Murder at the Murder Mystery Weekend

by David W Robinson

  The hours since his arrest had taken their toll. He looked as bedraggled and dishevelled as his wife had appeared to Joe. Handcuffed and clad in police holding overalls, a plain white jump suit, while his own clothing had been sent for analysis, he looked thoroughly wretched.

  “Now, Mr Kendrew, Mr Murray would like a word with you,” Sergeant Idleman announced. “I must advise you that he is not a police officer and you are under no obligation to speak to him, but he has said he may be able to help.”

  “I’ve nothing to say to him.”

  Joe recalled the time a salesman, similar to Kendrew, had arrived at the Lazy Luncheonette. Before he could say a word, Joe had said, ‘I’m not interested,’ to which the salesman responded, ‘how do you know when you haven’t heard what I have to offer?’ Joe applied the same principle now.

  “How do you know when you don’t know what I have to say?”

  Kendrew grunted. “It’s your fault I’m here.”

  “No, Kendrew, it’s your own fault. If you’d been a bit more honest, the chief inspector and the sergeant, here, may have thought twice. And right now, if you don’t want to speak to me, I’m cool. I’ll go back to the hotel and leave you to rot. I’ll be able to read about your life sentence in the papers.”

  Some of Kendrew’s arrogance returned. “I’m innocent.”

  “No you’re not,” Joe argued. “You’re guilty as hell, and you know it. But you’re not guilty of the murders. Now do you want me to leave, cos it’s New Year’s Day and there’s a party on at the hotel. I’d much rather be there than here.”

  Kendrew remained silent for a long time. First he looked down at his cuffed wrists, then he stared up at the narrow windows running along near the ceiling pining, Joe surmised, for his freedom. His eyes, Joe noticed, were pale and bloodshot, his square features worked agitatedly as if he were carrying on some internal argument with himself.

  In order to turn on the pressure, Joe scraped his chair back and stood. “All right. You can roast him for all I care, Phil. Pity the real killer will get away, but what the hell, it’ll look good on your returns. Help keep the Chief Constable off your back.”

  Some of the Kendrew’s attention returned. The hollow eyes bored into Joe. “Just say your piece and get lost.”

  “Fine. I’ll do that.” Joe paused a moment and sat down again. “Tell me about you and Naomi Barton.”

  The agonised face twisted into a demonised mask. “I hated her. She was a…”

  Joe held up a finger for silence. “The French have a thing about English food, you know. They say we Brits only know three vegetables, and two of those are cabbage. And I spend my working life cooking cabbage.” He narrowed stern eyes on Kendrew. “But don’t let that fool you into thinking I am a cabbage. I’m smarter, sharper than an idiot like you will ever be. When I ask you to tell me about you and Naomi, I don’t mean the smokescreen you’ve been putting up for the last two years. I mean how long had you been having an affair with her, and what were your plans?”

  The look of horror on Kendrew’s face could have been mistaken for incredulity at the outrageousness of the accusation, but Joe was not fooled. It was the astonishment of one caught in the act despite the care he had taken to cover his tracks.

  Kendrew dismissed the allegation. “You’re out of your mind. I told you, I hated the cow.”

  Joe ignored the bluster. “You were good; the pair of you. I spoke to Naomi yesterday, and she had me convinced. Dropping oh so slight hints that she was sleeping with Reggie, the same way you had, only much subtler than you. She was actually, skilfully hiding the fact that she was sleeping with you.”

  “Look, I told you…”

  “Shut your mouth and open your ears,” Joe snapped. “Right now, you are looking at a life sentence. That can be anything from ten years to whole of life. The only thing that stands between you and that is me. The police are working through Naomi’s room right now, and they will find traces of you on the bed, because that’s where you were on Friday night, when your poor, gormless wife thought you’d got up to go for a smoke. Those traces, plus your prints on the pistol that killed Reggie will probably be enough to convict you. But I know you didn’t do it. Now either answer me straight, or I walk out of here, go back to the Twin Spires, get drunk and hopefully attend another, er, business meeting with Melanie Markham before I go home to Sanford tomorrow morning.”

