The Filey Connection

by David W Robinson

  “As good as,” Sheila countered. “We’re eighty miles from Sanford. What on earth makes you think he would have been there on Tuesday night?”

  “He annoyed me,” Joe declared. “Now are we gonna get a move on?”

  They set off once more for the most northerly point of the beach and the landward end of the Carr Naze.

  From there, a rough path led along the base of the cliff until they reached the spur of rocks thrusting out into the sea.

  “Interesting legend behind the Brigg,” said Sheila taking Joe’s hand as she stepped between the treacherous rocks and intermittent pools of water. “They say that the Devil dropped his hammer into the sea while he was making the ridge,” she gestured up at the towering cliff. “Then he dipped his hand into the sea to get the hammer back, and when he pulled his hand out, he found he’d picked up a fish instead and shouted, ‘Ha, Dick’, and that’s how the Haddock got its name.”

  Helping Brenda across a difficult patch of rock, Joe tutted. “Where do you get this twaddle?”

  “It’s legend, Joe,” Sheila insisted. “Myth. Fireside stories from the days before TV, radio and newspapers.”

  Joe was not convinced. “Well, if you ask me, it was an insurance fiddle. The Devil claiming for a lost hammer that was hidden in the back of his van.”

  Both women laughed.

  From the far end of the Brigg, where Constable Flowers and a couple of colleagues were stationed, keeping back sightseers, they had a fine view of Gristhorpe Sands, Cayton Bay and, seven miles to the north, Scarborough with its harbour and prominent lighthouse. To the south, they could now see the cliffs at the furthest point of Flamborough Head, and looking back the way they had come, Filey sat slightly north of centre of the fine, sandy bay.

  A number of anglers were still fishing on the south, Filey side of the Brigg, but Joe noticed instantly that there were none on the north side; not just in the area where Eddie had gone into the sea and where the police now kept people back, but all along the length of the spur, there were no anglers.

  “Better catches on the other side, sir,” Flowers explained when Joe asked. “You can fish this side, but the waters are fast and your chances of a bite are a lot slimmer. Usually only really skilled anglers fish this side. On the south side, you’re inside the breakwater formed by the Brigg, and the fish come there to feed.” He waved at the north side in general. “But to be honest, we have divers down there, and we don’t want anglers snagging them.”

  “Sounds like another fireside tale for the kids before radio,” muttered Joe logging the information in his agile brain.

  “Sir?”

  “Nothing. It’s just that a lot of things don’t add up, Constable, and I think you’re possibly dealing with a suicide.”

  Busy wiping mossy weed from his boots, Flowers looked sharply up at Joe. “What makes you say that?”

  Patiently, Joe explained his findings and conclusions. Flowers listened with equal patience, occasionally asking questions to clarify one point or another, and when Joe had finished, he ruminated on the matter for a few moments.

  Eventually, he said, “I can see where you’re coming from, sir, but it’s largely circumstantial. I’d need more concrete evidence than that before confirming suicide. But I will make a note of it all in my report. The CID bods can make their minds up whether they want to investigate further.”

  “I tried asking around at Irwin’s tackle shop in the town, but he gave me the bum’s rush.”

  Flowers laughed. “Ivan or Jonny?”

  “Jonny. We met Ivan at Coble Landing, and he was none too pleasant, either.”

  Flowers smiled again. “This is a close-knit community, Mr Murray, and people like the Irwins are very protective of it. It’s bluster, most of it, but they can be serious trouble if you’re not careful.”

  “Well, anyway,” Joe concluded, “We thought you ought to know all this.”

  Flowers was eager to encourage him. “No, sir, that’s all right. Despite what most people think, the police are always glad of the public’s help, no matter how trivial things may seem.”

  The head of a police diver appeared in the water, close to the edge of the rocks. He held up his arm clutching a wet and bedraggled coat.

  “Mike,” shouted one of the officers on the rocks. “We’ve got something.”

  “Excuse me, sir,” said Flowers, and hurried off across the slippery surface to join his colleagues.

  Joe and his two companions watched as the garment was passed onto land, its pockets searched, a wallet removed and that too searched, before the coat, wallet and its contents were carefully placed in separate, seal-easy evidence bags.

