A Murder for Christmas

by David W Robinson

  With a wry smile, Kirkland shook his head once more. “It still wouldn’t get me the Middleton Penny.”

  “It would if you knew who had it and you knew that it wasn’t George. Is that what you were searching for when you emptied the contents of her handbag over the floor?” Joe did not wait for an answer. “You worked it out, didn’t you, that Jennifer had the penny. You saw her hit on George after she’d done talking to you at the bar yesterday afternoon. You knew he was one of our party, and when she introduced him later, you knew he wasn’t what he claimed to be, and you guessed, quite rightly, that she was putting him up as the owner to mask the real owner’s identity. And that real owner could only be her or Dennis Wright. So you came to her room to negotiate in the early hours, she wouldn’t have it and when she turned her back, you killed her. Then you looked for the penny, but couldn’t find it, so you stole her laptop, thinking she might have left a clue on there. You also took her diary because amongst the other information it may contain would be her password. Only it wasn’t in there, was it? So you got rid of the lot, and sat back while the cops took George away. You’re stuck here, along with the rest of us, but all you have to do is maintain this implacable front and walk away on Tuesday morning.”

  Kirkland gave Joe a small round of applause. “Very clever. Very inventive, but completely wrong. I didn’t make your friend at all. When she told me he was the Director of Sanford Leisure Services, I took that at face value and I guessed he owned the penny. But I’m like you, Murray. I cover my back. When I returned to my room, I checked on the internet. The Director of Leisure Services is not named George Robson. Offhand I can’t remember his name, but it isn’t George Robson.”

  “Cliff Leasowe,” Joe said and Kirkland nodded.

  “The name rings a bell. So, at one this morning, I knew that Robson was not who he claimed to be, but I still had him marked down as the current owner of the Middleton Penny. It was only when I learned he was a gardener that I struck him off the list and thought about Jennifer herself or, more likely, Dennis Wright.”

  “There’s too much here that I don’t buy,” Joe said, “but I can’t pin it down yet.” Kirkland was about to protest, but Joe held up his hand. “All right, all right, I’m not saying you topped her, but I’m not saying you didn’t, either. Something was going on in the background here, and I haven’t figured out what it is, yet. Did Jennifer ever mention using Quinton as research for a novel based on coin collecting?”

  “No. And frankly, if I were into that sort of thing, Quinton would be the last person I’d use as a research model.” He grinned. “Unless I needed a villain.”

  Joe stood up. “I’d better get back to my friends, but I’m warning you, Kirkland, if I find out you’re lying, I’ll be back. And in case you want to hit me with a bottle of wine, I’m in 306.” He turned his back and walked away.

  Rejoining his friends, he found George had wandered off and Brenda was quite tipsy. By midnight, Mavis was roaring drunk. Joe knew that when the lounge closed at one, he would have to help Sheila and Brenda get her back to her room.

  “You can put her to bed,” he warned. “I don’t want a reputation like George’s … at least, not with Mavis, I don’t.”

  And yet, the ill-fitting pieces of the complex jigsaw haunted his thinking, and refused to produce a clear picture. No matter which angle he approached the puzzle from, the murder of Jennifer Hardy made no sense.

  “If Wright and Jennifer really were trying to scam Quinton and Kirkland, then Wright wouldn’t have murdered her, but neither would either of the others. They may have been mad if they realised what was going on, but it would also have provided them with the biggest hold they could hope for over both of them. Two respected academics trying to defraud potential buyers? They’d have Wright and Hardy by the short and curlies.”

  “Could Jennifer have decided to swap sides?” Sheila asked. “That would annoy Dennis Wright sufficiently to want her out of the way.”

  “Then why did she give Quinton the bum’s rush on the dance floor, and why did she brush Kirkland off, and why did she jump George?” Joe demanded. “By that theory, she should have been in bed with Quinton or Kirkland, not George.”

  “Kiss,” Brenda said.

  “You should switch to lemonade,” Joe told her. “Asking me to kiss means you’ve had too much Campari.”

  “No, no,” Brenda said impatiently. “KISS. Kay, eye, double-ess. It’s an antonym. Keep it simple, stupid, where stupid is you.”

