DEADLY DECEPTIONS

by Bill WENHAM

  “Body, Inspector?”

  “Yes, sir. You see, since the unfortunate death of Dr. Brewer, there is no one in the immediate vicinity to act as coroner or medical examiner. The nuns handle general medical things, as you know, but we’ll need to bring someone over from Cambridge before the body can be moved from this room. We are very sorry, your Lordship” Middleton said.

  Allenby suddenly realized that he’d been holding his breath and he struggled now to let it out slowly but before he could say anything, Middleton had turned to Bristow.

  “Just see to that right away will you, Detective Sergeant,” he said.

  Bristow walked over to the doorway, took out her cell phone and made the call.

  “If we can get someone to come out tonight, sir, the body can be moved immediately. Otherwise it must remain right here until morning.” Middleton said.

  Allenby nodded.

  “That’s perfectly acceptable, Inspector. I understand completely and at least there is no blood soaking into my carpet, is there?” he said, intending it to be taken as a joke. In poor taste, perhaps, but still a joke.

  Unfortunately, Middleton pounced on it immediately.

  “You don’t seem to be overly concerned about this man’s death, Sir Alfred. Why is that?”

  Allenby instantly gathered his composure and said in a somewhat superior tone, “I would have thought that it would have been rather obvious to you, Inspector. Nobody wants to have anyone die in their home but you must remember that he was a complete stranger to me, merely a voice on the phone followed by several minutes of conversation at most. I am sorry when anyone dies, Inspector, but unless it is a relative or someone close to me, then, no, I’m not overly concerned. If that seems to be unfeeling of me to you, then I apologize,” Allenby said, quite obviously very irritated by Middleton’s question to him.

  “Well, thank you, Sir Alfred. We’ll leave now since there doesn’t seem to be anything more we can do here at the moment. We will return when the coroner gets here from Cambridge,” Middleton said, and thought, I bet I get an earful from the Chief Constable about that little lot as well!

  Allenby said, “I’ll have Ives call you when he or she arrives.”

  “No need, your Lordship, whoever it is will call us before they leave Cambridge and we will be back within minutes of their arrival here.”

  Middleton motioned to Bristow, who opened the study door.

  “Thank you, Sir Alfred,” Bristow said.

  “Not at all,” Allenby replied graciously, “Ives will see you out.” He pressed the bell button on his desk for his valet, who appeared instantly, as if by magic.

  When they were back in their car, Middleton said, “Well, Bristow, what did you think of all that?”

  “A whole lot of smoke and mirrors as far as I’m concerned, sir. There was definitely something very much amiss in there, sir.” Bristow said.

  “How so, Bristow?” Middleton asked curiously.

  “Well, I hope that all the other peers of the realm are much more truthful than he is because that one was lying his bloody head off,” she said.

  “You saw something then, Bristow?”

  “Not something singular, sir. I saw two very odd things.”

  “Really? And what were they, may I ask?”

  “You may, sir, and one was a piece of broken window glass over by the window curtains. It was on the carpet and I trod on it. Houses like that, with all those servants, don’t have bits of glass lying around or one of the housemaids would be out of a job.”

  “And the second, Bristow?”

  “Ah, that one was a real gem, sir, and it was just as well that we got there when we did.” Bristow said and stopped.

  “Well, are you going to tell me what it is or should we play Twenty Questions?” Middleton said in an exasperated tone.

  “You know, sir, sometimes you take all the fun out of it,” she said.

  “Do you like your job, Bristow?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir, I do,”

  “Then bloody well get on with it while you’ve still got it,” he said, smiling at her.

  “Well, sir, while you were chatting away to Sir Hoity Toity, I took a look at the chair the dead man had been sitting in. You never guess what I found,” Bristow said.

  “I don’t intend to guess, Bristow. Get on with it!”

  “There, in the soft leather of the arm of that chair was the faint imprint of a ….” Bristow paused and then said dramatically, “heavy pistol, sir.”

  “Really, Bristow?”

  “Yes, sir, really, and ….”

  “Bristow!”

  “…the imprint was completely gone when we left. So what do you make of that, then?”

  “Well, it certainly puts a very different light on things and since no one was shot, I can only assume that Prentiss was somehow threatening him with it, wherever it is.”

  “And the broken glass, sir?”

  “I think that goes along with Prentiss’s outfit. I would bet a bundle that he came in through a window and not through the front door, Bristow. I wonder what his good man, Ives, would say if we asked him.”

  “He’s the old faithful retainer, sir. He’ll say whatever his Lordship has told him to say,” Bristow said.

  “My thoughts, exactly, Bristow,” he said as Bristow started the car.

  “So, what next, sir?” she asked.

  “I think an immediate examination of the dead man’s cottage is in order,” Middleton told her.

  “Immediate, sir? Like right now, tonight, you mean?”

  “I do indeed, Bristow, before someone else beats us to it.”

  “We don’t have his keys, sir,”

  Middleton laughed.

  “I believe we might just find his cottage also has a broken window when we get there,” he said.

  “And if we don’t?”

  “Then I suppose one soon will be then, won’t it. Have you never heard of the end justifying the means, Bristow?”

