DEADLY DECEPTIONS

by Bill WENHAM

  “That’s true, but three of them pretty well solved themselves though, didn’t they? – and four out of five isn’t bad, is it? Maybe even this one will solve itself eventually, you never know.” she said.

  Finally the crowd dispersed, the ambulance removed the body and for appearances sake only, the crime scene was taped off.

  When that was done, Bristow dropped Middleton and Rachel off and then she went back to the Inn. She shook her head sadly as she went into her room. The events of tonight would be hard for Middleton to handle.

  Middleton had decided, at Rachel’s invitation, to move into her cottage with her, but it wasn’t immediately. He told her he would sell his house in Cambridge but he was also told that the housing market was a little slow right now and it could be quite a while before it sold.

  He had made his decision in late June and in mid-September, much to his surprise, his house was sold. He was even more surprised to find that there were three buyers all bidding on it and he ended up with considerably more than his asking price. He had now been an official resident of the parish of Little Carrington since the beginning of October.

  A few of the more prim and proper eyebrows were raised when he moved in with Rachel. He also got some envious looks from some of the other local males, both married and single, and there were also a few whispers but nothing was ever said by anyone directly to them. Perhaps what they were doing was considered to be immoral by some but it certainly wasn’t illegal and Middleton told Rachel that it was nobody’s bloody business but their own.

  His new arrangement now gave Middleton a roughly fifteen minute commute each way to Cambridge but he felt the fringe benefits of his new situation were well worth it.

  As it turned out, Bristow was right, the murder of Sir Alfred Allenby did solve itself but not until several years later, in 2011, and even then the solution was hardly believable.

  A will, the sole beneficiary of which was the nursing home in which the deceased person had spent the last of their days, had also contained a large, quite bulky and sealed envelope. It was addressed to Detective Inspector Middleton of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary, with a request that it be delivered after the reading of the will. It was dated November 30th of 2004 and was hand written in a spidery scrawl but its message was plain enough.

  It was a confession, written in a rather odd, first person, narrative style, as though the writer was reliving every single moment of it.

  At first glance it could be considered to be a joke, the dead person’s parting gift to the world, but it was no joke to Paul Middleton. It finally put a demon that had nagged at him for years to rest.

  The spidery writing described in detail how, why, where and when the murder of Sir Alfred Allenby had taken place and admitted that the letter writer was the culprit.

  It described the reasoning for choosing Guy Fawkes Night and how the writer had only realized afterwards that a perfect murder had been planned and committed. The purpose of the letter, it said, was to ease the writer’s own conscience before they went to meet their maker and while they still had the mental ability and capacity to write it all down coherently.

  The writer added that they hoped that the letter would also ease Middleton’s feelings as well because he was a good man and the letter writer was sure that an unsolved case such as this would eat at him and would feel like a black spot on his otherwise illustrious career. Even though he had never caught the murderer, at least he would now know how it had been done and by whom.

  The letter began;

  Dear Detective Inspector Middleton,

  For your information, the following is a true account of how Sir Alfred Allenby was killed on November 5th. 20004. This is exactly, word for word, what happened and the circumstances that led up to it.

  The events of that night began several months earlier, in June, when the Cambridge police had contacted me to advise me of my brother’s death. It had been recorded as a ‘Death by natural causes’. He’d apparently suffered a massive thrombosis resulting in cardiac arrest and was currently lying at rest at the funeral parlour of Mr. Abraham Forster, the local parish undertaker.

  I returned to Little Carrington to make arrangements for my brother’s body to be taken to my home town of Ruislip, in Middlesex, where he would be buried in the cemetery of my local church.

  However, since Parker had been found at the local Manor House, I didn’t believe for one minute that he had died of any ‘natural causes’. That was not in keeping with what he had told me he was planning to do at all! Somehow, and I had no idea how, Sir Alfred Allenby had killed him. Of that I was absolutely certain.

  The police, you Inspector, told me that me that my brother had been responsible for three of the murders in the parish. I already knew that, but at the time I had pretended to be extremely shocked and distraught, had nodded vaguely, had made no comment and had left the parish as soon as my business with the undertaker was completed.

  Back in London, I discovered that Parker, despite our recent argument, had still left me everything he owned, his savings, his house and its contents including all of his WWII collection. I had heard about it for so many years and had despaired over his obsession with it, but until now, I had never actually seen it. It was a most impressive collection.

  I paid the Cockney couple renting his house to terminate their lease early, explaining that the owner, my brother, had just died. I would have to sell it, needed immediate occupancy for whoever bought it, and offered them first refusal.

  “Sorry, lady. Me an’ me old girl ‘ere would love t’ ‘ave it but we just ain’t got that kind o’ dosh, ‘ave we, love?” the man said and gladly accepted my generous monetary offer to vacate.

  “We can ‘ave a bleedin’ good ‘oliday in Rimini wiv that an’ still ‘ave enough t’ rent some place else, can’t we?” he told his somewhat dubious wife right in front of me. They moved out a few days later.

