The Whitby Murders (A Yorkshire Murder Mystery)

by J. R. Ellis

  ‘Just keep an eye on Louise.’

  ‘That’s why I rang, sir. I called in to see her yesterday and she seemed okay. She said she was going to look up some old friends in Leeds and meet up with them last night. And just to reassure you, I’m still absolutely sure that she was not involved in anything bad.’

  ‘Good. Well, keep in contact with her. She’s been through a lot and I’m still very concerned about her. She obviously likes you.’

  ‘Yes, we get on well, so don’t worry, sir. I’ll pop in again soon and she’s got my number if she wants to call me.’

  ‘Good. I assume you’re also keeping an eye on that partner of yours so he doesn’t shame us all by getting arrested for being drunk and disorderly.’

  Steph laughed. ‘I am, sir, but the good news there is that he had a very sober time with his friend. They had a few cocktails, a pizza and then went home.’

  ‘Good lord! How sensible! You’ve obviously made a man out of him. You want to be careful, he seems to be really settling down. He’ll be wanting a family next.’

  She laughed again. ‘Maybe, but all in good time for that one, sir.’

  One of the reasons why Andy had called a comparatively early end to his evening with Jason was that he wanted to make an early visit to the apartment shared by Mark Garner and Maggie Hinton, before they left for work. He collected DC Jenkins and they arrived at the address in Dalston before 8.00 a.m.

  Maggie opened the door and was startled by the sight of the two detectives. Andy made the introductions and they showed their identification.

  ‘Is this to do with the deaths in Whitby?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  Maggie’s face crumpled in despair. ‘Oh God, no! I thought we were done with that.’ She turned back into the hallway and shouted, ‘Mark! It’s the police.’

  Mark emerged wearing suit trousers and a white shirt without a tie. He was drinking from a mug. He frowned at Andy and Jenkins.

  ‘If this is about Whitby, we’ve told you everything we know. Anyway, this is a bit early, isn’t it? We’ve got to be off soon,’ he said.

  ‘We won’t keep you long. It’s you we want to speak to but it would useful if Ms Hinton was here too.’

  Maggie was alarmed. ‘Mark, what’s this about? Is there something you haven’t told me?’

  ‘Let’s go inside, shall we?’ continued Andy. The four of them walked silently into a long kitchen diner and sat down on sofas.

  ‘I’ll come straight to the point,’ said Andy, addressing Garner as he consulted his briefing. ‘When you told DCI Oldroyd about the incident at university concerning Dominic Holgate plagiarising your work, you said that the authorities sorted it out and you didn’t get involved. You also stated that Holgate apologised to you in the end.’ He looked at Garner, who was avoiding eye contact.

  ‘But we’ve spoken to Mr Timmins, the head of student records at St Thomas’s, and he says that the incident was in fact very acrimonious. Holgate actually accused you of copying from him.’

  ‘Mark! You didn’t tell me that. What’s going on?’ interjected Maggie.

  ‘So,’ continued Andy, ‘I think it’s time you gave a truer account of what happened and your feelings towards Holgate.’

  Garner looked sheepishly at Maggie and took a deep breath. ‘I didn’t want to worry you. You’ve been in a very emotional state and I thought you might start worrying that I had a motive for wishing Dominic harm.’

  ‘Well, I bloody well do now, you absolute idiot!’

  ‘So tell us what happened?’ Andy interjected.

  Garner frowned at the memory. ‘We submitted our essays and a few days later we were summoned by the head of department to his office. He presented the two essays to us and they were very similar. I was furious because I knew he’d copied from me. I’d leant him my work to have a look at, not to present huge chunks of it as his own. He’d been in one of his bloody plays and done no work that term.

  ‘I couldn’t believe it when he claimed that he’d written the essay and I must have copied from him. I think he was terrified they were going to expel him because he’d done something like it before.’

  ‘He had. So what happened?’

  ‘I had a real go at him in front of the head of department and, yes, I threatened him, said I would beat him to pulp and so on. It was all anger; I would never have done it.’

  ‘How was it resolved?’

