The Whitby Murders (A Yorkshire Murder Mystery) J. Ellis (distant reading TXT) 📖

assume you’re out of bed now. We think we know who the perpetrator is: it’s Ben Morton, and his accomplice was Elaine Pesku. We’ll deal with her, but he’s down there near you. His London address is in that file I gave you. Get some officers from the Met to help you and get round there and arrest him. And watch it, he could be dangerous.’

‘Yes, sir, I’m on to it.’

‘Also, look out for an old painting. It might not look much, but it’s very valuable and I think he may have it. If you find it take care with it.’

‘Right, sir.’

Oldroyd ended the call and thought carefully about his next action. Should he ring Louise to tell her about Ben Morton? It would be a terrible shock after all she’d already been through and Ben was miles away in London. It would probably be better to keep her in the dark until they’d wrapped it all up and then he could break it to her gently.

Andy Carter swung into action after he’d spoken to Oldroyd. He collected Jenkins and DC Brook from the Met and they sped to Morton’s address in Notting Hill. It was still quite early for a Saturday morning when they arrived. The door was opened by a bleary-eyed housemate of Morton’s. He looked like a student and was younger than Morton.

‘Police,’ announced Andy, holding up his ID. ‘We understand Ben Morton lives here.’

‘That’s right. But what—’

‘We need to speak to him.’

‘Okay, come in. His room’s on the first floor, but I think I heard him go out.’

The detectives piled up the stairs and Andy hammered on the door without response. ‘Morton, open up. It’s the police,’ he shouted, but there was still no response. He turned to the person who’d let them in. ‘Is there a spare key?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘Okay.’ Andy put his shoulder to the door and burst it open. They entered a large bedroom which was crammed with painting materials, half-finished canvases and pieces of frame. In one corner was a small untidy bed and a desk covered with papers. The most striking things were a number of completed paintings on the walls. Black and red swirls of colour surrounded vampires, bats, dripping blood and fangs biting into necks. Intense and diabolical red eyes stared out from beneath black wing-like capes.

‘Bloody hell, Sarge!’ said Jenkins. ‘This bloke must be a bit of a weirdo to paint that stuff. It’s like a horror film.’

‘Well, he certainly liked his vampires, that’s for sure.’ He turned to the young man who was peering into the room. ‘Did he tell anyone where he was going?’

‘I don’t know. What’s all this about?’

‘He’s wanted for a very serious crime so you’d better call everyone together and we’ll see if anyone knows where he’s gone.’ The young man disappeared. The detectives put on their gloves.

‘Sarge, look at this. You said there was a painting missing.’

DC Brook had unwrapped a package and took out a square picture frame. The painting showed a bare-armed woman with long red hair. She had her arms around a man and seemed to be biting his neck.

‘Well, whatever turns you on, I suppose,’ said Jenkins, grinning. ‘I can think of better things for her to do to me than bite my neck.’

‘I’m sure you can,’ replied Andy. ‘But this looks as if it could be the one we’re looking for,’ he said, shaking his head at the idea that something like that could be worth a lot of money. They continued to search the flat for anything significant. Covered in bubble wrap and hidden in a drawer, Andy found two knives, one with a retractable blade. He put those in a plastic bag.

‘I think this bloke must have had a good opinion of himself, Sarge. Look at this,’ said Jenkins, who was sorting through the paintings.

Andy went over and looked at a canvas that was covered with artistically enhanced copies of a photograph of Morton. They were in different colours and all bore a single-word title in a variety of fonts: ‘Genius’, ‘Michelangelo’, ‘Rembrandt’, ‘Great Artist’, ‘Famous’, ‘World Beater’, ‘Single-Minded’ and so on. Underneath an image in black was the phrase ‘Destined for Greatness’ and underneath one in red was the word ‘Killer’. The effect was chilling.

‘He has an ego, all right,’ said Andy. ‘And he seems to be telling us that he’ll stop at nothing to assert himself. We need to go through everything very thoroughly. I’ll go and talk to the other housemates.’

He went through into the kitchen area to find three sombre-looking people gathered together, two women and one man.

‘What’s Ben done?’ asked one.

‘He’s the prime suspect in a murder case,’ replied Andy.

‘What! You mean that thing in Whitby? He was up there, wasn’t he?’

‘He was and he’s in possession of a valuable stolen painting.’

‘I can’t believe Ben would do anything like that,’ said one of the women. ‘He was always so quiet and gentle. He was an artist,’ she added at the end as if this precluded him having any criminal tendencies.

‘How much did you know about him?’ asked Andy.

The group glanced at each other. ‘To be honest, not a lot really,’ replied one. ‘He was very private and didn’t join in much with anything that was going on. He never asked anybody into his room.’

Not surprising, thought Andy as he noted that what they were saying correlated with how Morton had been described by his colleagues at the Imperial College. He seemed to be an example of what Andy thought of as the loner criminal syndrome: distorted and insane ideas develop in a person who has little contact with others. Nobody had realised what deadly notions were forming in the mind of this solitary artist.

‘Do any of you know where he is?’

‘No,’ said the man who’d let them into the house. ‘And James, who might have seen him earlier, has gone out. I’ve been trying to contact him.’

‘I’ll take his number,’ said Andy. This was