  After going through all of Parker’s collection and reading a couple of the books, I sold it all – except for one item. I kept one of his guns, a Mausser automatic pistol and the magazine of ammunition that went with it.

  Before actually disposing of Parker’s collection, I had gone through it all very carefully again and a plan of action had formed in my mind. At the time of my last visit with him, when he was out murdering innocent people all over the place, I had wanted no part of his crazy activities. But, now that he was dead and I was sure it had been at the hand of the fake Lord of the Manor, I felt that it was up to me now to do something to avenge him.

  In amongst his collection of books, I had found an instruction pamphlet, printed in German, on how to disassemble, clean, oil, and reassemble the Mausser I had put aside. Although printed in German, the illustrations made the procedure easy enough for me to follow. Parker had been fluent in German but I couldn’t read a word of it. I was sure that Parker had maintained it properly but I didn’t want it to blow up in my hand.

  When I had it properly cleaned and reassembled, I checked to make sure that the firing mechanism was working correctly. Then I loaded the ammunition magazine into it, wrapped it in a clean tea-towel and set it aside in a dining room cabinet drawer. Part one of my rather long range plan was now complete but with one tiny snag.

  I had absolutely no idea how to actually shoot such a weapon!

  To solve this problem I went into a sporting goods shop to buy an air pistol. When asked what kind, I said I really had no idea but wanted to give my nephew, my non-existent nephew of course, a target pistol for his birthday to practice with.

  But not one with real bullets, of course, I had added hastily.

  A CO2 powered air pistol was recommended to me, together with a couple of boxes of waisted lead pellets and several CO2 replacement cartridges. As part of my package, the shop owner also threw in a couple of packages of thin cardboard targets as well.

  My quite large and detached house in Ruislip had an equally large and secluded rear garden which backed on to one of the
few open fields in the area. Because of the seclusion and the fact that the pistol made no more than a faint popping noise when it was fired, I had plenty of privacy in which to practice.

  Like my brother had been, I was in good health and had remarkably good eyesight for my age - or any age, in fact.

  As I practiced and as my ability to handle the pistol improved, I chose smaller and smaller targets. Finally I strung a dozen light bulbs from a line at the end of my garden and between two fruit trees. From thirty feet away, my planned operational distance for my real action, I shattered each of them quite easily.

  As I looked at my handiwork, I smiled, took very careful aim and shot out each of the remaining glass filament stems.

  Satisfied that I could handle a weapon, albeit an air pistol, competently, I set about practicing with something a little more realistic to my purpose. This entailed setting up a much larger target at the same distance and with a different style of shooting altogether. It would be this style of shooting that I would use when the time came for the real thing. I actually used the Mausser as well for this kind of practice but without ever firing it.

  Another of Parker’s collection of books showed a technique taught to Allied secret agents during WWII. It was referred to in the text as the ‘Crouch, point and shoot’ technique. The concept was that, if one pointed a forefinger at a target, they would be pointing straight at it.

  By association, if the hand with the pointing finger also held a handgun, it too would be pointing directly at the target. The book said that, when there was no time to aim, this couching and pointing technique was a lifesaver for the agent with the gun and a life taker for whomever was standing in front of it. The crouching position also offered much less of a target area to anyone shooting back as well.

  With all my practicing completed and my planned action date rapidly approaching, I diligently worked out the rest of the details of my deadly venture.

  Now that the deed was about to be done, I felt no remorse whatsoever but I knew that I could never have carried out the rest of my brother’s ghastly mutilation plan, even if I had been physically capable.

  I felt, from what Parker had told me about the fake Sir Alfred, it was almost certain that he was responsible for killing my brother somehow. When the time had finally come, I had found it had been very easy to kill him also.

  I planned Sir Alfred’s day, or night, of departure from this world with an almost military precision. Parker would have been very proud of me. I had chosen bonfire night - a night which is always filled with the sounds of explosions of some kind to be heard everywhere. Even the muzzle flash from the Mausser would probably go unnoticed with all of the other flashes, bangs and distractions going on. I recalled sadly that it was what Parker had originally asked me to come to Carrington for - to create a diversion for him.

  An illusion, he had said. Always hide in plain sight, Pauly, and you’ll never be seen. And that was exactly what I had done. I had shot Sir Alfred dead in front of several hundred people, including you Inspector, and no one had apparently seen me do it!

  To create my illusion, I had dressed in an old suit of Parker’s and wore his old cloth cap on my head. I had carefully tucked and pinned my hair up inside it but had worn my own walking shoes.

  Taking a leaf out of Parker’s own book, I had also worn horn rimmed glasses with clear lenses and had pasted on a wispy false moustache with theatrical spirit glue. To top it all off I had also worn his old overcoat.

  It was a bit long on me but to anyone watching, even if they had noticed me, all they would have seen was an old man lighting the touch paper of a single rocket stuck in a wine bottle. Dozens of others were doing much the same thing all around the bonfire.

  I waited patiently until I had a clear frontal view of Allenby and with his companions turned away from me. All of them were looking skyward at the bursting mass of rockets overhead.

