A five-foot Christmas tree stood in one corner, its lights flashing amiably, and various other decorations were scattered about the wall. Joe had always considered it unusual since both her sons lived in America, and although she would love to be with them, he knew that Sheila preferred Christmas at home.
On the one occasion he had asked, she explained, “I speak to them regularly over video links, but especially on Christmas morning, and my grandchildren like to see the house properly decorated.”
But now, she appeared pale, drawn, and it seemed to both Brenda and Joe that she had lost weight; the difficult feat to achieve considering her already slender lines. Clad only in a nightdress with a fluffy gown wrapped around her, she directed Joe to the kitchen, asking him to make her a week tea without milk, and standard brews for himself and Brenda, and led her best friend into the living room, where she cowered in an armchair by the glowing gas fire.
When Joe joined them, Brenda was on the corner of the three-seat settee closest to Sheila, and when he had distributed the cups of tea, he took the seat on the other end of the couch.
Brenda wasted little time on small talk, and asked how Sheila had come to this situation.
“The Cape Verde Islands. I had this local dish. Arroz de Marisco.” Sheila pronounced it in an almost perfect Spanish/Portuguese accent. “It’s a sort of Portuguese paella, and I’m not saying there was anything wrong with it, but you know me. I prefer traditional British cooking.”
“Joe’s home-made steak and kidney pudding,” Brenda said.
Sheila raised a weak smile. “I wouldn’t go that far.” She received a scowl from the object of her teasing. “But ever since I had this meal, I’ve not been right.” She gazed sadly through the windows. “It must be awful for Martin. Here we are, married just three months, and he’s saddled with a wife who falls sick at the drop of a hat.”
Joe’s smartphone bleated for attention, and he cut the call off, but not without checking the menu window and registering a call from Tel Bailey.
He apologised to Sheila. “Not urgent. I can get back to him.”
Ignoring the interruption, Brenda was keen to reassure her friend. “Martin sounded very concerned when we spoke to him this morning.”
“He is,” Sheila said. “I feel so sorry for him, Brenda, but he’s a paragon of patience.” For the second time she smiled at Joe. “I’m sure you could learn a few lessons from him.”
“Nice try, Sheila, but I’m too concerned about you to let you wind me up. I don’t want you worrying about your wages or your profit share. They’ll be there, as always.”
“To be honest, money is the least of my worries. But you’re very kind.”
Joe leapt upon the opportunity to tease her for a change. “I know I am, but don’t go telling everyone.”
Sheila took a sip of tea as her stomach gurgled audibly. “I’m sorry. I can’t help it.”
“Then stop apologising for it,” Brenda suggested.
Sheila’s sadness showed through again despite her obvious attempts to suppress it. “I was going to invite you both for Christmas lunch. Well, you both live alone, and although I know we usually make our own arrangements—”
“Yes,” Brenda interrupted. “You usually come to my place, or vice versa.”
“And I usually end up with Lee, Cheryl and young Danny,” Joe said.
“I was saying,” Sheila went on, irritably, “I was going to invite you for lunch on Christmas Day, but I’m not sure I’ll be well enough.”
“Let’s change the plans, then. If you’re up to it, bring Martin along to my place for a good, old fashioned knees-up,” Brenda insisted, “and I’ll invite Joe along. Short of a donkey, we need something to pin the tail on.”
Joe ignored the badinage. He desperately wanted to bring up Howard’s opinions. Brenda had warned him not to mention it, and he agreed. In his balance sheet, when tallying up the pluses and minuses, diplomacy was firmly in the column headed ‘Liabilities’. Resisting the urge to open his mouth (and put his foot in it) he nevertheless told her of Howard’s visit to The Lazy Luncheonette.
“He was always more considerate than his mother,” Sheila responded. “If Rita were still with us and I told her about my troubles, it would eventually turn into a debate on her health problems.”
“Have I told you about my bad back?” Joe said, and grinned at her. “Do you think you’ll be well enough for Churchill’s tomorrow night?”