  She glanced over at him and smiled.

  “I have, sir, but never in police work.”

  “Particularly in police work I should think, Bristow – and you just keep your eyes on the road, if you please, young lady,” Middleton said.

  When they reached Prentiss’s cottage, Bristow got a call on her cell phone as she parked in the road outside. She listened for a moment.

  “Uh, huh. Thanks. I’ll tell him,” she said. “That was the coroner’s office. They won’t be out until the morning. Eight thirty, they said.”

  Middleton nodded.

  “Good. That’ll give us more time to do what we need to do here,” he said and got out of the car. Bristow got out also and followed him around to the back of the cottage.

  “There, you see, Bristow, what did I tell you?” Middleton said triumphantly as he replaced the ceramic garden gnome he’d just broken the window with, back into the flower bed where he’d found it.

  “You were right, sir. Mischievous little buggers, those garden gnomes are, aren’t they? Right little vandals, some of them,” Bristow said.

  Middleton reached through the broken window pane in the door and unlocked it.

  “Watch how you go, Bristow,” Middleton said as they went inside.

  “Why is that, sir,” she asked.

  “Because it’s dark in here, Bristow,” he said. “That’s why.”

  “And we are the police, sir, and we can put the bloody lights on if we want to,” she said, grinning in the dark. She reached over beside the door frame and flipped on the light switch.

  “So, what are we looking for then?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure, but it will probably be hidden away, whatever it is,” Middleton said.

  “So, I just keep looking until I find something, is that it?”

  “Yes, that is it, and don’t be so bloody sarcastic, Bristow,”

  “Sarcastic, sir? Me, sir? Surely not? I thought I was just being helpful,” she said, grinning.

  “If you
want to be helpful, Detective Sergeant, just stop your idle chattering and find what it is that I’m looking for,” Middleton said.

  “Yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full, sir,” she said and flounced away to start searching. They began with the ground floor and much to Middleton’s aggravation, it was Bristow who found that ‘something’ first.

  The elusive ‘something’ was a regular three ring office binder with a plastic cover.

  “What on earth made you look in there, Bristow?” Middleton asked.

  “Just normal police procedure, sir. Its called a process of elimination. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. I figured it must be in there because we’ve looked everywhere else,” she answered and was feeling very pleased with herself.

  Bristow had found the binder inside the oven of Prentiss’s old fashioned wood burning kitchen stove. They both sat down at the kitchen table and opened it. It contained the documents that Prentiss’s had bought from Leo Surridge. Middleton took the pages out of the binder and stacked them on the table in front of them. After a minute or two of scanning them, Middleton said, “Oh, my God, Bristow. I can’t believe what we’ve got here. This is a veritable treasure trove of information that turns all our thinking about these cases completely upside down.”

  Bristow took a page from the binder pile and read it.

  “It looks like we’ve been totally wrong all along about everything too, doesn’t it?” Bristow said quietly.

  Middleton nodded.

  “Uh, huh, Bristow, there was no mysterious female assistant, other than his sister and even she was gone in a couple of days - and no magical illusions apart from Prentiss’s change of appearance. We were searching for things that just weren’t there and overlooking those that were. I should have known better.”

  Bristow didn’t think that he needed verification of his comment and picked up the piece of paper that he had just put down on the table. She started to read it and said, “This shows our Lord of the Manor in a somewhat different light, doesn’t it, sir? The ultimate illusion, in fact, because he’s not an aristocrat at all – he’s a bloody German spy!”

  “Well, he was rather than is, I think, Bristow, and a very clever one at that. He has created a very believable alternative persona for himself here,”

  Middleton said. “So good, in fact, that it seems a shame to expose him after all these years. I hardly think he would be classed as a war criminal any more than any of our own people would be.”

  “We have no option though, do we?” Bristow said and was surprised by Middleton’s answer.

  “We always have options, Bristow, and to do something or not to do it are two of them,” he said. “As police officers, we always have to remember that we, as individuals, are not the law unto ourselves. We are merely here to uphold it and enforce it if, when and wherever it becomes necessary. Regrettably, some of our people tend to forget that sometimes.”

  Middleton surprised her again with his next question but she was now used to him using her as a sounding board when he was thinking.

  “Why did we come here to this pretty little community, Bristow?” he asked.

  She frowned, not understanding where he was going with this because the answer seemed so obvious, but she also knew that Middleton often attacked his problems obliquely.

  He answered his own question for her.

  “We were called here to investigate a murder, Bristow, followed, as it has happened by two more of them. Our role in life is simply to produce a satisfactory conclusion to whatever it is that we’ve been assigned to - in this case, multiple murders.

  It is not, however, either our role or responsibility to delve into every aspect of the life of this community unless there has been some criminal involvement by someone who lives here, in those murders. We are the police, Bristow, not a pair of vigilante do-gooders out to convert the whole community into a perfect picture of innocence.”

  Middleton paused in his monologue and Bristow could see the troubled look in his normally placid eyes. For a change, she held her tongue and let him continue without interruption.

