The Midden

Chapter 15

Miss Midden had woken from her snooze under the clear blue sky and had got to her feet with a refreshed determination. She wasn't going to go on living like this. She wasn't going to have her weekends spoilt by a wretched sponger like MacPhee, for that's what he was, no more than a sponger on her hospitality and good nature. She had had enough of him. But her feelings went deeper than that. She had had enough of looking after the Middenhall and the spongers down there, for that was really what they were too, arrogant, self-centred, spoilt spongers who had always had servants to do things for them and who, if she hadn't been the sort of person she was, would have driven her into the role of a servant too. MacPhee (she was no longer prepared to use his phoney rank he was MacPhee and that was probably a false name too) had had his uses with them. He made up a foursome at bridge, he listened to their repeated stories about Africa and the good life they had enjoyed there and he was happy to sympathize with their views about the way things had deteriorated everywhere. Miss Midden wasn't. 'The good old days' their good old days had been other people's bad old days with long hours and miserable wages and the brutal assumption that the lower classes, black or white, were there to be despised and set apart. And they grumbled. Oh God, how those people grumbled. They grumbled about everything, particularly the National Health Service to which they had contributed not one penny during their spoilt, distant lives. Old Mr Lionel Midden had been furious when he had to wait to have a hip replacement and had come back from the Tween General Hospital complaining about the bad food and the fact that the nurses had refused to call him 'Sir'. And all he had ever been was a so-called recruiting officer for some mining company in Zambia, which he still insisted on calling Northern Rhodesia. Mrs Consuelo McKoy, who had lived for thirty-five years in California until her husband died and she found he had left her nothing at all in his will and had in fact spent his last few years gambling his fortune away, deliberately, she said, to spite her, was always saying how much better things were done in the United States. 'People are so hospitable and friendly there. Over here there is no friendliness at all' Miss Midden particularly resented that 'over here'. It suggested that Mrs McKoy was an American herself, whereas she had been born in London where her father had had a grocer's shop in Hendon. She had married Corporal McKoy of the US Airforce during the War and had lorded it over the family on the occasional trip to Europe. Miss Midden could remember her driving up to the Midden in an absurdly large Lincoln Continental Bob McKoy had borrowed from a business associate (he had gone into electrical engineering at the end of the war) in London. Now she demanded to be driven in the old Humber staff car when she wanted to do a little shopping in Stagstead and insisted on sitting in the back while Miss Midden drove.

It was the same with all of them. Almost all. Mrs Laura Midden Rayter, who as long ago as 1956 had insisted on keeping her maiden name when she married, was different. She helped with the washing-up and vacuumed her own room and generally made herself useful about the place. Arthur Midden, who had been a dentist in Hastings and who suffered bouts of depression when he did bizarre charcoal drawings of gaping mouths as a form of therapy, actually paid for his room and board.

'I don't like to inflict myself on you, my dear,' he said when he first came to the Middenhall, 'but it's peaceful up here and I need company since Annie died. You don't make many friends in dentistry and Hastings has deteriorated with so many young people injecting themselves there. I never liked giving injections and the sight of hypodermics still unsettles me.' No, they weren't all spongers or complainers, but most of them were. Besides, Miss Midden had never liked the Middenhall even as a child. It was dauntingly ugly and she had shared her father's distaste for it. She had only agreed to take over to allow him to go into a retirement home. The house and its inmates had broken him. Miss Midden had given him a few years in which to sit and read in his own room in Scarborough and nurse his ailments. Even so she resented the treatment he had suffered at the hands of the so-called family.

Now, stepping out across the rough grass and avoiding the wet places where the sedge grass grew, she knew the time had come to get out herself. She would see her cousin, Lennox, who had taken over as the family solicitor from his father, Uncle Leonard, and tell him she was no longer prepared to take responsibility for the place. He would have to find someone else. She would keep the farmhouse, possibly letting out to summer visitors to earn some money, but she wouldn't live there. She would go away and find work of some sort. She had a small amount of money put away, not enough to live on but enough to allow her time to make a different life for herself. With this sense of resolution, the decision made, she walked into the yard and steeled herself to give MacPhee his marching orders. But as she entered the kitchen and saw him she knew that something far worse than a hangover afflicted him. He stood staring at her with terrified eyes and he was trembling all over. For a moment she thought he might be dying. She had never seen such palpable terror in anyone before. The man had ceased to exist as a man or even an animal. He had become something amorphous, almost liquefied by fear. For a few seconds his state kept her silent. Then she said, 'What in God's name is the matter?'