  I held a windproof cigarette lighter firmly in my left hand and the Mausser in my right. I crouched down and, with the overcoat open it concealed the gun in my hand from everyone, including my target who was still gazing skyward. Everything that I did was done without obviously trying to hide at all.

  I knew my next action would take split second timing, but I had already practiced the action of it many, many times but without actually firing. I would have to light the rocket’s touch paper with my left hand, and then with the count of just two seconds, I had to point and fire the Mausser. If I had timed it correctly, the gun’s muzzle flash and the igniting of the rocket’s fiery trail should be simultaneous.

  The actual noise of the shot should be drowned out by other loud and similar sounding firework explosions such as the ‘Atomic Whizzbangs’, also occurring nearby in addition to the roar of the huge bonfire itself.

  With the front of my overcoat unbuttoned and before the rocket had even ignited, I had the Mausser out from the waistband of my trousers.

  I pointed it and fired just the one shot, as I had practiced so many times, at the exact moment the rocket left the bottle in a flaming shower of sparks covering up the muzzle flash of the Mausser.

  ‘Just point your trigger finger at your target and the gun muzzle will follow’. That phrase from the instruction manual had pounded through my head for weeks and now it was over, but when actually fired, the recoil from the Mausser had surprised me.

  As I tucked it back into my waistband and let the overcoat drop back over it, I stopped just long enough to look up and watch my own rocket burst above me - a perfectly natural thing for anyone to do.

  But I didn’t wait to see if my shot had found its mark or to see Allenby fall because I was supremely confident that I had done what I came for. I didn’t even look in his direction. Then I casually picked up the bottle, turned my back completely on my target and walked slowly away. I had only gone perhaps twenty feet before I heard the doctor’s cry of ‘Good Lord, the man’s been shot’.

  I dropped my wine bottle on the grass, where it would be one of many, and looked back over my shoulder at the spot where I had kneeled to fire the Mausser. It was already being trampled over by the ogling crowds who, at the time, had seen nothing at all and now wanted to see everything. The crime scene was already impossibly compromised and contaminated as you, Inspector, would soon discover.

  As soon as I heard the doctor say, “He’s dead, Albert.” I moved on, knowing that my one deadly shot had found its mark.

  “For you, Parker, and for our poor Dad,” I whispered as I headed into the next field to get my car. The ‘parking’ constables had already left and people were still streaming to the spot where the Lord of the Manor’s body lay.

  I waited until the constables were out of my sight, reached my car and started it up. Then very, very slowly, I drove it away.

  Several minutes later I stopped it outside what had been Parker’s cottage and I got out. Across the other side of the road were the Village Green and the pond.

  I strolled casually across the road, over to the pond and now carried the German Mausser automatic pistol in my right hand. There was no fear of being seen at the pond because practically everyone in the parish was at the bonfire field half a mile away.

  I threw the pistol as far as I could into the middle of the pond. Then I walked back to the car, got in and started it up again. If anyone had seen anything at all, it would be a man that they would report to the police. At this point, it really didn’t matter if someone did see me. It would add to the illusion I had created so long as no one was close enough to record my licence plate number. My fingerprints on the gun would mean nothing, even if the police thought of looking in the pond for it, since I had never, ever had cause to have my prints taken.

  I returned to my car and left Little Carrington satisfied that neither the police nor any one of the villagers had even known I had been there.

  I smiled to myself and drove slowly away and out of Carrington parish with my task accomplished.

  On the way back to Ruislip I discar
ded Parker’s old cap and the false moustache out of the car’s window at different points along the motorway and I unpinned my hair.

  On the following morning I donated all of Parker’s clothes to a local shop trying to raise money for Third World countries.

  My gift was gratefully received because Parker’s wardrobe had contained many expensive suits and his dresser had a good selection of quality shirts and ties. I also donated ten pairs of his shoes plus the one pair of my own, suitably cleaned, that I’d worn in Carrington.

  As soon as I had left the shop, the woman running it probably took the one shabby suit and overcoat from the pile and put them outside in the bin. They were the same clothes that I had worn on the previous evening. They were also some of the same ones that Parker had worn for his decrepit old man act in Little Carrington and I guessed that the woman would dump them once they were sorted through. They would soon be gone altogether, probably that same day.

  When I got back home, I sat for a few minutes nursing a hot cup of tea and mentally retraced my actions of the previous evening searching for any possible loopholes.

  “I need you to create a distraction, an illusion, for me, Pauly. That is the whole secret to success in what we’re doing,” Parker had said to me.

  To create my own illusion I had been a man who wasn’t a man, had used and parked a common make and colour of car in amongst dozens of others that looked almost exactly the same and had created just one more explosion amongst many hundreds of others. Everything I had done had gone totally unnoticed by anyone and any footprints that I’d made had been almost immediately obliterated by hundreds of people rushing to get a look at what had happened.

  After a while I relaxed and decided that there just weren’t any loopholes and that I had probably just committed the perfect murder in my dead brother’s name. I finished my tea and turned on my television. The news was just starting. Sir Alfred’s murder was the lead item.

  As an old woman living alone, I tend to talk to myself, which I’m sure is not unusual.