  Joe clucked. “You mean an acronym. Brenda, what the hell are you on about?”

  “You keep complicating matters with theories of scams and fiddles and hoaxes. To me, it’s simple; one of them, either Wright or Kickling or Quizzling –”

  “Kirkland or Quinton,” Sheila corrected.

  “Them, an’ all. One of ’em got jealous. There was a barney, and he murdered her. Simple as that. KISS.” She downed another slug of Campari and soda.

  “It still doesn’t make sense,” Joe argued. “Quinton may be a slimeball, but he’s not stupid. He knows Jennifer was leading him on, and Wright just wasn’t interested in Jennifer. He could be faking it, but I’ve seen those emails. They’re for real. He even threatened her with the courts in one of them.”

  “Perhaps then, George really did kill her,” Sheila suggested.

  “Now you’re deserting him.”

  “No, Joe,” she disagreed. “I’m just looking at the facts. Neither Wright, Kirkland nor Quinton have a motive that you can pin down. You’re no closer to proving any of your theories than you were this morning. There is nothing to link her death with any of them.”

  “There’s the book,” Joe reminded her. “There was something fishy going on there.”

  Sheila shook her head. “It could have been a simple error on Dennis Wright’s part when he first typed up the manuscript. Jennifer noticed it and put it right in the edited version. Whatever the explanation, the book turned out all right when it was published.”

  Joe had to admit she had a point, but doubts entered his mind immediately. “No. I don’t’ agree. It was edited the other way round. She made the change. I’m sure she did.” He chewed his lip. “There’s something about that book. Can’t think what it is, though.”

  Sheila picked up the book and thumbed through the pages. “You publish your own little booklets, Joe, and how many times have you asked Brenda – when she’s sober – or me to read through them, to make sure there are no mistakes. And how many times have we turned up mistakes you didn’t notice when you were preparing them?”

  Joe was not listening. He was staring at the back cover of Missing Pennies, and in particular at the white box in the bottom right hand corner, which contained the barcode and the ISBN, mentally comparing it to the photograph he had seen of the book close to Jennifer’s Hardy’s dead hand. They were different. He knew they were. What was the difference? A white box approximately two and half inches long by an inch high, in it were printed the bar code, usually identifying the ISBN and the price. Jennifer’s copy had a bar code and the numbers … there were no numbers. Yes there were, but they were underneath the barcode. A printer’s identifier. And that meant…

  “It was a proof copy.”

  “Prove it.” Brenda giggled and sank the last of her drink.

  Sheila frowned. “What are you talking about, Joe?”

  “Jennifer Hardy’s book. Dockerty showed me a photograph, remember? The book was visible in the top corner, near her right hand. I could see the barcode, but there was no ISBN.”

  “ISBN,” muttered Brenda and nodded off to sleep.

  “Looks like we have two of them to get upstairs,” Sheila disapproved. “So you’re saying Jennifer’s copy of Missing Pennies didn’t have the ISBN on the back. What about it?”

  “ISBN’s are expensive,” Joe told her. “I know. I looked into it back in the days when I thought about putting my Casebooks out in paperback. You buy them in blocks, and the current price is something like
a hundred and twenty pounds for ten. So small guys like me, who write more as a hobby, tend not to bother with them. But a major publishing house, like Wright’s, wouldn’t dream of skimping on the cost of an ISBN. The only copies you’re likely to see of Wright’s title without an ISBN are proof copies. Even then, it’s iffy. It’s more like he had it printed privately.”

  “And what’s so odd about that?” Sheila asked. “He may well have had it privately published before he sent it to his publisher.”

  “When he’s had work put out by them before? No way. And besides that, why would Jennifer have a proof or private copy? The thing is published, it’s out there. You bought a copy yesterday. It’s for real and for sale. Why didn’t she have the real McCoy?”

  Sheila remained perplexed. “I see what you’re saying, but I don’t think there’s anything sinister about it. Maybe it was memento.”

  Joe downed his drink. “Yeah, and maybe it was a huge scam that went wrong.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Getting a brace of drunken women and one half-drunken man upstairs and into their rooms proved at least as difficult as hassling Dockerty and Barrett for information, and like the police officers, all three were every bit as uncooperative.

