The Murder Suite: Book One - The Audrey Murders (3 page)

Pearl looked out her window at the cop car parked across the road.  She made a quick call to the restaurant and the pub to warn them that the new Constable was on the prowl. She promised to call again when he left.   She smiled at his naivety.  Sometimes the paddy wagon parked there in order to stop all the cars going in and out of the harbor hoping to catch the boozers on a Saturday night.  Pearl always warned the pubs and the cops wondered why the traffic suddenly became non- existent.  Tonight would be the same.  Shame really, Pearl thought. He seems like a nice young cop.

Pearl knew everything that went on in the little Whangaora township.  Her cozy, buttercup yellow, one bedroom cottage was neatly fringed with a well- tendered garden of hollyhocks, flowering bushes, bromeliads, and succulents galore. Pearl loved her garden.  A little wooden gate led to her front door.   She would sit on her patio and watch the locals come and go.  If there was a stranger in town, Pearl knew about it.   

She had just seen a strange black truck head off up Wainui Road.  It was too dark to see who was driving it but she did know he wasn’t from around here.    Pearl returned to her knitting.  She was making scarves for the library gift shop in town. She liked to keep busy. 

Twenty minutes later she heard the police car start up and drive off towards town.   She called the pubs to give the all clear.   A few minutes later she heard the traffic began to flow. 

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              Audrey looked at the time.  It was ten o’clock. She heard his truck coming up the driveway.   She peeked through her curtains as the man turned off the lights, got out of the truck and headed inside Suite C.    Guess he just went down to the waterfront restaurant, she thought.    Audrey went there some nights when they had their roast dinner menu.   The locals knew they could get a good feed for only twenty dollars. Trouble was, you couldn’t go back for seconds.   It was a help yourself type arrangement and every now and then a stranger would confuse the set up with a smorgasbord and think it was “all you could eat” and would go back for seconds only to be instantly and curtly scolded for his ignorance.   A good crowd would turn out.    Tonight was Saturday night and she knew that the restaurant and the pub would just be full of the local drinking crowd, mostly men.  

Whangaroa was an older community with the average age of the residents  fifty, even sixty and older.   

She hadn’t heard a peek out of the honeymoon couple upstairs.  They were checking out tomorrow and as she had no-one checking into the suite for a couple of days, she didn’t have to rush around cleaning it tomorrow. It could wait.  She had too much on her mind at the moment.   She needed a plan.  

Audrey had done her research and had been planning this for months. She just had to wait until the right time and place.  She was a believer that life was all about luck and timing.  Be it bad luck or good luck it didn’t seem to matter it was the timing that was most important.   Tomorrow night would be the perfect time.   It would only be her and the man here.   Her twelve acres of complete privacy gave her all the cover she would need.   

She walked over to the door and turned out all the lights.   He would think she had gone to bed and not disturb her tonight.  Tomorrow he would head off early to get in a full day’s fishing.    Audrey stripped off her clothes and hopped into her king size bed naked.  She liked the feel of the cool crisp sheets against her body.  She also liked sleeping alone.  So many years of living a single life had spoiled any possible relationship she might now have.  

The sound of an old man snoring beside her was repulsive, irritating and sleep depriving.    In her youth she never seemed to notice snoring. She thought it was because she always fell asleep first or maybe it simply didn’t matter then.   She turned on her telly quietly so that no one would hear it if they came to her door.  She usually went to sleep with the telly on and the sleep mode set for forty-five minutes. 

The pa was busy tonight. An off sea wind muffled grunts and squeals from deep in the pine forest.

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Audrey awoke to the sound of his truck crunching down the gravel driveway.  It was only seven o’clock.  She rolled over and went back to sleep for another hour.  When she finally awoke bright sunshine was streaking through the curtain gaps into her bedroom.  Feeling hungry, she walked downstairs to the kitchen and turned on the jug for a cup of tea and popped a piece of bread into the toaster.  She could hear movements in Suite A and returned to her bedroom quickly throwing on her jeans and t-shirt and twisting her hair into a ponytail.  In the bathroom she splashed cold water on her face.

“Shit, I look awful” she confined to her reflection in the mirror.  Any minute she expected the young boy to knock at her door so she could check them out.   They must be leaving early, she thought.  The toaster popped out the toast and the jug stopped boiling.  

Audrey didn’t like mornings. She awoke feeling headachy and sore all over and lived on painkillers.   It was a habit to reach for her pills the minute she woke, popping two into her hand and taking a gulp of water to swill them down.  

She blamed her headaches on her bra straps digging into her shoulders and causing the constant neck pain radiating up the back of her head. She had weighed her boobs by putting the scales on the kitchen table and placing her boobs on the scale.  Forty-five pounds they weighed!  Twenty-two and a half pounds each!  No wonder she had a constant headache.

Audrey was right.  The young boy, all fresh faced and fanciful was knocking at the door downstairs.  She welcomed him inside, took his credit card and ran it through the machine.

“I hope you enjoyed your stay,” she said as she printed out his receipt, stapled it to his bill and handed him the copies.

“Thanks,” he said.  “It was great. We are heading off to Cape Reinga today.  How long do you think it will take?” he asked.”

“It will take you about an hour and a quarter to get to the east coast from here and another couple of hours to the top. But you should stop on the way and visit the white silicone beaches.  You can drive legally on ninety mile beach and the sand dunes are great for boogie boarding” she offered.  

“We will,” he said as he left. “We left the keys on the kitchen counter.”

“Thanks, Goodbye,” she called back as he headed up the steps.

