“To pay for the fish and chips, Brenda.” Her best friend’s mouth fell open once again and Sheila forced patience upon herself. “You’ve been jumping to the wrong conclusions. He wasn’t badgering me for money. He was raising hell because he wanted to pay, but he’d been paying all weekend, and I insisted it was my turn.”
Joe had recovered his voice. “According to Brenda and Stewart Dalmer, you walked away after you gave him the money.”
“Of course I did, Joe. We were going to eat fish and chips in the street, and I needed somewhere to sit down. There’s a little wall alongside the fish dock, and that’s where I was going.”
Joe shook his head in bewilderment. “Well slap me with a wet haddock and charge me fifty quid for first aid.”
Brenda’s surprise had faded as the reality sank in, and she agreed with Joe. “I know how you feel. Sheila Riley getting it on with some bloke.” A broad grin spread across her face. “So that’s where you were last night. I suppose you dropped your—”
“Mind your own business, Brenda.”
Brenda laughed. “Do me a favour, Sheila. You’re talking to a professional woman, and I know men. They won’t buy a bicycle without taking it for a test ride.”
Maddy chuckled. “I quite agree with you, Brenda, but you should be careful about describing yourself as a professional woman. It’s wide open to misinterpretation.”
“No, but I meant—”
This time it was Joe who interrupted. “We know what you meant.” He concentrated on Sheila. “You’ve been seeing this guy all this time, yet you never said a word.”
“I wanted to be sure, Joe. I value my reputation, as you well know, and I was keen to avoid the kind of risible comment Brenda has just passed.” She sipped from her glass again, and it was as if she needed the Dutch courage to make our final announcement. “Well, now I am sure.” Once again she paused and heaved in a deep breath. “Last night, Martin asked me to marry him, and I’ve said yes.”
This time, even Maddy had not guessed where Sheila was going, and the announcement was greeted with complete, amazed silence.
“We’ve set a date. September twenty-first. I’ve already texted my sons and told them. They’ll be flying in from America. Obviously I will invite my nephew, Howard, and your niece, Joe, and I want you, Brenda, Maddy, to be my maids of honour, and you, Joe, to be my escort.”
Joe almost choked on his lager again. “I don’t know how many more shocks I can take this morning. Escort?”
Sheila smiled benignly. “My father died many years ago, Joe.”
“What about Peter or Aaron? I mean, they’re your sons. Shouldn’t they—”
“They may be in their thirties, but they’re still too young to walk their mother down the aisle.”
“Howard then?”
“I’ll be asking Howard to act as Martin’s best man.” More surprise greeted her announcement. “Well, Martin isn’t from Sanford. He’s not even a Yorkshireman. He doesn’t know anyone in the town and he hasn’t been at the school long.”
“Has anyone told Howard?” Brenda demanded.
“Not yet.” Sheila focused on Joe. “You sound as if you don’t want to do this?”
He spread his hands in an expansive gesture of acceptance. “No. Nothing of the kind. I’m just trying to make sure that there’s no one else with a bigger claim on you as their surrogate daughter.”
Sheila chuckled and squeezed his hand. “There is no one else, Joe.”
“In that case, I will be honoured.”
Chapter Fifteen
The bar of the Miners Arms was as busy as any Friday night Joe could remember. George Robson and Owen Frickley used the pub as the starting point for their night’s drinking. They would move on to Sanford town centre by 9 o’clock, or if they were feeling more adventurous, they might take a taxi to Wakefield or Leeds. Mort Norris and his wife sat with Irene and Norman Pyecock and Cyril Peck and Mavis Barker.
During the day, Sheila’s nephew, DI Howard Riley, who coincidentally lived with Joe’s niece, DI Gemma Craddock, the nominal head of Sanford CID, had arrived from Leeds, to attend his aunt’s wedding, but Sheila, in asking him to act as Martin’s best man, insisted that he was too young to escort her into the church, and that honour still went to Joe.
Howard did elect to join Joe, Les Tanner and Stewart Dalmer, to celebrate Martin’s stag night, although as such events went, it was much tamer than those of younger men. They were not in any kind of fancy dress, they had no intentions of getting absolutely blind drunk.