  Kendrew’s shoulders slumped. “How did you guess?”

  “I didn’t. My friends, Sheila Riley and Brenda Jump did. Like I said, your missus is a poor, gormless child who’s hopelessly in love with you, and love is a funny thing. I wouldn’t know because I’ve never been in love… not properly anyway. But Sheila and Brenda have, and they know how it can blind people. Fliss’ love for you, plus your little game of ‘I hate Naomi Barton more than she hates me’, has blinded your wife to the truth.”

  Kendrew swallowed hard. “Have you told Fliss?”

  “No. I don’t think it’s my place to tell her anything. It’s yours. And she’s so distressed that Sheila and Brenda won’t say a word, either, because they don’t want to hurt her any more than today’s events have already.” Joe spread his hands in a casual gesture of superiority. “Quite frankly, people like you sicken me when you don’t make me laugh. You think yourself so superior, so intelligent, and yet when someone looks closely enough at your actions, you’re transparent.”

  Anger suffused the sallow cheeks. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Would a supposedly intelligent man take on a huge house, drop himself in way over his head, just to spite a woman he dislikes? Would he hell as like. But he would take it on if he was planning to push his wife out and bring in his new girlfriend, who also happens to earn a huge salary, because between them, they could easily afford the place. When were you planning on dumping Fliss?”

  Kendrew leaned forward. The anger was gone again, and he had the air of a man who was beaten, ready to throw himself upon the mercy of his enemies.

  “When Reggie retired,” he admitted.

  “Because when Reggie retired one of you would step up to Sales Director, and let’s be frank about this, Kendrew, it didn’t matter which one, did it?”

  Kendrew shook his head. “We couldn’t do anything before, because it would be obvious to Reggie that we were creating a… I dunno… kingdom within a kingdom. Reggie was a control freak. He wouldn’t have tolerated that, and instead he would have brought someone in from the outside. So we had to wait until he retired next year… pardon me, this year. Once one of us moved up, we would be earning well over a hundred thousand a year between us. The mortgage on Parkfield would be easy.”

  “And it would be too late for Reggie to do anything about it other than fire one or both of you, and if he did that without good reason, you’d nail him for a settlement that would practically bankrupt the company.”

  Kendrew nodded miserably, and the anger took over again. He glared at Joe. “Do you know what it’s like to struggle? Never enough money, scraping and scratching your way to payday every month, waiting and waiting for that old fool to get out of the way and let someone take over who could do the job. Fifty bloody thousand a year?” he sneered. “It’s nothing. Nothing at all.”

  “Yes I know what it’s like to struggle,” Joe hissed, “because right now I’m struggling to keep my hands off you. I employ two women who don’t earn a third of that, but I don’t see them plotting behind someone else’s back. I don’t see them ready to drop me at a minute’s notice once I’ve put my nephew in charge. You’re scum, you. D’you know? You’re not fit to work as a doormat.”

  “Take it easy, Joe,” Grant advised. “And what of your wife, Mr Kendrew?”

  The younger man shrugged. “Fliss is a good woman, but Naomi was just… I dunno… better.”

  Still struggling to keep his temper under control, Joe hammered at him. “The worst thing that could have happened was Reggie dying,” Joe said. “Naomi was telling the truth abou
t that, wasn’t she?”

  Again there was the slightest incline of Kendrew’s head in agreement. “We’d managed to persuade Reggie that selling out to Midland Kitchens was the wrong move, but Wendy has never had any serious interest in the business, and she’ll probably sell up, and Naomi and I will probably both get the boot. Either that or we’ll be demoted. Our plans are in ruins.”

  “Naomi would have got the boot,” Joe corrected. “She’s dead, too. And do you know why she’s dead?” He leaned angrily forward and only just stopped himself from reaching across the table and yanking Kendrew’s head upright to a position where he could look him in the eye. “Because someone believed the claptrap you put out about her screwing Reggie. Someone believed that because she was his mistress, she might know why Reggie was killed, and in turn she might know who killed him. So she had to be silenced.”

  The young man broke down, his shoulders heaving, his body racked with sobs.

