The Midden

Chapter 16

This was a very different Major from the one she had left cowering in the corner. And what he was doing was most useful. He was talking sympathetically to the young man. MacPhee's feelings, as shallow as they were squalid, were soon calmed and now that the immediate danger was over he was looking for some advantage from the situation.

'You've been done over really badly so that's why you can't remember,' he said, 'but it'll come back to you. I have had the same experience myself. Only two days ago I was cycling along minding my own business when this tractor came out without looking. I had to have six stitches and I couldn't remember even having them. You probably came off your motorbike...I hope you were wearing a crash helmet. You'd have been killed otherwise. Something must have gone through it. Ever so dangerous, motorbikes are. What sort is yours?'

'A Suzuki.'

'Is that a very fast one?'

'I've done a hundred and forty on her,' Timothy said.

'Oh, how could you? I mean that's twice the speed limit. You were lucky the cops didn't time you. Is that why you don't want the police?'

Timothy Bright jumped at the excuse. 'Yes. I don't want to lose my licence.'

'And what about your family? They'll want to know you're all right. Where do they live?'

'They've got a place...I don't know,' said Timothy Bright.

Miss Midden tiptoed away. The Major was earning his keep after all. Naked and injured young men were his cup of tea. She needed a real cup herself and time to think what to do. Her first impulse to call the emergency services had evaporated. The young man Timothy wasn't as badly hurt as he looked. He was talking quite clearly, was probably suffering from mild concussion and not the fractured skull she had first feared.

She had other reasons for not involving the authorities. She had never got on with the people in County Hall whose gainful employment consisted in finding reasons for being there. There had been a man and a woman from the Health Department who had calmly walked into the kitchen down at the Middenhall on the assumption the place was an old people's home and in the altercation that followed had accused her of not having a licence to run a nursing home and having no authorization to...Miss Midden had chased them off the premises and had got her cousin Lennox, the solicitor, to issue a formal complaint to the County Council on the grounds of trespass. Not that that had deterred the officials. A man from the Fire Department had arrived shortly afterwards, this time with an official document declaring his right to inspect the 'Middenhall Guest House or Hotel' to ensure that it had the requisite fire escapes and internal fire doors. Miss Midden had disabused him of the notion that it was anything more than a private house and had abused him personally in the process. He had gone away with a good many fleas in his ear and Lennox Midden had had to write another letter. Another time the Twixt and Tween Water Board, claiming jurisdiction over all water in the county, in particular the stream that fed the artificial lake Black Midden had constructed, had sent inspectors to check that no noxious substances were flowing from it down to the reservoir. The only noxious substance they had encountered had been Miss Midden herself. Again Lennox had been forced to point out that the lake had been constructed in 1905 and that any noxious chemicals entering the reservoir were almost certainly coming from the slurry of a dairy farmer six miles away on the Lampeter Road.

Altogether Miss Midden had had interfering busybodies in, official positions up to the eyeballs. And when it came to the police her feelings were incandescent. They had chased old Buffalo across the lawn and had held him in the cells at Stagstead overnight after roughing him up and accusing him of drunken driving. And that damned Chief Constable had tried to fence the common land known as Folly Moss for his own private use. She had fought him over the issue and won, just as she had won in court over Buffalo Midden. She'd won and humiliated the corrupt brute. He'd be only too delighted to have his men in the house asking questions and poking their noses into her private affairs. They'd want to know where the Major had got his injuries and...No, the last people she wanted to bring in were the police. And in any case the young man clearly didn't want them anywhere near him. He had been terrified by the prospect of her calling them. Presumably he was some sort of criminal, or a junkie. Miss Midden sat at the kitchen table and poured herself another cup of tea.

She was still sitting there an hour later when the Major reappeared with the news that Timothy Bright had cleaned himself up in the bathroom and said he was hungry and could he have something to drink. Miss Midden turned an angry eye on him and said, 'Water.' She got up and opened the Aga and got out some eggs to make an omelette. She was feeling hungry herself and the Major definitely needed food. He looked ghastly and he deserved to. And now it appeared he was upset because the young man had broken an eau-de-Cologne bottle in his washbasin and had torn the shower curtain. Pathetic. But he had managed to wheedle some more information out of the young man. 'He's some sort of financier in the City. He doesn't remember where exactly.'