  A grim-faced Flowers approached them. “I wonder if any of you could identify this.”

  They looked it over, a wax cotton coat in dark green with a twill lining.

  “Like I said earlier, I never saw him this morning,” said Joe.

  “How about the wallet then?” asked Flowers when the others said nothing.

  Again they were unable to comment.

  “Anything in the wallet?” asked Joe?

  “Just this, sir.”

  Flowers held up the evidence bag for them to see a white, laminated card bearing the legend,Sanford 3rd Age Club, beneath which was a passport sized photograph and the member’s name:Edward Dobson.

  From somewhere behind Joe, Brenda burst into tears.

  Chapter Ten

  The day moved on quickly. Returning to Filey from the Brigg, they caught the bus to Scarborough, Joe complaining at the cost of the fares when he had a perfectly good car back in Sanford, and they arrived in the area’s premier resort just before two.

  “We’ll be on the sea front tonight,” Joe told them, “and time is getting on. Why don’t you just do your shopping in the town?”

  They agreed and headed for the Brunswick Shopping Centre on the Westborough pedestrian precinct, where Joe elected to stay outside.

  “Keep your phone on, Joe,” Sheila urged.

  “In case we need a pack mule,” Brenda chuckled.

  While they disappeared into the shopping mall, Joe took a seat on a nearby bench, savouring the sun on his skin, while he enjoyed a cigarette and permitted his agile mind to run over the strange events of the last few days.

  Eddie Dobson’s disappearance had overtaken Nicola Leach’s death, but his brush with Ivan Irwin over the Land Rover had brought Nicola back to the forefront of his mind, and the more he thought about it, the more he became convinced that the two deaths were linked. Brenda had linked Eddie to Nicola and now the pair were dead.

  “I don’t like coincidences,” he said to his two companions when they came out of the Brunswick Centre half an hour later, “and we’re wading in them.”

  Ambling along Huntriss Row, towards the monolithic Grand Hotel, Brenda asked, “are you suggesting that Knickers-off and Eddie were up to something that got her killed and persuaded him to jump into the sea?”

  “Maybe he didn’t jump,” Joe suggested. “Maybe he was pushed.”

  “Not according to Constable Flowers,” Sheila countered. “He said there were no suspicious circumstances and no one else was involved.”

  “No,” Joe disagreed. “He said he didn’tthink anyone else was involved.”

  “All I can say is it must be something really bad,” Brenda said, pausing to study the window display of a craft shop. “I do like some of these African wood carvings.”

  “Most of them are turned on lathes in Leeds,” Joe argued. “What do you mean it must have been something bad?”

  They reached the end of the narrow, pedestrian lane, with the Grand Hotel, its four domed spires framed in the afternoon sun, standing over to their left.

  “I know a little café over there,” Sheila said. “Let’s have a cuppa.”

  While they manoeuvred their way through the throng of afternoon traffic and people, Brenda said, “Let’s be brutally honest about this, Nicola wasn’t much better than a tart. I reckon I’
m fairly freewheeling, but she makes me look like a Trappist Nun.”

  “You mean Trappist Monk,” Joe said.

  “She means Trapistine Nun,” Sheila corrected them both.

  Joe sighed as they crossed the public car park outside the Grand. “Get to the point, Brenda.”

  “What I’m saying is, Nicola would have to commit a murder before she’d show any regret.”

  “Now there’s a thought,” Sheila said, leading the way to the left hand corner of the Grand and the upper station of the funicular railway that ran down to the promenade. “Suppose Eddie killed Nicola and then decided he couldn’t live with the guilt, so threw himself into the sea off the Brigg.”

  Joe fumed as they made the café by the funicular station. “Why don’t you order toasted teacakes and leave the deducing to me?”

  They took a table outside, and ordered the teacakes.

  “Go on then, Joe,” Sheila said while they waited. “What’s wrong with my idea?”

  “The pudding is over-egged,” he said and rolled a fresh cigarette.

  He refused to yield to any more questions until their tea and teacakes were delivered, and then, while they ate, he explained his reasoning.

