by Bill WENHAM
You don’t know me at all, Miss Siggers, as you are about to find out, Prentice thought!
He nodded.
“Are you sure, Miss Siggers? I wouldn’t want you to lose one of your loved ones,” he said.
“Oh, no, not lost, surely, Mr. Prentiss, just merely relocated. So, when would you like to choose one?” she asked him.
“Well, ma’am, I’ve always believed that there is no time like the present. Do it now and get it over with is my motto, Miss Siggers.”
“And a very good one it is too, Mr. Prentice,” Annie said, thinking he was referring to the cat selection, but Prentiss had something totally different in mind. “If you would like to pop by in the morning, I’ll have a starter pack ready for you. Some food, a couple of bowls, a basket for sleeping and a bag of cat litter, enough to get you started,” she said.
“And a cat too, I hope, Miss Siggers,” he laughed and Annie giggled girlishly.
“Yes, of course, a cat, Mr. Prentiss. I think I have just the one for you too. She is a lovely long haired tabby, spayed of course, and I think you will love her, just as I do. There are others, of course, if she isn’t….”
Prentiss put his hand gently on her thin arm.
“No, Miss Siggers. Your choice will suit me perfectly and what is the young lady’s name?” he asked.
“It’s Tabatha, Mr. Prentiss, but I just call her Tabby. Silly old woman, aren’t I?” Annie said and giggled again.
Good God, Prentiss thought, I do believe the little old dear is flirting with me! I am Death, dear lady, and one should never, ever flirt with Death!
“Not at all, ma’am,” he said gallantly. “A most appropriate name for her, I would think, and thank you.”
Prentiss appeared to be considering something and then said, “I don’t suppose I could impose on you to come by for her tonight, could I, Miss Siggers? If it is not too late for you of course?”
“No, no, of course it isn’t. Do you want to come right now?” she asked.
“Ah, could we make it in about twenty minutes, Miss Siggers? As you have rightly pointed out the night air is quite chilly and I would like to just pop home for a coat,” he say.
“Of course, Mr. Prentiss, that will give me plenty of time for what I need to do?” she said.
Me too, me too, Prentiss thought to himself.
To Annie he said, “That is splendid, Miss Siggers. Simply splendid and thank you.”
He watched Annie walk away and then, crouched over, just in case, he hurried back to his own cottage. Once inside, he quickly changed into his usual day time clothes, put on a pair of latex gloves and took out Doc Brewer’s engraved scalpel from a box in his cupboard.
He had actually boiled and disinfected it when he’d got home that night and had also made a cardboard sleeve for it so that he could keep it in the inside pocket of his jacket. He hadn’t known what else to do with it at the time, but he did now!
This will throw the police for a loop, he said aloud. He didn’t bother with his walking stick as he left the cottage again, using his usual painful shuffling gait. It was a long walk but he didn’t want his car to be seen.
Annie met him at her cottage door, greeted him pleasantly and invited him inside. She didn’t comment about his change of clothing and didn’t notice the latex gloves. Annie Siggers had noticed a lot too much earlier and not nearly enough now. But it didn’t matter because it was far too late for that now anyway.
“I hope you can manage Tabby and all her stuff, Mr. Prentiss,” Annie said as she turned to pick up the cat that was sitting patiently behind her. Several others were roaming around the room or sitting on the furniture as well.
“You can always….” she started to add, but, just as he had done with Doc Brewer, Prentiss reached forward, grabbed her by the hair and pulled her head backwards. Before she could react or make a sound, he had sliced the scalpel across her thin and scrawny throat. He released his grip on her hair and her body sagged to the floor in a small, very bloodied and pitiful looking heap in front of him.
Prentiss simply dropped the scalpel on the floor beside the body, went back out through the still open door and closed it behind him.
Annie’s cottage was located as one of very few in Orchard Lane and Prentiss realized that, as he resumed his painful looking and bent over shuffle, that he had no option but to take a chance on being seen as he passed only one or two more cottages. He’d passed the same ones on the way over and had seen no one. That didn’t really mean anything in villages like these though, because the eyes and ears were always everywhere. Especially old Joe Turner’s.
Since he had been a resident of Little Carrington, he had made a point of taking the occasional nighttime walk just to set a pattern of behavior in case he needed it, as he did now. On the one or two occasions he had been recognized and had been spoken to, he had just joked that with old age, he had developed insomnia and he couldn’t even remember if he had Alzheimer’s or not now.
The body had been discovered by young Pattie Everton, daughter of one of the local farmers, who delivered milk for the old lady’s cats every day. She was practically hysterical when she ran into the tiny police station to report what she’d found.
In no time at all, the news of another murder, the third, had been flashed around the community. When the name of the victim was announced the entire community was once more astounded, even more so than when they’d heard about Amy Warren and Doc Brewer.
The victim was another woman, but this time it was little old Annie Siggers, the eccentric local ‘cat lady’! She was elderly, frail and completely harmless so why on earth would anyone want to kill her?
Joe Turner had so many details of it that Roger Sedgwick, a Black Bull regular, asked if it was him who’d done her in.
