Costa del murder, p.1
Costa Del Murder, page 1
part #9 of Sanford Third Age Club Mystery Series
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
Costa del Murder
A Sanford 3rd Age Club Mystery (#9)
Chapter One
Flashing blue lights cut through the rainy September night. The ambulance braked for a set of lights on red, the driver checked both ways and accelerated through the junction, the siren wowing to warn other vehicles off.
In the back, Joe Murray lay strapped onto a trolley, an oxygen mask covering his nose and mouth. His breathing came in painful gasps and his left arm hurt. Unable to speak (and even if he could he would never make himself heard through the mask) he silently thanked God for the impulse that had made him give Brenda and Sheila keys to not only the Lazy Luncheonette but his upstairs apartment, too. Without them, they would not have raised the alarm until tomorrow morning when they couldn’t get in. They would have called the emergency services who would have broke in and found him … dead.
The word rang round his head. It couldn’t be happening. Not to him. Fifty-six was no age to hang up his teapot and hand in his whites.
But there was no mistaking the symptoms. Chest pains, spreading to his left arm, sweating, struggling to breathe and when he did catch his breath it was shallow and painful.
Heart attack!
“Brenda, help me,” he had croaked into his mobile. “I’m dying.”
Brenda Jump had known him long enough to know when he was not pulling her leg, or simply seeking a sympathetic ear. Giving him instructions to stay still and calm, she rang the ambulance from home, then jumped in her car and drove to the Lazy Luncheonette, arriving there a few minutes ahead of the paramedics. Somewhere along the line, she also rang Sheila Riley, their friend and fellow employee, who arrived just after the ambulance.
By then, Joe had begun to feel better, but the paramedics were taking no chances. They checked his pulse and temperature, and ran an ECG. They even pricked his thumb and checked his blood sugar despite his protests that he was not diabetic. Talking over the phone to a doctor in A & E, they eventually strapped him to the gurney and hauled him down the stairs and into the waiting ambulance, where Brenda climbed in the back with him while Sheila followed in her car.
And while he lay bound to the trolley, Brenda gave the paramedic, a young woman named Karen, his details, and Joe thought about mortality.
How could this be happening? He was fifty-six, not eighty-six. He had never been overweight in his life, and his work kept him reasonably fit. People of his age and general good health did not have heart attacks.
The truth hit him like a hammer. Men of his age did have heart attacks. Not often, but they did. Men his age died from them. Not often, but they did. Gripped by the fear of approaching eternity, the thought sent his pulse racing again.
While the ambulance hurtled along the roads, he thought about all the things he had meant to do before he died, and regrettably, discovered that they did not amount to much. He had achieved almost everything he wanted in his half century and a bit, and the things he had wanted badly would never come anyway. Like joining the police force. He had always been too short, and by the time they removed the height restriction he was too old.
And while he thought about his thin, unfulfilled ambitions, the question rapped repeatedly at his brain. Why me, why me, why me? What had he ever done that he deserved to die at such a young age?
The ambulance screamed into the A & E parking area, the back doors flew open, Karen and her driver unhitched the trolley, and hurried him down the ramp. Briefly exposed to the chilly, wet, night, he shivered, but then he was inside the hospital, zooming along under the overhead lighting, the bland walls of the corridor rushing past him on both sides.
When they stopped, he could hear them talking about him.
“Male, fifty-six. Presenting chest pains, left arm pains. Pulse irregular, breathing laboured.”
“Leave him with us.”
The paramedics disappeared. A young man, wearing the dark blue jumper of a hospital porter, appeared behind his head and began to wheel him along. Brenda hurried alongside him, holding his hand, trying to reassure him.
They spun the trolley round, pushed him into a cubicle. A nurse appeared, slipping her hands into protective gloves, preparing a cannula.
“Are you his wife, luv?”
“What? Oh, God, no. I’m a close friend and an employee. Getting in touch with his next of kin is, er, problematic. She lives in Tenerife.”
Joe wanted to protest that Alison was no longer his next of kin, but the nurse was too busy to listen.
She leaned over him, a reassuring smile on her pretty face. “Just a little scratch, Joe.”
He felt the sting of the needle bite into the back of his hand, and the cannula slide into the vein, followed by the fumbling and discomfort of the nurse strapping it to the back of his hand.
“We really should have his next of kin, you know, Mrs …?”
Again he wanted to complain, but they were taking little notice of him.