MacPhee held on to the kitchen table and opened his mouth. His lips quivered, his mouth moved jerkily, he gibbered.

Miss Midden pulled a chair out and pushed him down onto it. 'I said what's the matter,' she said harshly. 'Answer me.'

The Major raised anguished eyes to her. 'It's in my room,' he gasped.

'What's in your room?' She was almost certain now that he had delirium tremens. 'Tell me what's in your room?'

'A man. He's been murdered. There's blood everywhere. On my bed, on the duvet, on my clothes.'

'Nonsense,' Miss Midden snapped. 'You've been having delusions, drinking all that whisky.'

The Major shook his head or it shook uncontrollably. It was impossible to tell which. 'It's true, it's true. He was under my bed and his face was covered with blood. He was naked.'

'Bollocks. You've just poisoned yourself with alcohol. A naked man with blood all over his face under your bed? Poppycock.'

'I swear it's true. He was there.'

'But he's not there now? Of course he isn't. Because he never was.'

'I swear '

But Miss Midden had had enough of his terror. 'Get up,' she ordered. 'Get up and show me.'

'No, I can't.'

'Get up, get off that chair. You're going to show me this man.'

The Major tried to rise and flopped back. Miss Midden seized him by the collar of his jacket and dragged him to his feet. But he just shook and whimpered.

'You sicken me,' she said and let go. He slumped down into the chair. 'All right, I'll go myself.'

She moved across the kitchen but the Major spoke. 'For God's sake be careful. I'm telling you the truth. He's in the bathroom. He could be dangerous.'

Miss Midden looked back at him with utter contempt and went out into the passage. She entered the dining-room and crossed to the door of the Major's bedroom and opened it. Then she stopped. Blood. There was blood on the bed, a lot of blood. And on the clothes by the fallen chair. Miss Midden felt her own fear and her own horror. But not for long. She stepped back across the dining-room and went into the little office where she kept her twelve-bore. Whatever had happened in the bedroom and whoever was in the bathroom, and for all she knew there was more than one person there, was going to have to face a loaded shotgun. She put two cartridges into the breech and closed the gun. Then she went back. As she entered the dining-room she saw the open window. Alert now to the reality of the break-in, she noticed the mud on the floor under the window. She crossed to the bedroom door and looked round carefully before stepping in, holding the shotgun pointed at the bathroom door. Two yards away she stopped. 'All right,' she said in a loud and surprisingly steady voice. 'Come out of there. Come out. I'm standing here with a twelve-bore so open that door and come out slowly.'

Nothing happened. Miss Midden hesitated and listened intently. She heard nothing. She moved back towards the dining-room and then hurried through to the kitchen. 'You come with me now,' she told MacPhee, and this time he stood up. Some of her courage had communicated itself to him and besides the sight of the shotgun was persuasive. He came across the room and she ushered him through into the bedroom.

'What do you want me to do?' he asked with a low quivering voice.

Miss Midden indicated the bathroom door. 'Open it. And then stand aside,' she ordered.

'But...but...suppose...' he began.

'Don't suppose anything. Just open that bloody door and stand aside,' she said. 'And if anyone is fool enough to try anything they are going to get two barrels.' She said this loudly. 'Now do it.'

Major MacPhee went forward and turned the door handle and shoved. The door flew open and he scuttled away into a corner of the bedroom and put his hands over his ears. Miss Midden had the gun up to her shoulder and was moving cautiously towards the bathroom. It was very small and now she saw the dirty feet protruding from the shower. She moved round to the side. Still keeping the shotgun to her shoulder she peered in. On the plastic tray of the shower, with the curtain crumpled beside him, was huddled a young man. His face was covered with dried blood, his chest was bloody too and water dripping from the shower had made a patch of clear skin with a runnel down past his navel. But he was alive. His eyes staring wildly at her from the mask of blood told her that. Alive and frightened, almost as frightened as the Major. All the men seemed to be frightened. But this one was wounded and his fear was understandable.

'Who are you?' she asked and lowered the gun. The question seemed to give the young man comfort. There might even have been hope in his eyes now. 'I said who are you? What's your name?'

'Timothy,' said Timothy Bright.