“Old Annie turned down your amorous advances then, did she, Joe?” he said, grinning.
“I wonder who really did this one, though,” Ray, the bartender said. “Joe here says that it was done with an initialed scalpel and it was found right beside her body. It had Doc Brewer’s initials on it but it couldn’t have been him, ‘cos he’s dead already.”
Middleton was mystified as to where old Joe got some of his very accurate information from until finally Mary Marsden admitted, under some gentle grilling from him, that she was Joe’s niece and fed him ‘the occasional bit of juicy gossip’.
As the days went by, Prentiss waited to be visited by the police inspector from Cambridge, but no one came. Feeling a little bolder, he even ventured into the Black Bull for a beer or two. The locals were so used to him by now that, apart from a nod or two, no one gave him a second glance as he sat alone and painfully hunched over at a corner table.
Why would anyone bother with him? He was just a harmless and very old man, one who was obviously, in his condition, totally incapable of such a deed. Of almost any deed, one would think.
He would have laughed if he’d heard Middleton’s discussion about magic, distractions and illusions with Bristow. Prentiss also knew that the main secret of believable and successful magic was to make something that appeared to be totally impossible happen right before the audience’s eyes.
Well, incapable appearing or not, he had just made that happen here in Carrington and on three separate occasions now.
When he had killed Annie Siggers, Prentiss had used an initialed scalpel, knowing that Dr. Brewer could not possibly have done it. Dead men didn’t, and couldn’t, cut old lady’s throats but it would give the police something else to think about.
Anyone from London, who knew him well, such as Leo Surridge, would have had a very different opinion because the man he knew looked completely different from this poor old man in Carrington. The London Prentiss stood at almost five foot eleven tall and weighed one hundred and fifty pounds. Now in his late seventies, he was almost militarily upright and could normally move both easily and painlessly. Even his fairly thick hair had just a touch of gray and his eyesight was still almost perfect as well.
He had skillfully applied a grey makeup and had added to and deepened the lines on his face with an eyebrow pencil. All his clothes were deliberately shabby and he had scoured the second hand shops to find them.
His transformation had been dramatic and even the estate agent who rented him the cottage, and had seen him as he really was, had no reason to recognize him now or even to see him again. Prentiss, in the original transaction, arranged that, for the whole term of his lease, the rental fees would be deducted automatically from his account over at the bank.
He was satisfied that he had created the perfect illusion under which to carry out his task. All anyone saw here in the village was an old and pain ridden man who was only in Little Carrington to end his days without the stress of big city living. Only three people had seen him any differently and all of them had now paid for that with their lives.
Prentiss had not just come about his change of appearance idea by chance either. Included in his huge collection of World War II memorabilia back in London were numerous books about the training and missions of the Allied secret agents and spies. Over the years, Prentiss had read them all cover to cover and some of then even several times.
Part of their training included the same simple tricks to change their appearance as Prentiss himself was now using. Things such as a small stone placed inside one shoe to produce a constant and convincing limp. Flour rubbed into the hair would turn black hair into gray or even white, if necessary. Then there were moustaches, beards, eyeglasses, walking sticks, crutches and so on.
The objective was often to hide in plain sight of everyone just as Prentiss was doing now. Those simple tricks had worked very well for numerous secret agents and Prentiss knew they would work equally well for him.
These days, the poor old man who was seen to hobble into and out of his cottage was one to be pitied for his intense pain and infirmity, but never to be even remotely suspected of murder.
For that reason alone, never once did old Parker Prentiss appear on either Middleton’s or Bristow’s radar. It wasn’t that they weren’t smart. They were but their quarry was very, very good at what he was doing.
The scene had been set, the hero and villains had been selected and the audience had been suitably distracted by Prentiss’s appearance and soon the final act would be performed.
He had felt no remorse whatsoever about killing Amy Warren, Doc Warren and Annie Siggers so ruthlessly. In commerce, a thing such as his disposal of his three victims would simply be chalked up to experience and the cost of doing business. All three of them fell into that category and they were apparently motiveless crimes
Amy’s error was twofold. She had seen him ‘out of character’ and he believed that she had also heard his phone call to Sir Alfred. Annie had seen him the same way, and although she hadn’t apparently realized it, she had to be eliminated immediately as well. They, and Brewer, were merely sacrificial pawns in the deadly chess game he was playing.
Prentiss decided to keep up his charade for a little longer and to see if he could somehow infiltrate the defenses of the Lord of the Manor now. Just their social differences alone would create a practically insurmountable barrier for him unless he could find a way to overcome it.
Well, that’s easy, he thought. I’ll just invite myself if he won’t do it for me!
There really wasn’t any hurry except that Prentiss didn’t want the fake Sir Alfred to kick the bucket from natural causes before he had paid the ultimate price Prentiss was demanding.
Allenby, or Schaeffer, as Prentiss now knew him to be, would most certainly die, but not until he had been tortured and hideously disfigured just as Prentiss’s father had been. But, as always, when it is least expected, fate had intervened.
