DEADLY DECEPTIONS

by Bill WENHAM

  “And everything being….?”

  “Well, you know, the shops, the post office, and the pubs and so on. Within walking distance…” She was about to add, ‘even for you’, but caught herself just in time.

  Prentiss appeared to consider his options for a moment. Finally, he asked, “Would it be available for a two year lease and I suppose another very important consideration is – does it come furnished?”

  “It does, sir, and as it happens, it the only one of the three that does,” she said.

  “And the lease?”

  “Not a problem there, I’m sure of it,” Pam said. She should be sure because the cottage had stood empty for almost three years now, ever since little old Tilly Mason had dropped dead in her kitchen.

  “Perhaps you would be kind enough to take me to see it then, Miss Wigglesworth?”

  “Please call me Pam, Mr. Prentiss, and I’d be delighted to drive you over there. Just let me just get the key.”

  Prentiss liked the cottage as soon as he saw it and he thought it would suit his needs perfectly. It had an almost panoramic view of the village, being located directly opposite the village green.

  The cottage was small, with just two tiny bedrooms upstairs, an equally tiny kitchen on the ground floor and a sitting /dining area that looked to be no more than ten feet square. It had just a few feet of garden in the front and not much more in the back. It was thatched, compact and quaint but that was about all that could be said about it.

  “The rental fee covers the cost of a young local lad coming round once in a while to keep the gardens tidy. He’ll even wash the windows if you want but you would have to pay him yourself for that,” Pam told him when she saw Prentiss frown.

  Actually it didn’t cover any of that but Pam would make damned sure that it did and she would pay for any window washing that was needed herself. The place had stood empty now for too long and she would be prepared to turn cartwheels even if she could get this old man to sign a binding two year lease on it. She silently prayed that he would take it.

  “Well, Mr. Prentiss. What do you think? Do you like it?” she said hopefully.

  “I’m a little concerned with those stairs, Pam. They are awfully steep,” Prentiss said.

  “There’s a very sturdy handrail on either side to help you get up them, Mr. Prentiss,” she said, hoping that would satisfy him.

  He favoured her with yet another of his wan smiles.

  “It’s not the going up that concerns me, Pam. It’s the falling down them that’s going to hurt,” he said.

  Pam looked shocked. Oh, shit, she thought, the old fool’s not going to take it and he won’t want either of the others. They are both unfurnished.

  “Just my little joke, Pam. I’m sure I’ll be able to manage and if the lease can be suitably arranged, I’ll move in on the first of next month,” he told a very relieved Pam Wigglesworth.

  She had told him about the other household expenses such as electricity and heating and he hadn’t balked at it. He hadn’t even been concerned that the cottage had no phone. The cottage had been converted to electricity and hot water radiator heating by Edgar, old Tillie’s husband, several years ago. Edgar had popped off only a couple of months after the conversions were completed. The cottage was now owned by their son who lived in Manchester and who pestered Pam monthly to ‘get the bloody thing sold or rented’.

  “I forgot to ask you how long you are planning to be here on this visit and where you are staying, Mr. Prentiss,” Pam asked him on the way back to her office in her car.

  “Just long enough to get the lease signed. A day or two at the most, I would hope and I’ve booked a room at your Black Bull Inn on a day to day basis,” he said. “When the lease is done, so am I, so I would appreciate promptness from you, please.”

  Pam bit her tongue at the jibe and gave him her businesslike smile. All teeth and absolutely no bloody sincerity, Prentiss thought.

  “Of course, Mr. Prentiss, I’ll get right on to it as soon as we get to the office. I should be able to bring it to the Inn for you to sign later today, sir,” Pam said.

  Of course she could do that. The snippy owner had pre-signed an open lease and had left her with the instruction to ‘make the best deal you can and get the bloody thing rented if you can’t sell it.’

  The following morning, after only one night at the Inn, Parker Prentiss, painfully clambered aboard the local bus to take him back to Cambridge. Another passenger, a woman already on the bus, got up from her front seat and helped him into it. He thanked her profusely as she smiled and moved further back inside the bus.

