The Midden

Chapter 14

After a while Sir Arnold concentrated his thoughts on some method of getting his revenge. He could confront that bloody lesbian bitch upstairs and demand to know what the hell she had hoped to achieve by having the lout brought to the Old Boathouse. It didn't make sense. On the other hand she had just tried to murder him and had very nearly succeeded. Would have succeeded if Vy hadn't, for once, come in at the right moment. So fucking Bea had to be mad. Mad, insane, out of her tiny, way off her trolley and a homocidal maniac. (The Chief Constable hadn't got the word wrong: 'homocidal' was exact.) And in addition she had an accomplice. He had no doubt about that either. She couldn't possibly have left the Old Boathouse and driven somewhere to find the young lout and drug him, and then driven back and carried him upstairs on her own. That was out of the question. She had been drinking with Vy all evening. He'd asked Vy that and she'd told him the truth. He was sure of that. His wife had been just as astonished to find the bastard in bed with her as he'd been himself. So there was someone out there and here the Chief Constable's mind, never far from paranoia, turned lurid with fury. And fear. A conspiracy had been hatched to destroy him. Hatched? Hatched wasn't strong enough, and besides it was too reminiscent of eggs and hens and things that were natural. There was absolutely nothing natural about drugging some young bastard to the eyeballs before stripping him naked and shoving him into a respectable Chief Constable's marital bed. It was an act of diabolical unnaturalness, of pure evil and malice aforethought. Hatched it wasn't. This vile act had been plotted, premeditated and planned to destroy his reputation. If this little lot had got out he'd have been ruined. If it got out now he'd still be ruined. In fact now that he came to think of it, he was in a far worse position than before because he had beaten the young bastard over the head and had kept him tied up in the cellar for twenty-four hours. He might even have killed the sod. For all he knew the bastard was dead and at this very moment under that narrow bed at the Midden rigor mortis might have set in.

A cold sweat broke out on the Chief Constable's face and he went through to his study to try to think. Sitting there at his desk feeling like death he searched his mind for a motive. Blackmail was the first and most obvious. But why, in God's name, should the beastly Bea want to blackmail him? There was no need. The woman had enough money of her own, or so he had always understood from Vy. Mind you, Vy had the brain of a mentally challenged peahen but she was good at smelling incomes. One of her upper-class virtues. No, Auntie Bea's motive had to be something else. Pure hatred for him? She had that all right. In spades. Not that the Chief Constable cared. A great many people hated him. He was used to being hated. He rather liked it, in fact. It gave him a sense of power and authority. In his mind hatred went with respect and fear. To be feared and respected gave him a sense of worth. It assured him that he meant something.

On the other hand, he was damned if he could see what anything else meant. There had to be some other more sinister motive. No one would go to all this trouble simply to ruin him. No, Auntie Bea was merely a willing accomplice, a subordinate who could open gates and keep Genscher quiet. In all likelihood she had been blackmailed, or at least persuaded, into acting as the insider. She wouldn't have needed much persuading either. Yes, that was much more like it. There was somebody out there here the Chief Constable's horizons expanded to include every villain in Twixt and Tween who had deliberately set out to destroy him. Or, and this seemed a more rational explanation, to hold him to ransom by threatening to expose him. That was much more likely. Well, that was going to take some doing now. Unless, of course, that young bloke was dead, in which case the fat would really be in the fire. Again the cold sweat broke out on his pallid face. The Chief Constable gave up trying to think. He was too exhausted. Making sure that Vy and Bea were now in the kitchen having breakfast, he went upstairs and climbed into bed. He needed sleep.

He didn't get much. Half an hour later his wife stormed into the room and woke him. She was in a filthy mood. 'You disgust me,' she told him. 'Can't you leave anyone alone?'

'Leave anyone alone? I never went anywhere near the bitch. She was the one who attacked me.'

'You really expect me to believe that? Bea has an aversion to men. She finds them repulsive.'

'The feeling is mutual,' said the Chief Constable. 'And I don't care what she finds repulsive, she's got no right to go round attempting to murder people.'