'Financier? Financier, my foot!' said Miss Midden, whose ideas were distinctly old-fashioned and who imagined financiers to be middle-aged men in dark pin-striped suits.

'A yuppie sort,' the Major went on. 'They sit in front of computer screens and telephone people. You must have seen them on TV.'

It was a silly thing to say. Miss Midden didn't watch television, didn't have one in the house and wouldn't allow the Major to have one in his room. 'If you want to watch that stuff, you can go down to the hell-hole and watch it with them,' she had said each time he had asked to have a set in his room. The exercise will do you good.'

'Why's he so scared of the police?' she asked now. 'Did you find that out too?'

'He's terrified because someone has threatened to do something horrible to him if he goes anywhere near them.'

'Near the police?' The Major nodded.

'So he's involved in something shady. Charming. Now I've got two of you in the house. What I want to know is how he got here in the first place.'

'He doesn't know himself. He has a motorbike. A very fast one. Perhaps he crashed it and '

'And then takes all his clothes off and climbs in through the window and...' Miss Midden stopped. She had just remembered that she had put the chain on before leaving for the weekend and when she had gone out just now the door had been partly open but the chain was still on the hook. The young lout hadn't got into the house on his own. And why had he gone to sleep under the Major's bed? Somebody had brought him, and that someone had stepped on the flower-bed to open the window. Finally that person had known she had gone away for the weekend. Her thoughts, as she broke the eggs into the bowl and began to beat them, focused on the people down at the Middenhall. No one else knew she had gone away to the Solway Firth. Come to that, no one even at the Middenhall knew she had returned. Miss Midden beat the eggs with the whisk in a new frenzy.

Sir Arnold Gonders' thoughts followed a parallel course, and had rather more in common with the frenziedly whisked eggs. He woke from his sleep only partly refreshed. If anything his total exhaustion earlier had to some extent deadened his perception of the danger he was in. Now the full force of it hit him. He might well have murdered...surely manslaughter was a justified plea. No, it wasn't. Not in his case. He was the Chief Constable, the supreme keeper of law and order in Twixt and Tween and the media would have a field day tearing him to pieces. Oh yes, he had cultivated them in the past, some of them at any rate, the commercial TV people in particular, to get his own back on the Panorama shits at the BBC who'd given him and the lads a hard time over that murdering rapist who had done a tidy stretch of a life sentence before it was found his sperm didn't match that found in his victims. But the Chief Constable had been around long enough to know that there was no loyalty in the media and that the stab in the back was established practice. He thought of all the papers who'd go to town on him too, the Guardian and the Independent, God rot them, then the Daily Telegraph with that bloody tough editor. Even The Times would join in. As for the Mirror and the Sun...It didn't bear thinking about.

As he shaved, as he tried to eat breakfast, as he dragged Genscher, now in a state of total funk, to the Land Rover, as he drove down across the dam to Six Lanes End and along the motorway to Tween, the Chief Constable's thoughts raced. He'd have the tyres on the Land Rover changed to make certain that no one could trace any remnant of mud from Miss Midden's back yard to them. He might have left the imprint of the tyres on the old drove road. Christ, why hadn't he thought of all these things the night before? In the back the Rottweiler lurched and bounced and tried to keep away from the bloodstained sheets and the parcel tape in the corner. Sir Arnold got rid of them separately in two bins several miles apart, the tape in the first and the soiled sheets in the second.

After that he felt slightly better. He began to think more constructively. He'd wait until the next day to go into the office. He had a perfectly good excuse not to go in today. He had to keep out of the way of those media hounds who wanted to interview him about the DPP's decision. And he had a hangover to beat all hangovers. Harry Hodge, his deputy, would cover for him. In the meantime he'd start his own investigation to discover who had set him up by using that bloody Bea cow. It had occurred to him that the bastard had to be someone who knew his movements and had known he wasn't going to be at the Old Boathouse that night. That was an important discovery.

The Chief Constable considered it and came to no very clear conclusion except that his return must have screwed up the plan somehow just as Miss Midden's return hadn't done him any good either. It was as he was driving along the Parson's Road that another idea occurred to him. He pulled up at a roadside telephone and checked there was no one anywhere about. Then he dialled the Stagstead Police Station. When the duty officer answered, the Chief Constable muffled his voice with his hand and spoke in a high disguised voice. It was a short message, short and to the point, and he repeated it only once before putting the phone down and hurrying on. Miss Midden was going to get another nasty surprise.

