A Murder for Christmas

by David W Robinson

  “That lets out Joe,” Alec Staines called out and many people laughed.

  Sylvia smiled and more seriously went on, “I have personal reasons to be thankful to my good friend, Joe Murray. As I was saying, it’s Santa’s joy to give out gifts on Christmas Eve, but on this visit, he is giving nothing. Instead, he will take. As he and I pass amongst you, we would ask you to donate whatever sum you wish, no matter how small or large, for the Save the Children fund. Please, ladies and gentlemen, please let the spirit of Christmas feed your generosity.”

  To another round of applause, while Vicky began singing White Christmas, followed by Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire, Sylvia and Santa stepped from the stage and began to circle the lounge. Around the table, Sheila and Brenda took out their purses, the Staines dug into theirs and Tanner brought out his wallet. Joe reached into his pocket and felt around the coins and notes.

  “You can do better than loose change, Joe,” Sheila urged.

  “And how do you know I’m looking for change?” he asked as Santa made the table nearby.

  “We know you,” Tanner said.

  “What did Sylvia mean she had personal reason to thank you, Joe?” Julia Staines asked.

  “Joe cleared her name over the death of Kim Lowe early this year,” Tanner explained. “We’re hoping he can do the same for you, George.”

  “I’ll do it,” Joe promised.

  “And there we were thinking he never cares about anything other than money,” Alec Staines chuckled.

  Joe had stopped listening. He was intent on the bearded face at the next table, his mind working to remove the beard and place the face beneath it.

  “Thank you,” Santa said to the occupants of the next table as they threw notes into the sack, and Joe recognised the voice of Tom Patterson coming from beneath the whiskers.

  Joe felt a secret admiration for his opposite number from the LHS. Patterson had done a good job of hiding himself behind the beard, but he needed no makeup to complete the picture. As he came to their table, his sack held forward and open, his cheeks were rosy from the heat of his getup, sweat poured from his brow.

  “Thank you,” Patterson said as Alec Staines dropped a ten-pound note in. Brenda and Sheila put in five pounds each, Tanner dropped in ten and Joe, much to the surprise of his fellow members, did not draw change from his trouser pocket, but his wallet.

  Taking out a twenty, he dropped it into the sack.

  “Thank you,” Patterson said.

  “You’re welcome,” Joe replied. “By the way, Tom, well done on the disguise. I knew Santa wasn’t one of my members, but I’d never have guessed it was you.”

  Patterson blushed under the beard. “Kind of you to say so, Joe.”

  He moved on and Joe took in the stares around him. “What?” he asked.

  “You,” Sheila said. “Twenty pounds? Christmas spirit getting to you, is it, Joe?”

  He shook his head. “Sylvia said it was the Save the Children Fund and I’m hoping they’ll save one for me. I could just about eat a whole one.” He smiled and the table laughed. “Besides,” he pressed home his advantage, “it’s tax deductible and I’ll probably stop it out of your wages.” Without leaving Brenda or Sheila time to argue, he turned to Tanner. “So when did Sylvia and Patterson dream this one up?”

  “About two months ago,” Tanner explained. “Shortly after you announced the venue in your STAC newsletter. You know what Sylvia is like when it comes to charity. When she learned that the LHS would be sharing the hotel with us, she wrote to Patterson and put the suggestion to him. He agreed and I think it went rather well, don’t you?”

  “A novel twist on the Christmas theme, Les,” Sheila agreed as Vicky led a further round of applause for Santa and Mrs Claus.

  While the singer went into the second half of her act, Sylvia and Patterson left the room, to return a quarter of an hour later, when Sylvia handed Tanner her red costume and sat with him to drink a small sherry.

  “Well organised, Sylvia,” Joe congratulated her. “But who’d have thought old Tom Patterson had that much go in him?”

  “I don’t understand, Joe?” Sylvia said. “From all I’ve heard, he does quite a bit for charity, and has done ever since his wife died.”