  After leaving a fully dressed Mavis on her bed, it was past 1 a.m. when Joe left Sheila to deal with Brenda, closed the door to his room, and set up his netbook to bring his account of the weekend up to date. He then pored over his notes, seeking that missing something that would tip the scales.

  But it refused to show itself. Armed with a pen and sheets of Regency Hotel notepaper, he scrawled idea after idea on them, ran them through exhaustive checks, even going so far as to set some up as flowcharts, and every time, it amounted to nothing.

  It had gone two before he climbed into bed for some much needed sleep.

  But sleep, when it came, was constantly disturbed by the need for the bathroom and the intervention of strange dreams in which both George Robson and Jennifer Hardy urged him to see the solution staring him in the face. In one dream, the face of Quinton became that of Wright, then Kirkland, then Patterson and finally Brenda urging him to, ‘kiss, kiss, kiss’.

  Up again by 6:30, tired and irritable, he returned to the escritoire armed with a cup of tea and fresh determination, and ran once again through his copious notes, and yet still he could not see anything in them. Fresh ideas would occur to him, he ran them through exhaustive chains of logic, but not one of them would plug all the gaps.

  Putting on his ‘forensic’ gloves, he switched on Jennifer Hardy’s laptop, checked the emails between her and Wright and her and Quinton, but could find nothing fresh in them. He stared for a long time at the photograph of her and Wright. Quinton glowered in the background; shoppers with laden bags, grown men dressed in fancy costumes, kids everywhere, other couples arm in arm – most ignoring the pair completely, and Joe could find no fresh inspiration in it.

  He checked the chapter of misspnew, the altered version of Missing Pennies, and sought clues there, but there was nothing. Comparing it to Sheila’s copy, that single altered paragraph was the only change he could find in the book.

  With the time coming up to eight, he threw open the curtain and stared out at the city of Leeds and its magnificent town hall. The cloud had cleared overnight and the sky was a crisp, polar blue. The temperature, he guessed, would have dropped, and that picturesque, Christmas card covering would have turned to a lethal sheet of ice. Even as he watched, a young man trudging his way along, presumably going to work, slipped and fell on the far pavement.

  Joe turned back from the window, and ran through his notes once again. Nothing. Zero. Zip. Zilch. No matter what he did, he could account for everything bar this, or that or the other. He could not make any theory fit all the facts.

  At 8:20, in a fit of rage, he screwed up the many sheets of paper covered in his scrawl, tossed them into the waste bin, then shut both computers down and made for the bathroom. A shower and shave left him feeling less like a zombie, but still blazing with anger and frustration. Taking the waste bag from the bin beneath his escritoire, he came out of the room at 8:45 muttering murderous curses to himself. Furious that he would have to hand over Jennifer’s netbook to Dockerty and still leave George in the frame, he hurled the waste bag into the bin at the end of the corridor and caught the lift down to the ground floor.

  He was not surprised to find Sheila and Brenda already seated at a table by the windows. Sheila, as always, looked spritely, but Brenda sat, her elbows on the table, head in hands, complaining and ignoring a bowl of corn flakes.

  “She’s very fragile, Joe,” Sheila explained, “and she blames you.”

  “Typical,” Joe responded, tackling his own bowl of cereal. “You were there when I helped her back to your room. I never touched her. Nor Mavis if she comes complaining.”

  “According to Brenda, if you hadn’t spent so much time talking to Wright and Quinton, she wouldn’t have drunk so much, so it’s your fault she has a hangover.”

  “Yeah, right. It is thirsty work talking to those two. But why should it make Brenda drink more?”

  “It’s counteractive,” Sheila said. “When you’re with us she has more time to wind you up and less time to drink.”

  Joe grunted. “Where’s George? Not done a runner, has he?”

  Sheila nodded across the room. “Sat over there with Alec and Julia Staines.” She smiled. “Apparently someone whispered to him that Brenda would be looking after him last night.”

  Joe shrugged. “I was trying to cheer him up.”

  “Yes, well, she got drunk and he got nothing.” Sheila chuckled and studied Joe’s deep frown. “Are you any further forward?”

  He shook his head, pushed the cereal to one side and pulled a plate of bacon and eggs front and centre. Picking up his knife and fork, he complained, “I’ve looked at this business seven ways from Sunday, and none of it makes complete sense.”