“Jump. Brenda Jump. There’s nowt about Joe Murray that I can’t tell you. I’ve known him fifty years or more. The nearest he has to family in Sanford is his nephew, Lee, but we can’t get him out of bed at this time of night. He has to be at work in about four hours. After Lee, there’s only Alison, and like I said, she lives in the Canary Islands.”
Listening in on the conversation, Joe made a rapid calculation in his head. Four hours? Lee usually arrived at six. That meant it must be two in the morning.
“I can open up myself if you let me go,” he shouted, but his words were muffled by the oxygen mask.
But at least this time he had their attention and the nurse lifted the mask. “What did you say, Joe?”
“I said if you stop buggering me about, I can open up the café myself.”
“You can’t go anywhere until you’ve been seen by a doctor,” the nurse told him. “Now, do you want to give me all your details?”
He scowled. “Ask Brenda. She knows it all.”
The nurse replaced the mask and spoke to Brenda.
Sheila joined them soon after, but it was to be a long wait. The two women were sent out when the doctor, a young blonde woman who Joe was sure used to call into his café for soft drinks and snacks when she was a schoolgirl, examined him. They took another ECG, and more blood, and he was left waiting again.
Brenda and Sheila looked exhausted, and he felt waves of fatigue sweeping over him.
Lifting the mask away from his mouth and nose, he suggested, “Why don’t you two go home? I’ll get a taxi back to the café.”
“We’re staying here, Joe,” Sheila told him, “until we know how you are and what’s happening.”
Just after five in the morning, the doctor returned and the mask was finally, permanently removed.
“Right, Mr Murray. We don’t think you’ve had a heart attack, but we’re not sure, so we’re keeping you in.”
“No way. I’m going home now.”
Joe tried to swing his legs off the trolley, but Brenda stopped him.
“Use your nut, Joe, and stay where you are.”
“I have to be there—”
“So you can drop dead while we’re serving
“I can’t leave it to Lee—”
“He manages when we’re away, Joe, so he can manage now,” Sheila insisted. “I’ll ring Lee in half an hour and make sure he knows. He’ll bring Cheryl and her friends in, and the Lazy Luncheonette will survive. Now stop behaving like a child and stay put.”
Sheila’s words forced another unwanted memory to the surface. Her husband, Peter, a police inspector and a personal friend of Joe’s had been barely fifty years old when a double heart attack killed him.
In an effort to shut the memory out, he pointed at the doctor who had been listening to the exchange. “She just said I hadn’t had a heart attack.”
“No, Mr Murray, I said we don’t think you’ve had a heart attack. We’re not sure. We need to carry out a second blood test twelve hours after the first.” The doctor checked her watch. “That’s about two o’clock in the afternoon. Your breathing is poor. Your chest is clacking like a rattlesnake in a bad mood. There may be some kind of infection in there. And you’re in pain with your left arm. Now for your own good we’re keeping you in. Once we have the results of the second bloods, we’ll know more and we can think about letting you go home, but there’ll be no work for a while, so get used to it.”
Joe flopped back onto the trolley. There was nothing else to do.
***
The wet weather, an ever-present feature after a glorious early summer, saw the Gallery Shopping Mall busier than normal when Brenda entered through its automatic doors. Early Christmas displays shone from one or two stores, catching the eye of some people, but the local press had been full of woeful tales from retailers, complaining that for the nth year in succession they were losing business to the internet. The public seating was crowded, people roamed from store to store and the cafés were busy, but in Brenda’s estimation, most folk were sheltering, not spending.
After leaving Joe at Sanford General Hospital, both had decided that sleep was the order of the day, not work, and left it to Lee and his wife Cheryl, to man the Lazy Luncheonette, while they went home, agreeing to meet at Ma’s Pantry, their favourite eatery, at quarter past twelve.
“Les said he would be here for about half past,” Brenda reported when she joined Sheila.
“I rang the hospital half an hour ago. Just before I left home,” Sheila said. “They say Joe’s fine, but grumpy, and would we please give them permission to put him to sleep … permanently.”
Brenda chuckled, and stirred her latte. “Never changes, does he?” Her face became more serious. “What will we do without him, Sheila? You know, if …”
“That was a question I asked myself so many times after Peter died. How will I survive without him? But I did.” Sheila smiled brightly. “I don’t think it’s an issue with Joe, though. You’ll see. He’ll be back in no time, moaning at us.” Again she frowned. “But if it isn’t a heart attack, what is it?”