  “As Brenda pointed out, Nicola wasn’t known as Knickers-off for nothing. Let’s assume that she’s had a bit of a thing with Eddie and let’s say she was blackmailing him.”

  Sheila shook her head and swallowed a large bit of teacake. “Nicola would not do that.”

  “I didn’t say she would,” Joe agreed, “but let’s assume it, anyway. It gives us a nice motive for Eddie to mow her down. From there you’re assuming Eddie gets a bad attack of guilt and decides to do away with himself. Why, then, did he bother with the fishing gear? It’s obvious he’s no fisherman. Why didn’t he just go out during the night and throw himself in the sea? Come to that, why bother with Filey at all? Why not just stick his head in the gas oven, or swallow a bottle of paracetemol with a bottle of scotch?” He finished his teacake, washed it down with a mouthful of tea and took out his tobacco again. “I’m linking the two deaths. I’ve no real evidence for that, but I’m doing it, and for me Eddie killed Nicola, or he arranged it, so he could get on the Filey trip. He had some motive for coming here, and he needed to come with the Sanford 3rd Age Club.”

  “And what could that motive be?” Sheila asked.

  “If I knew that, I’d be able to tell you everything.”

  Brenda finished her teacake, licked her fingers, wiped her mouth with a serviette and looking from one to the other of her two companions, asked, “Why does a toasted teacake always taste better when someone else has prepared it?”

  On Brenda’s rhetorical question, Joe’s creased features darkened. “Here we are discussing murder and suicide and she’s on about toasted teacakes.”

  “I’m changing the subject, Joe,” Brenda argued. “All this talk of death. It’s depressing.”

  “All right. Are you saying there’s something wrong with my toasted teacakes?” he demanded.

  “No. It’s just that they’re tastier when someone serves them to you.”

  “I suppose,” said Sheila from behind her teacup, “it’s the general indolence of holidays. We all like to be waited on, and that adds to the ambience of a toasted teacake. And, of course, because we spend so much of our time actually making these things, we have an insight into the preparation that allows us to enjoy them on more levels than your average customer. Rather like one artist can appreciate the work of another on more levels than the casual viewer.”

  Joe snorted. “I don’t see many of my toasted teacakes hanging on the walls of Sanford Art gallery.” Pushing aside his teacup, he rolled a cigarette, jammed it between his lips and lit it. “You know what I don’t understand?”

  Across the table, Sheila tidied the cups, saucers and detritus of their afternoon snack. “I should think there are a lot of things you don’t understand, Joe. The principles of artistic perspective, for example, Schröedinger’s cat…”

  “I’ve never seen art made of Perspex,” Joe interrupted.

  Alongside him, Brenda was equally puzzled. “And what’s to understand about whoisit’s cat?”

  “Schröedinger’s cat was a theoretical exercise in quantum physics designed to demonstrate the uncertainty principle,” Sheila explained.

  Their blank stares clearly told her that Joe and Brenda were completely at sea.

  With a world-weary sigh, Sheila explained, “Basically, you seal a cat in a box and attached to the box is a canister of poisonous gas and another piece of equipment that emits an atomic nucleus that may or may not decay in one hour. If the nucleus decays, it will emit a particle that triggers the gas, if it doesn’t the gas will not be triggered. The experiment is set up so that chances of decay or not decay are exactly fifty-fifty. When you open the box you will see either a dead cat or a living cat. It…”

  “Isn’t this a bit cruel to the cat?”

  Sheila took in Brenda’s concerned stare, and hastened to explain. “There isn’t really a cat, Brenda, it’s a hypothetical exercise only.”

  “How does the cat breathe if the box is sealed?” demanded Joe. “I mean, the chances are it would run out of air if the box wasn’t large enough.”

  “And did they put milk in for it?” Brenda wanted to know. “If the RSPCA found out there’d be hell to pay. Sealing cats in boxes with poisonous gas. It’s not right.”

  Sheila gave up the ghost. “Let’s forget about Schröedinger’s cat. Tell us what it is you specifically don’t understand, Joe.”

