A Murder for Christmas

by David W Robinson

  “Why doesn’t that surprise me? Not twenty minutes ago, I pointed out that yesterday morning you’d read Jennifer’s note upside down. It had nothing to do with sex or sperm. It was trying to tell you that the churches had been swapped in that text.” Joe gestured at the stained copy in Barrett’s hands.

  “So what?” Dockerty was on the verge of exploding.

  Joe tutted. “All right, Chief Inspector, here’s the story. There’s a reason Wright wasn’t interested in Jennifer’s plan to con Kirkland and Quinton. He had his own plans and they would be a lot more lucrative than the lousy hundred thousand Jennifer’s scheme could offer, plus his plan didn’t need her … well, it didn’t need her alive.”

  Wright fumed. “Murray –”

  “Quiet, Wright,” Dockerty ordered. “Go on, Murray.”

  “When I spoke to Wright yesterday, he was at pains to point out how much he rode on his reputation. His books must be one hundred percent, factually accurate. He cannot afford to make a single mistake. Now, take a distinguished academic,” Joe gestured at Wright, “who’s up for some professorship in the United States, give him two divorces and a business deal gone sour, and what do you have? A distinguished academic, up for some professorship in the USA, but with a black hole where his money used to be.”

  “This is nonsense –” Wright began but Joe cut him off.

  “Let me finish, Wright, and then you can have your say.” Joe paused a moment. “I’m divorced. I know how costly it can be. I guess it’ll be even more expensive in the USA. Add to that some business deal going down the pan, and I figure you needed a way out of the hole without digging it any deeper by borrowing. So you prepare a second manuscript, one with the churches the wrong way about.”

  Wright looked flustered and lost. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand any of this.”

  “You’re not on your own,” Dockerty complained.

  Joe disregarded both. “Missing Pennies is already on sale in the States, but it’s not doing well. Apart from a few anoraks, who the hell is interested in old coins that have gone missing? You have a deal with a British publisher. It’s not worth much, because even here we don’t have that many coin nerds. But a deal is a deal, and it’ll make you enough for a bacon sandwich or two at the Lazy Luncheonette. Then you think to yourself, suppose the Brit publisher gets the churches the wrong way round. What will that do to your reputation? It’ll make you look an idiot. The professorship could go, too. What would you do in that situation, Dr Wright?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Wright insisted, “and I refuse to sit here and listen to any more of this garbage.” He got to his feet.

  “Stay where you are, Dr Wright,” Dockerty insisted. When Wright sat again, the Chief Inspector swung his gaze back on Joe. “Go on, Mr Murray.”

  Joe registered the Chief Inspector’s sudden politeness and felt gratified by it. “You will sue your publisher for tarnishing your reputation. You’ll probably come away with a couple of hundred thousand. The publisher may go bankrupt, but what the hell do you care? You don’t live in this country these days so you don’t care if a few jobbing printers and a shed load of clerks and editors lose their livelihoods. Back home, however, the publicity surrounding the case will turn the book into a bestseller, and just to add a little custard to the jam roly-poly, you’ll be in demand on the lecture tour all over the world. You win on all fronts. My best guess would be a million dollars or more.”

  “This is total hogwash,” Wright protested to Dockerty. “The man’s a fantasist.”

  “Am I?”

  Once again, Joe took Jennifer’s laptop and opened up the documents folder.

  “Two versions of the same file: missporig – Missing Pennies original – and misspnew – Missing Pennies new. When I checked them, orig had the churches the right way round but new had them the wrong way round. How do you explain that, Dr Wright?”

  The room waited and Wright did not answer for a long time.

  When he did, he was unsure, picking his words carefully. “I – I can’t. If Jennifer had any plans to try this on, she never said anything to me.”

  “And I don’t believe that,” Joe declared. “Let me tell you what I think happened. Jennifer, we all know, was desperate to become Mrs Dennis Wright, version three, but you weren’t interested in a lush whose panties were forever in free-fall.”