“Lifestyle.” Brenda’s firm tones brooked no argument. “He’s stressed to hell most of the time running the Lazy Luncheonette. He dashes about like a blue-arsed fly, trying to do everything, and even when he locks up for the day, he spends hours doing the books and working out the orders for the following day. Then there are those bloody cigarettes. How many times have we asked him to stop smoking? How much grief did I give him at Windermere during the summer? He could hardly speak for coughing. He doesn’t eat properly, either. The only time he gets a decent, proper meal is when he comes to your house, mine or goes to Lee’s on a Sunday. The rest of the week, he lives on snacks, and microwave dinners.”
Sheila chewed her lip. “And if he’s not working on the café, he’s fiddling with bits for the 3rd Age Club. What he needs is de-stressing.” A sly smile crossed her face. “Shall we send him off to Tenerife to be with Alison?”
“What a good idea.” Brenda laughed again. “First off, let’s sort the club out with Les, then we can cut along to the travel agent’s and see what they might have on offer.” Her face took on the appearance of someone who’s just had an idea. “How would you fancy a week in the sun?”
“Ooh, not half.” Sheila’s smile evaporated as quickly as it had appeared. “I don’t know if Joe would stand for it. We usually go away in October, don’t we?”
“Yes, and we get enough earache off him then. Both of us off together.” A slow smile crept across Brenda’s lips. “We could just book it and present him with a wossname; fait accompli.”
Sheila laughed. “I’d love to see the look on his face. And it would be fun, wouldn’t it? You, me and Joe. We can keep an eye on him, make sure he gets plenty of rest.”
“And raid his wallet for goodies.”
A look of serious intent spread across Sheila’s features. “Not Tenerife, though. I was joking about that. I don’t think mixing with Alison would do him any good.”
“Fine with me. There are plenty of places on mainland Spain with vacancies at this time of year. Or we could look at the Balearics.”
Sheila began to get excited. “I haven’t been to Majorca since before Peter died.”
“Well, why don’t we go to the travel agent’s after we’ve spoken to Les, and see what they have to offer?”
Sheila was about to answer, but caught sight of Les Tanner’s imposing figure making towards them. “Here comes the captain.”
Les, a former Captain in the Territorial Army Reserve, greeted them cordially, joined them, and after securing a cup of tea and a cheese sandwich, listened to the tale of Joe’s overnight adventures.
“Always said it would be the death of him one day, that café. I’m surprised he hasn’t handed the reins over to Lee before today. Taken a bit of a back seat. What do the medics say?”
“Nothing definite yet, Les. They don’t think it’s a heart attack, but they won’t know for sure until later this afternoon.” Sheila checked her watch. “About another hour and a half.”
“Whatever it is,” Brenda told him, “Joe is going to need some rest, so we need someone to take over the running of the 3rd Age Club while he’s down. You were the natural choice.”
“Glad you think so, Brenda.” Les beamed at her. “And of course, I’d be delighted. Y’know, I’ve had my share of clashes with Murray, but they’ve never been personal. I think he’s hopelessly inefficient, but I wouldn’t like to see any harm come to him. First order of business will be to organise a get well message from the members to our Chairman.” He bit into his sandwich, chewed and swallowed. “So what will you do with him? Sit him at a corner table in the Lazy Luncheonette and make him do crosswords all day?”
“We were just discussing that. We’re going to the travel agent’s when we leave here. We’re thinking of taking him to Spain for a week or two.” Sheila tittered. “We’re not going to tell him until it’s all arranged.”
“Good idea. Bit of sun and sand. Just the thing after a wobbler.” Les swallowed a mouthful of tea. “Look, I don’t want to sound pushy or anything, but Sylvia and I have an apartment in Spain.”
The women exchanged smirks. “Do you now?”
“Yes, Brenda, we do.” Les appeared at his most imperiously disapproving. “Our relationship is an open secret, you know.”
“Only teasing, Les. We know what you two get up to,” Sheila agreed. “What were you saying about an apartment in Spain?”
“It’s in a complex on the Costa del Sol. Apartmentos Ingles. There’s a pool, lawns, patio area, nice bar. It’s right on the seafront, too. Ideal place for a little R and R.”
“Oh, that’s good of you, Les,” Brenda said. “How much?”
“I let Robson and Frickley have it cheap for a week last year, but for you two and Murray, it’s on the house,” Les replied. “With my compliments. Least I can do for the miserable old so-and-so.”
Sheila appeared concerned. “Are you sure, Les? I mean we don’t object to paying our way.”
“Wouldn’t hear of it. I pay the rent monthly from my bank. All you need is your flight, and you can get a return to Malaga for less than a hundred pounds.”