'You must have provoked her in some way. She's a very lovely, peaceful person.'

Sir Arnold looked at her with bloodshot, unbelieving eyes. 'Peaceful?' he snarled. 'Peaceful? That woman? You've got a bloody odd idea what peace is like. There I was hunting for my slippers that's all I was doing, trying to find my slippers under the bed and without the slightest warning she hurled herself on me.'

'I don't believe it. But I haven't come here to argue with you. Bea and I are leaving now. We're going to Tween. You can come when you feel up to it.'

'Like never,' Sir Arnold thought, but he didn't say it.

'And while we're on the subject, I suppose you know that young man has escaped from the cellar. He wrapped insulating tape round Genscher's nose and got away.'

'Really?' said Sir Arnold, trying to think how he could use this new interpretation of events. 'The bloke escaped after wrapping tape round Genscher's nose? How very peculiar.'

'He got through the hatch,' said Lady Vy. 'You can't have tied him up very well. Thank goodness the whisky and the Valium didn't kill him.'

'How very remarkable,' said Sir Arnold. 'You don't think the people who brought him could have realized they'd made a mistake and moved him to the place they'd intended?'

'How the hell would I know what to think?' Lady Vy answered and looked at her husband suspiciously. 'And you look as if you hadn't had much sleep, come to that. You should take a look at yourself. You're not at all a picture of health.'

'I don't feel it,' said the Chief Constable, 'and you wouldn't either if you'd been half suffocated by that beastly Bea. And for Heaven's sake, don't mention anything about the fellow in the cellar to her.'

'You don't think she doesn't know already? Honestly, you are a fool. With all that noise going on? She hasn't said anything because she's too tactful. She just thought you'd been beating me up. Mrs Thouless saw the blood too.'

The Chief Constable sat wearily up in bed. This was the sort of news he least wanted. 'Has she told you that?' he stammered.

'Not in so many words, but she asked what to do with the rug in your study with the blood on it. And of course you had to leave a bloodstained bedside lamp by the desk.'

'Dear God,' said the Chief Constable. 'It's a wonder she hasn't sold the story to the Sun already.'

'Since she didn't see anything else she can't be certain what has been going on.'

'Not the only one round here,' said the Chief Constable and slipped miserably back under the bedclothes. He felt like death.

So did Timothy Bright. After lying under the bed listening for sounds of movement in the house and not hearing any, he crawled slowly and awkwardly out and tried to get to his feet. He almost succeeded. He got halfway up before falling over and banging his head against the edge of the chair on which the Major had folded his clothes. The chair toppled over and Timothy Bright's scalp wound began to bleed again, this time onto the Major's tweed jacket and his natty little waistcoat. Timothy Bright lay there for a bit trying to think where he was or how he came to be naked and cold and hungry and why his mouth tasted like...He didn't know what his mouth tasted like. He tried again to get up by clutching the bed, then slumped down on it and lay there. Thought was returning. To get warmer he pulled the duvet over him and felt slightly better. Only slightly. A terrible thirst drove him to try to stand up again. He succeeded and stood, wobbling a little, listening.

The house was silent. Nothing moved. The sun shone in the window and outside he could see a patch of vegetable garden with some broad beans and a row of twigs for peas. Beyond it a wooden shed and a copse of tall trees and a drystone wall with more trees behind it. There was no sign of life, apart from a thrush breaking a snail's shell on a concrete path. A cat appeared round the pea twigs and stopped, its eyes fixed on the thrush. Then it turned and slid round the broad beans and crept forward with the utmost stealth. For a moment Timothy Bright was almost transfixed by the drama, but the thrush flew off and the cat relaxed. Only then did he notice the blood on the pillow and the duvet. It was fresh blood. He was bleeding. Oh God, he had to do something about it.