  ‘I proved that I’d written the essay by presenting dated drafts. He gave in and admitted it. He had to resubmit for a basic mark, but I thought he was bloody lucky to still be on the course after trying to blame me. That was criminal. I should have threatened to go to the police. That’s what the authorities always dread: bad publicity. They made us sign a non-disclosure agreement. I felt it was almost making me part of something criminal when I was entirely innocent.’

  Andy pressed on. ‘Did you ever threaten Holgate again?’

  ‘No. After we signed the agreement, he said he was sorry and I just left it at that. We’d never really been friends, just members of the same course. It soured the rest of my time at university a bit. I avoided him whenever he was around.’

  ‘And then he turned up a few years later?’

  ‘He did. It was a bit of a shock when Maggie’s friend Andrea turned up with her boyfriend and it was him. We had a word. He apologised again and we decided to leave it alone for the sake of the friendship group.’

  ‘Very mature and sensible,’ remarked Andy. ‘But how do you feel about him now?’

  Garner paused and Maggie looked at him. ‘I was still really pissed off with him, to be honest. It wasn’t great going out in a group when he was there and hearing people praise him: “Oh, Dominic, this and that”, when I knew the truth about him; he was a cheat. Sometimes I felt like denouncing him in front of the group but I didn’t want to upset everything. In particular, I don’t know whether Andrea knew about it and I didn’t want to be the one who told her.’ He paused. ‘So that’s it.’ He turned to Maggie. ‘I’m sorry.’ She shook her head and looked away, seemingly not yet ready to forgive him.

  Andy was not finished. ‘So did you see an opportunity to get revenge when you were all in Whitby?’

  ‘I wasn’t there when they were killed. I didn’t get there until the next day.’

  ‘How do we know you weren’t there? Did you plan things with someone else who had a grievance against Holgate?’

  ‘And what about Andrea?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe you can tell me?’

  At last, Maggie came to Mark’s defence. ‘I think that’s ridiculous, Sergeant! We all saw what happened to Andrea, and Mark wasn’t there. What reason would Mark have to kill her? Are you saying he killed Dominic after Dominic had killed Andrea? Why can’t the police just accept what happened that day? All of us have had to come to terms with it.’

  ‘It’s not quite so straightforward,’ replied Andy, but he didn’t go into details. ‘Where were you on Wednesday, the day of the murder, and Thursday?’

  ‘Here at work. I didn’t have any time off. I was going to join them in Whitby for the weekend. They let me have the Friday off in the circumstances and I drove up there.’

  ‘Okay. Give the address of your workplace to DC Jenkins. We’ll need to check your alibi.’

  ‘Fine.’

  When they left, Andy was pleased to have got to the truth about the plagiarism incident but he wasn’t convinced that there was much mileage in pursuing Garner any further. His story was convincing.

  Andy felt dispirited and tired after his very early start. He still seemed to have found out very little for his boss to use and was wondering whether his work in London was at all worthwhile. However, it was at this point that he received a call from Oldroyd telling him about the discovery of Hugh Preston’s body and urging him to continue his investigations.

  When DC Hampton returned with his boss, Inspector Granger, to the house where Elaine Pesku rented a room, he hoped that he would
not encounter the ‘white goddess’ woman again. There was to be no such luck, as she again answered his knock on the shabby door. She looked exactly the same as he remembered, with her pale face and vacant eyes, peering at him as though the light was too strong. She looked as if she rarely made it out of some dark room, which he imagined to be heavy with the scent of joss sticks and full of outlandish furnishings and ornaments connected to spells and witchcraft.

  ‘Yes,’ she murmured, and didn’t seem to remember him, although it had only been two days since he was there before.

  ‘Whitby police. Can we speak to Elaine Pesku, please?’ he asked, presenting his ID.

  ‘I think she just went out.’

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘Not long, I heard the door.’ She screwed up her eyes and looked closely at Hampton. Was she short-sighted? he wondered. ‘Weren’t you here the other day? I said you wouldn’t get anywhere alone, didn’t I? It’s nearly Halloween; the powers of darkness are strong. Only the white goddess can save you. If you—’

  ‘Did she say where she was going?’ interrupted Granger. The woman turned her dreamy eyes to Granger as if seeing her for the first time.

