What's In A Name?

Giles Gestapo was not the sort of person that people took to easily. His name didn’t help for a start. It made people think he wasn’t somebody you’d want to spend time with. The ‘Giles’ made him sound upper-class and the ‘Gestapo’ – well, it made him sound like a not very pleasant German person.

Ironically, however, he was neither upper-class nor German (nasty or otherwise). His parents ran a not-very-successful village shop in Derbyshire and had named him Giles after a Leeds United football player. And the name ‘Gestapo’, although rare these days, could in fact be traced back to Anglo-Saxon times when the word meant ‘Bringer of rabbits’.

As Giles had grown older and begun to realise that his name could become a serious hindrance, he contemplated changing it to Giles Rabbit-Bringer or Giles Bringerofrabbits or even Giles Rabb-Itbringer. Giles Rabbi T. Bringer he dismissed immediately. Indeed, whatever permutation he thought of sounded just as silly as Giles Gestapo. So he gave up and decided he’d just have to live with it.

However, this proved to be a BIG MISTAKE as his dissatisfaction with his name gnawed away at his soul and seriously affected his personality to the extent that the few people who knew him were not in the least surprised the day Giles was accused of murder.

* * *

Stacey le Garde (who, incidentally, had recently changed her name from Catherine le Garde) was screaming her face off that the toaster was buggered: “It’s shagged my bleedin’ Jumpstarts!”

“Poptarts!” Giles yelled back from the next room. “They’re bloody Poptarts!”

* * *

Suspicion immediately fell on Giles the moment Stacey’s body was found in the bath. She was fully clothed and totally immersed in water, clutching the aforementioned electric toaster to her chest with both hands. (Although Stacey had been wrong about the toaster being buggered earlier, it was certainly buggered now.) On first inspection, the police pathologist surmised that death had been caused by electrocution. However, the subsequent autopsy revealed that there were no less than six Poptarts firmly wedged in Stacey’s gullet.

Although the police were initially convinced that Giles had cold-bloodedly and premeditatedly murdered the woman with six Poptarts and a fully functioning electric toaster, they gradually began to accept his story that this was simply a tragic, though somewhat ingenious, case of suicide. During the early stages of their investigation, they had had serious doubts that anyone would deliberately cram six Poptarts in their mouth and then run a fifteen-metre extension cable to the bathroom, attach a toaster and then get in the bath with it. However, further examination of the evidence led them to the inevitable conclusion that they really couldn’t be arsed to argue the toss about it. This conclusion was in no small measure due to the following facts which the police unearthed during their intensive enquiries:

1. Stacey frequently used peroxide to dye her hair.
2. She habitually chewed gum.
3. She had a pierced navel.
4. She often wore those minuscule thong things, half of which are visible above the tops of the jeans.
   

The police made other equally damning discoveries but it was essentially these four pieces of evidence which ultimately convinced them that Stacey was quite frankly no better than she ought to be and, if indeed she had been murdered, probably had it coming to her anyway. Besides, Stacey had no family and no friends, and so nobody was likely to kick up a fuss on the murder or suicide front.

On informing Giles of their decision not to press murder charges, he received the following stern warning: “We’ll overlook it this time, Gestapo, but we’re warning you sternly that if you ever so much as murder someone in the future, we’ll have your bollocks for….. for…. for something you really won’t want us to have them for. Got it?”

* * *

Not long afterwards, Giles finally did change his name, primarily to escape the media attention focused on him in the aftermath of ‘The Curious Affair of the Poptart/Toaster Murder/Suicide Incident’, as it came to be known. Henceforth, Stanislav Stiffdick lived a quiet and unassuming life until the day he brutally murdered his not-very-successful Derbyshire village shopkeeper parents in their bed.

This time, the police wasted no time in arresting and charging Giles (or Stanislav). This time, there was no escaping the fact that the victims were not only as good as they ought to be but possibly even slightly better (despite evidence that Mrs Gestapo once chewed gum for a bet and Mr Gestapo sometimes put his pet ferret, Nigel, down his trousers). This time, therefore, suicide was not an option.

Giles/Stanislav continued to proclaim his innocence to the last but the evidence against him was damning in the extreme. If he had been content with merely sabotaging his parents’ electric blanket to transform it into a lethal weapon, he might even have got away with it. But when the pathologist discovered four Weetabix (all totally devoid of milk or even sugar) firmly stuck in each parent’s gullet, the police knew they had their man.

On being convicted and sentenced, Stanislav Stiffdick (né Giles Gestapo) stood solemnly in the dock, his head bowed, and mumbled, “I never meant to be a cereal killer.”

* * *

There are on this occasion, dear reader, not one but three morals to be drawn from this tale:

Moral 1: Never trust anyone whose surname is the same as the name of a secret police organisation (e.g. Sheila Kayjeebee, Montgomery Mossad, etc).

Moral 2: You can get away with murder but only when your victim isn’t, or victims aren’t, at least as good as he/she/they ought to be.

Moral 3: When Shakespeare wrote those immortal words, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”, he’d obviously never heard of Giles Gestapo.