The bathroom door was open and he went through to it and grabbed a towel and wiped his hair with it. There was a lot of blood on the towel and when he looked in the mirror over the washbasin he didn't recognize himself. His face was covered with dried blood, his hair was matted with it and his chest was scratched and horribly bruised. In an instant the vision of that skinned pig returned and he lurched back. The Major's bathroom was not a large one, was in fact merely a shower-room with a little shelf under the shaving-mirror on which he kept his bottle of Imperial Russian eau-de-Cologne (at least the bottle was genuine, he had pinched it from a rich friend, but he had long ago used up the contents and refilled it with 4711). Timothy lurched backwards into the shower curtain, a plastic one to which the Major had neatly sewn a rather pretty piece of Laura Ashley floral material, and as he tripped he clutched the shelf. The Imperial Russian Cologne bottle fell into the basin and broke. It was followed by the shaving-brush, the Major's cut-throat razor which he used very carefully to trim his hair before dyeing it, his toothbrush and the scissors that were necessary for his moustache. But it was the cut-throat that threw Timothy Bright. It brought to mind a scene from a nightmare, the nightmare that had become central to his being, that of a man with black shiny hair in the back room of a bar who had sliced the end of his nose and talked about piggy-chops and what was going to happen to Timothy Bright if he didn't do something terrible. It brought to mind that terrifying photograph of the pig. Somewhere still deeper within him it may even have rekindled the forgotten horror of Old Og's ferret, Posy, with blood on its snout after killing the bought rabbit. In his panic reaction he fell back into the shower taking the curtain with him and sat with blood running down the curtain and the wall. There he sat crying, with tears and blood running down his face. He cried noiselessly. The house was silent again.

It remained so through the midday and into the afternoon. It was only then that Major MacPhee rose from his vomit and on all fours crawled out into the hall. The silence suited him too. It seemed to indicate that Miss Midden had gone down to the Middenhall and that he could use the upstairs bathroom and not go through his room past the body under the bed to clean himself up. Never, except by military convention, a very clean man, he felt the need to wash at least his face and neck before getting dressed...He had reached the bathroom and had turned the tap on before it dawned on him that his only clothes were in his bedroom and to get them he would have to go in there. He held the edge of the basin and sensibly didn't look at his face in the mirror but bowed his head over the warm water and dipped his face into it very gently several times. The stitches above his eye stung. He washed his hands and somehow his neck with soap. He emptied the basin and dipped his face into the water again and very carefully used a flannel to clean it.

All this took time and had to be done slowly and deliberately. His physical state demanded it. He felt awful, more awful than he could ever remember feeling in his life, even after a particularly frightening experience with a sadistic sailor from Latvia in Rotterdam who had threatened to kill him with a knife and had cut him, very slowly, right across the chest. But it was his mental state that was worse. He had to get rid of the body before Miss Midden found it and called the police. He had to clear up the mess in the dining-room. And she might come back at any moment. He took a clean towel from the cupboard and dried himself and took it downstairs with him, holding onto the banisters as he went. But when he came to the bedroom door his terror returned and it was only the thought of Miss Midden and the police that compelled him to open it and peer in.

What he saw held him rigid. His clothes were on the floor beside the overturned chair and there was blood on them. There was more blood on the duvet and the pillow was bright with the stuff. The Major whimpered and looked frantically round the room. Finally he crept in and made his way to the chest of drawers for a shirt, all the time keeping his eye on the door of his little bathroom. The man was evidently in there. Somehow he got the shirt on and had opened his wardrobe for a clean pair of trousers and a jacket when he heard a noise in the bathroom. It was a strange and horrible sound, a sobbing moan and a groan. The Major grabbed the clothes he needed, took a pair of shoes from the rack, and hurried into the dining-room to finish dressing. The situation was almost worse now than it had been when he thought the young man was dead. He might just have got rid of a dead body, taken it out and hidden it somewhere before deciding what next to do. With a live man that was impossible. To take his thoughts off the subject for a moment he went out to the kitchen in his socks, fetched some water and a rag from the sink, cleared up the vomit on the floor, and put the empty decanter back into the sideboard. He could always fill it with whisky again. Miss Midden seldom drank the stuff and perhaps she wouldn't miss it for the time being. He had just finished and was back in the kitchen when he heard footsteps in the yard.

Miss Midden had returned.