Murder at the Murder Mystery Weekend
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Murder at the
Murder Mystery Weekend
A Sanford 3rd Age Club Mystery (#5)
David W Robinson
Copyright © 2017 by David W Robinson
Cover Photography by Adobe Stock © DiViArts
Design by soqoqo
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
Murder at the
Murder Mystery Weekend
A Sanford 3rd Age Club Mystery (#5)
Prologue
“I want more.”
She shook her head, lips pursed pensively. “You were paid for the work you did as you asked. It was a one-off payment, and the understanding at the time was that you signed away all rights. I don’t see how you can come back now demanding more of the spoils.”
“You tricked me. You made me believe that it was worthless.”
She laughed. “We tricked you? I think if you search your memory, you’ll find that it was you who were only too eager to take what you could and be out of here.” She raised her folded hands and let them flop into her lap. “No, I’m sorry, but according to our best legal advice, you have no call on the company. It’s as simple as that.”
“You bitch, I’ll…”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” The man’s voice remained calm, collected, but all the more ominous for its lack of threat.
“You think you’re big enough?”
The second man retained his aplomb. “I don’t think. I know.”
She signalled for calm. “This is getting silly. There is no place for these macho, playground threats and counter threats.” She rounded on the complainant. “The legal position is quite clear. You have no claim, and even if you had, how much of it do you imagine would be left by the time the lawyers had taken their fill?”
“My ideas. My concepts. This is theft.”
“We bought them fair and square,” she argued. “And you were happy to take my money and run when times were tough, weren’t you? You signed everything over to us. Our lawyers have assured us that your claim is not valid. As far as we’re concerned, that is the end of the matter.”
The angry complainant made for the door. “I’ll make you pay for this. Both of you. You’ll regret the day you crossed me.”
He turned and stormed from the room.
The other man wiped imaginary beads of sweat from his brow. “I thought you handled it pretty well.”
She was not so sanguine. “We had a contract. It was that simple. ”
Chapter One
As always, Reginald Grimshaw, known to everyone who worked for him as Reggie, was last to board the minibus outside the company’s Sheffield factory. And as always, he did not rush. Whether the sun was shining or, as now, rain poured from leaden skies, Reggie took his time.
“Morning all,” he said, taking a seat beside his wife Wendy. “I hope Robbie’s sorted out some real fun for this weekend.”
Across the aisle from him, Robbie Kendrew, the sales manager for the Eastern Region grinned slyly. “Actually, it was your good lady wife’s idea, but I’ve done my homework, Reggie, and if anyone gets it right, I’ll wear one of Fliss’ dresses to next month’s sales meeting.” He pointed with his thumb at his wife sat beside him.
While Fliss scowled and the driver pulled out of the factory gates, turning right towards the distant motorway, Grimshaw laughed aloud at Kendrew’s joke. “Careful, me ducks, or I may hold you to that.”
Through rain streaked windows, the 64-year-old looked fondly on his factory as the bus passed along the front. Set in the heart of a large industrial estate, it was a sprawling unit, producing tailored kitchens for the modern house and home, and Reggie felt a certain pride and even smugness that he could have come so far in life.
“I started out as a joiner and cabinet maker in Nottingham; a chippy,” he had once told a reporter from Down to Business magazine. “That was in the sixties. By the mid-seventies I was working for myself, and ten years after that, I was renting a shed in Brightside, Sheffield, and employing a dozen men to make and install the kitchens. Now look at me.”
Look at him, indeed. Grimshaw Kitchens were renowned all over the eastern side of England from Grantham in the south to Darlington in the north, from The Wash to the Tees estuary. Through Lincolnshire, the three Yorkshires, Humberside, Cleveland, and into County Durham, Grimshaw Kitchens were an integral part of modern living.
The bus ran along the broad dual carriageway of the Catcliffe spur, Sheffields major link with the M1, the light, morning traffic of the motorway visible a mile away. To the left was a huge advertising hoarding, with his face smiling back at him above the slogan, Grimshaw Kitchens: the dream of every housewife. Reggie smiled back at it. How often had that slogan got him into hot water?
So it was sexist in these politically correct times. Did he care? Did he hell as like. That slogan summed up the attitudes of his youth when the man was the breadwinner and the little woman stayed home to cook, clean and bring up the kids. And when these bloody women’s libbers climbed on their soapbox to rail against him, Reggie rubbed his hands with glee. It was tantamount to free publicity. Despite their occasional demands for a boycott of Grimshaw Kitchens, the company had weathered a number of recessions.
