Copyright © 2019 by David W Robinson
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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, and incidents are used fictitiously.
First Dark Edition, darkstroke. 2019
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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 and darkstroke 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
The STAC Mystery series:
The Filey Connection
The I-Spy Murders
A Halloween Homicide
A Murder for Christmas
Murder at the Murder Mystery Weekend
My Deadly Valentine
The Chocolate Egg Murders
The Summer Wedding Murder
Costa del Murder
Christmas Crackers
Death in Distribution
A Killing in the Family
A Theatrical Murder
Trial by Fire
Peril in Palmanova
The Squire’s Lodge Murders
Murder at the Treasure Hunt
Murder at the Treasure Hunt
A Sanford 3rd Age Club Mystery (#17)
Chapter One
Madeleine Chester drove home the final, large screw, and stood back to admire her handiwork.
Firmly bolted to the wall was a rustic timber slice, the bark still on its oval outer edge, its surface deep-varnished, the legend Stilldiggin burned into it and painted a rich, dark brown.
Standing alongside Maddy, the postman screwed up his face in an impossible vision of surprise and puzzlement. “Stilldiggin?”
“It’s better than boring old number ninety-six Cliff Road, isn’t it?” Maddy suggested.
“I suppose so, but what does it mean?”
“Well, you know how some people call their houses Dunroamin?”
He nodded. “We have a few Dunroamins round here, Mrs Chester.”
“It’s Ms Chester, not Mrs,” Maddy scolded him. “Well, I’m a genealogist, so—”
“You chisel bits of rock off the cliffs?”
“No. That’s a geologist.” Maddy sighed and tried to think of a simple way of explaining herself. “I dig into peoples’ pasts. Find out who they’re related to.”
The postman stroked his chin. “Shouldn’t think you’ll have much trouble here, then. I reckon if you go back three generations, everyone is related to everyone else.”
Maddy gave up the effort. “Yes, well, I can tell them that for sure, can’t I? Anyway, as I was saying, people eventually settle down in the house where they intend to stay for the rest of their lives, and they’re Dunroamin. You see?”
With a slow nod, as if expecting some startling revelation, the postman nodded.
“Well, if I’d given it all up and retired, I would have called my house Dundiggin, but I haven’t given it up. I’m still doing it, so it’s Stilldiggin.”
He screwed up his face again, into a more complex mask, spelling further bewilderment. Maddy had the feeling that he was silently questioning her state of mind rather than her logic. “Well, if you’re happy with it, missus, that’s all that matters.” He handed her a bunch of envelopes, gave her a cheerful wink, and walked back along the path out onto Cliff Road.
With a wry smile, Maddy wondered how long it would take the postman to spread the word that their resident celebrity was losing her marbles.
Not that fronting Look Who’s Behind You, or her ten-minute slot on Eastern TV’s Good Morning program qualified her as a mega-star, but in a close knit, conservative (small c) community like Cragshaven it did help account for her occasional eccentricities such as Stilldiggin.
And TV personalities, even minor ones like her, were all slightly batty, weren’t they?
She was a comparative newcomer to the village, having lived there for less than five years, but it was half a decade during which she had found something approaching true peace.
Cragshaven nestled in a rocky cove on the Yorkshire coast between Scarborough and Whitby. A traditional fishing community, most of the village lined the single street which led down to the tiny quayside. The prospect of walking up or down the 1:4 gradient was terrifying, and only residents’ vehicles were permitted to drive beyond the public car park at the top of the hill. Stilldiggin stood on the flat plain not far from that car park. A detached bungalow on a road lined with similar properties, it suited Maddy. There were fine views across the Yorkshire moors to the west, and eastwards over the cliffs to the sea, while to the south she could just make out the uneven lumpiness of Scarborough Castle. From her front door, she could see the northernmost of Cragshaven’s twin headlands (unimaginatively named North Cliff and South Cliff) the crags which created the haven from which the village took its name. It was an idyll. Not a haven between two crags, but a haven of tranquillity after a lifetime spent in the cutthroat rat race of Leeds.
“Cutthroat?” Zara, her daughter, had cried. “Mother, this is Leeds, not Chicago. You spend all your time at the Central Library and in the Records Office. The closest you come to cutthroat is using a carpet knife to sharpen your pencils.”
Maddy was not to be dissuaded. She needed to be away from the city, any city, and living where there was plenty of open space.
“It’s all right now, Ma,” her son, Simon, had said when he visited soon after she moved in. “You have all the space you need, but come winter when the snow drifts are eight feet deep, you might feel a bit more walled-in.”
“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it,” Maddy had replied.
“That’s the point. You won’t be able to cross the bridge. That’ll be snowed in, too.”