'Can you stand up? If you can't, just lie there and I'll call an ambulance.'

The fear returned to Timothy Bright's eyes but he got to his feet and stood naked in the shower.

'Now come through here,' she said. 'Come through here and sit on the bed.'

Timothy Bright stepped out of the shower and did as he was told. In the light of the room Miss Midden could see him more clearly. He was quite a young man and well-built. She leant the shotgun against the corner of the Major's bookcase. She had no fear of the man who called himself Timothy.

'How did you get yourself in this state?' she asked, and parted the matted hair to get a better look at the wound on his head.

'I don't know.'

'Someone beat you up? Must have done.' The scalp wound wasn't so bad after all, and scalp wounds always bled profusely.

'I don't know.'

'All right, lie down and let me have a look at your eyes.' She looked into each one, turning his head towards the window. 'And you don't know how this happened?'

'I don't remember anything.'

'Concussion. I'll call the ambulance. You need to be in hospital. And I'll call the police too.'

She pulled the duvet over him and was about to go through to the hall where the phone was when Timothy Bright stopped her. He' had suddenly recalled what the piggy-chops man with the razor had said: 'One more thing you got to remember. You go anywhere near the police, even go past a cop shop or think of picking up the phone, like your mobile, you won't just get piggy-chops. You won't have a fucking cock to fuck with again first. No balls, no prick. And that's for starters. You'll have piggy-chops days later. Slowly. Very slowly. Get that in your dumb fucking head now.' And Timothy Bright had. Even now, when he had no idea what had happened to him or where he was or who this woman was who had forced him out of the little bathroom at the point of a double-barrelled shotgun and was saying he might have concussion and ought to be in hospital, that terrible threat was as vivid as it had been at the moment it was uttered. And the cut-throat razor had quivered where the man with slicked-back hair had thrown it so expertly.

'No, not the police, not the police or an ambulance,' he gasped. 'I'm all right. I really am. All right.'

Miss Midden turned back to the bed and looked at him. 'No ambulance? No police? And you say you're all right? That's one thing you're not. Are you on the run or something?' There was very little sympathy in her voice now. Timothy Bright shook his head.

From the corner the Major eyed him intently. He was a connoisseur of little sordid criminals and their fears. He couldn't make this one out at all. Snob. Upper crust. Not your standard lager lout. This one had background. Even in his naked and filthy extremis this one carried a degree of assurance the Major would never begin to achieve. Envy intensified his insight, the social insight that had been his chief weapon in the battle to keep his head above the raging maelstrom of his own self-contempt. This one wasn't all right, but what he was the Major couldn't tell. Not queer either. He'd have spotted that straightaway. But he wasn't all right.

Miss Midden stepped back into the room and picked up the gun she had left against the bookcase. Standing over the bed she asked, 'Just what has been going on? You'd better tell me or I am going to phone for the police. Spit it out, sonny. What have you been up to?'

Timothy Bright fought to find a plausible explanation. He didn't know what he had been up to. Perhaps he did have concussion. He couldn't remember anything coherently. Something to do with going to Spain. Something about Uncle Benderby. He'd been on his bike. 'I had a motorbike,' he said, and tried to remember.

'Go on. You had a motorbike. What happened to it?'

Timothy Bright had no idea.

'How did you get in here then?' Miss Midden demanded. But again he had no answer for her.

'You may not know but I'm going to find out. Me or the police. It's up to you.'

Timothy Bright lay on the bed and whimpered.

'Men,' said Miss Midden. 'Pathetic' She turned on her heel and walked out of the room. In the dining-room she looked at the mud on the floor and then at the open window. She went to the front door and out onto the gravel and looked at the flower-bed under the window. There were footmarks there, and some white petunias the Major had planted had been crushed by someone's feet.

Miss Midden went back into the house and tried the sitting-room on the other side of the hall. There was nothing there to indicate anyone had been into it. Nothing in the hall either. She mounted the stairs and looked into every room. There was not a sign of any disturbance. And there were no clothes to be found anywhere. Her office was just as it had always been. And the kitchen. Not a trace of clothes. She went out into the back yard and walked slowly round the house, even looking into the byre and the shed but there were no jeans or shoes or shirt. Everything was just as she had left it. Mystified, she went back into the house and was about to go into the dining-room when she heard voices. She stopped. The Major was asking questions.

Miss Midden slipped into the room to listen.