The Whitby Murders (A Yorkshire Murder Mystery) Read online

  ‘Right, sir.’

  ‘Okay, here we are. Hey, look! We may have got them both together!’

  Hampton looked into the shop window through the gruesome displays of jet spiders and cobwebs to see two men talking behind the counter.

  ‘The older one is Withington and I’ll bet the younger one is his son. They’ve seen us.’ As the detectives watched, Withington, who had spotted them through the window turned and said something to the younger man, who looked towards Oldroyd and then bolted into the back room where Oldroyd and Steph had spoken to Withington on their previous visit.

  ‘I think he’s making a run for it,’ said Oldroyd. ‘Quick, get round into the lane at the back; there will be an exit there.’

  Hampton ran off behind the shop and into a narrow cobbled lane just in time to see a figure come out of a door and run off.

  ‘Stop!’ shouted Hampton. ‘Police!’ But the man ran on.

  Hampton chased him along the lane, and down a sharp turn back onto Church Street where his quarry ran into a group of tourists sauntering up towards the abbey steps. He ran past them, despite their angry cries but the collision enabled Hampton to gain on him. In desperation the man turned into an inn yard. Hampton closed in and pulled him to the ground.

  ‘Not a wise move, sir, running away from the police,’ he said as he hauled the man to his feet. ‘It always makes you seem guilty. I think we’ll make our way back to the shop, shall we? And then to the station.’

  The sullen young man said nothing and just stared at the ground. He had no choice but to obey Hampton, who held him firmly by the shoulder with the other hand grasping his arm.

  Ben was on the train again, this time travelling from Manchester Piccadilly down to London Euston. The short break with his parents had proved very restorative. He smiled to himself. It was wonderful how he could always expect the same welcome at home even though he was now nearly thirty and his parents were getting on a bit. By this stage, they knew very little about his life, which was probably just as well. Their world was very different from the one he now inhabited.

  He got his laptop out and placed it onto the table. There were no people in the seats opposite. He needed to look through his PowerPoint slides for his next lecture. He enjoyed the teaching but felt exploited: temporary, part-time contracts were all he’d ever had in the academic world. In some ways he preferred part-time work because it gave him the chance to do his own artwork, but there too he’d not been as successful as he would have liked. Why were his talents not properly acknowledged? So many of the people with tenured jobs in universities were not as academically capable as he was. As for some of the artists whose artwork was praised, he believed his own work to be much better. It was often the way with gifted artists; they struggled for recognition from the establishment. It had been the same throughout history and he wasn’t the only one now in this position but at last he could see his prospects improving.

  He gazed out of the window at the fields and hedgerows as the train sped south towards Birmingham. He was looking forward to meeting up with everybody again in London. After what had happened he was determined to make a new start and show them all what he was capable of.

  It was a pity Louise was not going to be there. He wasn’t sure exactly what he felt about her at the moment, but he’d had clear signals from her that she liked him. Everyone’s feelings had been all over the place in Whitby, but there would be time to sort things out when they both got back to London.

  ‘I think it’s time for some plain talking,’ said Inspector Granger firmly with a grim expression on her face as she confronted the elder Withington across the table in the interview room. A solicitor was present.

  When Alan Withington had bolted out of the shop, Oldroyd had gone straight inside to find the father furious with his son, calling him a spineless coward and much worse. Customers were staring at the two men so Withington again took Oldroyd into his office at the back. He’d refused to answer any questions and called his solicitor to meet him at the police station.

  Granger continued. ‘What exactly has been going on with your jewellery sales and how was your niece involved? We’re having samples of all the items you have on sale analysed, so there’s no point trying to conceal anything. The game’s up. What the police in Leeds never managed to prove, we will, so you might as well tell us everything now.’

  Withington paused, looking grim as if he was weighing up the options. ‘All right,’ he began, ‘not everything we sell is genuine Whitby jet. But it looks just as good so I don’t really see the problem.’

