The I-Spy Murders
A Sanford 3rd Age Club Mystery (#2)
David W Robinson
Copyright © 2017 by David W Robinson
Cover Photography by Adobe Stock © DiViArts
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All rights reserved.
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, places, and incidents are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.
Printed in the United Kingdom
First Black Line Edition, Crooked Cat Books. 2017
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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 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
By the same author
The STAC Mystery series:
1. The Filey Connection
2. The I-Spy Murders
3. A Halloween Homicide
4. A Murder for Christmas
5. Murder at the Murder Mystery Weekend
6. My Deadly Valentine
7. The Chocolate Egg Murders
8. The Summer Wedding Murder
9. Costa del Murder
10. Christmas Crackers
11. Death in Distribution
12. A Killing in the Family
13. A Theatrical Murder
14. Trial by Fire
15. Peril in Palmanova
The SPOOKIES Mystery series
The Haunting of Melmerby Manor
The Man in Black
The I-Spy Murders
A Sanford 3rd Age Club Mystery (#2)
Prologue
The younger woman opened her mouth to scream.
“Shut up,” hissed the other. “Just shut it.”
The youngster put a fist to her open mouth in an effort to suppress her cries.
Her elder chewed an anxious lip and pressed a hand to his neck again.
“Definitely dead.”
The young girl burst into tears once more. The woman grabbed her by shoulder and shook her. “Listen, you silly little tart, this is no time to lose it.”
“What… what are we gonna do? Call the cops?”
“If we do, we can both kiss goodbye to whatever careers we may have.” The woman’s mind ran into overdrive again, mapping out possible scenarios. “Come on. Give me a hand to dress him.” She reached for the dead man’s clothes.
Horror struck across the younger woman’s delicate face. “I… I can’t touch him.”
“You didn’t have a problem a few minutes ago, did you?” the elder said, dragging his shorts on over his ankles. “Now stop being childish and help me.”
“What are we going to do?”
“I’ll call Wellesley. He’ll advise us.”
***
Gasping with exertion, they dragged his body a final few yards and released him. The elder woman looked back towards her car. It was almost invisible from this point, only the faint glow of its rear lights showing through the forest.
The girl turned away, unable to look upon his dormant, staring eyes. With an annoyed tut, the woman reached down and rolled him over so that his face lay buried in the mossy carpet of the forest floor.
“We’re just going to leave him like that?” The youngster was still too shocked and horror-struck to allow the full implications of the night’s events to sink in.
“There’s not much danger of him being found at this time of year,” the elder said. “The summer months, yes, but October or November? Not very likely. All the same we’d better cover him up.” Shining her light around, she made for a mass of fallen twigs and branches. “Come on. We’ll use these to cover him.” She strode boldly across the small clearing and grabbed a branch. “Ouch! Bloody hell!”
The youngster picked her way through the darkness. “What’s wrong?”
The other pointed to her right leg, where blood poured from a long cut just below the knee. “I’ve sticking plaster in the car,” she said. “Let’s deal with him first.”
They spent the next twenty minutes dragging twigs and scooping up leaves to cover him.
When they were finished, the elder led the way back to the car. “Fifteen miles, now, and we’re home free,” she said.
Her younger companion sulked. “It’s awful what we’re doing. He deserves a decent burial.”
“He was a pervert. He deserves what he got.” Climbing into the car, the woman checked her injured leg. “Stopped bleeding,” she said, examining the long, livid scar. “I’ll get to A & E tomorrow and get a tetanus jab.” She turned severe eyes on her companion. “Do you want to spend the rest of your life catering to pervies like him?”
A long silence followed. Eventually, the youngster shook her head.
The other started the car. “In that case, stop worrying about it. We’ve done the right thing. Now don’t ever mention it again.”
Chapter One
With the whine of a drill setting his teeth on edge, Joe Murray frowned and barked, “Say again. I didn’t hear you for that noisy sod.”
The driver stood before him, one of the Sanford Brewery dray men, grinned and raised his voice. “I said I’ll have a full English, two rounds of toast and a tea.”
Joe scribbled the order out and passed the note through the wall hatch to the kitchen.
While pouring the tea, Joe glanced sourly at a pair of workmen who were standing on table 13, to the right of the Lazy Luncheonette’s dining area. One had a large hammer drill pressed to the wall, the other stood by with angle-iron brackets and wall bolts. The trigger pressed, the workman leaned on his drill and the high-speed bit whined once more, reaming its way into the solid brick behind the plaster and pine finish, showering dust out into the air.
“Can’t you drill a bit quieter?” Joe shouted.
“What do you want me to do?” the workman called back. “Cover the bit with woolly earmuffs?”
“I need the earmuffs,” Joe retorted. “And that bloody thing needs a silencer.” He lowered his gaze to their heavy boots standing on newspaper which had been spread over the laminate top of table 13. “And you should have taken those pit boots off,” he complained.
