DEADLY DECEPTIONS

by Bill WENHAM

  Suddenly she slowed down and looked across the street at one of the larger cottages. The moonlight illuminated the sign in old English lettering hanging above the door quite clearly. It was lettered in keeping with the old world appearance of the quaint thatched cottage. It read:

  ‘Ye Olde Tasty Tea Room’. Prop. R. Donnelly.

  “That’s where she lives, sir. A nice little tourist business, I would think,” Bristow said. “This is where I picked her up this morning.”

  “She lives there too, then, does she?” he asked and frowned slightly.

  He was having trouble forming an image in his mind of the elegant and beautiful woman that he’d almost brought to tears, serving teas in a pinafore in such a place. He also noticed a light was on in an upper room as they carried on with their walk. Twenty minutes later, when they returned by the same route, the cottage was in darkness and a cloud was now covering the moon. Most of the lights in the other cottages were out by now as well.

  Middleton guessed that the villagers were not exactly night hawks with little or nothing to do after the pubs closed. He mentioned his thought to Bristow.

  “Maybe that’s why Randy Andy is so popular around here,” she said, with a grin. “Maybe I should look him up myself.”

  “Oh, grow up, Bristow,” Middleton said.

  “I am grown up, sir, that’s why I would have such thoughts,” she said brightly.

  “You’ll do no such thing, young lady. We have the dignity of the Cambridge Police Force to consider.” Middleton said, with mock severity.

  “Well, sir, in that case, I suppose the Force is in luck if not to dally with Randy Andy is all it takes,” she said.

  “Must always have the last word, eh, Bristow?” Middleton said.

  “Yes, sir, I must.” Bristow said, grinning, as they reached the entrance of the Inn. “You should never end a conversation with a question if you want to have the last word. Every woman worth her salt knows that, sir!”

  It was strange, she thought, that there had to be so much formality between them. He knew her first name was Sally but he never called her that. She was always Bristow when he addressed her or Detective Sergeant Bristow if she was being introduced. This was not unusual either, since all of the senior officers addressed their various subordinates, male or female, that way. Consequently, she didn’t find it either demeaning or offensive. It was merely a question of ranking. She, in turn, would address an ordinary constable that way herself. What would he have called her if her surname had been like one of these modern day double barreled names?

  In the old days the joining of the names had been justified but these days they could be hyphenated merely because the woman refused to give up her maiden name to convention.

  Then she laughed when she thought of some of the possibilities and the resulting nicknames. Just imagine if her name was something like Penelope Parcellini-Postlethwaite. At school, and even later as an adult, she would have been teased unmercifully and would have surely been dubbed – ‘Penny Parcel Post’!

  Worse yet, possibly, if her name had been Felicity Fischbinder-Featherstonehaugh, she was sure to have ended up as ‘Feely Fish Feathers’. Middleton wouldn’t have to worry though, because the police college would have definitely found some way to reject her application with names like those! Just plain Bristow didn’t seem so bad after all.

  She liked being plain Sally Bristow and it would be hard to mess with a name like that – and with her looks it was doubtful that anyone would ever call her ‘Plain Sally’.

  The school playground chat of ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me’ suddenly popped into her head. I don’t know about that, she thought, because some nicknames can cause a lot more pain and grief than any of the sticks and stones. Rudge’s nickname of ‘Randy Andy’ was a very good example of that!

  Bristow liked Paul Middleton a lot and respected him and his abilities as a detective immensely, but he was also like a father figure to her. Her own father had passed away when she was just three years old and she had only a very faint recollection of him. She remembered that he was kind, just as Middleton also was.

  Her mother had remarried within eighteen months and after that Sally Bristow’s was not a happy childhood with her new stepfather. Later on, when she was a teenager he became furious with her when she dropped his surname and reverted back to her own father’s name.

  “If you don’t want my name, you ungrateful little bitch, then you don’t get my food or my roof over your head either. So get out right now. Try that for a while and see if you like it!” her stepfather screamed at her.

  Her mother had cried but Bristow got out, supported herself with part-time work while she completed her schooling. She never saw her stepfather again and felt no remorse when she learned later that he’d passed away.

  Apart from the respect that she felt for Middleton and despite her own ability to take good care of herself, she always felt completely safe in his presence. She fell asleep that night thinking how lucky she was to have him as her superior officer and police partner.

  In the morning, when she joined him in the breakfast room, Middleton was looking rather pensive.

  “Someone on your mind, sir?’ she said as she seated herself at the table.

  “Pardon?” Middleton said, and shook his head as though to bring his thoughts back into focus.

  “Nothing, sir. You just had a kind of lost and faraway look in your eyes,” she said.

  He smiled.

  “Did I really?” he said. “A little early for me to be daydreaming, don’t you think, Bristow?”

  “It’s never too early – or too late to dream, sir. Its how a lot of us get by and get what we want out of life,” she said seriously.

  “Is that right, Bristow, and what do you dream of then?”

  She smiled.

  “That depends, sir. I can’t control what I dream of at night and, like everyone else, I just have to accept what I receive.”

  “And daydreams, Bristow, what about those?”

