The Whitby Murders (A Yorkshire Murder Mystery), J. Ellis [free ebook novel TXT] 📗

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