“I don’t drink that often,” Martin told them.
“Neither did I,” Stewart Dalmer assured them, “but after you’ve spent some time with the Sanford 3rd Age Club, you’ll soon find you need alcohol in large quantities.”
Joe took the risible comment in good part, but Les Tanner was less generous. “Moderation in all things, Mr Dalmer. That’s my motto.”
The time was coming up to half-past seven, and the September night was closing in on the town, the early darkness served to remind Joe of his failure in the warm, summer’s evenings of Whitby.
“The one case that escaped you, Murray,” Les Tanner commented with more than a hint of schadenfreude.
“I needed more time, Les. And let’s face it, if I get many more snide remarks like that from you, the case of the murdered payroll manager-cum-TA officer won’t take a lot of solving, even if I have to own up to it myself.” He beamed on Martin. “You don’t want to take us two seriously, my friend. Les and I have been at each other’s throats since the schoolyard, fifty-odd years ago.”
“Good-natured repartee?” Martin asked. “There is a theory, you know, that only genuine friends can tolerate those kinds of exchanges.”
In order to distract attention from any possible disagreement, Howard asked, “Aside from the ring, have you bought some kind of gift for Aunt Sheila?”
Martin dug into his pocket. “We were never formally engaged, so I thought she’d like something in place of an engagement ring. I bought her this.”
He came out with a jeweller’s box, and flipped up the lid. Inside, hung on the end of a silver chain, was a silver-plated heart, of a kind Joe had seen before, but as Martin readily demonstrated, it was more than just a piece of ornamental jewellery.
He prised apart the two halves of the heart, and revealed a USB plug on the end of one half. “The modern day equivalent of a locket where you can store photographs. It has 32 gig of memory. You can store an album full of photographs on it.”
Joe felt his colour drain, and his blood ran cold. His mind went into overdrive, backtracking, seeking the location where he had seen this same locket… and then he remembered. He turned urgently to Howard.
“I don’t wanna be a party-pooper, but I have to get to Whitby. You’re the cop. You can get Helen Dalkeith to turn out. If we get a move on, we can be there for ten o’clock.”
Howard was astonished to say the least. “At this time on a Friday night, Joe? And it’s supposed to be Martin’s stag night.”
Joe fixed Martin with an urgent eye “I’m sure you won’t mind, Martin,” he said nodding his head to get Martin to do the same. “Trust me, this is urgent. If we don’t move, someone is gonna get away with murder.”
“Murder?”
Joe was already on his feet and encouraging Howard. “Come on. You can phone Gemma while we’re on the way, and I’ll speak to Sheila.”
“Don’t forget, Murray, you’re supposed to be walking Sheila down the aisle,” Les Tanner reminded him.
“We’ll be back in plenty of time,” Joe said as he and Howard disappeared through the door.
Within 20 minutes, they were speeding north on the A1, and while Howard negotiated with Helen Dalkeith on a hands-free connection, Joe was in the passenger seat speaking to Sheila on his smartphone, reassuring her that he would be back in Sanford first thing in the morning, in plenty of time to accompany her to the church.
When both phone calls were done, Howard repor
ted his progress. “Inspector Dalkeith will be at this Ashton woman’s home by the time we get there. She’s coming from Scarborough, so I have to ring her when we’re north of Malton. Now will you please tell me what the hell is going on.”
Joe relaxed in the passenger seat. “You heard Tanner in the Miner’s. We stayed at the Westhead during the summer, and there was a murder. As usual, I poked my nose in, but I couldn’t crack it. First time in living memory that I haven’t been able to get a handle on a case. When Martin showed me that locket thing, the USB memory stick, I suddenly realised that Kim Ashton had one similar to that hanging over a photograph of her mother. Kim, so her partner and his son told me, had information regarding her mother’s death and the people who might or might not have been responsible. We couldn’t break down any of the suspects and at the same time, we couldn’t find this supposed evidence. Helen Dalkeith assumed that it didn’t exist. Kim’s partner’s son, Ben Foster, burnt several documents, but they related to his mother, and at a pinch, Dalkeith will admit that he could just have burned his mother’s diaries. He said he didn’t, and now I agree with him. She was a careful woman, Kim Ashton. She says she kept records, and trust me, she will have kept records, and they would be somewhere secure.”