  Joe nodded and polished off a half of bitter. “I can see him going round with the collecting tin,” he said, “but I’d never have backed him to dress as Santa. Whenever I’ve spoken to the man, he seems to be the sort of dry and reserved kind. You know.”

  “Never judge a book by its cover, Joe,” Sheila reminded him. “Look at you. Who would have expected you to put twenty pounds into the hat?”

  “Oh, but that’s nothing new,” Sylvia said and Joe silently urged her to shut up. Sylvia did not see his frantic gestures. “As you know, I collect for Sanford Hospital children’s ward every December, and Joe always gives me fifty pounds. Don’t you Joe?”

  He tutted while Sheila stared in amazement. “We are talking about the same Joe?” Sheila asked.

  “Never judge a book by its cover,” Joe echoed.

  “Well, I must say, Joe, you had us all fooled,” Alec Staines commented. “You’re the last man I’d back to give to children’s charities.”

  “I think I understand,” Brenda said, and dug into her bag for a tissue to dry her eyes.

  Joe said nothing. Sheila took his hand and he knew that she suddenly understood.

  But Joe was not thinking about the fact that he had never had children, or that Brenda was crying for the same reason.

  There was something else; something trying to force its way through the general feeling of good cheer; something trying to beat down the noise of Vicky Orleans squawking her way through a medley from Oliver. It was something someone had said; something that had just happened; something he knew was important; something he knew he was missing.

  Vicky left the stage at five thirty and people began to drift from the room.

  “Don’t forget that dinner is seven thirty to eight o’clock,” Sheila said.

  “Cabaret nine until ten,” Brenda said with relish. “And it’s disco and karaoke from ten onwards. It’s gonna be a lively night.”

  “Stay put, George,” Joe said, “I need to talk to you before we get any rest.”

  Chapter Eleven

  As the room emptied, Joe refreshed their drinks and he and George sat alone at the table.

  “I don’t need all the gory details, George,” Joe said, “but tell me how you came to meet Jennifer and what happened from there.”

  “There’s nowt to tell, Joe,” George said. “Most of our lot were out shopping yesterday afternoon, you, Sheila and Brenda included, but you know me. Christmas isn’t much of a scene for me, and there’s no one I have to buy prezzies for, so I stuck around here all afternoon watching the football on telly. She came into the bar about half past five, I spotted her and thought, ‘hey up, lady, it’s your lucky day, George is gonna pull you.’ I offered to buy her a drink and she told me to clear off. Ten minutes later, she was talking with some suit at the bar, and after that she came over and apologised.”

  “Which suit?” Joe wanted to know.

  “Search me. Kirkwood or someone. Tall, slim feller, maybe our age. Beard.”

  “Kirkland,” Joe said. “Warren Kirkland. Go on. After that?”

  “I did what comes natural to me, Joe,” George promised. “You know me with the dollies. I know how to charm ’em and she gave me all the right signals. But I knew she was a bit snooty, like. That’s why she asked me to tell everyone I was Director of Leisure Services back home. I went along with it because I knew I was on a promise.”

  “You knew or you were just in with a better than even chance.”

  “No, Joe, I knew. She told me so. She would drop ’em if I pretended to be the Director of Leisure Services. Yeah?”

  Joe’s eyes widened. “She said it just like that?”

  “Well, no, but that’s what she meant. I think she actually said, ‘do me this favour,
George, and you’ll find me very grateful’ and she put a lot of stress on the word very.”

  Joe nodded. “But she didn’t say why?”

  George shook his head. “All she told me was she wanted to put that Kirkland bloke, and another guy, the fat one with the greasy hair, in their place. Kick ’em in the cobblers. My guess was she’d had summat going with them and they were hassling her. Plus, like I said, she was a bit snooty, her being a professor and all that. Happen she wanted them to think she’d cottoned on to a man who really was summat.”

  “Both Kirkland and Quinton – the one with the greasy hair – approached her while she was dancing with you.”