It was an aspect none of them had thought about. It had only just occurred to Joe. Thursday was the traditional 3rd Age Club’s Christmas dinner and dance held at Sanford’s finest restaurant/nightspot.
Sheila’s face fell. “I don’t want to commit myself, Joe.”
“Well, you have your tickets. If you don’t think you can make it, let me know, and I’ll see if I can sell them to someone else.”
“Howard and Gemma,” Brenda suggested brightly.
“Hardly third-agers,” Joe protested, “and they’re not members of the club.”
“Neither is Martin, but it didn’t stop you selling me a ticket for him,” Sheila reminded him.
Joe gave up the unequal battle. Whenever he got into a debate with the two women, he invariably lost the argument. “All right. Whatever. Listen, Sheila, I don’t want you coming back to work until you’re absolutely well, and if that means sometime in the New Year, then so be it. We’ll cope.”
“I miss you two more than anything else. I enjoy the banter in the café. I even enjoy your snaps and snarls, Joe. I’m really sorry, and I want to get back as soon as I can.”
Joe patted her hand sympathetically. “Take it easy. Get yourself right. No hurry.”
It was almost half past four and night had already fallen by the time he and Brenda came out to their respective cars, and at Joe’s suggestion, they pulled out of the street, around the corner, away from Sheila’s prying eyes before they stopped, and he climbed into the passenger seat of Brenda’s Peugeot.
She ran the engine to keep warm, and asked, “What do you think?”
“I think Howard and her doctor were talking a load of hot air. Did you see how pale and pasty she looked? That’s not in her mind, Brenda. There’s something seriously wrong with that woman.”
“But if that’s the case, Joe, they would have traced it by now.”
Joe drummed irritable fingers on his knee caps. “I don’t know. They’re not perfect you know, these medics. They can miss things.” He quickly changed the subject. “Can we manage, do you think? Or should we get some help in? At the café, I mean.”
“I think we’ll definitely need to bring in some of Cheryl’s friends. What with you flying off to investigate this and that murder, it’ll probably be too much for us, but I’ll keep an eye on things.”
“Right.” Joe prepared to leave the car and return to his own. “I’d better shoot off to Leeds, and I’ll see you first thing in the morning.”
***
Even with a hands-free option, Joe was reluctant to use his phone while driving, but as he ran down the M1 into central Leeds, smack in the middle of the rush hour, a level of traffic compounded by the extra pressure of Christmas shoppers, he made an exception and returned Tel’s call, only to discover that the elite builder was ringing to apologise.
“Yeah, Joe, it was Denny who said I should ring you, cos I was a bit short with you earlier.”
Joe grunted. “If you want snappy, you should try me behind the counter of The Lazy Luncheonette first thing on the morning. Just forget it, Tel, and concentrate your mind and recalling every tiny thing you can about last night. I’m on my way to Leeds right now, but tomorrow, I’ll get hold of Ros Hepple and see what she can tell me.”
North Shires had their offices on Park Row, the main banking and insurance area of the city, but it was a one-way street, and only the upper half was accessible to traffic other than buses. It meant fighting his way right round the city centre, to approach from The Headrow, across the front of the magnificent town
hall. At this hour, the streets were clogged with a constant stream of headlights, augmenting the spread of Christmas illuminations hung both above the streets and glowing from shop windows.
Joe had met ex-Detective Sergeant Denise Latham when she was investigating the fire which burned down the old Lazy Luncheonette, and she had helped prove Joe innocent. More than that, she was instrumental in exposing the real arsonists/murderers. From there, a firm friendship had developed, turning almost inevitably into a relationship, and Joe was happy to be with her. He even helped with her investigations, most of which were on behalf of North Shires. When she was killed in a car accident (which later proved to be deliberate and a case of murder) North Shires offered Joe the opportunity to take on her work. He did not exactly decline, but he remained choosy about the cases he was willing to accept.
Since then, he had developed a good working relationship with the company’s senior investigator, Eliot Banks. Banks freely admitted that he preferred to use men and women who had seen service with the police, but like many people, he readily acknowledged Joe’s deductive skills and intuitive leaps to the correct conclusion. He also paid excellent rates which helped offset Joe’s reduction in income when he had to pay Lee, Sheila and Brenda their share of The Lazy Luncheonette’s quarterly performance.