Maddy liked to think that her offspring had missed her after she left South Leeds, but it did not ring quite true. She saw little of them when she lived there. Simon had his live-in girlfriend and his high-powered sales career, and if Zara was ever to become the teacher she wanted to be, she had to keep up with her studies and when she was not studying she hung around the students’ favourite bars and clubs.
As she packed away her tools, the noise of an ageing car engine reached her ears. Maddy recognised the chug and rattle. Of all her acquaintances, only one would have the audacity to turn up in a place like Cragshaven in such a boneshaker. She turned as the Vauxhall saloon pulled into the kerb outside her bungalow.
She didn’t see much of Joe Murray, but he was a loyal friend, and during the previous summer she had helped bring him ‘back to life’ after a three-month disappearance during which his f
riends and colleagues had assumed him to be dead.
Maddy glanced at her watch and read just after 10 o’clock. As always, Joe was bang on time. It was something to do with having spent most of his life opening up his café for early-morning truckers.
She greeted him with a broad smile. “Good to see you again, Joe.”
He gave her a crooked grin and a kiss on the cheek. “And you, Maddy. Are you ready for the big treasure hunt?”
Small talk wasn’t his thing, either.
“Not so you’d notice. In any case, we can’t check-in until four o’clock, and Whitby’s only about ten miles. Let’s go inside and have a cuppa.”
He followed her towards the door, and took in the newly installed plaque. “Stilldiggin?”
“I’ve just had that debate with the postman. Come on, I’ll tell you all about it over a brew.”
Joe, she reflected as she made tea in her untidy kitchen, never looked any different. He was in his mid-50s, short, slightly wizened with a mop of unruly, curly hair. The proprietor of The Lazy Luncheonette, a popular and profitable truckstop in Sanford, his closest friends, Brenda Jump and Sheila Riley, claimed he was short tempered and outspoken to the point of rudeness, but Maddy had never found him anything but good fun. Honest, certainly, but ever since the threat to his life in Majorca, he seemed to have found his second childhood, and his infrequent visits to her were a delight of the kind highlighted by his reaction to Stilldiggin.
“That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said, “but I like it.”
Over a pleasant cup of tea, they caught up on gossip, news of this old friend, that old enemy, and eventually Maddy brought him round to the subject of his friends in the Sanford 3rd Age Club.
“I don’t run it anymore,” he confessed. “After that business in Palmanova, I handed over to Les Tanner. Sheila and Brenda still do their bit, but I’m leading a life of semi-retired leisure.” He grinned again. “Why do you think I came by car rather than on their bus?”
“They will be in Whitby, though?”
“Yes. As long as Keith Lowry can get the old banger over the hills.”
***
Half a mile away, number 16 Mount Street was a bungalow crouched between tall, three and four-storey houses, and as a result, even on a sparkling summer’s morning like this, with the promise of a hot day to come, the squat building was left in shade.
“Just like my life,” Kim Ashton grumbled as she stared through the windows at the scrub of lawn in front of her property.
Sitting incongruously at the kerbside directly in front of the bungalow, was her recently acquired Bentley Continental, £85,000 worth of second-hand vehicle, outshining the Fords, Vauxhalls, VWs, Peugeots, Citroens, and Renaults which were the basic, lower middle-class standards of Mount Street. She had owned the car less than three months, and had bought it on Alan’s advice. If picking up over £8 million on the National Lottery meant moving several steps up the social scale for her, then she needed a vehicle that spelled out her newly-acquired wealth and influence. And if she found the car too big to handle, there was always Alan, her life partner, now her chauffeur. It was fitting. She had been dependent upon him for years, and now the tables were turned, and she would not let him forget it.
Kim turned from the window, crossed the living room to the display cabinet, its top dominated by a 10x8 photograph of her late mother.
“But it’s about to change, Mum. You see if it doesn’t.”
Even clad in her pale blue tabard bearing the logo of the Westhead Hotel, where she had worked as a chambermaid, Deirdre Ashton was nevertheless a fine looking woman. She had about her a serene beauty, tinged with the impish humour of one who enjoyed life. That was Kim’s mother. Between work, the bar, and the bingo, she was a woman who revelled in a good time. Yes, she had a reputation as a gossip, but that was common enough amongst the working people of any town, including Whitby, but there was never anything malicious in her chitchat. Certainly nothing to warrant the unfair, unreasonable punishment meted out to her.
A tear welled in Kim’s eyes. She lovingly fingered the EPNS, crystal heart hung on a silver chain and draped over the photograph frame. The action caused her shake herself out of the maudlin, pointless self-pity. Her mother had been gone three years, and no amount of grieving would bring her back. All she could do was make those responsible pay. Despite the coroner’s verdict, notwithstanding the fines meted out in the construction company, Kim knew that her mother had been murdered, and the time was fast approaching when her killers would be brought to book for their crime.
“I’ll get ’em, Mum. Just watch me.”
The door opened and Alan Foster entered.