  “She told Kirkland to eff off. Just like that. I didn’t know these university sorts used that kinda language. She was even worse with the other feller. Gave him both barrels. Told him she’d been using him for months and he was no more than a research project. She also said if he came near her again she’d squash him. I think she was gonna go for the poor sod, but I pulled her back and told him he’d better clear off while he was still in one piece.”

  “All right.” Joe shuffled the information in his brain. “Right, you went back to your room and she took your picture holding a CD. Why?”

  George shrugged. “Ask me another. Joe, I was hot for this chick, and when you’re nearly there, you don’t stop to ask questions. If she’d wanted me to strip and then take a full frontal, I wouldn’t have refused.”

  “And after she took the photo?”

  “We had a glass of brandy and … well, you know. We, er, got down to it.” George looked away. “Afterwards, I used the bathroom, dressed, kissed her goodnight and that was it. Next thing I knew, plod was knocking on my door and arresting me.”

  “All right, George.” Again, Joe racked his brain for the information he needed. “Did she mention a penny at all?”

  “Joe, you’ve been married, you know what the bedroom score is. You don’t talk about money when you’re getting it on.”

  “So that’s where I went wrong.” Dropping his sarcasm, Joe clucked impatiently. “I’m not talking money, either. Did she mention the Middleton Penny to you at all, any time during the night?”

  George shrugged. “Middleton Penny? What’s a Middleton Penny?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Joe insisted. “Did she mention it?”

  “No. I’ve never heard of it, and she didn’t talk about anything to do with Middleton … oh, wait, she did mention some railway that runs from Middleton. She’s studied it or summat.” George frowned. “Maybe she’s a train-spotter or something.”

  “And maybe you should go back to school and learn some history,” Joe countered. “The Middleton Light Railway was the first commercial track in the world.”

  “Was it? Stevensies Rocket and stuff?”

  “Stevenson’s Rocket is what…” Joe shook his head. “Don’t worry about it, George. In fact, don’t worry about anything. I know you’re innocent. It’s just a case of proving it.” He downed his drink. “I’ll catch you later… By the way, Brenda’s promised she’ll look after you tonight.”

  George’s eyes lit. “Yeah? I’d better shave and shower then.”

  ***

  On reaching his room, Joe felt waves of fatigue threatening to overtake him and thrust him into sleep. He pushed it aside. A life spent running a workman’s café involved early mornings and long hours, and he was no stranger to tiredness. He had a mystery to solve, a friend to vindicate, and sleep could wait.

  Itching to get at Jennifer Hardy’s computer, he dug into the wardrobe and came out with the thin latex gloves he had begged from Barrett. Joe had worked on so many puzzles and crimes that he was fully aware of the risk of disturbing latent fingerprints.

  Taking the bag from the wardrobe, he once again opened it carefully, took out the computer and the diary and a dirty tissue stuck to the diary. He peeled it off and threw it back at the bag, which it missed. Ignoring it, he opened the diary. A list of names and addresses, one or two appointments inked in for the early part of the year, then nothing. Jennifer Hardy was not the kind of woman to use a paper diary, and he was willing to bet that she kept her appointments schedule either on the computer or on her mobile phone.

  Opening up the machine, he switched it on. The machine sparked into life, but as it went through the boot routine, the battery warning flashed up.

  Joe returned to the wardrobe and took out the power adaptor for his netbook and was delighted to find that it operated Jennifer’s just as efficiently. Soon he was confronted with a standard Microsoft admin screen demanding that he log on. He frowned. Password. Tom had told him not once but twice that Jennifer locked the machine up. Where would he find Jennifer’s password?

  He reached for the diary again. A little obvious, and scarcely secure, but he had no other clue. Thumbing through the pages more slowly this time a sense of irritation and anticipation began to build in him. To her credit she had not written the password down, which meant that if the killer/thief had intended adding or removing something from the machine, he could not have done so without the password, and the chances were that the ‘evidence’ – Joe could think of no other word – was still there.

  But that same lack of a password was annoying. He tried ‘Jennifer’ and got nowhere. ‘Hardy’ and ‘jhardy’ produced the same lack of results. He tried other combinations and all led up a blind alley. Worried that the machine may eventually shut down and lock him out altogether, he sat back in the chair and looked out onto the empty, snowy streets. His lively mind ran back and forth over the events of the last 36 hours and all he had learned of Jennifer Hardy.