  “We have an unusual problem here too, Bristow, and we normally have the complete opposite. In this case we have a lot too much information. Some of it is very useful and much of the rest it could be extremely harmful to the community as a whole and to a man who has led a faultless and productive life here for a great many years. His activities have been a credit to this community, regardless of his background or origin.”

  Bristow looked at him as he paused.

  “Go on, sir, I’m listening,” she said.

  “The murders, the reason we came here, have been solved now. We know, without a doubt, that Prentiss was responsible for all three of them and we have ample proof of that on the table in front of us. Also, on this same table, we have documents that could ruin a man, who, at the time, was merely serving his country. He was a spy, admittedly, but I wouldn’t think he was ever a murderer. He has served this community, of English people, Bristow, for almost sixty years, and I’m sure you can see my dilemma. I want to be fair but I can’t play God either.”

  Bristow reached across the table and touched his hand.

  “I think you are forgetting something here, sir. You are not Hercule Poirot, much as you may think you are, or God either, for that matter. It isn’t necessary for you to dot every ‘i’ or to cross every ‘t’ and you don’t have to do a dramatic unmasking of the real killer in his Lordship’s library either. You owe no one here an explanation, either. Only your own superior, if you even have one, that is,” she said, grinning at him, “needs a report. That’s a report, sir, not a ten volume series on how you turned over every stone here in Carrington parish.”

  “Are you done, Bristow?” he said.

  “I suppose I could have made it a lot shorter by just telling you to do as your conscience dictates,” she grinned.

  Middleton squeezed her hand and released it.

  “And you, Bristow? What would you do? What about your conscience?”

  She smiled at him.

  “Me, sir? I will support you in whatever decision you make, you know that, and I know it will be the right one.”

  Bristow grinned inwardly and decided to play him at his own game and pose him a silly question of her own.

  “Where were these documents found, sir?” she asked, with a straight face.

  “Pardon? They were in the wood stove, Bristow. You know that. You found them,” Middleton said.

  “And what does a wood stove do, sir?” she asked with a mischievous smile.

  “It cooks?” Middleton asked with a shrug of his shoulders.

  Bristow laughed.

  “And it burns wood. If it can do that, I’ll bet it can burn others things as well. After all, you did say we have a lot too much information here. Perhaps we should dispose of some of it, sir, if you get my drift. Personally, I can’t remember finding one damned thing at all here other than those which proved Prentiss did the murders.”

  Middleton’s tense expression relaxed.

  “Have I ever told you that you are much too smart for your own good, Bristow?” he said.

  “You have, sir. Many, many times, in fact,” she replied with a smile.

  “Well, I’m saying it again and thank you. I truly believe we are doing the right thing here,” Middleton said.

  “So do I, sir. So do I.”

  They spent the next half hour going through the documents carefully. Any that were related to the murders were classed as ‘keepers’ and put back in the binder. Bristow gathered up the rest and took them over to the stove. She lifted the stove top and dropped the paper sheets, one by one, inside so that they would burn easier. Then she took down a box of matches from a shelf over the stove and handed it to Middleton.

  “If you’d care to do the honours, sir,” she said.

  “Are you sure, Bristow? You don’t want to change your mind?”

  “I’m sure, sir. Go for it.”

  Middleton lit a
match, dropped it in amongst the papers, waited a moment to ensure that the pages were on fire and then closed the lid.

  They both sat at the table until they were sure the paper had been consumed. Bristow got up to check.

  “Wouldn’t want the police to poke around in the embers and find something of importance, would we?” she said.

  Middleton laughed.

  “We are the police, remember?” he said.

  She peered into the top of the stove and shook her head.

  “Right, so we are, and I do believe there’s nothing at all worth looking at in here, sir,” she said, grinning.

  “Okay, what now, do you reckon, Bristow?”

  She thought for a minute and then said, “Well, I think we’re done here, sir, but I’ve just had a thought.”

  “That’s nice, Bristow. It’s nice for a woman to have one of those things occasionally,” Middleton said.

  “I’ve just had another one, sir,’ she said and smiled sweetly. “ And I’m going to make you suffer for that crack, you just you wait and see.”

  “And the other thought, Bristow? What was that?”

  “It was one that I’m surprised you didn’t have yourself. Elementary, Inspector Watson, really.”

  “Get on with it, Bristow, we haven’t got all bloody night.”

  “Then that’s a pity, sir, because I think we may just may need it,” she said.

  “What is it, Bristow, and no jokes, please?”

  She smiled cheekily at him.

  “How do you suppose Prentiss got to the Manor House, sir. It would be a bloody long walk for me and, murderer or not, he was still an old man.”

  “Oh, good God, Bristow! His car, of course! How the hell could we have missed that?” Middleton said.

  “Not we, sir, - you. It is your investigation. I’m just along to make sure you don’t miss anything, like the….” she said, giving him a bland look.

  “Okay, so I missed it, but you don’t have to rub it in, thank you,” he said huffily. “Let’s just take this binder and get out of here. The front door this time, I think.”

  As Middleton locked the cottage’s front door, Bristow started the car and he asked, “Do you know what kind of car he drives?”

  Bristow nodded.