“You just get on with your job, Joe, and leave us to ours,” said the senior man as he leaned on his drill again.
The dray man still waiting for service laughed. “What’s it all in aid of, Joe?”
Pouring the tea, Joe clucked. “Brenda. She’s on this I-Spy programme next week, isn’t she? I offered to put a portable on the wall but she and Sheila and Lee persuaded me to pay for one of those large TV screens instead.” He waved at a large, cardboard box containing the set, currently resting against the seat back between tables 13 and 14. “We’re gonna tune it to the I-Spy channel so you lot can eat
your breakfast and gawp at Brenda making a fool of herself.”
“I might come back a TV star,” Brenda Jump shouted from the kitchen as the drill dug into the wall again.
“You might come back with your reputation in tatters, Brenda,” called the dray man handing over a ten pound note in payment for his breakfast.
“Her reputation can’t sink much lower,” Joe commented, ringing up the sale and clawing change from the cash register.
“I heard that,” Brenda shouted.
Sheila Riley hurried from the kitchen carrying orders. “She heard that. And have you arranged cover for next week? I’m not carrying the can for the delays if you haven’t.”
“It’s done, it’s done,” Joe told her. He handed change to the drayman. “See. I own the bloody place and I’m just here to do as I’m told.”
The driver wandered off to join his mates on the left hand side of the café, away from the drill, and Joe concentrated on his next customer.
Eight o’clock Friday morning and the Lazy Luncheonette was at its busiest. Outside, the hot summer continued, with no sign of an end to the heat wave which had engulfed the country for the past eight weeks. With the last of the brewery drivers queuing up for breakfast, and the factories across the road ready to start work, the combination of heat and never-ending queues caused Joe and his staff enough stress without the added irritation of two men hanging a TV on the wall, but the installers had insisted it had to be done now or not until Monday.
“Monday’s no use,” Joe had protested. “The programme starts running on Saturday and I need it working by then. Can’t you do it at five in the afternoon, when the café’s shut?”
They stuck to their guns and for once, Joe was beaten into submission.
“I just hope you’re right about the extra custom it will bring in,” he had said to Sheila and Brenda as the men arrived to begin work at seven in the morning.
Situated in the middle of Britannia Parade, a line of shops set slightly back from the busy dual carriageway of Doncaster Road, the Lazy Luncheonette had never suffered from a lack of trade. The industrial estate was directly opposite with all its factories and offices, Sanford Retail Park stood at the rear, and the café enjoyed the overspill from there. Sanford Brewery was less than a mile from the place, and its delivery drivers were regular callers, and since Doncaster Road was one of the busiest motorway feeders in the town, the café drew in a lot of passing traffic; everyone from truck drivers to company reps, council employees to white van man.
But the place did have those times when it was slack: the post-rush hour period, for example, the eye of the storm, as Joe described it, when the factories and truckers got on with their work, and the shoppers had not yet reached burnout in the retail mall.
Advertising Brenda as one of the I-Spy contestants would, the two women assured him, pull in more custom. Putting it on TV in the café would encourage those not in a hurry to stay longer and spend more money.
“I-Spy is big news, Joe,” Brenda had told him. “Everyone will be watching.”
“Wrong,” he retorted. “I won’t be watching for one. They did it before, didn’t they? On the main channels. Not satellite. Cameras watching people twenty-four hours day and night. I tuned in once during the early hours of the morning and what did I get? Pictures of people sleeping? Sleeping!” his eyebrows had shot up. “It wasn’t the most riveting TV I’ve ever watched.”
“It was very popular, though,” Sheila informed him. “I-Spy is slightly different. It only runs for one week every three months, and there are no evictions. It’s hit top viewing figures every time it’s run, and with Brenda in it, the viewing figures will go ballistic. You watch.”
“Since you’re making me put a telly in the café, I’ll have no option but to watch, will I?”
The Lazy Luncheonette had stood in the centre of the parade since the end of World War Two. It had survived economic booms and busts of varying degrees. Through countless strikes, the demise of the pit and the foundry, and the rise of the service industries, the café had kept going, regularly re-inventing itself, changing first from Alf’s Café to Joe’s Joint, then Joe’s Café, and finally the Lazy Luncheonette. And Joe knew it was due to his willingness to change with the times. Not him personally. No matter what changes the place underwent, he remained the same liverish grouch he had always been, but his business acumen was sufficient to carry this workman’s diner through the best and worst of times, and when the idea was put to him, he saw the potential right away.
“There’ll be a knock-on effect, too,” he had said to the women, coincidentally, his two best friends as well as employees. “I can see the sign in the window for months, after. ‘Brenda Jump, former I-Spy housemate, employee of the Lazy Luncheonette’.”