“Like a thirty-two gig memory stick that no one realises is there?” Howard asked.
“The answer is either yes or no. And we won’t know until we get there, but I’m betting that it’s yes.”
***
It was a little after 11 o’clock when they pulled up outside 16 Mount Street in Cragshaven, to find Inspector Dalkeith and Sergeant Calvin waiting for them.
Although she reserved an air of professional civility for Howard, Helen’s attitude to Joe was less generous. “If this is another wild goose chase, I’ll book you for sure.”
Joe disregarded the threat and nodded to the house. “Alan Foster here?”
“No. Ever since Kim’s death, he’s moved back with his first wife, Tracy Huckle.”
Joe tutted. “He obviously has less sense than I credited him with.” He nodded to the house again. “Let us in, I’ll show you what I’m talking about.” As they walked down the path to the front door, he asked, “Have you got a laptop with you?”
Fishing into his pocket for the door keys, Sergeant Calvin held up a laptop bag in his left hand. “All present and correct, sir.”
“Good job, too. We didn’t have time to nip home and pick one up.”
Once inside the house, Joe, his head filled with memories of the mess he had waded through the last time he was in the place, was pleased to see that everything had been tidied up.
“So who owns the house now?” he asked.
“Kim Ashton,” Helen replied. “For a woman of her wealth, she was completely disorganised when it came to sorting out her affairs. Alan insisted her lawyer had the will, but he didn’t. She didn’t make one, and she died intestate? As matters stand, she has about eight million quid sitting in the bank, and this house. Best bet is it will go to Alan Foster and his boy, but her solicitors – the same cheeky sods who should have advised her to make a will – are still trying to find if she had relatives anywhere.”
Joe chuckled. “Would Kim Ashton’s relatives please form a queue at the bar?”
No one else found the remark amusing, and he made straight for the display cabinet where he removed the heart-shaped locket from the photograph frame upon which it hung, and pulled the two halves. Almost immediately, they came apart, and in his left hand, he held the memory stick.
“Your laptop, please, Sergeant.”
Calvin set the machine down on a coffee table, found a wall socket and plugged it in before booting up the machine. A minute or two later, Joe inserted the memory stick in a USB port, and opened the files.
Far and away the majority of them were photographs, mostly of the Westhead Hotel, and others who were suspected of her murder: Tracy Huckle, Ronnie Ilkeston, Ferris Brandt, Lucas Wrigglesworth and for some inexplicable reason, Marlene Ellery.
Calvin felt obliged to comment upon the latter’s inclusion. “How could she kill anyone from a wheelchair?”
Joe’s head clicked everything into place. “How tall is Marlene while she’s in the wheelchair? And what height did you say the killer might be, Inspector? Three-foot-three?”
Joe returned to concentrating on the contents of the flash drive. Amongst them were the newspaper clippings he and Maddy had unsuccessfully chased up during the summer, but they wouldn’t tell him anything he did not already know. He knew that whatever he was looking for it was not amongst the things he had learned of in June.
It would be a long, slow, laborious process, and one which was moved from Mount Street, to one of the interview rooms in Whitby police station, where the three detectives took it in turns to catnap, while Joe worked his way through the documents and images.
He learned much, but nothing that would pinpoint the killer, until he began to concentrate on the images of the Westhead Hotel.
According to Helen Dalkeith, there were several photographs which had been taken by the police, particularly those of the room where the window fell from when it killed Deirdre Ashton. She queried how Kim Ashton could get hold of these images, and Sergeant Calvin was at a loss to explain it.
To Joe, it was irrelevant. As a little after two in the morning, he found what he was looking for – one of those photographs they were discussing.