Alone at last, she thought.   As soon as she heard their car driving away she made her way upstairs.  Might as well do the linens and laundry she thought as she stripped the super king bed.   Everything got washed and ironed.  She took armfuls of bed linens and towels down to the laundry and started the first load then made her way upstairs again to make the bed and clean the kitchen.  You never knew when someone just might drop by to enquire about a vacancy.   Today, however, she would not put up the vacancy sign at the gate.   Tonight she wanted privacy- just her and the man.

The day was taken up with cleaning, washing, ironing and changing the water in the hot tub upstairs.   She took pride in keeping the hot tubs clean and inviting.  No one wanted to bathe in the same water as the honeymoon couple the night before.  Each suite had it’s own private hot tub which was one of the major attractions of her business. 

Audrey had spent a fortune on her tropical gardens.  Thick luscious palm trees bordered the   driveways shading hundreds of healthy succulents and native ferns. 

The gardens reminded her of the gardens in Montecito, California where she had lived for many years before returning to live in New Zealand.   The locals thought she was a rich American when she moved into their town.  She wasn’t.  She had spent every penny she had ever earned and even borrowed more to create this masterpiece.   The business was all she had.  Originally she had lived in the South Island which might as well been a different country from the far north.  This was something else.  It was hard to relate to the locals whose lives had been spent living off the land.  Audrey’s life had been spent living off her wits.  She had very little education but had been moderately successful using her youth, femininity, intuition and common sense to get her through.   Her youth was now behind her and her femininity had only just got her into trouble.   Men had been her Achilles heel since day one.  Audrey blamed everything that ever went wrong with her life on men.  Her Father, her two husbands, her countless lovers, they had all let her down. Now it was time for men to pay.   Tonight would be the beginning of her next project and Audrey knew she wasn’t happy if she didn’t have a project.

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Doug was feeling quite contented.  He had found a great fishing spot and had settled down for a day of fishing and some serious beer drinking.   He had stopped at the little grocery store in Kaeo before heading off and picked up some bait and a supply of beer.  

It was a great little store, he thought.   Had a good selection of beer and wine, which was surprising for a little store in the middle of nowhere.   He also grabbed some bread, ham and cheese and a couple of packets of potato chips.    The sun was out and the day had nice breeze: all good.    Catching a couple of snapper he knew dinner was set.   Maybe he would invite the blonde, Audrey, over for dinner. Would be nice to have some company and perhaps he would get lucky.  He grinned.  Being single again is not such a bad deal.  He might even stop over in Whangarei on the way back to Auckland and get himself a girl or two.  He had been checking out the girls’ online last night.  Some pretty tasty girls; young Maori girls, Asian girls, Pakehas with big tits - quite a selection. 

His line jerked and broke him out of his fantasy.  A “big one” this time.  Doug couldn’t remember the last time the fish had been so kind to him. He twisted the large snapper off the hook and placed it on the chopping board.  It was a good size and provided a couple nice big fillets of which he put in the chilly bin.  He scraped off the board and threw all the remnants into the ocean.    Doug fished and drank beer all morning, ate his lunch and continued to do the same through the afternoon.   By the time he decided to head back to his chalet he had a full chilly bin of filleted fish and a full stomach of beer.   He didn’t have to drive far to get back and he knew that cops were few and far between out here in the far north so he had no worries about being stopped. 

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Constable Driver was worried.  He hadn’t heard from his wife all day.  She was supposed to be doing the final packing up of their house in Auckland and he knew it was a big job and he was sure that she would call him to complain that it was just too much.

              She had not been well the past few years.  Her illness had caused a problem for him at his last job and he hoped the new therapy was helping. He wondered how the boys would take to their new home and school here in Kaeo. He had considered sending the boys to Kerikeri for school but it meant taking the bus in and out every day and he hoped he could support the local school even though the school’s academic reputation was poor.  Most of the kids in the area went to Kerikeri. He would leave the decision up to his wife.   He had hired a local lady to prepare the house for their arrival.   She had washed all the curtains, scrubbed the floors and made all the beds with clean linens.  Everything else was to arrive with the family on Monday.  There were just a few days to go. 

              Driver considered eating a roast dinner at Whangaroa tonight. He had heard that it was good tucker and he needed a home cooked meal.  Roast lamb, roast pork and roast beef with roasted potatoes, kumara, pumpkin, cauliflower with cheese sauce and peas and gravy.  His mouth watered just thinking about it.  He would head over there early and do a sweep of the area while he was at it.   It wouldn’t hurt to get to know some of the locals.  

The phone rang.  It was his wife.  He breathed a sigh of relief. She sounded happy and excited.  The packing was done. The truck was organized for tomorrow.  It would arrive in Kaeo at noon on Monday. She and the boys would drive up Monday morning and be there in time to help unpack.  She said the boys were really excited and they were looking forward to kayaking and fishing.   Driver had promised that he would buy them both kayaks so they could go out in the harbor and up the Wainui River when the tide was in.   They were ten and eleven years old and good swimmers so he had no fear of them being around water. 

He felt relieved that his wife was coping with the move. He hung up the phone, donned his jacket, grabbed his hat and headed off out the door.   He had work to do and he wanted to get to the dinner tonight. He heard the local roast pork was truly delicious

C H A P T E R   1 4

Audrey was prepared and excited.  “Finally,” she thought. “This is the right time.” She had been feeding the wild pigs for a couple of months now.  Always in the same place so they would expect to find the food there.   She had learned about pigs from the local pig farmer.  He had told her that if a man falls down in a pigpen and can’t get up the pigs would eat him alive.  She had always been afraid of pigs since then. Once when helping a neighbor head off a straying calf she realized she was alone in a muddy paddock surrounded by huge pink menacing sows. As they headed towards her she ran as fast as she could, terrified she would fall and they would attack her.