  However, the Parker Prentiss who strode jauntily along the railway station platform swinging his walking stick as though it was a conductor’s baton, looked nothing like the poor, decrepit old man who had boarded the local bus earlier.

  When he boarded the London bound train, his face wore a self satisfied smile as he thought of the two year signed lease nestling in his inside jacket pocket.

  Step One of his long time mission had just been completed. He would attend to Step Two as soon as he reached London. He had already done much of his preparation prior to going to Cambridgeshire.

  He would now rent out his own house in London for the same two years. He would rent it furnished also, but with the proviso that his ‘museum room’ must be kept locked by the rental tenants and never opened under any circumstances.

  “Got a bleedin’ body in there, ‘ave ya, then, mate?” the young Cockney and his wife who were to be his tenants joked.

  “No, of course not. Nothing like that but it does contain my life’s work. Just dry and boring historical facts and figures, actually. Nothing of interest to anyone else, but invaluable to someone like me.”

  “Right, mate. Then don’t you worry about nuffin’. Me, I’m blind an’ me ole lady here, she can’t see a bloody thing iver, so we ain’t goin’ t’ go pryin’ inta yer stuff, okay?” the Cockney laughed. “Your ‘ouse’ll be safe enough wiv us, believe you me.”

  Renting his house and on his terms had been a very simple matter, since accommodations, especially rentals, were few and far between in his area. Prentiss had also put the rental at a very attractive level to get a quick and satisfactory response. It was snapped up within a week by the Cockney couple.

  Unbeknownst to Middleton and Bristow, the person they were looking for, and within a one year time span, had been a resident of Little Carrington for well over a year before the first of the murders had occurred.

  Prentiss, using his own car, had moved to Little Carrington in the spring of 2004. Once he had established who his target was, he bided his time. There was no hurry and he didn’t want to cast suspicion on himself by acting too soon.

  By now, even though he waited, his obsession had driven him almost to the point of madness, but a by-product of madness is often extreme cunning as well. So it was with Parker Prentiss.

  Where the former German spy was concerned, Prentiss felt no compassion at all. He would whatever was necessary and to anyone at all, in fact, in order to achieve his objective. As far as he was concerned, he could allow nothing and nobody to get in his way and people, if they did get in his way, were merely disposable pawns in the deadly chess game he was about to play.

  Although the elimination of his target was planned, Prentiss had not intended to take any action on it just yet. In fact, the action he did take, almost a year later, was also unplanned and unintended by circumstances that threatened him and forced the action on him.

  His first actually planned action was to make an anonymous call to the Lord of the Manor. Since he didn’t have a phone in the cottage he would have to make the call from the public call box in the village. It was located about a hundred yards from the Rose and Sceptre pub.

  Prentiss waited until dark and for the pub’s evening business to get well under way and then he drove his car over to the phone box.

  He placed his call and spoke directly to Sir Alfred, making it quite clear that h
e knew that the man was a fraud. He hung up and was about to leave the box when he saw Amy Warren waiting outside to use it next. She had a shocked expression on her face, and since there was a missing window pane in the box right at shoulder level, Prentiss realized the woman had heard every word.

  He had no idea who she was but realized that she could badly jeopardize his mission.

  He hurried out of the box and in time to see the woman riding away on her bike. As he got into the car and started the engine, he could see the red taillight from her bike as she crossed the Cam River bridge into Great Carrington.

  He caught up with her in Cox’s Lane, just as she was leaning her bike against the fence in front of her cottage.

  Prentiss got out of the car quickly and looked around quickly for some sort of a weapon. Beside the right side of the fence’s front gate was a cast iron boot scraper. He picked it up and before the young woman could react, he had hit her across the side of her head with it. She collapsed in a heap beside her bicycle.

  He opened the rear door of the car, pulled the unconscious woman up off the ground and bundled her into the back seat. Prentiss realized that, now that he’d gone this far he had no other option than to finish the job.

