Miss Win: Tales of Intrigue and Deception

By Rosemary Mairs

Have you ever been deceived?

Fooled by a stranger, or a loved one?

 

Award-winning Rosemary Mairs delves into the motives, daring and cunning, of deceivers. Examines the myriad ways to be duped – financially, romantically . . . fatally.

 

In the title story a lonely divorcée finds happiness with a younger man. Is he genuine, or has she fallen victim to a romance scam? A selfless father acts with courage and bravery in Hero, so why can't he face his son? Is a school girl with a life-threating nut allergy only an attention seeker? In Just One someone decides to put it to the test. An ex-trickster tries his upmost to keep out of trouble, but sometimes life spins out of control in Flick the Slick.

 

Betrayal. Concealment. Duplicity. No one is what they seem. Sprinkled with dark humour, these absorbing tales reach into the deepest recesses of the human psyche, ask:

 

Who really can you trust?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rosemary Mairs
• Release date: Feb 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9781738461813

Book preview

Title

Copyright © 2024 Rosemary Mairs

The right of Rosemary Mairs to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the author.

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-7384618-0-6

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-7384618-1-3

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover and interior design by Damonza

For my mother and sister, with love

Contents

Angel

Hero

Rev Ricky

The Portrait

Memory Tap

The Stole

Flick the Slick

Bobby-Dazzler

No One Will Know

Miss Win

Just One

Perfect Day

‘Bad Boy’ Blade

Scar

Waiting

Pinter Genes

Buster

In Her Sleep

Bottle of Vodka

Digit

Beautiful

The Plague

Hobnobs

The Spare Room

Acknowledgements

Also by Rosemary Mairs

About the author

Angel

I always get away with it.

Some would call it luck, or being in the right place at the right time, but it’s more than that. People make it easy for me – they want to believe in what they see. The drunken tramp is given a wide berth, the skinhead shouting abuse, but not the young mother in the supermarket, the smart businessman.

Not a child.

It wasn’t murder though, or even manslaughter. If it had been labelled, I suppose they would have called it negligence. I neglected to save her life. That is what a lawyer would have said in court. A jury would have been shocked by my youth – just ten years old! Such beautiful hair, they would have sighed, would have pictured my mother brushing it, her hands pausing on my shoulders, sharing a smile in the mirror.

Why, the court would have wanted to know. Why didn’t you go for help? I could have told how she abused me, shown the bruises, but I didn’t have any. If I had, I would have shown them long ago, to teachers, to whoever would look and listen. Sometimes, I wanted her to beat me. She would vent all her anger and it would go away. I don’t know why she hated me. Sometimes she would notice me and stare, as though I were a stranger walked in from the street. Her gaze would move to my hair, seeing how long it had grown, would look at it with disgust in her eyes.

I was so used to her silence, when she screamed for me the night she fell I didn’t recognise her voice. I thought it was someone outside. She was lying on her back on the kitchen floor, an overturned chair beside the bench. She spoke quickly, as though making up for lost time, frantically telling me to get help. Her voice was clear, even with blood trickling from her head.

I went upstairs, got back into bed.

She made noise for a while.

In the morning I ran outside for help.

They put me in a home.

Plain sailing, once I got the measure of everyone. I did well at secondary school, was ‘an exceptional pupil’; apparently university would carry me forward to a bright future.

A lecturer let slip personal info. I was his star student – asked the right questions, chatted after tutorials. Happened to mention how much I loved children. He told me about his two-year-old daughter. He and his wife went out a lot. Perhaps I’d like to babysit? He remembered what it was like living on a student grant.

He had done well for himself since. His wife had a chain of jewellery shops. She kept hers in a fancy glass box on her dressing-table. Should have known better; her shops were heavily alarmed. The insurance company thought the same, tried to get out of paying after the break-in. She proudly showed me her new safe, keyed the combination in front of me. Someone that stupid deserved to be robbed again, but I’d enough already to search for my father.

It would only be a matter of time, if I looked hard enough, but I’d always been fatherless, had nothing to go on. No birth certificate. They’d searched for it among my mother’s belongings when I moved into the home, but couldn’t find it.

I travelled from town to town. All I had was my mother’s name. No one knew her. Why did I expect anyone to know her? As time passed I started to believe my own story – I had always been in the orphanage. She had died giving birth to me. My father had come to get me, but they’d turned him away.

I was in a café, my funds almost gone, when someone approached, asked if I minded sharing my table? He looked about fifty. There was something familiar about him – the shape of his face, similar colour of eyes to mine.

I could almost convince myself . . .

We went back to his house.

A father figure; better than nothing.

He brushed my hair each night in long, sweeping strokes. We shared a smile in the mirror, him unable to believe his luck at landing a twenty-year-old with golden hair to her waist and the face of an angel.

A registry office wedding.

