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

‘It started with one of your students – Elaine Pesku. She was Romanian. You began an affair with her. She was very cagey about her previous life, so you decided to investigate a little. You discovered that she was a criminal on the run, and her real name was Irina Albesku. She had a violent past as part of a drugs gang in Bucharest. How did you get all that information?’

At this point, the solicitor advised Morton that he didn’t have to say anything. Morton, however, shook his head. It seemed that he realised it was all over. And he wanted to talk about his plan. It appeared to Oldroyd as though he was proud of it. He smiled. ‘I have a friend who’s a detective; he owes me a few favours. It didn’t take him long with a photograph of her to find what I wanted.’

Oldroyd nodded. ‘More likely you blackmailed him over something, but never mind about that for the moment. The big break finally came over the summer. Elaine, let’s continue to call her that, had come up here to Whitby for a summer job and you came to see her.’

‘She was working in this escape room on a Dracula theme . . . in Whitby of all places, where Dracula himself arrived in England. She showed me round. I suddenly had this incredible idea. It was so ingenious. It was a thing of beauty. It brought everything together.’

‘Your concept of beauty is a very dark one,’ replied Oldroyd sharply. ‘Anyway, I think by then your affair with Elaine was probably near its end, but she was a useful, tough accomplice, having a violent past and being used to handling a gun.’

‘It was her who got the gun,’ said Morton. ‘She seemed to have some connections with the underworld over here.’

Oldroyd paused. It was time to play his card. ‘We have apprehended Elaine Pesku and her account of the scheme you played out together was that it was entirely your idea and you forced her into assisting you. Is that true?’

Morton shook his head again. ‘It’s true that I hinted that I could reveal what I knew about her, but she was more interested in getting her share of the money from us selling that picture. She was up for it all, so don’t let her play the victim. She’s a ruthless woman.’

Oldroyd smiled. He would never have seen Pesku as a victim. It was interesting to play accomplices off against each other. It usually worked and they ended up telling you more than they intended in order to incriminate the other.

‘Anyway,’ he continued. ‘The first victim was the unfortunate Hugh Preston. He made the mistake of telling Elaine about the trick sarcophagus. Having checked that he hadn’t told anyone else, you killed him and hid his body in the skip.’

‘Yes,’ said Morton. ‘We couldn’t risk anyone else finding out. Of course you did eventually.’ He shot Oldroyd an evil look. ‘It was good practice for the main event. Elaine lured him into the escape room office when he was paying a visit one day after the escape room had closed. I stabbed him with the same knife I used on Andrea and then we went out in the night to dispose of his body. It was like a rehearsal. I never thought those bloody kids would discover the body; that was a stroke of bad luck.’

Oldroyd frowned and shook his head. ‘So,’ he continued, ‘the main scheme depended on getting the confidence of Andrea and her boyfriend Dominic and exploiting their love of dressing up and drama. You were all coming up to Whitby for the Goth Weekend, which I imagine was your suggestion in the first place, and to add to the excitement and the horror, you suggested a practical joke. What would happen was this: Dominic and Andrea would pretend to have rows with each other and then when you were all in the escape room, Dominic would pretend to completely lose it and stab her.’

Morton seemed to relish the memory. ‘Yes, everyone thought the Goth Weekend was a great idea so I booked an Airbnb and organised the escape room with Elaine. No one knew about her connection with me. Then one night I was in a pub in London with Dom and Andrea, and I suggested we should perform this trick while we were up in Whitby taking part in this vampire-themed game. It would be perfect for the Goth Weekend. We would all be dressed up in a spooky environment: perfect. They were eating out of the palm of my hand; they thought it was a fantastic idea. They both had a great sense of humour and loved jokes. Everybody would laugh about it for days. We came up to Whitby the week before without anyone knowing. I explained everything and we practised it. It all fell into place. I remembered that Dom had told us about the gun his uncle had given him, so I carefully asked him a little more and he said it was a Glock pistol. So Elaine got hold of a similar model, along with a silencer. Like I said, she has lots of contacts in the underworld.’

‘They didn’t suspect a thing,’ continued Oldroyd. ‘Why should they? It was meant to be a clever practical joke that would amuse their friends and they played their parts to perfection, even having an argument the night before to establish they were in a bad mood with each other. It turned out to be a devilish confidence trick in which they lost their lives. They unwittingly collaborated in their own murders.

‘Dominic stabbed her with a false knife, one where the blade retracts inside the handle as it meets the body so it looks as if the blade is entering the flesh and then he ran out through the emergency exit. There was a bag of fake blood inside her dress and Andrea also had capsules of the