But getting to North Shires, especially in the rush-hour was no easy task. Long before he made the final right turn into Park Row, his frustration was manifesting in muttered curses and agitated gestures to other road users. The cost of a pay-and-display car park did little to appease his annoyance, and by the time he confronted a security guard inside the North Shires’ building, he was at boiling point.
“He never told me he was expecting you.”
“He keeps you abreast of all his appointments, does he?”
The security man was suitably offended. “I’m here to keep toe rags like you out of the building.”
“Even when one of the big bosses is expecting me? Just get on the phone to him, you clown, and tell him Joe Murray’s here.”
“If you’re ragging me…”
With this unspoken threat hanging in the air, the security officer spoke to Banks, and Joe was finally allowed to go on his way.
For all that the company was housed in an impressive ten-storey office block, in the heart of the city’s financial district, its front windows overlooking Part Row, and the wide open City Square, complete with Christmas decorations, Banks’s fourth-floor office was at the rear of the building, and looked out onto a dingy yard littered with dustbins, and a small smoke shelter.
Eliot Banks was somewhere around forty years of age. A tall, square-shouldered man with a rough edge to his voice. The fingers of his large hands were decked with various gold rings, and behind the open collar of his white shirt and the loosely hanging, red, company tie, a thick, gold chain dangled around his neck. It was all designed to intimidate; to give the impression of a late-model, tough street cop, even though most people were aware that Banks had never been in the police service. Joe did not know him well, but based on Denise’s basic biography of him, he knew that Banks had some military service behind him, and he was excellent at his job, uncompromising, and not afraid of pushing the edge of the envelope in order to prevent fraud.
He waved Joe into an empty seat, and held up a bottle of Johnny Walker.
Joe declined. “I’ll catch up with the booze in the Miner’s Arms tonight. You said you had something for me.”
“I do,” Banks said, pouring a generous measure of whiskey into a beaker.
To Joe, the gesture had more to do with the man’s posing as a wannabe cop, and as if to reinforce it, Banks took a healthy swallow, dropped the beaker on the desk and leaned back in his chair.
“The case is a good few years old, Joe, and North Shires did settle at the time, even though there were a lot of questions unanswered. Fifty thousand quid. And that happened – we think – not once but twice. Course, I wasn’t with the company at that time, and I might have dug a little bit deeper into it than the company or even the cops.”
“Don’t think I’m being picky, Eliot, but you’re not saying what this is about.”
“Yeah. Right. Murder, Joe. That’s what it’s about. The police said no… at least in one case they did. Initially they couldn’t prove anything in the second, but we eventually showed them the error of their ways. Trouble is, the cops can’t find the perpetrator, and I’m keen to prevent it happening a third time.”
Joe applied his mind, and waded through the disparate elements of the tale. “Right, so you know who he is, and where he is, and who he’s gonna kill next?”
“No, yes, yes. I don’t know for sure that he’s the right man, but I do know where he is, and I know who his next victim is likely to be, and if I’m not mistaken, she’s a friend of yours.”
Joe laughed nervously. “That doesn’t leave you with many options. There aren’t many people I can call friends.”
“How about Sheila Riley?”
Joe gaped. “Sheila?”
Banks nodded grimly. “If I’m right, Joe, she doesn’t have long to live.”
Chapter Five
Joe’s head whirled. He reached across the desk, took the bottle and swallowed a slug from the neck. “Are you off your trolley? Sheila? She’s just got married.”
Banks remained comfortably superior. “I know. And that’s what put me onto her.”
He sat upright in his seat, and opened the file on his desk. From his poor vantage point, Joe could see that one of the documents was a photocopy of a page from the Sanford Gazette, and it detailed Sheila’s marriage back in September, carrying a page-wide photograph of her, her new husband, and one or two of those in attendance, including Joe, Brenda, and Sheila’s two sons.