  ‘The problem is you’re selling it as if it’s made of a rare local gemstone and charging accordingly when it’s actually made of some kind of paste. It’s what’s called fakery, cheating, being a crook or however you want to describe it,’ said Oldroyd, who was angry at the man’s unapologetic attitude and had adopted his powerful and hawkish interviewing technique, which cowed the most hardened criminal.

  ‘Okay,’ said Withington, backing down. ‘We get a supply of stuff from this bloke in London who produces fake jewellery. We give him an original and he produces several copies. Alan negotiated the deal. He’s good at that, just no backbone when things get a bit tough.’

  ‘And where did Andrea fit in?’

  ‘She was just a courier. She brought stuff up when she came to visit. She did the same when we were in Leeds. We knew the police were watching me and Alan so it was less chancy for her to carry it and I wouldn’t trust the post or any delivery service where things might go missing.’

  ‘Why did she do it?’ asked Granger.

  ‘Money. I paid her; she was often short of cash, especially when she was a student, but her job in that theatre company didn’t pay much either.’

  ‘So she collected the stuff from your supplier and brought it up to you?’

  ‘Yes, then I gave her the money for the next consignment.’

  ‘But it all changed last Tuesday, didn’t it?’ said Granger. ‘She came up here a day before the others. Was that to tell you she didn’t want to be involved anymore?’

  Withington sighed. His scam was collapsing around him and there was no way to avoid telling the truth. ‘She’d inherited that flat from her aunt and said she was going to rent it out so didn’t need to do any work for me anymore. She made it clear she’d never been easy doing it. I always reassured her on that point. She just brought the stuff to me; it was my decision what to do with it.’

  ‘Obviously your moral sophistry didn’t satisfy her,’ observed Oldroyd acidly, but Withington ignored him if he even understood what Oldroyd was implying. ‘So when she wanted out of the arrangement, did she become a liability and a danger to you? She knew all about your operation, didn’t she?’

  Withington realised what Oldroyd was driving at. ‘Hey! Hold on. You can’t seriously think I would harm my own niece.’

  ‘Most people who are murdered are killed by a relative. She could have exposed you and maybe sent you to prison.’ Oldroyd pinned Withington with his penetrating grey eyes.

  ‘So I arranged for her boyfriend to stab her in an escape room and then persuaded him to kill himself? Sounds like a crap scheme to me.’

  ‘Stranger things have happened. You may have been working with other people who had a motive.’

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘That’s what we want you to tell us. And let me inform you we have a significant amount of forensic information concerning these deaths and if any of it leads back to you then you’re in real trouble.’

  Withington scoffed and shook his head. ‘You’re wasting your time. I’ve got nothing to hide and neither has my son. If he had, you’d easily get it out of him.’

  The interview ended. Oldroyd and Granger convened in her office. Oldroyd was downbeat.

  ‘You’ll be interviewing the son to cross-check a few things, but at the moment it doesn’t appear that this is going to take us very far. I was trying to unnerve him by ramping up the extent to which we suspect he
might have been involved, but it didn’t seem to have any effect. He confessed to his crooked dealings because he has no choice; he knows we’re onto him. But I didn’t get the feeling he was concealing anything about his niece’s death, did you?’

  ‘No, I agree. We’ll finally put a stop to his business practices, but I think that’s all we’re going to get out of it. We need to track down this supplier and I think we’ll find that he was the person Barnes was seen with in the café.’

  ‘Most likely.’ Oldroyd sighed. ‘Okay. We’ll just have to wait to see if Andy comes up with anything in London. I’m even more convinced the answer lies within that group of friends. I don’t think Whitby is going to yield us anything else.’

  Events were shortly to prove Oldroyd wrong.

  The next port of call for Andy and DS Jenkins was the Imperial College of Art where Ben Morton worked and had also been a student; it was in Bloomsbury like St Thomas’s. This made Andy think about whether Morton and Holgate may have known each other in their student days but there was a bit of an age gap between them and just because the institutions were physically close, didn’t mean it was likely that they’d met, given the number of students in the area.