Anyway, no matter what they said about him, he wasn’t so chauvinistic that he didn’t recognise talent in women. Sat behind him was Naomi Barton, Northern Sales Manager, and her returns spoke for themselves; she was every bit as forceful as young Kendrew.
The reporter had reworded it in the final draft, but the gist of his argument came across. In this game men and women were paid the same flat salary and the same bonuses for hitting their targets. Sex, whether it meant gender or recreation, did not come into it.
Selling kitchens, he had learned a long time ago, was hard work. It was also a specialised art. Unlike selling to businesses, who usually had to go somewhere for their requirements, the householder had complete freedom of choice. They could go to ABC, XYZ, the Man in the Moon, or they could decide not to bother. Getting them to sign on the dotted line, there and then (the only way to ensure the sale) was a delicate balance between persuasion and persistence. For a salesperson to leave the house on an assurance that the customer would ring back when they had made up their mind, was a cast-iron guarantee that the customer would not ring back. The sale had to be closed on the night, after the presentation, and that was where people like Robbie Kendrew and Naomi Barton proved their worth. For all his force of personality, Reggie had never been particularly good at it; Kendrew and Barton were world class.
Not only first rate at selling but also training others to sell, and keeping those others on their toes, reminding them there were targets to be met.
This was a different world, Reggie reflected as the bus dropped onto the motorway and climbed the hill towards the long, lazy junction with the M18, where they would filter off to the left, making for the A1 and Lincolnshire. When he was an apprentice working on the council estates of Nottingham, back in the early sixties, there was no choice between stick and carrot. The stick was all. He learned his trade at the hands of skilled craftsmen who would not hesitate to physically kick him up the backside when he got it wrong.
These days, the carrot mattered just as much as the stick. Of course he screamed at them the way the joiners had screamed at him. Of course, he threatened them with the sack if they didn’t get their finger out. It was his way of establishing his top-dog status. But his salespeople also earned good bonuses on their deals, and every quarter, the top people from each of the two regions, were treated to a weekend’s entertainment in a classy hotel.
The managers, Kendrew and Naomi, took it in turns to organise the events, and Reggie noted that there was a good deal of one-upmanship between them. Every three months, the appropriate manager was determined to outdo the previous shindig. This month Kendrew, desperate to outclass Naomi’s September weekend of glider training in North Yorkshire, had booked them for a New Year Murder Mystery Weekend at one of Lincoln’s top hotels. All good fun, naturally, but as a sign of the keen competition between the two managers, they had laid a private bet between themselves; £500 to the one who came nearest to solving the mystery correctly. They’d even asked Reggie to adjudicate in the matter.
He didn’t mind. It wasn’t really his place to mind. That kind of rivalry was good for the sales teams and anything that was good for them, was good the company. The awesome cost of the weekend – all up it would run to close on three thousand pounds – would be borne by Grimshaw Kitchens, but the loser of the bet would pay the £500 out of his or her pocket.
Competition, Reggie thought. It was good for business, good for morale, more than good for the balance sheet and by default, his private bank account.
Alongside him, Wendy, his wife of almost 30 years, stared through the windows at the heavy, Friday morning traffic. Eleven years his junior, she’d been a fine looking woman when he first met her. Not that she was bad looking even now, but the years had begun to take their toll. A former actress, the daughter of a Sheffield foundry worker, Reggie often wondered how much of her middle-aged attraction she could have maintained without the business to finance it.
“You deserve it, ducks,” he said, and she turned her head to face him, a thin smile on her lips.
“Deserve what, Reggie?”
“Everything. If it wasn’t for you we wouldn’t be where we are.”
It wasn’t flattery. Reggie Grimshaw didn’t do flattery, and by his logic there were no such things as delicate ears between a man and his wife. If he had strayed from the marital bed over the years, he had always returned to it full of remorse, and Wendy had always accepted his apologies. Reggie Grimshaw knew which side his bread was buttered.
So he did not flatter her. Instead, he told the simple truth. Wendy had urged him to expand all those years ago. Wendy, it was, who had spoken to the banks, securing those first loans against their humble terraced house, to get the new factory up and running, Wendy was the one who managed the company finances in the early years, and saw off the predators. Without Wendy, Grimshaw Kitchens would not exist.
She smiled more fully. In years gone by the smile would have been filled with love, adoration, even hero-worship. Nowadays it was pleasure; the simple pleasure of being together.
“Your skills, Reggie. That was the foundation. It was all you, not me.” She took his hand. “Now switch off and let’s enjoy the weekend. I don’t want to hear another mention of Grimshaw Kitchens.”