  “Ah, daydreams, sir. That’s something else again. Mostly I daydream about things that I can never have, like a big win on a lottery or being swept off my feet by a rock or movie star. Just harmless fantasies, sir. Everyone has them, don’t they?”

  The waitress interrupted her by coming to the table to take their order. After she had left again, Middleton said, “How about ambition, Bristow? Do you have any particular daydreams in that direction? You’ve done extremely well to reach the rank of Detective Sergeant already.”

  Bristow looked over at him, smiled and said, “You want to know my ambition, sir. My real and honest to goodness ambition?”

  He nodded.

  “It is to be exactly like you, sir. I would like to be able to think like you, act like you and to earn the respect of everyone I meet, just as you do – that’s my ambition, and forget the rock stars, its also my most reoccurring daydream as well.” Bristow said.

  For a moment, Middleton was at a loss for words. Finally, he said, “Well, Bristow, I’m very flattered to be your role model, and as such I will try to do everything I can do to help you reach your goal. You are a very special young woman, very insightful too, so what did you mean by asking me if I had someone on my mind?”

  Bristow grinned at him from across the table.

  “I thought you’d missed that, but what was I thinking. You never miss anything, do you? I think you know exactly what I meant and who I was referring to.”

  Middleton nodded.

  “It was that obvious, was it? I must be slipping.”

  “She’s very attractive, sir, and divorced, I believe. I’m pretty sure old Joe Turner could give you all of her vital statistics and even tell you what she eats for breakfast as well if you were to ask him.”

  “I will not ask him!” Middleton retorted huffily. “I’ll ask her myself if I want to know.”

  Bristow reached across the table and gently took his hand.

&nbs
p; “And you do, sir, don’t you?” she asked.

  Embarrassed, Middleton quickly disengaged his hand.

  “Sometimes I think you are just too bloody smart for your own good, Bristow,” he said.

  Bristow grinned at him again.

  “I just love it when I’m right,” she said and poured each of them a cup of tea from the pot the waitress had brought automatically to the table.

  “Tea, sir, or would you like me to make some more brilliant and accurate assumptions?”

  “Just pour the bloody tea, Bristow, and keep your smart arse assumptions for the cases we’re here for,” he growled at her for a moment and then he grinned back at her.

  “I have to tell you. I’m really glad to have you here with me on these cases, Bristow. I really am – and now where the hell is that girl with our breakfasts?”

  Since the Inn’s owner’s generosity had not extended to their meals, Middleton felt he had a right to be impatient if he was paying for them. He didn’t want to waste any time because he had given a lot of thought to the cases before he went to sleep last night. He had a few ideas he wanted to develop with Bristow as soon as they got to the station this morning.

  When they finally got there, Middleton found that he had a surprise visitor, someone he hadn’t seen or met so far but had already heard a lot about.

  Sitting in a chair in the outer office, drinking tea and waiting for him, was Andy Rudge!

  As Middleton and Bristow came through the door, Andy Rudge stood up and swaggered over to them. He was still holding his tea mug in his right hand and Middleton noticed that his knuckles bore the signs of fading bruises but there were none on his face, indicating that he had been the aggressor.

  “Hi,” he said. “I’m Andy Rudge. I figured you’d get around to me eventually and since I was passing, I thought I’d just pop in.” He didn’t attempt to shake hands with either of them. He gave Bristow a leering look instead. It was a very bad move for him to make.

  “And why do you think that we would we want to talk to you then, Mr. Rudge?” Middleton said

  Rudge coloured and looked flustered.

  “Well, I….” he began and then stopped abruptly. Bristow seized her opportunity.

  “Been up to something naughty then, have we, Mr. Rudge?” Bristow said, eying the man critically. It was very easy to see why so many women were captivated by him. He was certainly good looking, Bristow thought, and could probably turn on a bright boyish charm just like flipping on a light switch. And he could turn to his dark side just as quickly, according to Rachel Donnelly. Bristow guessed him to be about forty or thereabouts.

  Not really my type, though, she thought, grinning to herself. I’m not really that much for other people’s hand-me-downs. I prefer my men to freshly picked and only by me. I don’t need one who’s already been picked over by most of the female population of the parish, thank you!

  Andy stood there in front of them struggling for words. Middleton decided to help him out.

  “If you would like to tell me what crime it is that you’ve committed, Mr. Rudge, I will have Sgt. Barnett take down your statement,” he said.

  “Crime!” a shocked Andy Rudge blurted. “I haven’t committed any bleeding crime!”

  “So, you have some information for us about the ones that have been committed then, right?” Bristow asked.

  “No, but, but…”

  “So you are just here to waste police time, is that it, Mr. Rudge?” Middleton said, giving him a stony stare. “We can charge you with that as well, you know?”

  “Well, I, I, I…” Rudge blustered.

  “Mr. Rudge, I have to tell you that if you have nothing better to do than to just stand there stuttering, we most certainly have. You have a very simple and easily understood choice here, sir. You can either get to hell out of this police station this instant or I will be more than happy to charge you.” Bristow said briskly.

  Rudge stared at her with shocked eyes and fairly bolted out of the little police station.