  Sheila sipped at a cup of coffee. “Try me.”

  Joe tucked into the eggs, savouring the cholesterol and dismissed thoughts of the Lazy Luncheonette. “Think about the two books,” he suggested. “We haven’t seen the book Jennifer Hardy had. It was covered in either blood or wine, so the cops have it. But my memory of it is clear and it tells me it was a proof or a fake copy. Now why would she want it? Let me run a little scam by you. She and Wright are looking to con Quinton and Kirkland out of a lot of money. They rope George in who’s game for a laugh if he can have what he wants with Jennifer. He pretends to be the owner of the Middleton Penny, or at least he knows where he can get it and the asking price is a hundred thousand. Nice round figure, Quinton can negotiate. In order to back up the idea, they have this fake book which they claim contains clues to the penny’s whereabouts.”

  “This sounds a little like one of those archaeological thrillers,” Sheila commented.

  “Yes,” Joe agreed, “and Wright mentioned them when I spoke to him yesterday. A complicated trail leading to a genuine treasure. The only difference is, by and large, there are no holes in those kind of novels. This theory has a huge hole in it.”

  “Such as?” Sheila asked.

  “I checked the altered manuscript on Jennifer’s computer, and the only change made was the swapping of the two churches.”

  “Perhaps that is the clue to the whereabouts of the Middleton Penny,” Sheila suggested.

  Chewing on a rasher of bacon, Joe disagreed. “That makes no sense. And even if it did, why was Jennifer murdered? If Quinton or Kirkland was going to murder her, it would make sense to wait until they had the penny in hand. Likewise Wright. What’s the point of killing her on Christmas Eve when the penny is still missing?” He shook his head again. “I’ve said all along that to identify the killer, we need a motive. We first concentrated too much on Jennifer’s behaviour, and now we’ve concentrated too much on the Middleton Penny. It was not the motive for killing her.”

  “It could be if Wright and Quinton or Wright and Kirk
land had reached a separate deal which cut her out of the equation,” Sheila said. “Perhaps Jennifer learned of it and confronted one or other of them. Things got out of hand and either Wright or Quinton or Kirkland killed her.”

  “You’re just complicating the issue even further,” Joe grumbled. “Remember Brenda and KISS? You’re not kissing.”

  “I thought I might be onto something,” Sheila complained. “The one angle you’ve never thought of is more than one killer.”

  “Yes I have, and it doesn’t fit with Tom Patterson’s account of the voices he heard in Jennifer’s room or the police forensic evidence. Muttered voices, possibly an argument. If there were more than one man in there, he would have noticed and said so. Also, the cops have only George’s dabs in the room. This was one man. But which one?” Joe swilled down his bacon with a mouthful of lukewarm tea. “When we serve tea at the Lazy Luncheonette, at least it’s hot.” He checked his watch. “It’s nine o’clock. You can bet that Dockerty and Barrett will be back within the next hour. That, Sheila, is how long we have to get George off the hook.”

  Across the table, Brenda stirred. “You’re both wrong,” she grumbled. “Jennifer Hardy was killed because she was too free with her favours.”

  “You reckon?”

  Brenda nodded and took a sip of coffee with a grimace. “She spent Saturday upsetting half of Leeds, then jumped into bed with George. That’s why she was done. Someone felt left out and smashed her one over the head.” Her stomach heaved. “You got any Alka Seltzer, Joe?”

  “Up in my room. Ask reception for some bicarb,” he told her. “But before you do that, tell me how you can be so sure.”

  “Because you just said none of your theories don’t make sense is why,” Brenda groaned.

  Ignoring the uncharacteristic double negative, Joe complained, “Neither does yours.”

  “Yes it does,” Brenda retorted, suppressing a dyspeptic belch. “If she was up to something between Wright and Quinton and Captain Kirk, do you think they’d murder her here? No, no, they’d wait until the weekend was over, follow her home and do her there. If you’re going to shine someone on, you don’t do it in a hotel full of people. Not even at half past three in the morning. It’s too obvious. And you don’t chuck her computer away without smashing it to bits first. Not with all that evidence on it.”