  The Imperial College of Art was housed in a much older building than St Thomas’s and the entrance hall was bedecked with abstract paintings and pieces of sculpture. After the usual preliminaries they entered the office of Morton’s head of department Dr Anna Murphy, a stylishly dressed Irishwoman in her forties with long auburn hair tied back. Andy did the introductions and explained the reason for their visit.

  ‘Ben’s still on leave,’ said Dr Murphy in a soft southern Irish accent. ‘We extended it after what happened. He’s not due to return until Friday.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Andy. ‘It’s you we want to speak to.’

  ‘About what exactly?’

  ‘We’re investigating every remaining member of that group of friends who were in Whitby together when two of them were killed. I want to ask you how you find Morton as an employee.’

  ‘Ben? Well, fine. The students like him. He’s conscientious and hard-working. We’ve no complaints and we continue to employ him on a part-time termly basis. He’s also an alumnus of the college although I wasn’t here when he was a student. Some of the older staff remember him from those times and I’ve heard them speak highly of him.’

  ‘I assume that contract doesn’t pay very well.’

  ‘To be honest no, it’s the way higher education is at the moment. Lecturers are poorly paid until they get a tenured job and those are very hard to come by now. But Ben always seems satisfied. It allows him to spend time on his artwork.’

  ‘How do you find him on a personal level?’

  She laughed a little nervously. ‘Goodness, well, we get on fine up to a point.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘It’s all a bit on the surface. He never gives much away about his feelings or attitudes to things. He always seems like a bit of a dark horse.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I’ll give you an example. He organized an exhibition of his artwork in a small gallery in Kensington but he never told anybody here. None of us knew anything about it until somebody read a review of the exhibition.’

  ‘Maybe he doesn’t want to mix his work here with his creative stuff,’ suggested Jenkins.

  ‘Possibly,’ said Dr Murphy. ‘It just struck us as odd. But you’re right in the sense that I always get the impression that his artwork comes first. His teaching is just to support himself and he didn’t want to invest too much of himself in it. I sensed he’s very single-minded and determined about his creativity and wants to be successful.’

  ‘You keep using phrases like “the impression” and “sense of” as if you weren’t sure about anything,’ observed Andy.

  ‘No, like I said, he’s a difficult person to get to know.’

  ‘And what is your opinion of his art? Is it good? Does he deserve more recognition?’

  Dr Murphy paused to consider. ‘That’s a difficult one. I have seen some of his work. Ben’s style is abstract and experimental. I find it very vibrant and effective, if predominantly dark, but as far as success goes, if you mean prominence, fame, money, then in the performing and creative arts we all know that can never be guaranteed however talented the artist. There’s a great deal of fortune involved in attracting the attention of critics, the media, sponsors, publishers, theatre directors and so on.’

  ‘That must be very frustrating to those who want to be successful but feel they’re not getting what they deserve.’

  ‘Yes, whether you’re an artist, actor, musician or whatever. It can be very hard.’

  ‘Does Morton ever talk about his private life? His relationships?’

  ‘No, and I think that was another way in which he seems a little remote; we know very little about him.’

  ‘Do you think he is capable of being violent towards anyone?’

  She thought for a moment and then shook her head. ‘I can’t see it. He’s always very genial and considerate. I’ve never seen him angry with anything or anybody. It would surprise me, but then again I wouldn’t really know.’

  ‘You know, I haven’t done this for years!’

  Oldroyd and Deborah were on the sandy beach at the west side of the town. They’d taken off their shoes and socks, turned up their trousers and were paddling at the edge of the water. Oldroyd was carrying their footwear in a rucksack. The sea was cold to their feet but invigorating. It was a windy afternoon with clouds scudding across a huge blue sky, which stretched out across the choppy North Sea. The wind was whipping the dry sand up into their faces and they had to keep turning their heads away from the more severe gusts. Herring gulls were sailing effortlessly overhead without flapping their wings as they used the eddies in the wind to keep themselves in the air. Oldroyd prodded about in the wet sand with his toes, winkling out shells and coloured stones.