In fact it was the Chief Constable who would have been very nastily surprised if he could have heard the conversation that had taken place in his house in Sweep's Place, Tween, between Auntie Bea and Lady Vy when they got back that morning shortly before lunch.

'My darling, if I'd only known,' said Bea, 'if I'd known what he was putting you through, I would never have allowed it.'

'I didn't know what to do,' said Vy tearfully, 'I felt so alone. He told me he'd see all the ghastly gutter papers got the story if I told anyone. I couldn't bear to think of the scandal. And there was a young man in the bed. I couldn't deny that.'

Bea looked at her narrowly. 'Oh he's a cunning devil, there's no doubt about that,' she said. 'I have to give him his cunning. But two can play that game and after all he wasn't very subtle.'

'Darling, you're talking way above my head. What are you saying?'

'Ask yourself this question,' said Bea. 'There was a young man in your bed, I don't doubt that. But where is he now?'

'I've no idea,' said Lady Vy. 'I went down to the cellar and he'd disappeared in the night.'

'Exactly. Arnold got you to help tie him up in the cellar so that you were even more of an accomplice. Isn't that the case?'

'I suppose it must be,' said Lady Vy. 'I hadn't thought of that.'

'And you say he was tied really tight? In two plastic bags?'

'Well, actually he couldn't get him into the garbage bags. He had to use the sheets off the bed. And lots of tape. You've no idea how much tape he tied round him.'

'And yet the young man disappears. Doesn't that strike you as peculiar?'

Lady Vy tried to stretch her tiny brain. It was reassuring to have Aunt Bea telling her things, but sometimes she couldn't understand what she was saying. 'The whole thing struck me as peculiar,' she said. 'I mean I've never found a young man in bed like that before. He was quite nice looking too if you didn't look at the blood.'

Auntie Bea controlled her temper with difficulty. 'No, dear, what I meant was...well, didn't it seem very strange that he should have escaped so quickly after you had helped tie him so securely?'

'Yes, I suppose it did,' said Lady Vy. 'And Arnold drugged him too to keep him quiet.'

'Oh sure. Arnold said he drugged him. Arnold said he did this and he did that but the only thing you really know is that you helped tie him up and then when you went to look for him the next day he had escaped. What a miraculous thing to happen, wasn't it? Or it would have been if Arnold hadn't untied him himself and helped him on his way.'

'But why should he have done that?' asked Vy, still stumbling about in her attempt to plumb the mystery.

'Because, dearest, because this was all an elaborate plan to make sure you didn't leave him and wouldn't make things awkward for dear Arnold at any time in the future.'

'But why should I...' Vy began before coming to her own conclusion. 'Oh, Bea dear, do you really think...?'

It was a thoroughly unnecessary question. Aunt Bea was thinking very hard indeed. She had already concocted a rational explanation for the succession of weird events that had taken place. They all pointed to the same conclusion: she must take Vy away from the malign influence of her husband. If there had been any doubt about the matter before the weekend, and there hadn't been, she now felt sure she was saving Vy from a man who was prepared to use any sort of crime for his own vile ends. Being bitten in the groin by Sir Arnold had not exactly inclined Bea to see him in an even faintly sympathetic light and now she had the evidence she needed to break him. And she would be protecting darling Vy at the same time. She got up and took Lady Vy by the hand. 'My darling, I want you to go upstairs and pack your things. Now you're not to argue with me. I am going to take care of everything. Just do what I tell you.'

'But, Bea darling, I can't just leave '

'You're not leaving, dear. You are merely coming down to London with me today. No argument. We're going to see your father.'

And with this dubious reassurance Sir Edward Gilmott-Gwyre was not someone she normally wanted to see Lady Vy went up to the bedroom and began to pack. 'I must leave Arnold a note just the same,' she thought, and wrote a short one to the effect that she had had to go down to London to see Daddy because he hadn't been well and she'd be back in a few days.

'Now come along, Vy dear,' Auntie Bea called. Lady Vy went downstairs obediently and left the note on the table by the front door. Aunt Bea saw it there, opened the envelope, read the note and put it quietly into her handbag. Sir Arnold could worry himself sick. And Vy wasn't coming back, so there was no need to deceive him. On this nice moral note she went out to the Mercedes and presently they were on their way south. By the time the Chief Constable parked the Land Rover in the garage, they were halfway to London.