It showed the interior of room 216, and was dated the same day Deirdre Ashton died. The window, to the left of the image, was clearly nothing more than a square aperture in the exterior walls. There were builders’ tools and other equipment lying around all over the empty room, and in the middle was a patch of plaster dust, through which ran the mark of a wheel which had obviously passed over it. But when Joe enlarged the image, that mark revealed a tread, and having seen it, he put everything together in a matter of seconds.
“Get everyone together in room 101 first thing in the morning, and we’ll have our killer.
***
With everyone gathered in room 101, there was an intense debate between Howard, Inspector Dalkeith and Sergeant Calvin concerning who should make the challenge. Howard insisted it should be Joe, Helen insisted it should be her, and in the end, Joe stepped in.
“Leave it to me. I’m not a cop, and they’ll feel more secure taking me on.”
Howard agreed. “I’ve seen him do it before, and he’s right.”
Helen chewed her lip for a moment, obviously tossing and turning the alternatives, and eventually she nodded her agreement.
Joe moved to the centre of the room. “First off, thanks for coming everyone.”
“The filth didn’t give us an awful lot of choice,” Wrigglesworth complained with a curt nod at the three officers.
“It was necessary, Lucas. We need to clear up not one, but two crimes this morning. The murder of Kim Ashton, and that of her mother, Deirdre, which happened three years ago.”
The announcement met with silent amazement. Ronnie Ilkeston recovered first.
“The inquiry agreed that Deirdre’s death was the result of a bizarre accident, which in turn was caused by negligence on the part of the builders.”
Pacing backwards and forwards before his small audience, Joe nodded. “I’m aware of that, Ronnie, and it was a reasonable conclusion for the inquest, because they were not privy to information which we have. If they’d been aware of what we know, they would probably have come to a different conclusion, the entire business would have been cleared up three years ago, and Kim Ashton might still be with us.”
Tracy shuddered visibly. “Perish the thought.”
“Uncharitable, Tracy,” Joe said. “I didn’t know her for as long as you people, so obviously I didn’t know her as well as you did, but I have the feeling that if this matter had been cleared up all those years ago, Kim would have been a different woman.”
“Leopards and spots,” Wrigglesworth commented.
Sat just to the lef
t as Joe looked on them, Alan Foster was stung into defending his former partner. “You didn’t know her, Wrigglesworth. You didn’t live with her. You didn’t see the other side of Kim.” His anger scanned the group. “None of you did.”
Joe focused on Ben. “Would you agree with that?”
The youngster sniffed. “I didn’t like her, she had a downer on my mam. But Dad’s right. She wasn’t always as snappy and hoity-toity as she was cracked up to be, especially before she won the lottery.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Ilkeston’s tones were positively scornful. “So the sun shone out of her backside only we didn’t see it. Can you tell us what the point of all this is, Murray?”
“It’s very simple, Ronnie. One of you murdered Kim, because she had evidence, even if she didn’t truly understand it, that you had also murdered her mother.”
At the back of the room, Ferris Brandt got to his feet. “That’s it. I’m outta here.”
He moved to the door, but found his way barred by Howard and Sergeant Calvin. Howard invited him to return to his seat, and he did so, his venomous eyes flitting between the three police officers and Joe.
Wrigglesworth was next to speak, unlike Ilkeston his tones were marinated in cynicism and disbelief. “You say she had evidence, and didn’t even know it?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying, Lucas. Kim spent the last three years of her life seeking evidence that her mother had been murdered, looking for clues that might point in that direction, and she’d accumulated an awful lot of information, all of which she stored on a memory stick.” Joe held up the USB implement. “This memory stick, as it happens. It took me until yesterday to realise where this thing was hidden, but once it dawned on me, it took two minutes to find, and hours of looking at the different documents and images to find what I was looking for. Everything on this memory stick is now on that laptop. ”
Joe nodded to Sergeant Calvin, who brought the laptop to life, and hit the necessary keys. The wall at the front of the room came to life, and on it was a projected image of the room from which the window had fallen, the image he had been staring at for hours.
Murder at the Treasure Hunt Page 15