  ‘No, we don’t speak much, but I sense a troubled aura about her.’ Not surprising, thought Hampton as, at the very least, she’s lost her job and maybe she’s involved in something far worse. You didn’t need some kind of special powers to work that out.

  ‘Do you know anything about her? Where she was before she came here and what she did?’

  The woman looked pained and screwed up her face as if remembering things was an effort. ‘She was a student in London. That’s all I know.’

  ‘Well, thank you, anyway,’ said Granger, and the detectives turned back up the narrow alleyway to the road at the top. As they reached the road, a car went past.

  ‘Hey, that’s her, ma’am, Pesku,’ called Hampton, pointing at the car. ‘In the passenger seat.’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Granger, ‘and I got a look at the driver. I think I know who it was. Come on.’

  They quickly got into the police car and Granger drove off after the other car at speed. The chase took them back downhill towards the town centre. As they got closer, Granger put on the siren. There was the usual pause before a driver realises the police car is actually following them and wants them to stop. Granger flashed the lights and the car came to a halt just as they reached the harbour. Suddenly, a woman dressed in jeans and a jacket threw open the passenger door and leaped out of the car carrying a bag. She ran up a steep street called Flowergate. It was Elaine Pesku.

  ‘Quick! After her,’ said Granger, and Hampton got out of the car and started his second chase of the week. Unfortunately, this time the pursued person was already out of view around a sharp bend to the right, and when he turned the corner she was nowhere to be seen. He ran up the cobbled street past a butcher’s shop selling meaty snacks and several goth dens now also adorned with Halloween displays. There were several narrow alleys down which she could have disappeared. He spent some time looking in shops, but there were so many places she could hide amongst the dense clutter that it was fruitless so he returned to the car. Granger was speaking to the driver who was none other than Philip Owen.

  ‘I don’t know why she’s run off,’ he was saying. ‘I was giving her a lift into town. She lives on my route in.’

  ‘I see. All very innocent again. You’re cropping up too many times in this case for my liking,’ said Granger. ‘Is this your dad’s car?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Owen, looking a bit embarrassed.

  ‘I’ll bet he doesn’t know you’re driving it, does he?’ Owen didn’t reply. ‘You’d better look after it, then. Is he insured for you to drive?’ Owen looked alarmed but Granger didn’t pursue it. ‘Did Pesku say anything to you about anything? Was there any particular reason why she wanted a lift? Had she had any news or anything?’

  ‘No, she never says much. She just texted to ask was I going into town and could I give her a lift.’

  Granger let him go and turned to Hampton who told her that Pesku had escaped. ‘Well, she obviously knows we’re onto her. I wonder if she’s somehow got word that Preston’s body has been found?’

  ‘It’s possible, ma’am. That industrial park where the skip was discovered isn’t far from where she lives and rumours travel fast, especially once those kids who found it got back home.’

  ‘I wonder what she’s going to do now?’

  ‘Lie low somewhere?’

  ‘Yes, but she can only do that for so long. She had a bag with her. She might have been going to leave the town for a while. Okay, let’s go back. I’m putting you in charge of the search; you’ve got the best knowledge of the town and the most likely places where someone might hide. We also need to find out where she was a student. That won’t be straightforward given that London’s got thousands of them.’

  Hampton was a local man who had lived in Whitby all his life and relished a challenge. ‘Yes, ma’am, leave it to me. We’ll find her.’

  ‘Do you want to hear my latest poem?’ Oldroyd had joined Deborah in a small café in one of the steep, narrow streets on the west side of the town. ‘I was writing it last night when you were asleep. It took my mind off the case, though it is about Whitby.’

  ‘Go on then,’ replied Deborah, taking a bite from her smoked salmon sandwich. She’d encouraged him to write as a counter to his tendency to overwork. Oldroyd read from his notebook:

  ‘Whitby Light and Dark

  Scudding clouds,

  Flicker light and dark,

  Across the sea.