“Contrary to popular opinion, we don’t just sit on our backsides waiting for things to happen here,” Banks went on. “We do our homework. I meanersay, why am I still here at getting on for six o’clock, on a December evening, when I could be home putting my feet up? Homework is why. Denise used to talk a lot about you and your friends, Brenda and Sheila, and I happened to be skimming through the Sanford Gazette when I noticed her wedding photograph.”
Joe frowned. “What puzzles me more than anything is you taking the Sanford Gazette here in Leeds. I live in Sanford, and I don’t always bother with it.”
Banks went on to list other provincial newspapers which he took on a regular basis, from cities like Wakefield and York, and towns like Huddersfield, Dewsbury, Harrogate, and as far afield as Scarborough and Hull to the East, Rochdale and Skipton to the West.
“I spend some of my time reading these things, Joe, because I never know what I might come across, and my job is all about preventing fraud, and if I can’t prevent it, then proving it and bringing it to the courts.” Banks tapped the photocopy of the Sanford Gazette. “When I looked at this photograph, I recognised Martin Naylor right away, only according to our records his name is Mervyn Nellis, and thirteen years ago, his first wife disappeared without trace.”
Joe’s quelled his immediate anxiety for Sheila’s safety. “The murder you couldn’t prove?”
“The very same. It’s difficult to prove murder when you don’t have a body, and Francine Nellis, nee Varanne didn’t leave us a body. She was French by birth, and when the police questioned Nellis, he insisted that she just took off one day, and he never saw or heard from her again. He assumed that she’d gone back to France, but immigration had no trace of passport ever being used, and the French police were about as much use as ours. They couldn’t find her, her family never heard anything from her, and that was it. Seven years down the line, she was declared legally dead, and North Shires had no option but to pay up. Fifty grand. At the time, Nellis lived in Darlington, but the minute he got his grubby little paws on the cash, he disappeared, too, and we never heard anything of him again. Then five years ago, a man named Marlon Newman took out a fifty thousand pounds policy on his partner, a lady named Deirdre Ullswo
rth. They were quite happily living together in a nice little house on the outskirts of Ripon. Two years down the line, Deirdre had a heart attack. She was a teacher, and we all know the kind of pressure they’re under. She was in her mid-fifties at the time, so it wasn’t entirely unexpected. A couple of weeks after she’d been discharged from hospital, she had a second heart attack and died. No post-mortem necessary. Marlon Newman took time out of his grief to claim the insurance, and North Shires paid up. This was just before I was appointed head of fraud, and I reviewed the case along with others, including Francine Nellis. Marlon Newman looks remarkably like Mervyn Nellis, and both of them bear a striking resemblance to Martin Naylor.”
To support his assertion, Banks placed two photographs and the photocopy on the desk, and turned all three to face Joe who could see the likeness immediately. They were the same height, had the same slender, but athletic build, but Mervyn Nellis sported shoulder length hair, while Marlon Newman was possessed of a full set, beard and moustache, and Martin Naylor’s hair was neatly trimmed, and he was clean shaven.
Joe recalled Sheila’s words on the afternoon she had asked him to escort her down the aisle. Martin isn’t from Sanford. He’s not even a Yorkshireman. Nellis, Newman, call him what you will, originated from Darlington, and although it was borderline, Darlington was not a part of Yorkshire.
His fear for Sheila’s life returned, and he urged Banks, “You have to tell the police.”
The other man shrugged his broad shoulders. “Based on what, Joe? Three men who look alike. Neither Nellis nor Newman are on any DNA database. Nellis was, true, but when his wife’s disappearance was ruled as nothing more sinister than that, he insisted on the record being destroyed, which it was. We did get onto the police in Ripon after Deirdre died and I’d rumbled the similarities. They exhumed the body, and did a post-mortem on what was left of her. Speculative, but it shouted atropine poisoning. Course, by this time, Marlon Newman had sold Deirdre’s house for the better part of two hundred grand, taken another fifty k off North Shires, and disappeared without trace. As far as the cops are concerned, it is murder, but it’s a cold case because they can’t find Newman. And you and I both know why they can’t find him, don’t we?”
Merry Murders Everyone Page 4