  Patterson clucked. “Really, Joe. The woman has only been gone –”

  Joe rounded on him and interrupted. “I’m telling it like it is, Tom, not like you imagine it to be.” He swung back on Wright. “The trouble with your little plan is, something may go wrong, and that would expose you as a crook, so you needed a scapegoat. I’m speculating again, but it could be that you mentioned it to Jennifer in passing, maybe when she was shacked up with you in the States. Either way, you needed to shut her up.”

  Running the gamut of interested and accusing faces, Wright sighed. “I told Murray most of this yesterday. Jennifer was the researcher and proofreader on Missing Pennies, and when we first started on the project, last year, she came to America for a couple of months. We were lovers. She wanted more. She wanted a permanent home in the USA. Let’s put no finer point on it, she wanted to share my permanent home in the USA. I said no. I’d done the marriage thing twice, and lost out both times. I wasn’t interested in getting married a third time and I told her so. She continued to pressure me by email, and after the book deals were signed, I cut her off. My attorneys ensured that she was paid her share of the advance and royalties. When the British publisher picked up the project, I contacted her again. I figured enough time would have elapsed for her to realise there was nothing between us. Judging from her emails, I thought that was the case, and we arranged to meet here, in Leeds, over this Christmas weekend to discuss publicity for the book in England.”

  “But she hadn’t written her hopes off, had she?” Sheila said, and Joe marvelled at her intuitive grasp of the dead woman’s feelings.

  “No,” Wright confessed, “she hadn’t. Aside from her idiotic idea for ripping off two coin collectors, she kept up the pressure. The rest of it you already know.”

  “Twaddle,” Joe argued. “It’s a persuasive argument, Wright, but it doesn’t fit because we all know what happened next. She walked out of the ballroom with George and you put your plan into action. George was the perfect patsy. At three thirty in the morning, you knocked on her door carrying a bottle of wine. A peace offering. Only Jennifer never got to drink it. Instead, you hit her over the head with it. And while she lay dying, you took this computer. You realised she would have locked it with a password, you know the password anyway, but you also took her diary to make it look as though it was the work of a common thief who may want the password. And while the cops began their work and arrested George, you installed that second manuscript on the netbook. Then you realised a slight flaw in your plan, didn’t you? Something you’d forgotten about. You couldn’t get it back to her room. The cops had sealed it off. So you emailed copies of the manuscript to her university account. That way, if things really hit the fan, you could always blame her.” Joe nudged Jennifer’s netbook again. “If you check her emails, Dockerty, you’ll see that one was sent from a webmail account to her university account at 4:40 this morning.”

  “This is complete nonsense,” Wright protested.

  “Is it?” Joe demanded. “You were stuck with the computer, knee deep in dirty floors and cooker hoods with environmental health due to pay a visit. You had to do something. So you dropped the diary and the computer in the refuse sack in your room, and then carried it out onto the landing and dropped it in the bin at the end of the corridor. The cops were too busy to notice, and besides, what’s so suspicious about a hotel guest dropping a bag full of rubbish in a bin? The cleaners carried your trash away and you went back to bed confident that by the time the police got around to looking for the laptop, it would be buried under tons of rubbish at the local dump.” Joe fingered the laptop agai
n. “You forgot something else, Wright. It’s Christmas. This hotel is one of the largest in Leeds. The bins are emptied every day of the year, but not over the Christmas period. What do you have to say to that, Dr Wright?”

  Ike Barrett stood and moved round the table to stand behind Wright, ready to arrest him.

  The academic’s hands shook as he rested them on the table. He stared down at the polished mahogany then slowly raised his head to drill into Joe’s eyes. “You’ve been very clever, Murray. I can’t fault your logic, and working out Jennifer’s password the way you did is nothing short of brilliant, putting this together the way you have done is the work of a genius.” He paused to lend his next words impact. “But it’s all drivel. Yes, I’m twice divorced, yes I had a large business deal go sour last year, but as I told you before, I am still solvent and I still have a reputation as a respected academic. I had no more plans to sue my publisher than I had of conning those two clowns out of their money.” He pointed at Kirkland and Quinton. “Finally, I did not kill her.”