Not only had some of the books in Prentiss’s possession described the German spies missions and methods, one had actually also described the Gestapo’s torturing processes in full and most horrifying detail. Prentiss also even had, as part of his collection, some of the actual equipment and instruments used by them for this purpose, plus a thick hand-written notebook describing the methodology, duration of each episode of the torture and the details of the information obtained from the victims.
Prentiss had brought some of these same items with him to Little Carrington and it was his intention to use them on Allenby to avenge his father, in the very near future.
Prentiss smiled grimly as he thought that if the police ever had cause to search his cottage they would have themselves a bloody field day!
Now, there would be a lull in his activities. He expected that even with Annie Siggers gone as well, the police would still be frustrated even more because there was not so far, and would not be, any evidence at all to base an arrest on - certainly not against Prentiss himself.
He was comfortable in the knowledge that the commission of each of the murders had been, and would be, faultless, clueless and with complete anonymity. There would be nothing at all for the police to discover except the scalpel, possibly the boot scraper, and the bodies themselves,
Prentiss smiled to himself. Perhaps it would be good for them to waste even more time looking for a completely useless object – the scraper. He decided that he would even help them do it himself.
The police had not yet found what had been used to submerge Amy Warren’s body in the pond. Perhaps it was time they did, Prentiss thought. He doubted that they would ever find the scraper because they wouldn’t know what they were looking for. It must also still be pretty well hidden anyway, he thought, because there had been no mention of it when the Warren woman’s body had been recovered.
Now Prentiss decided to take a chance. What he was about to do could have one of two results. It could either uncover him or it could cement his position as the frail old man in the village.
He hobbled painfully across the road to the police station to report an ‘incident’. Mary Marsden immediately helped him into one of the office chairs and asked him if he would like a mug of tea before Sgt. Barnett even had a chance to ask the old man why he was there. Later, Mary didn’t think to wonder what the gray powdery substance was on the sleeve of her cardigan where it had brushed against Prentiss’s face, or how it had got there.
Prentiss told Sgt. Barnett that, unable to sleep, he had looked out of his window in the early hours of the morning and had seen someone throw something into the pond. He didn’t see who had thrown it or what it was because he wasn’t wearing his glasses but it must have been rather heavy because it had made quite a splash. That much he could tell, he said.
Sgt. Barnett asked him when this had occurred and Prentiss said, deliberately vaguely, that he thought it might have been on the night the young woman was killed. He added that he wasn’t sure, of course, because his old brain didn’t work as well as it used to.
Barnett asked him why he had waited so long before coming forward. Prentiss said that it had slipped his mind until he’d heard in the pub about the other poor woman.
Mary handed the old man a mug of tea which he accepted gratefully and he apologized profusely to Barnett for not being able to remember.
“That’s okay, Mr. Prentiss. It may be nothing because folks around here are forever dumping stuff in the pond. Bloody inconsiderate as far as I’m concerned,” he said.
Prentiss nodded and went to put his mug of tea on the edge of Barnett’s desk. He deliberately missed it and the mug fell to the floor and smashed, spilling hot tea everywhere. Mary rushed over with a cloth to clean up the mess.
“I’m so sorry, young lady. I’m just a clumsy old oaf and I’ll buy
you another mug.”
“That’s alright, Mr. Prentiss, we’ve got plenty of mugs here, so don’t you worry your head about it. Mary will make you another tea.” Barnett said,
“No, no, thank you all the same, but I think I’d better be getting home before I do any more damage. I’ve told you what I came in for anyway, haven’t I?” Prentiss said and attempted to stand.
Barnett came out from behind his desk and helped him to his feet. Then he picked up and handed Prentiss his walking stick and opened the outside door.
“Thank you for coming in, Mr. Prentiss,” He said. “We’ll look into it as soon as we can.”
Prentiss nodded and hobbled away. With his back towards Barnett, the policeman couldn’t see his smile. The dropped mug thing had just been another distraction because the longer he stayed the harder it would be to maintain this image and the police were trained to watch out for such things, surely?
Chapter Nine
On the day following little old Annie Siggers’ murder, another visitor came into the police station. Sgt. Barnett courteously asked the middle-aged woman if he could help her.
“I sincerely hope so, Sergeant. My name is Mattie MacAndrews and I’m from the R.S.P.C.A. We got a call to say that there are numerous homeless cats here in your village. Is that correct?” she said.
“It is, ma’am, and due to an unfortunate circumstance here, the poor lady that owned them has died.”
The officious looking woman raised her eyebrows.
“Died, you say, Sergeant?” she said. “We were told that she’d been murdered.”
“Well, yes, ma’am, your information is correct, but how can I help you?” Barnett said.
“Are the poor things being cared for by anyone, and how many of them are there?”
“In answer to your first question…” Barnett glanced at her left hand, saw no wedding ring and thought, bloody old maid, and she wouldn’t be a Ms. either! He continued, “…Miss MacAndrews, a young girl who delivers milk for them daily, is looking after them at the house. For the time being at least.”