  ‘It’s wonderful!’ exclaimed Deborah as she allowed the tiny waves at the edge of the water to lap over her feet. ‘Look at all these colours. I’m going to make a collection of these to take back.’ She spent some time collecting rounded and flat stones of differing hues. She loaded them into the rucksack and took a drink from their water bottle. She handed the bottle to Oldroyd and then suddenly announced: ‘I’m going to run.’

  ‘What, in your coat?’ asked Oldroyd. They were both wearing weatherproof jackets.

  ‘Yes, why not? Come on!’ she called to him, setting off down the beach, slapping through the water in the direction of Sandsend. Deborah had persuaded Oldroyd to start running and they did parkrun in Harrogate on Saturday mornings when they were at home and sometimes a little ‘parkrun tourism’, as it was called, visiting other parkruns nearby. His fitness levels had improved but he couldn’t keep up with Deborah, who was lean and very fit. She had been running regularly for years. He set off after her, mentally making the excuse for his no doubt inferior performance that he was carrying the rucksack. He jogged at a steady pace, watching Deborah disappear into the distance but enjoying the exhilaration that he’d discovered running gave him, which was worth the effort involved.

  After they’d gone some distance, Deborah arced away to the left up onto the dry sand and towards some rocks. Oldroyd finally reached her, puffing up the slight gradient from the water’s edge. Deborah was sitting on a rock looking as if she’d merely strolled to that point.

  ‘That was great,’ she said as Oldroyd sat down. ‘Let’s have another drink and a snack.’

  Oldroyd, out of breath and sweating slightly, took off the rucksack. Deborah opened it and took out the water bottle and two muesli bars. Oldroyd would have preferred a chocolate brownie, but accepted Deborah’s supervision of his diet which, together with the running, had enabled him to lose weight and feel much fitter.

  ‘You did well – especially carrying that rucksack. I thought we needed a bit of extra effort to burn off last night’s indulgence,’ sa
id Deborah, referring to the fish and chip treat at the Seagull Café.

  ‘Yes, you’re right. I think we’ll go back to the Seagull again tonight, it’s such a great place, but I promise not to have fish and chips this time. I’ll have fish, but something healthier like scampi.’

  ‘That’s still fried,’ cut in Deborah, ‘and I expect you’d have it with chips. I think a nice fish pie would be better.’

  ‘Okay, you win, I—’ His phone went off, and he scrambled to get it from the rucksack. ‘Sorry, it’s Andy reporting back. I was expecting him about this time.’

  ‘Fine, I’ll go for another paddle while you’re talking to him.’ She strode off down to the water. In the distance another group of gannets was circling in the sky and diving into the sea. Some raucous gulls flew overhead.

  ‘Andy, how’s it going?’ began Oldroyd.

  ‘Okay, sir, can I hear seagulls in the background?’

  ‘Yes, I’m on the beach. Paddling actually.’

  ‘Wow, isn’t the water freezing? It’s the end of October.’

  ‘Pretty cold, yes, but it feels great.’

  ‘I think I’ll stick to the indoor pool at our gym,’ laughed Andy. ‘Anyway, sir, I followed up on Holgate. We met his father at the apartment. That wasn’t easy; he was gutted as you can imagine. Needless to say, he doesn’t believe his son would have killed his girlfriend, nor would he have killed himself. He said that Holgate could have got a gun from his uncle – that’s Holgate senior’s brother who was in the army. He wasn’t aware that his son had any enemies. He dismissed the plagiarism business as a motive for Garner to harm his son. I’ve still got to follow up on Garner, but unless we find out something new about that incident I tend to agree with him.’

  ‘Did you have a look round the flat?’