  “I know.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Joe’s announcement drew gasps from the small assembly and once again, the room threatened to erupt, but this time the noise came from both Wright and Dockerty.

  The academic’s face suffused with colour. “What? You have the temerity to accuse me, put me through seven kinds of hell and then say you knew I was innocent –”

  “I’m sorry, Wright, but it was necessary.” Joe beamed up at Ike. “You can sit down, son. You won’t be arresting our distinguished historian.”

  At the far end of the table, Dockerty looked fit to burst. “What the hell are you playing at, Murray? First Quinton and Kirkland, and now Wright. There is such a thing as wasting police time, you know, and you just took a big step towards a charge.”

  “I said I was sorry, Dockerty, but this has been a trying twenty-four hours, and I needed to get all that out of my system. We were never supposed to think of Quinton and Kirkland, but some of the circumstances surrounding this case led me to believe one of them could be the killer. We were, however, supposed to believe that Wright murdered Jennifer. I said at the beginning it was a story, and I meant it. But I didn’t write it.” He turned his head to the right. “Did I, Tom?”

  Patterson’s florid features ran the gamut from alarm to confusion to embarrassment to puzzlement. “I’m sorry, Joe, I don’t understand.”

  “The story of Dr Wright murdering Jennifer was a tale we were meant to believe, but like most people, when Tom devised it, he failed to plug all the gaps. Let me tell you what really happened.” Joe licked his lips. “Poor Tom Patterson is a man bereft of his wife, in need of another. He has been enamoured of Jennifer for years, and when he finally plucked up the courage to propose, she rejected him. She was, as Wright has told us, besotted with the idea of life on an American campus, basking in the reflected glory of a twice divorced, but highly respected historian. That angered old Tom, but what made it worse was listening in over the last few months, he learned that Jennifer had been unfaithful to him with Kirkland and Quinton, too. To really rub salt into the wounds, when Wright rejected Jennifer on Christmas Eve, instead of coming to her dear friend for solace, she jumped into bed with a common council gardener from Sanford. The anger must have been growing for months, and when he realised that he could never have her, he decided that no one could. And while he was about it, he would kick this Anglo-American upstart right where it hurt most: in the reputation.”

  “I don’t know where all this is coming from, Joe, but you should be wary of my reputation, never mind Dr Wright’s,” Patterson warned.

  “You over-egged the custard tart, Tom,” Joe replied. “That drawing was one hen fruit too far.” He whipped his attention to the two police officers. “The symbol he used is an old one for a church. There are more modern ones in use now, but Tom specialises in old maps. As I suggested earlier, he drew it before he ever entered the room. Then he went in, hit her with the bottle, and while she lay dying, he put the drawing and the eyeliner pencil near to her hands. But he was standing at her head, looking down her body and he put the drawing and the pencil down the wrong way round. To him, her right hand was the left and vice versa. That was mistake number one, confirmed when he told me she was not left-handed. I suggested to you, Dockerty, that it happened because he was hyped up at having just committed murder, and that’s probably true. Having done all that, he then stole her computer and her diary. He needed the computer so he could manipulate the files, and he needed the diary to disappear with it so he could point the finger at Wright the way I just did. He then returned to his room and rang reception to tell them about the noise he’d heard.”

  Patterson folded his hands on the table and looked down at them.

  “While you, Dockerty, started your investigation, he was one room away working on her computer. He probably knew her password in advance, but if not, he will have guessed it when I commented on Jennifer’s necklace on Saturday night. He deleted her files of Wright’s book, all except for one, missporig, and then he made a few changes to page 178 before saving it as misspnew. Or maybe he already had a copy which he’d changed and loaded onto the machine from a memory stick, but don’t ask how he could have got hold of a copy of the manuscript, because I don’t know. As I explained, in Tom’s version of Wright’s book, the churches are switched round. He couldn’t be certain that the computer would be found, so he sent a copy from Jennifer’s webmail account to her university account. He knew it would look as if Wright had done it. With that finished, he came out of his room clutching a bag of rubbish, which also contained the computer and diary, and calmly dropped them in the bin at the end of the corridor before taking Jennifer’s personal effects from Ike. And that was it. Everything was set up to see Wright facing a murder charge.” Joe’s accusing stare rested on Dockerty, “But you buggered it up. You misinterpreted the note and arrested George instead of Wright.”