  Joe sat back and poured forth his disdain. “You disgust me, Kendrew. You and all those like you. All you ever stop to think about is yourself. You have a good looking wife who adores you, yet all you ever did for that poor kid was use her. She doesn’t matter to you. All you care about is your bit on the side and the ruin of your plans. I ought to walk out of here and let you stew in the mess you’ve made.”

  “Hear, hear,” said Sergeant Idleman.

  After fuming for a moment, Joe homed in on Kendrew again. “You were arguing with Reggie in his room on Friday night. What about?”

  Pulling himself together Kendrew shook his head. “It wasn’t me. I’m not saying you didn’t hear Reggie shooting his mouth off, but it was not me. At midnight, I was with Fliss. Half an hour later, I was with Naomi. Half an hour after that, your friends saw me in reception. I didn’t see Reggie all night. Not after he left the bar at half past ten.”

  “And last night?”

  Kendrew shuddered. “I was unwell. I don’t know whether it was the vol-au-vents, the chicken, or maybe bad beer, but I kept throwing up. I didn’t leave our room until after eight this morning when I went to Naomi. And that’s when I found her.”

  Still angry, more at his own misinterpretation of events, Joe stood up. “Do what you want with him, Phil. I don’t care.”

  “Wait there a minute, Joe,” Grant insisted. He addressed the uniformed constable. “Take him back to the cells. I’ll want to talk to him again.” He concentrated on his suspect. “I’ll need to formally interview you, sir, and this time, if you want to get out of here, I’ll need some answers.”

  While Kendrew was led from the interview room, Joe rolled a cigarette. Holding it up, he asked, “Smoking area?”

  “Outside,” Grant said, and he and Idleman led the way.

  “I must say, I was wrong about you,” Idleman commented as they ambled along the dimly lit corridor towards the rear car park.

  “Most people are. They just think I’m a grumbling old nosy parker.”

  “And you are,” said Idleman as they stepped out into the gloomy day, “but I would never have guessed about him and Naomi Barton.”

  “It wasn’t my doing,” Joe confessed. “It really was Sheila and Brenda who rumbled it.”

  The car park was half full of patrol cars and private saloons. The far side had no walls, but all Joe could see were the terraced houses opposite, hiding the city of Lincoln beyond them. A pair of uniformed officers were busy checking their vehicle before setting out on their patrol, but other than them, there was no sign of life.

  “New Year’s Day, huh?”

  “Quiet,” Grant commented. “It’ll liven up when the pubs open tonight.” He lit a cigarette. “All right, Joe, where does all this leave us?”

  “Up a gum tree,” Joe admitted. “I’m certain Kendrew didn’t kill either of them. I think he should be hung, drawn and quartered for the way he’s treated his wife.”

  “Hear, hear,” Sergeant Idleman repeated much to the amusement of the two men.

  Joe chuckled. “But he’s not our killer. Y’see, and this never occurred to me before, but if he was, he did too much.”

  “How so?” Grant asked.

  “Take the pistol, for example. All right, so he hid it in the shrubbery, but why not leave it there? When we found the movie gun, you said it could have stayed there for months without being discovered. The same applies to the real gun, so why did he lead his wife right to it, then pick it up to get his dabs all over it?”

  “Double bluff,” Idleman suggested. “We nick him then let him go after all this comes out.”

  “Possible,” Joe admitted, “but then why kill Naomi?”

  “Because their plans were screwed up after Reggie was killed.”

  “Which only prompts me to ask, why kill Reggie in the first place? You heard him say that he and Naomi had persuaded Reggie not to sell, but Naomi told me, and he’s just confirmed that where Wendy is concerned, it’s no contest.”

  Idleman pondered the question. “We could be looking for two killers.”

  The chief inspector shook his head. “I don’t believe that.”

  “Me neither,” Joe said. “And then there’s the problem of the killings matching the murder mystery play. Both he and his wife swear they’ve never seen the thing before. No; I think someone has used him as a patsy.”

  “If that is the case, it’s possible that Naomi was murdered purely to point the finger at him,” Grant said.