  As he had picked her up, her bike had fallen over and several items had spilled out of the wicker basket attached to the handle bars. One of the items was a roll of red ribbon.

  Prentiss stood undecided for a moment. He had to kill her. He had no option about that now and he would have to dispose of her body as well. But where? Suddenly, he gave a grim smile. Where else? In the place that he looked at every morning when he drew back his bedroom curtains, that’s where!

  He picked up the roll of ribbon, opened the boot lid and dropped the scraper and the roll of ribbon inside. Then he slammed the lid down and got back into the car. He thought for a moment more. If he was going to do this, then he’d better do it properly. He wanted no mistakes at this stage of the game.

  Prentiss drove back to the Village Green opposite his own cottage He hadn’t intended to do anything more than the call yet but tonight the circumstances had changed. He also realized that, ready or not, his vendetta had just started with an unexpected victim.

  Prentiss looked into the back seat of the car and noted that the woman hadn’t moved. Perhaps his blow to her head had killed her, he thought, but he felt no remorse at all.

  He drove the car to the rear of the Village Green where the pond was located. He parked as close to it as he could and left the engine running. The Inn across the Green was busy, with several cars parked outside but Prentiss couldn’t see any people outside. He reasoned that if he couldn’t see anyone, then they couldn’t see him either and that boosted his confidence.

  Then the young woman started to wake up. He obviously hadn’t hit her hard enough to kill her after all. He dragged her out of the car and on to the grass beside the pond, popped the boot of the car open and took out the scraper.

  The woman looked at him with terrified eyes and then, when she saw the scraper in his hand, instead of screaming, she began to plead with him for her life. It was probably the worse decision she had ever made in her whole life.

  Prentiss stepped up to her. She had struggled to her knees in front of him. Then, although he’d never done anything even remotely like this before, he calmly bludgeoned her to death with the cast iron scraper.

  Blood poured from the gaping wound in the side of her head, on to the grass and ran into the pond water. Prentiss looked around and still saw no one. He went back to the car boot, took out the roll of ribbon and quietly closed the lid again. He put the heavy scraper and the roll of ribbon down beside the woman’s body.

  Now that the deed was done, Prentiss found himself breathing heavily and could feel his heart pounding in his chest. He took a deep breath and then unraveled the ribbon from the roll. With one end of it in his right hand, he pushed it under the woman and knotted the ribbon tightly around her waist. Then, working feverishly, he picked up the scraper and tied the rest of the ribbon to it, leaving about a foot of it joining the scraper to the now dead woman’s waist.

  He peered over at the pub again but still no one apparently had come outside. Prentiss realized that it had also started to rain and that was perhaps why. Either way, luck was with him and he only needed a minute or so more and he’d be Scot free.

  He eased the body over right to the pond edge and rolled it into the water. The attached boot scraper followed and both of them sank beneath the surface of the pond.

  His hastily constructed plan hadn’t considered that, if the police found the body in the pond eventually, they would also find the scraper attached to it. He had handled it, it was old, dirty and greasy and it probably had his fingerprints imbedded in the grime all over it. Hopefully, immersion in the pond water would remove his prints over time.

  It was now pouring with rain as he restarted the car. He was now soaked to the skin but the heavy rain had already washed the blood deep into the grass. At least he could no longer see any.

  He drove to his cottage which was no more than a hundred or two feet away across the other side of the Green, but tonight, soaked or not, he took the long way around returning via Parson’s Lane and the village hall.

  When he finally got back to the cottage, he stripped off all his clothes, toweled himself dry and put on an old dressing gown, a favourite of his. He picked up all his wet clothes, put them on wooden coat hangers and hung them up in the kitchen to dry. If they dripped, the water would only go on to the red tile floor and could be easily mopped up. By the time Prentiss had finished that as well he was both physically and mentally exhausted. When they were dry enough in the morning, he would burn them in the wood stove.