There was a time, Kim reflected, when she had looked upon him and craved his attentions. A time when he was fit, strong, healthy, a man worth stealing from his slovenly ex-wife. And he had been a pillar of support after her mother’s death, but time had begun to fade his attraction. Ever since he turned 40, the first hint of a paunch had begun to show at the waist, the matt of dark hair, neatly trimmed and covering his head was thinning, and his cheeks had begun to sag along with his red-rimmed eyes. Over the past thirteen weeks, Kim had to wonder whether he stayed with her because of the lottery win. Worse than that, she had to wonder why she stayed with him. Aside from his skill as a chauffeur, and half-baked social secretary, he had little to offer.
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
Kim believed that he only asked these questions for the sake of giving him something to say. He knew what her answer would be.
She delivered it anyway. “Absolutely. Listen to me, Alan, I expect to sign the final contracts on Monday. After that the Westhead will belong to me, and I intend to make those people responsible for my mother’s murder know about it. And that includes your slutty ex-wife.”
Alan’s face coloured at the derogatory mention of Tracy, his ex-wife, and it was unfortunate that as Kim said it, Alan’s son, Ben, entered the room.
“Don’t you talk about my mother like that.”
Of the pair, Ben was rapidly becoming more interesting to Kim. Age 16, he was a strong, strapping young man, who would grow into a double of the man his father had been when Kim first settled down with him. Ben also made no secret of the fact that he hated Kim, detested her for the place she had taken in his father’s life, a position which should be held by Tracy Huckle. Kim did not care that he hated her, but she was impressed by his courage, his unwillingness to hide his antipathy.
As always, Alan was left trying to bridge a gap between his common-law wife and his son, and it rarely worked out, much to Kim’s amusement. Ben refused to back down, and Kim refused to take the boy seriously.
“If your mother would prefer some other description, perhaps she shouldn’t have behaved the way she did.” Kim reached down to the lower drawers of the display cabinet, unlocked the top drawer, and came out with a large scrapbook, which she held up in front of Ben’s eyes, taunting, teasing him. “Or would you like me to show you the pictures again?”
Ben snatched for the scrapbook, but Kim held it away from his grasp.
“Stop it,” Alan pleaded. “The both of you. For God’s sake, just pack it in.”
Kim put the scrapbook away again and locked the drawer. “Then get some control over this boy.”
Ben’s temper was rising again. “I’m not a boy. Not any more. One of these days, I’ll snap.”
Kim sneered openly. “When you’re grown up. In the meantime, get your backside outside and clean the inside of the car.”
“Up yours.”
Alan sighed. “Please, Ben, just do it. Let’s have a bit of peace.”
The young man disappeared, and Alan felt emboldened to round on Kim. “He’s right, you know. One of these days you’ll push him too far. I might not be bothered about Tracy, but she’s his mother, and he cares about her.”
“Do I look as if I give a toss?”
***
As her taxi turned
off the main road, and sidled up to the premises of Stewart Dalmer Antiques, Sheila Riley chewed her lip.
In all the years that the Sanford 3rd Age Club had been in existence, she had never missed an outing or a weekend, and she had never strayed from the pack. She passed every day, every weekend, every week, including those times when they had travelled abroad, in the company of her best friend Brenda Jump.
Whitby would be different. She had other, more important issues to deal with, and what was worse, she could not tell anyone, not even Brenda, anything about them. If it all came to nothing, then no one would be any the wiser, but if matters came to a head… Then she would have a lot of explaining to do.
Brenda, she knew, would be disappointed. Like many members of the club, Sheila was blessed with the ability to put herself in other people’s shoes, especially other members, and she knew how she would feel in Brenda’s position; especially with the news coming at such short notice, right out of the blue, and on the day they were travelling. But reflecting on the last week or two, Sheila could not see how she could have avoided the situation.
She looked out at the long, low shed where Dalmer kept his business, it’s barred windows and door, the range of intruder alarms reminding her of visits to open prisons in the company of her late husband (who had been a police inspector) when he went on official tours of such places.
She doubted that Dalmer, a former teacher who had taken early retirement and set himself up as a buyer and seller of antiques, kept anything of serious value in the premises, but she imagined that his total stock in trade was worth many thousands of pounds, and security on this order made absolute sense. Stewart Dalmer was, if nothing else, a man of absolute sense.
She could make out someone moving around inside. It had to be Dalmer. He employed no one. In her mind’s eye, Sheila could imagine him flitting here and there, ensuring that everything was spot-on before picking up his small suitcase and coming out to join her in the taxi. The club’s hired bus was scheduled to leave the Miner’s Arms at 1 o’clock, and it was coming up to 12:30. It was no more than 10 minutes from here by taxi, but all the same, she encouraged the driver to give a couple of toots on his horn and let Dalmer know that time was pressing.
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