He liked me at home, waiting for him, dinner on the table. Hanging out with my new friend Kyle didn’t go down well. He wouldn’t believe it was innocent, couldn’t bear that Kyle was half his age.

‘Months! We’ve only been married a few months!’ He seemed to think his fists could pummel love for him back into me. I stopped seeing Kyle, but he’d got a taste for it, or maybe it was a reminder not to be a naughty girl again.

His company sent him away on business. Kyle poured me another glass of wine. We giggled like schoolchildren, would have the whole week together. He wouldn’t be back until Friday.

We didn’t notice him at first, at the bedroom door. Kyle started, tipped his glass – a pool of red on the sheet.

He grabbed me by the hair, pulled me off the bed, turned his attention to Kyle.

They were a good match.

It went on and on, until I got bored, picked up the bottle.

Kyle wouldn’t stop sobbing afterwards. ‘What have you done?’ he kept asking over and over. ‘What have you done?’ ‘It’s all right. Go home,’ I told him, as if a dead husband was an everyday problem for me, and he went, well, ran, actually. It took the police a while to find him. He was hiding in a derelict office block. They gave me protection – an officer outside the house – until they found him.

When the trial came to court the jury were slow coming to the obvious verdict. Kyle had been seen fleeing the house. He had motive, means and opportunity. Then of course there was my evidence. The trouble was, he didn’t look the type – the boy next door. He cried as the judge passed sentence; some of the jury even looked upset.

He hadn’t been as comfortably off, my husband, as I had thought. The house was rented, not his. The sale of the car, a few savings – enough for a cruise. The other passengers were mostly middle-aged couples. It was beginning to seem like a waste of time, but then he walked past my sun lounger. He stood at the railing, gazed at the ocean. His clothes were understated – chinos and a checked shirt – but he was rich. Extremely. Old money. I could smell it.

I wore a spectacular cocktail dress to dinner – black. I was a widow after all. But he didn’t show. A heavily tipped waiter gave me some info. Randal Sinclair-Barret. His wife was dead; heart attack, something like that. He was taking his stroll one evening. The deck was deserted; everyone was inside, dancing, gambling. Someone was perched on the rail, poised to jump, the wind streaming her hair against the sky.

‘You’re very young,’ his mother stated coldly, when we were introduced.

I exchanged a smile with Randal. ‘Guilty as charged.’

She was still frosty when we announced our engagement.

The next day she wanted to see me, alone. Randal had never got over the loss of his wife, who he adored. I was merely a distraction. She was not going to let an upstart on the make ruin her son’s life.

‘Randal tells me you ride?’

Above the fireplace was a huge painting of a horse.

‘I’ve always wanted to learn, but was too scared . . . seems a dangerous sport. I might take the plunge now. Perhaps we could ride together?’

‘You won’t get away with it.’

I had no idea what she meant.

‘Making a fool out of my son. Out of me.’

Her eyes held mine, disgust radiating from them, until she could no longer bear to look at me.

I turned back to the painting.

‘Randal wants me to have my portrait done. He says I have the face of an angel.’

A flutter of air, as she stormed from the room.

She was right of course.

Appearances are deceiving.

Hero

The clock in Rob’s hospital ward reached seven, and the first visitors arrived. Soon, Matt would be here; he would have to pull himself together to see his son. Rob watched the other patients welcoming loved ones, the smiles and holding of hands. It looked deceptively easy, this showing of affection, but it wouldn’t be like that with Matt, especially not today, not on the day of Peter’s funeral.

There was nowhere to hide. No way of avoiding this visit from his son. He could tell a nurse he didn’t feel up to visitors, but that would be the coward’s way out, and Rob had earned himself the reputation of a hero. Yesterday, Matt had sat silently beside his bed. Rob knew he was thinking what he had already said: ‘You could have been killed as well.’

He would have been shocked if he had read his father’s thoughts, if he’d known Rob was glad he couldn’t go to the funeral, relieved that he didn’t have to pay his respects. If only they had never met Peter, he kept thinking, if only he had never come to the farm looking for work.

‘I’ll take ye on a month’s trial,’ Rob had told him. What he really needed was someone with experience of dairying and sheep farming, not a student taking a year out to raise money to go to college.

When Matt left school to work on the farm full time they wouldn’t need extra help. Lately, he’d been spending more hours indoors than out, doing his schoolwork, cooking their evening meals. They were getting by somehow, without Lorna. The house wasn’t kept the way it used to be, or their clothes ironed, but they managed.

It was Lorna who had told Rob that Matt wanted to stay on at school to do A levels. He had been shocked. Matt was needed on the farm. What was the point doing more exams?

‘He’s thinking of doing accountancy,’ Lorna had said.

They’d had this conversation in bed. Rob still wasn’t used to sleeping alone. Even now, a year after her death, when he woke during the night he reached out his hand, expecting his wife to be lying beside him.