  When he had first arrived back at the cottage he had felt a wide range of emotions, from terror of discovery, to relief and elation of not being seen and followed by a deep sense of satisfaction at having succeeded in a task that he’d never performed before.

  It was regrettable, he supposed, since he’d never even seen the woman before and didn’t know her name either. He knew where she had lived and was thankful that the cottages in Cox’s Lane were a good distance apart. He was confident that he hadn’t been seen there either.

  Now it was a waiting game to see what happened next. He’d already waited a year and it could be a few more days until the woman was found to be missing. It could be weeks or even months before her body was found.

  In that assumption, Parker Prentiss was completely wrong, because it was found on the following morning!

  Chapter Eight

  Some time later, and after disposing of Doc Brewer as well, Prentiss had a very disturbing encounter with little old Annie Siggers. She had stopped him late at night in the village and had asked him if he was ill.

  “Why, no, Miss Siggers. Why on earth would you think that I was ill? Old and decrepit, perhaps, but no, I’m not ill.”

  “Oh, I saw you were at Dr. Brewer’s place a couple of nights ago and I wondered if you had a medical emergency” she said.

  Prentiss had just found himself in a most awkward spot. He hadn’t thought anyone had had seen him there that night, least of old Annie Siggers.

  “Like you, Mr. Prentiss, the doctor was such a nice and gentle man and I was appalled that anyone would kill him. The poor man wouldn’t hurt a fly. Hadn’t you heard?” she prattled on, but had she noticed the difference in his appearance, he wondered.

  Instead of his normal, shabby and shuffling persona, he was dressed completely in black from head to toe and had also been walking quite normally when she had surprised him. He was wearing his nighttime ‘prowling’ outfit and he thought quickly for something to distract her attention.

  “No, I hadn’t heard, Miss Siggers, and I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “I’m surprised that you get out at night like this, Mr. Prentiss. The night air can’t be good for you surely. I thought that when I spotted you at the doctor’s house a few nights back. That poor man
should be inside at night, I said to myself. He’ll catch his death one of these days,” she said.

  Prentiss had felt his heart lurch. Oh, my God! The old woman had actually seen him there!

  “Yes, ma’am, you are quite right of course but as far as being ill, I hadn’t gone to see the doctor about me at all and I got no response when I rang his bell. The purpose of my call on him was only to see if he knew of a good vet in the area.” he said, hoping that what he was about to say to her would sound feasible to the old woman.

  “A vet, Mr. Prentiss? Why on earth would you want to be treated by a vet?” she said in a surprised voice.

  Prentiss laughed.

  “No, no, Miss Siggers. You’ve misunderstood me, dear lady. I’m just an old man now and sometimes I get very lonely in the cottage by myself. That’s why I sometimes go for walks like this if I feel up to it. I just thought that if I found a vet, then he or she could perhaps help me to find a pet to keep me company.”

  Annie Siggers gave him a bright if somewhat toothless smile.

  “A pet, Mr. Prentiss. How very nice for you. What kind of a pet were you thinking of?” she asked.

  Prentiss appeared to be considering his answer before he spoke.

  “Well, not a dog, of course, since I wouldn’t want it to run loose and at my age I couldn’t always be up to taking it for walks in all weathers either.”

  He knew very well who it was he was talking to. Old Annie was well known in the community as the ‘cat lady’.

  “I was thinking of perhaps a cat. I believe, from what I’ve heard, that they are very clean, affectionate and a lot less trouble than dogs – and they don’t bark to annoy the neighbours either, do they?” he said with a smile.

  “Did you have a particular kind of cat in mind,” Annie asked.

  “No, not really. I don’t know anything about them at all. I’ve never had one before, you see.”

  Annie smiled back at him.

  “Well, Mr. Prentiss, you are in luck, sir, because I have lots of them. Of course, I love them all very dearly but I think I can spare one of them for you if you like. You are a good, kind man and I know you will gave my little darling a good home,” she said.