  Taking a deep drag on his cigarette, he tuned in his lively mind. “That cop. Flowers. He asked us whether we recognised Eddie’s jacket, and then his wallet, and yet, he had a STAC membership card in there. Heknew it was Eddie’s so why ask us to confirm it?”

  Again it was Sheila who had the explanation, and to her relief it was simpler than quantum physics. “The police need as many forms of positive identification as they can get,” she advised them. “It’s all right saying they’ve found a wallet containing his membership card, but for all they know, the wallet could have been stolen, that could be the thief’s coat and Eddie Dobson could be laid beaten up in hospital or something.”

  “Ah.”

  “Right.”

  A short silence intervened. Joe screwed up his malleable features again.

  “I’ll tell you what is a much more important question. Why did Eddie take a coat with him in the first place?” He gestured around them. “It’s been hot enough to fry eggs on the pavement for the last week and there’s no change in the forecast for at least another day or two. Why would he want a coat?”

  The two women sat in awe of him. After a slightly longer silence, Joe realised they were waiting for him to supply the answer.

  “Well, I don’t know, either. I was asking the question. It doesn’t mean to say I have the answer.” He checked his watch. “It’s almost half past three. Shouldn’t we be getting back to Filey? Dinner’s at five and the coach comes at six.”

  The other two agreed, Joe paid the bill and they ambled away from the cliff top, up into the town centre, towards the bus station. They waited patiently at a crossing for the lights to change in their favour. When they did so, Joe stepped out, only to be dragged back by Sheila as a red van tore past.

  “Idiot,” Joe cursed, and studied the back of the van.Scarborough Gases, serving the licensed trade since 1965. “He’ll be serving time for dangerous driving when I’ve done speaking to his bosses.”

  “You should watch where you’re going, Joe,” Sheila told him. “I always taught the children that just because a traffic light says stop, you should not assume that drivers will stop.”

  Ten minutes later they boarded a bus, Joe grumbled about not being allowed to smoke, while Sheila and Brenda sat on the rear, face-to-face, bench seat comparing their purchases.

  As the bus turned off the main road, onto the A1039 into Filey, Sheila asked, “Joe, are we going to tell the oth
ers that Eddie is, er, you know?”

  “Dead,” growled Joe. “You mean dead. Right? Why do we have a problem using the word, dead? Huh? He’s dead. There’s nothing we can do about that, so we shouldn’t be troubled about using the word.”

  “All right,” interjected Brenda, “but are we going to tell everyone else?”

  The bus bumped over a level crossing and plodded on to Filey town centre, Joe gave the proposition brief thought and then shook his head.

  “My feeling is no, we don’t tell ’em. At least, not tonight.” He picked up the doubt in their eyes. “Look, we’re all going out tonight to enjoy ourselves, to take in a show. We booked it months ago, and we’ve all been looking forward to it, right? Right. Do we want to spoil the evening for everyone else? We three know. That’s enough for now. My feeling is we should leave it until tomorrow morning and I’ll let everyone know at breakfast.”

  “And put them off their bacon and egg,” grumbled Brenda.

  “It didn’t put you off your toasted teacakes,” Joe pointed out and stared out of the windows. Passing the front of the Star Inn, he spotted Sarah Pringle coming out, alongside a tall, well-built man dressed in scruffy jeans and a shabby working shirt. Even without the fisherman’s jumper, Joe recognised him as Ivan Irwin.

  It was not only Ivan who had changed, but Sarah Pringle looked different, too. She had put on her wig, the one she had worn the previous night. In daylight, he could see the effect it had on her. Reaching her neck and shoulders, it appeared almost black and took several years off her age.

  The pair were smiling over something.

  “I’ll bet he’s telling her about how he tried to warn me off,” Joe grumbled.

  “Say again, Joe?” Sheila said.”

  He shook his head. “Nothing. Sarah Pringle and one of those Irwin brothers.” He nodded through the window. “She’s pinching a couple of hours off.”

  “Quite right, too,” Sheila said. “You do it back home.” Dragging their attention back to the debate, she said, “I think you’re right, Joe. I think we should keep Eddie’s death between ourselves for the time being.”