Sheila tutted. “Brenda is a Housey not a housemate.”
“A what?” Joe frowned. “A Housey? As in housey-housey? I haven’t heard bingo called housey-housey since I was a kid.”
“We’re talking I-Spy, not bingo, Joe,” Brenda clucked. “You know that roommates are called roomies, well the housemates on I-Spy are called Housies.”
Having partly lost track of the conversation, Joe dragged it back to its start point. “It’ll have a knock on effect, no matter what you’re called. We could milk this for months.”
“I’ll be on for a pay rise, then, Joe,” Brenda suggested.
“Let’s not get carried away.”
Before he could see any increase in profit, he had to pay out a large sum of money, and now he had to put up with the drilling.
To his relief, however, the whine of the drill bit suddenly ceased, and the workmen dismantled the equipment. Joe’s joy was short lived. A minute or two later, they were back on table 13, working with large hammers, setting bolts for the TV support into the wall.
“This racket is giving me a headache,” Sheila commented as she circumnavigated the queue on her way back to the kitchen.
“Yeah,” Joe agreed, pouring tea for his next customers. “On a scale of one to ten, I rate it at minus five.”
***
By the time Joe settled down for his break at 10:30, the TV, a 42” flatscreen, was up and running, and already the centre of attention with the staff and the few customers enjoying a mid-morning snack.
Joe seated himself at table 5, immediately in front of and to the left of the service counter, and opened the Daily Express at the cryptic crossword. Sheila was out delivering the morning’s sandwich order to Ingleton Engineering, a mile or two from the café. Lee, Joe’s nephew and the Lazy Luncheonette’s head cook, was preparing lunches, and after Brenda served a middle-aged woman with tea and a toasted teacake, she poured herself a cup of tea and joined Joe, but promptly turned her head to watch the TV.
“Have you worked out what the point of this I-Spy programme is yet?” Joe asked without looking up from his crossword.
“It’s reality TV, Joe,” she explained for the umpteenth time. “You put eight people in a house, all of different ages and generations, and see how they get on twenty-four hours a day, for seven days. There are cameras all over the house… except for the lavatory and one other room.”
“It’s invasion of privacy TV, if you want my opinion,” he responded. “And didn’t that other one go on for weeks, and weeks, and weeks?”
“Yes. And at the end of every week, one of their housemates was evicted. I-Spy isn’t as grand as that, but it’s different because of the age gap of the Housies. At fifty-five, I’m the eldest, and I think the youngest is a girl of about twenty-three. We’re from all walks of life, too. There’s an actress amongst us.” Brenda sipped her tea. “And an estate agent, and a nurse.”
“And a woman who makes meat pies for truckers. You.” Joe put down his pen. “No offence, Brenda, but I know what you’re like with men. Do you suddenly want to become the star of the modern equivalent to a what-the-butler-saw machine?”
Brenda laughed throatily. “The Mata Hari of Middlewich? I shouldn’t thi
nk so. Besides, there’s none of that stuff allowed… well, there is, but there’s a private room for it. It won’t be going out on film.”
“No, but the minute the millions of viewers see you heading for that room, they’ll know what you’re up to.”
Lee appeared in the kitchen doorway, his hands white with flour. A former prop for the Sanford Bulls rugby league team, he was a huge, muscular young man, an excellent cook, having been trained by Joe and the local catering college, but notoriously clumsy. Even as he leaned against the door jamb. He dislodged a beaker and only just caught it before it shattered to the floor.
“Me and Auntie Sheila are looking forward to seeing Auntie Brenda on the telly next week,” he chortled as he put the beaker back on the shelf.
“Break many more plates, lad, and I’ll cut your TV rations off until the next millennium,” Joe warned him. “Does your Cheryl know she’s coming in all next week to cover for Brenda?”
“Yes, Uncle Joe,” Lee replied. “She’s looking forward to seeing Auntie Brenda on the telly an’all. She loves I-Spy, our Cheryl.”
Joe shook his head. “And I thought your wife had more brains. Does she also know that you’ll need her two mates, Pauline and Franny next Friday while we shoot off over to Chester for Brenda’s coming out party?”
“Yes, Uncle Joe,” Lee reported. “We’ve got it all in hand.”
“Good,” Joe said. “And have you got today’s lunches in hand?”
“In the ovens and cooking.”
Irritated that he could find nothing more to pick Lee up on, Joe turned his attention back to Brenda. “And what the hell are you gonna do with the prize money if you win it?”
“Twenty-five thousand pounds, eh? If I win, Joe, I promise you one thing. I won’t offer to buy you out.” She drank her tea. “And it’s D-Day, by the way, not the coming out party.”
“D-Day?” Joe was appalled. “What the hell are you gonna do? Invade Wrexham?”
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