  Idleman shuddered. “That’s appalling, sir. I mean, there’s never a good excuse for murder, but to kill someone so callously, simply to get another man jailed for it, is shocking.”

  Joe puffed on his reluctant cigarette. “I sometimes wonder what they teach you people about motives.” He noticed her scowl, signalling a return to her earlier animosity. “It’s all right, Sergeant, I’m not having a go at you, but at the system. What you have to bear in mind is that the motive always makes sense to the killer.”

  “True enough,” Grant agreed. “It doesn’t matter how crazy he seems to the rest of us, he does what he does because it makes absolute sense to him.” Dragging deeply on his smoke, he asked, “Anything else springing to mind from the Twin Spires, Joe?”

  “Suspect-wise? No. We’re swimming in them.”

  “The Grimshaw Kitchens lot are favourite, surely?” Idleman commented.

  “You’d think so,” Joe agreed, “but don’t knock the crowd from Markham Murder Mysteries. Melanie knew Grimshaw years ago, and Gerry Carlin was humping Wendy on Friday night.”

  Idleman almost choked. “I must say, Mr Murray, I don’t care for your terminology.”

  “I am what I am, Sergeant. I speak as I was brought up to speak. Making love is not an option in Sanford… usually because love is the last thing on most men’s minds.” Joe crushed out his cigarette. “Right, I’ll grab a cab back up the hill and do some more nosying.”

  “Sergeant, run Mr Murray back to the Twin Spires.” Joe was about to protest, but Grant got there first. “Least we can do, Joe.”

  “Good of you,” Joe thanked him. “What will you do about Kendrew?”

  “I’ll interview him again, right now. As long as he gives me some answers, I’ll let him go” He frowned. “I think you’re right. I don’t think he killed either of them. But that still leaves us with the question of who did.”

  “Well, while you’re talking to him, see if you can persuade him to go down on bended knees to beg his wife’s forgiveness. If I had someone like her for a missus, I maybe wouldn’t be so grouchy.”

  ***

  As it turned out, Kendrew arrived back at the Twin Spires less than fifteen minutes after Joe, to be greeted effusively by his wife, who smothered him in hugs and kisses.

  And when she was through with her husband, she hugged and kissed Joe, too.

  “Thank you, Mr Murray. Your friends said you’d do it and you have.”

  “Yes, well, I think your husband needs to clean himself up, Fliss. Police cells aren’t the most hygienic of places.”
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  Kendrew swallowed hard, stared malevolently at Joe, and then down at his wife. When he looked at Joe again, his glower had subsided. Slowly, he offered his hand. “Thank you, Murray.”

  Joe shook hands. “No problem, son. Now take your missus somewhere private and expensive. You owe her big time. If she hadn’t hassled me, you’d be rotting in that cell forever.” Joe delivered a meaningful glance. “Remember. You owe her.”

  Joe watched them amble towards the lift, then sensed a presence at his side. “Hello, Brenda.”

  “Did you tell her?” his companion asked.

  Joe shook his head. “I’m more discreet than that, and you know it. It’s not my place to tell her anything, but I made it clear he should. Especially if he wants her back.”

  “He doesn’t deserve her, and if she’s only second best, she shouldn’t take him back.”

  Joe led the way towards the bar. “I agree, but it’s not our decision to make, is it?”

  Brenda tugged at his sleeve. “Come on, Joe. Sheila and I have been doing some detectiving and you need to see what we’ve noticed.”

  He followed her through Reception and into the dining room where Sheila stood at the information board, looking over the photographs. Running an eye over the table, Joe noticed instantly that the fake cheese wire had turned up.

  “Who found that?” he asked.

  “Oh, Julia Staines,” Sheila replied. “Apparently they win a bottle of champagne for it, and Inspector O’Keefe will announce its importance before dinner. Joe, look at this, will you?”

  Moving to join her at the board, Joe said, “That reminds me, I won’t be with you for dinner this evening.”

  Brenda’s eyes opened wide. “Oh yes? And who’s the lucky woman?”

  “Melanie. Who else?”

  “Joe, I need you to look at this and confirm what I’m saying.”