***
A worried frown creasing her brow, Melanie Markham stepped into the Scampton Room, the fancifully named lounge bar of the Lincoln’s Twin Spires Hotel, and crossed the richly carpeted floor to the corner by the podium, where her troupe were sat.
“Trouble, Melanie?” Gerry Carlin asked.
A little older than Melanie’s 48 years, and having worked for Markham Murder Mysteries for almost 20 years, Gerry was one of the longest serving members of the cast. Solid, unflappable, completely dependable, willing to pitch in wherever it was necessary, whether carrying props, updating scripts, or learning a new part on short notice.
But Melanie doubted that even Gerry had come across a problem like this before.
“You look like we’ve been cancelled,” he said as Melanie joined the 10-strong group.
Gerry pushed a cup of espresso across the table to her. She took a generous mouthful and put the cup down. “I think I’ll need something a little stronger.”
The faces, four men, five women, looked expectantly at her. The younger, newer members of the cast were easy to spot. Fresh faced, filled with enthusiasm, they were setting out on the unstable journey that was acting, hoping it would lead to bigger, better things: the RSC, prime time TV, even Hollywood. Some of the fire had been extinguished in the more mature men and women. They’d already been around the block a couple of times and they knew the value of steady, if unspectacular work like Murder Mystery Weekends. They earned slightly above scale (the minimum an actor could be paid) but slightly above scale was better than delivering pizzas or claiming unemployment benefit.
“So come on, Melanie. What’s wrong?”
She might have been able to fool some of the younger players, by telling them that the hotel had cut them short on Saturday night, New Year’s Eve. But Gerry was too old a hand to be duped. The timings were spot on, and it would take days, maybe weeks, to rearrange everything.
Besides, the problem was more curious than serious.
“There’s a snag,” she said eventually.
“They want us to lead the crowd in a couple of choruses of Auld Lang Syne?” Emma Pemberley suggested.
“We’ll be joining in on Auld Lang Syne anyway,” Melanie retorted. Emma had been with them five years. A capable actress who rode on her reputation established in a long-running sci-fi TV series back in the 1990s, she was not one of Melanie’s favourites.
“The hotel is busy over the weekend,” Melanie announced, bringing her mind back to the problem at hand.
“I’m relieved to hear it,” said Gerry. “Nothing worse than playing to a half empty house.”
“Yes, well, I’ve just been informed that one of the parties is the Sanford 3rd Age Club. About seventy of them.”
Lee Sissons, one of the younger men, laughed
. “A shed load of geriatrics. Wassup, Melanie? You worried they’ve all got Alzheimer’s?”
Melanie frowned her disapproval. “The Sanford 3rd Age Club is one of Accomplus’s biggest customers, and I’m assured that they are not a mob of geriatrics. They’re more like a bunch of third age rockers. Anyway, it’s not the club I’m worried about. It’s their Chairman; Joe Murray.”
Puzzlement greeted the announcement.
“Joe who?”
Melanie took another mouthful of coffee. “Really, Gerry, I expect better of you. Here we are, preparing and presenting our own murder mysteries, yet none of you can be bothered with any research. Remember I-Spy, the reality TV series, at Gibraltar Hall during the summer? One of the Housies was murdered.”
“Oh, yes. Ursula, er, Kennedy,” Gerry said.
“Kenney. Ursula Kenney,” Melanie corrected. “Joe Murray was the detective who solved it. He worked out who did it and how, and why if I recall correctly.”
“He’s a cop?” asked Danielle McMahon, one of the younger women.
“No. He’s a private investigator of sorts. The police were sure Ursula’s death was suicide. They didn’t believe anyone could get to her with all those cameras running day and night. It was Joe Murray who demonstrated that it couldn’t have been suicide, and he then proceeded to show the police how it was done and eventually showed them who did it.”
“A wizard?” Lee said.
Melanie nodded and finished her coffee. “He solved the murder of an MP at another of Accomplus’s hotels near York, he also solved the killing of an academic at a five star place in Leeds last Christmas. He is a master. You can’t fool him.”
Gerry swilled the remains of his tea around his cup and swallowed it in one gulp. “And he’s coming here to see us? Wonder what he’ll make of our little mystery?”
“Mincemeat.” Melanie finished her drink and slid the cup and saucer across the table. “Someone get another load of coffee. Ask them to charge it to the company account.” While Lee Sissons leapt to obey, she concentrated on Gerry. “Murray will see through us like we’re invisible. He’ll spot every clue and have it solved by tonight.”