishment work on the café.
As much as he recognised his failings, he could do nothing about it. The café was his business, his life. It was a virtual symbiosis. He was the driving force behind its success and it gave some focus to his life.
“Just a shame there won’t be no one to leave it to other than loopy Lee,” he muttered to himself as the bus drew nearer.
Christmas was the worst time of year. Divorced, no children, and aside from Brenda and Sheila, he had few people he could call real friends, so there was no one with whom he could enjoy Christmas, and even in the days when he had – during the years he and Alison were wed – he had never particularly liked the season. It got in the way of making money. He usually spent the day with Lee and Christine, and visited Sheila or Brenda or both on Boxing Day. And yet he never felt particularly lonely; not while he had the Lazy Luncheonette for company.
“So why am I shooting off to Leeds for three days to celebrate something I hate?” he muttered as the bus pulled into the kerb and the air-operated door slid open. Having no answer to the rhetorical question, Joe picked up his suitcase and waited for Keith, the driver.
Stopping like that did nothing to endear the bus driver or the Sanford Third Age Club to other road users and within seconds, horns were tooting.
“You do cause some trouble, Joe Murray,” Keith Lowry, a veteran chauffeur of many STAC outings, chortled. He opened the side panel for Joe to drop his small suitcase into the luggage compartment. “Why couldn’t you get on at the Miners like everyone else?”
“Gar.” Joe’s grumble summed up his feelings. Throwing his case into the luggage store, while the driver closed up again, he boarded the coach to a mixed chorus of greetings and complaints.
Sheila and Brenda had taken the front, nearside seats. Across the aisle from them, behind the driver, sat Mavis Barker, an empty seat beside her reserved for Joe. Settling in, he asked, “Everyone here?”
Sheila nodded. “All present and correct, sir. And good morning, Joe.”
Alongside her, in the window seat, Brenda leaned forward and gave Joe a cheery wave. “Morning, maestro. In a Christmassy mood are you?”
Joe scowled.
To muted, derisive cheers, the bus pulled out from the kerb, Keith battling his way across to the outer lane where he could accelerate past the queue of traffic for the retail park.
Joe held out his hand across the aisle. “Gimme the microphone, Sheila.”
“If what?”
Joe frowned. He was in no mood for lessons on saying please and thank you. “If you don’t, I’ll have to lean across you and take it and you’re always complaining about people invading your personal space.”
Sheila tutted. Brenda handed her the microphone and she passed it to Joe. “Good manners cost nothing, Joe.”
“Then I’ll buy as many as I can get hold of,” he riposted and switched on the PA mike. Getting to his feet and turning to face his 70 or so charges, he said, “Morning everybody. Sorry about the slight delay, but I had to make sure my reserve crew didn’t bankrupt me while I was away.”
A few catcalls greeted his announcement.
“Bankrupt you, Joe?” laughed George Robson. “Rumour has it you supported the Bank of England in last year’s downturn.”
“Yeah, well I’ve told you before about listening to rumours. They’re nothing but … er … rumours.” Joe went on, “All right, folks, here’s the drill. We’ll be at the Regency in Leeds in about thirty or forty minutes. You grab your luggage quick, and that w
ay this bone-idle sod, Keith, can get his bus back to Sanford and take the rest of the weekend off, then you check in. Drop your luggage in your rooms and the rest of the day is yours. Don’t forget, dinner is at seven thirty and the disco starts at nine.”
Sat halfway down the bus on the nearside, Captain Les Tanner, looking his usual immaculate self in regimental blazer and tie, asked, “Are you running the disco, Murray?”
Joe shook his head and answered through the microphone. “We’re not the only crowd in the hotel. Some mob called the Leodensian Historical Society are there, too, so the Regency have hired a pro DJ to entertain us.”
Alongside Tanner, his open-secret lady friend, Sylvia Goodson, complained, “Yes, but he may play all this modern music. We want you to do the disco, Joe.”
“Hey, don’t blame me. I only made the arrangements and the Regency were insistent. No amateurs.” He gave them all a wrinkled smile. “Mind you, by the time I’ve had a word with the DJ, he’ll know that we don’t care for anything later than Abba.”
The announcement got Joe his first ragged cheer of the morning. Taking his seat again, he passed the microphone back to Sheila who handed it to Brenda who in turn hung it back on its clip above her.
***
Closing her mobile phone, Jennifer Hardy said, “Dennis is on the ground at Manchester Airport. He’ll be here in about an hour.”
Seated across from her in the grand lounge of the Regency Hotel, Tom Patterson, Chair of the Leodensian Historical Society, lifted his cup, little finger extended, and drank daintily. Putting the cup back on its saucer and replacing both on the table, he applied a judicious pout to his chubby, florid features and asked, “Why do you bother with him, Jennifer? He turns you down time and time again, yet you’re still, shall we say, interested in him.”
Jennifer crossed one knee over the other, exhibiting a broad expanse of her heavy calves. When they first became acquainted, almost 25 years previously, those calves had been shapely and alluring, exciting, Patterson decided. Back then, he too had been leaner, fitter, trimmer. Time, and the passing of the years, had taken its toll on both of them.
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