Her words came back to Rob as he saw the new lad’s eagerness to learn about farming, how he gazed across the fields, a look of awe on his face at the view. Matt couldn’t want to work in a town, to be stuck in an office all day. Farming was in your blood, everyone knew that.

Peter ate his packed lunch with them in the kitchen. Matt made something for himself and Rob, a pattern they’d fallen into since the summer holidays had started and Matt was at home.

‘Did you know, Dad, Peter’s going to be a veterinary nurse?’

Rob nodded. Peter had mentioned this was what he wanted to study at college.

‘He’s good wi’ animals, that’s for sure.’

Peter’s face lit up, pleased by this praise. He pushed his hair behind his ears, tucking into another sandwich. He needed a good haircut. This seemed to be the preferred style of the young ones these days – long and untidy. Matt’s was the same. Rob couldn’t get him near a barber. He took after his mother, fair hair and pale skin, but it was his eyes that caught Rob out – he had Lorna’s way of looking at you, as though trying to read your thoughts, his blue eyes intense.

Peter asked what needed done that afternoon. Rob’s reservations about taking on a student had proved unfounded. What Peter lacked in experience he made up for in enthusiasm, always turning up on time each morning, working hard.

What was more, Matt was showing a greater interest in the farm. Rob would come into the milking parlour to find both Matt and Peter putting on the clusters, or they’d be cleaning out a shed together, one forking, the other wheeling away.

They were always talking when Rob came in for his lunch.

‘Do you like the darkness?’ Matt was asking Peter as Rob came through the kitchen doorway.

‘Sure, it’s still the summer,’ said Rob, as he washed his hands at the sink. ‘The nights are hardly dark at all.’

Matt and Peter burst out laughing.

‘The Darkness.’ Matt emphasised the words as though this would make Rob understand. ‘We’re talking about music!’

It was good to hear laughter in the house again, even at his expense.

Later that week, Rob moved the cows to a different field. He could have done with help, but the bull was with them. It was used to Rob; he knew how to handle it safely.

He had told Peter to fence any gaps in the farm hedges. Rob could hear the ring of hammer against steeple as he closed the gate on the cows. He walked across the fields in the direction of the noise to see how he was getting on. The hammering ceased as Rob got closer. Peter was standing still, the hammer hanging in his hand, looking down the hill towards the farmhouse.

Rob stopped when he realised what Peter was watching. Matt was hanging clothes on the line in the garden. He bent over the basket of washing, then reached up to peg the clothes, his T-shirt rising up his back. Peter’s eyes never left him as he emptied the basket. Rob turned, walking back the way he had come.

He knew then, knew what was happening, wasn’t stupid, but wouldn’t let himself believe it. They had become good friends, that was all. He couldn’t let himself think otherwise – the unthinkable.

The phone rang one day, a girl wanting to speak to Peter. ‘Please, ask him to ring me. To ring Fiona.’

When they were eating lunch, Rob said, ‘Fiona was on the phone.’ Peter’s face coloured. ‘Ye didn’t tell us ye had a girlfriend.’

The summer was almost over. Matt had got the exam grades needed to go back to do A levels, but to Rob’s relief his son never mentioned it, getting stuck in every day on the farm. Rob began leaving the milking to Matt and Peter while he got on with other jobs.

The sheep broke out of their field into a neighbour’s farm. Rob headed back to the yard to get the boys’ help.

No sign of them outside.

They were in the kitchen. There was a murmur of voices as Rob entered the house. The kitchen door was ajar. They stopped talking. Peter’s back was to Rob. Matt stepped forward, his arms going around him, their lips meeting.

Rob was outside again.

Something inside his head was beating, getting faster, more insistent.

He found himself in the milking parlour. If he could only block it out, erase it from his mind. He walked down the parlour in slow, measured steps, trying to calm his breathing, trying to stop the pounding in his head.

A footstep behind him.

Peter’s voice.

‘Will I bring in the cows?’ Peter repeated.

‘I need ye to move the bull into the pen.’

The image of Matt played over and over in Rob’s mind; his son’s expression as he held another man in his arms. He had never seen such intensity of emotion in Matt’s eyes, on his face . . .

The sound of yelling brought Rob to his senses.

What had he done?

He grabbed a stick, ran from the parlour, towards the other end of the yard.

Peter was slumped against the pen rails, the bull ramming into him. Rob shouted as he ran, tried to get the bull’s attention.

He reached the pen, rushing at the bull, brandishing the stick.

It backed off.

Peter was face down on the ground. Rob lifted him under his arms, his hands slipping on the bloody clothes, dragging him out. He could hear Matt’s screaming voice somewhere behind him. He had almost got Peter to the gate, but the bull was moving towards them . . .

Matt came through the hospital ward door.

His eyes were bloodshot. He tried to smile at his father. It pained Rob