  “Oh, my, Bristow, that was beautiful,” Middleton said laughing and wiping his eyes. “I just wish Rachel Donnelly and her crew could have been flies on the wall to see that. I bet he’s never been put down so badly in his whole life before and by such a beautiful woman too.”

  Bristow looked at him in surprise. He’d never paid her a compliment on her looks before. It was odd but also rather nice. Middleton was right too because Sally Bristow was a very beautiful woman. Brains and beauty in one very attractive package. She was five foot ten, slim and with darkish, naturally curly blonde hair which she kept short and easily managed. She was about twenty five and unmarried. Unmarried rather than single, because single could also mean divorced. At the moment, she thought of herself as a career policewoman, with her eye on the eventual rank of Detective Chief Superintendent, but perhaps not in Cambridge.

  “These aren’t a woman’s crimes, you know, Bristow,” Middleton said, bringing her mind back to the present. “Not as a general rule of thumb, anyway. But one of them may have been involved as an accomplice and at the moment I think that is highly likely. A woman usually leans more towards poisoning, drowning or a bloody good whack on the head with the legendary blunt instrument – she commits reactionary, bloodless crimes wherever possible. That’s been my personal experience. Not always, though, because a good many of you ladies can be also be pretty bloody handy with a shotgun or a pistol as well.”

  Bristow interrupted him with, “I guess we ladies just point and shut our eyes before we blow some poor bugger’s head off then, do we, sir? Its just so that we don’t have to see the blood flowing. Is that what you’re saying?”

  Middleton snorted.

  “No, of course not, Bristow, I was just speaking in general terms.”

  Bristow glanced at him and said, “Then I’m sure you are aware, sir, that in the rest of the animal world, of which we humans are a part, by the way, the female of the species is nearly always the most aggressive and vicious. Also, take some of the spiders, in the insect world, where the female has the disgusting habit of eating the male after mating.”

  Middleton turned a blue eyed and bland look on her.

  “Really, Bristow, I had no idea you ladies could be so bloody dangerous.” he said.

  This was not true at all because he had watched with interest as Bristow had taken down a male instructor, almost twice her own weight and bulk, in the police gym. That was one of the reasons he had chosen her. The other was her superb performance on the police driving track. If she hadn’t joined the police, she could have quite easily qualified as a racing driver.

  She was admittedly very easy on the eye, but she was his partner, driver and assistant. And as such she could have looked like the back of a bus and it wouldn’t have mattered one iota. He had chosen her for what she was, not for how she looked.

  He admitted to himself, though, that he was glad that she looked as good as she did and he loved their daily repartee. Even that demonstrated what a quick and agile mind she had as well.

  Soon he would have to recommend her for promotion to Inspector and he would hate to lose her. In the meantime, he would teach her all he could.

  Bristow was from Pinner, a town in the west of greater London and she had trained at the Metropolitan Police College at Hendon.

  Initially, she had been posted to Battersea but after a year or two she had requested a transfer to Cambridge. The reason given on her transfer request was that she wanted to be near her ailing and widowed mother. Her stepfather, rather than just dying, had been killed in a drunken brawl in London’s dockland and had ended up floating face down in the filthy water of the Thames. That had been several years ago now.

  Although she had never said so to anyone, she hadn’t been sorry to see him go. She regretted the circumstances, as she would have for anyone, but that was all. She would never miss him and doubted if she would ever even think of him again.

  She did, however, react very angrily when it was sugge
sted by an undertaker that her stepfather shared her mother’s prepaid gravesite. Bristow said no and flatly refused to pay for his funeral and said her mother had no money for it either.

  When it was pointed out that she was his daughter, she told the undertaker and anyone else who was interested, that the fact that he had married her mother didn’t make her his bloody daughter. He, or his dead body, was no concern of hers, she said, and not her responsibility either.

  “But what will we do with his body?” the undertaker asked in a worried tone.

  “Well, as I see it,” Bristow said, “You have one of two choices. You can either bury him, just as he is, in any conveniently empty hole in the ground you have handy – or you can dump him back in the bloody Thames where you found him. The Port of London police fished him out and they can dispose of him.”

  The undertaker was quite put out by her outburst.

  “Now, you just see here, Miss Carlson….”

  Before he could say any more Sally Bristow snapped, “I’m not Miss bloody Carlson and I never have been. If you’d even bothered to check, you’d know that my name is Sally Bristow and I am no relation at all to that cruel bastard. Does that make it clear enough for you?”

  “But the funeral expenses, the coffin….” the undertaker started to say.

  “Bugger the funeral expenses. I’ve already told you, they are none of my concern. If you want to put him in something, dig up a big enough cardboard box from somewhere and stuff him in there. I’ll say this to you just one more time. I don’t give a shit what you do to him or with him. I hope that is quite clear enough for you now.”

  She stalked out of the funeral parlour and never heard from them again. She assumed he’d ended up in a pauper’s grave somewhere, if they even had such things anymore. Either way, she didn’t care.

  Bristow had only been in Cambridge for less than six months when her mother had also died. That she did care about and she made sure that her mother had a proper funeral with all the trimmings. It was about this time when Middleton had chosen her from several well qualified candidates to be his new partner.