  With the clock pushing up to 6:15, he despaired of working it out and was ready to hand the machine to the police, when Tom Patterson’s words came back to him. Like all historians, she was fearfully protective of her work.

  Her work.

  With the memory of gold glittering in his mind’s eye, Joe attacked the keyboard again. His first attempt failed, but when he pressed CAPS LOCK and tried again, the screen burst into life with a picture of the Salamanca, Matthew Murray’s engine that had run coal on the Middleton Light Railway from Broom Colliery to the Canal Side.

  Delighted at his powers of deduction, Joe looked the desktop screen over.

  There were few icons; the standard ones, plus shortcuts to Word and Excel, the documents folder, pictures folder and the Firefox internet browser. Joe double-clicked the latter, hoping the machine would pick up the wireless connection in the room. He was content to learn that it did, and immediately shut the browser down. There was nothing he needed from the internet. Instead, he went in search of Jennifer’s emails.

  He found Outlook empty, so went back online and there he found her university email and several webmail addresses.

  Searching through them, it began to dawn upon him what a mammoth task he had set himself. Jennifer never got rid of anything and there were literally thousands of messages stored on the machine.

  He was irritated to find that her university account was locked with a password, but when he tried the one for the machine as a whole, it worked, and he tutted. Keeping the same password for all accounts did not constitute good security, especially when she so blatantly displayed that password for anyone and everyone to see.

  Here again, there were over 1800 messages. It was as if the woman had never done any housekeeping on her account.

  In order to narrow down the choices, Joe clicked on the recipients’ tab, listing all the messages by name instead of date and scrolled down to those between Jennifer and Dennis Wright, Jennifer and Oliver Quinton, Jennifer and Warren Kirkland.

  There were many. Too many to go through individually, so he began to dive into them at random.

  Most were from Jennifer to Wright. He had obviously chosen to ignore a good many and when Joe read them, he could understand why. The woman was simply obsessed with the idea of becoming, if not his third wife, then certainly his life partner.

  My darling Dennis
, she had written in January, we’re so good together that I cannot wait until the day when that togetherness is permanent.

  My love, she had said in April, my mind drifts back to those wonderful weeks in Alabama, the warm night enhanced by the wrap of your arms around me.

  At first Wright’s responses had been gentle, but later they were sterner, rebuking.

  Jennifer, he had responded late in May, will you please stop this. I’ve made it clear that I am not seeking a permanent relationship with you or anyone. What we had was fantastic, but it ended and I’m fine with that. Why can’t you be?

  As the months progressed, she exhibited a clear air of desperation in her messages. In October, she wrote, Dennis, my love, why do you hurt me like this? You know how much I love you, you know how I long to be with you. Please Dennis, for my sake, for our sakes, I’m asking you to reconsider.

  There were no further replies from Wright, other than one message, sent a week earlier, detailing his flight into Manchester. I arrive at eight in the morning, and I figure I’ll be in Leeds by ten. We can finalise details of the signing tour then.

  Jennifer had written back arranging to meet him at the railway station in Leeds, but Wright had not even acknowledged the email.

  There was one other message that interested Joe. Sent by Jennifer, the header read, I can solve your financial problems.

  Joe opened and read it.

  Darling. I have the answer to your financial problems, and all it needs is one or two changes to The Missing Pennies. Get on Skype and we can talk about it.

  It was sent, so Joe noted, in August; a month before Quinton claimed he and she met for the first time. Joe could not find a response from Wright.

  When he checked the exchanges between her and Quinton, they gave no clue to what Jennifer had meant. They were simple arrangement emails and confirmations. The exchanges were always initiated by Jennifer and Quinton merely replied saying, ‘I’ll be there.’

  He shut down the software and opened up the photograph albums. Here again, he found a lack of housekeeping. Over 3,000 images, and not a single folder.