  Dockerty scowled. “You’ve made your point, Murray. Go on.”

  “Tom wasn’t worried. He saw a way round the problem immediately. He had Sanford’s finest detective staying here. He knew months ago that we would be here because he’d been in contact with Sylvia Goodson to arrange the Santa stunt. My presence fell nicely into his plans. He knew I would follow every lead on the case, and like a good lapdog, I did. The first night we were here, he even tested me. What could I tell about him just by looking at him? Then, when I spoke to him in the lounge before lunch, yesterday, he was at pains to tell me that he couldn’t find her laptop. He knew I would realise what had happened to it and that I would either pressure you into looking for it, or, more likely, spend an hour or two digging through the hotel rubbish to get it back, and once I did, I would follow the false trail he had laid, all the way to Dr Wright.”

  “Which you did,” Ike pointed out. “So what put you on this track?”

  “A few things, Ike,” Joe declared. “First, Tom made an elementary error. He claimed not to know Quinton’s name. A few hours later, he told me he’d warned Jennifer about both Quinton and Kirkland months earlier. Now that may sound like nothing, but it actually indicates a man taking a special interest in the woman. Next, although he claims not to be, Tom really imagines he’s up to speed on IT, but in truth, he’s like a lot of us. An amateur. Every time you do anything with a document, the properties change.” Joe pulled the laptop to him again. “I checked the two manuscript files before I came down here, and it confirmed my suspicions. If you check the document properties, you’ll find that misspnew was created at 5:30 in the morning on December 25th. Yesterday. It was accessed later, by me, but the machine takes the creation date from the date and time it was either imported to the hard drive or actually created, and the only way Tom could change that would be to change the computer’s clock and calendar. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Tom did know about the document properties and it was part of his plan to accuse Wright.”

  “He was taking a risk,” Dockerty observed. “If
we’d knocked on his door, we may have caught him.”

  “Caught him doing what? Working on a laptop? It could have been his. You wouldn’t have questioned him.”

  Barrett blushed. “He was working on a laptop, sir,” he said to his superior. “He told me he’d decided to do some work because he couldn’t sleep.”

  Dockerty fumed. “And you never mentioned it?”

  Barrett was about to plead, but Joe got in first. “I wouldn’t blame Ike, Dockerty. At the time you were not even concerned for a missing computer, and to Ike, to anyone, you included, it would have looked like an academic pottering with one of his university papers.”

  Taking advantage of the short silence that followed, Wright pointed out, “If all this is true, he must have been planning it for months.”

  Joe nodded. “I’m sure he was. Do you think he just got angry with you yesterday, Doctor? Jennifer has been chasing you for over a year and Tom has probably sat back seething with anger for over a year. By yesterday, he was furious. But he made too many mistakes, and this time he couldn’t know he would be rumbled.” Joe reached into his carrier again and came out with a copy of Missing Pennies. “This isn’t mine. I may be an anorak, but not to that extent. Sheila bought this in Waterstone’s, yesterday. Wright even autographed it for her in the bar last night.”

  Joe flipped through the book to a page he had bookmarked. He held it up and open for them to see.

  “Chapter seventeen, The 1933 George the Fifth Pennies,” he said, and lay the book on the table before him. “I’ll just read paragraph three. ‘In 1970, during renovation work, the penny encased in the cornerstone at St Cross, Middleton was stolen. Alarmed at the theft, in order to prevent a repetition, the Diocese of Ripon ordered that the penny in the foundations of St Mary’s, Hawksworth, be removed and deposited at the bank for safe keeping’.” Joe looked up. “This is the official publisher’s volume, and the two churches are correctly identified. That book,” he pointed to the evidence bag in front of Barrett, “is a fake.”