  Light came with Hilda,

  The abbess on the hill,

  A beacon of hope.

  Darkness with Dracula,

  Bounding from the ship

  As a black dog.

  All is now tame.

  Tourists in the bright sunlight,

  Goths dressing up in dark.’

  ‘Oh, I like that,’ said Deborah. ‘I take it the light is with Hilda the Abbess of Whitby?’

  ‘Yes, she lived in the seventh century and was apparently a very virtuous, much-loved woman. Then darkness and evil with Dracula.’

  ‘And why is everything now “tame”?’

  ‘That might not be the right word. I was just thinking about the contrast between drama and the seriousness of the past in fact and fiction with today, when everything has become sort of trivialised into tourism. I suppose I was thinking about this Dracula’s Lair thing in the case and people just coming here to sunbathe or dress up as goths. It’s a leisure and entertainment place now and it used to be a powerhouse of virtue, ideas, exploration. Think of Captain Cook going out from here to Australia and the South Seas. Do you know that Caedmon, the first named English poet, looked after the sheep at Hilda’s monastery?’

  ‘Well, fascinating stuff, but it’s not like you to romanticise the past. It’s great that people have the leisure to come and enjoy themselves. Life would have been very hard for ordinary people in all those times you mentioned.’

  ‘I know. It just amazes me what distinguished people there have been in a small place like this.’ He put the book aside and carried on eating a cheese and pickle sandwich. ‘Do you fancy a walk up the hill on the east side after this? We can see the abbey ruins and the church where Bram Stoker set scenes in Dracula.’

  ‘Sounds good.’

  Oldroyd finished his sandwich and drank his coffee. Then he sat back with a sigh. Mixing work with pleasure as he was doing at the moment certainly had its advantages. There was nothing he liked better than pottering around an interesting place like Whitby, especially with such a pleasant companion.

  Six

  The time and distance seemed endless, and my knees trembled and my breath came laboured as I toiled up the endless steps to the Abbey . . . I could see the seat and the white figure . . . There was undoubtedly something long and black bending over the half reclining white figure. I called in fright, ‘Lucy! Lucy!’ and som
ething raised a head, and from where I was I could see a white face and red, gleaming eyes.

  From Mina Murray’s Journal in Dracula

  Oldroyd and Deborah sauntered down Church Street towards the abbey steps. There was further evidence of the preparations for Halloween in the shops: pumpkins, witches, black cats and cobwebs were in even greater profusion. When they reached Withington’s shop, Oldroyd glanced through the window and caught a glimpse of Withington himself. For a second the crooked jeweller’s eyes met his and then he looked away frowning. Oldroyd smiled. That man would be relieved when they went past his shop and didn’t go in. He knew the police were investigating his activities and he would most likely be prosecuted. Not before time, thought Oldroyd.

  They turned the corner and saw the steps curving up steeply to the right.

  ‘These steps appear in Dracula. Mina Murray sees her friend Lucy on a seat at the top with a strange figure leaning over her,’ said Oldroyd.

  ‘Dracula himself, presumably,’ replied Deborah, who was breezily walking up the steps as if it was all level. Oldroyd tried and failed to keep up with her and had to sit down for a short rest at the top. Deborah joined him on a bench.

  ‘This is about where Stoker imagined Lucy to be, I think,’ said Oldroyd, looking around at the church, the abbey and back down over the panorama of the town and out to sea. ‘It must still be spooky up here at night and of course this is where Louise and the others came when they got the text from Dom.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me about that.’

  Oldroyd explained about the strange late-night encounter in the churchyard.

  ‘Good Lord! That sounds like a scene from Dracula itself. I’m not fond of films like that. If I’m watching something like that and it gets too horrific, I have to remind myself that it’s all acting and special effects, nothing’s real.’

  ‘Indeed,’ replied Oldroyd rather vacantly because a thought had struck him. For once Deborah didn’t notice.

  ‘Come on then, let’s have a look round the abbey ruins, shall we?’ she said, getting up from the bench.