The Midden

Chapter 19

Far away to the south Auntie Bea was doing her best to persuade Lady Vy that she must take her case to her father. 'Darling, you must see that it is the only way you can save yourself. Arnold's trying to blackmail you with unfavourable publicity and getting your name in the tabloids. If you get your father to act now...'

'Oh but Bea, don't you see Daddy would be so shocked,' said Lady Vy, looking vaguely round the restaurant as if for support. Le Clit, decorated in a specious art deco and newly opened in a renovated garage in the Fulham Road, didn't seem the right atmosphere in which to talk about Daddy. Sir Edward Gilmott-Gwyre held strong views about women like that. 'And anyway,' she went on, 'even if I do tell him, what can poor Daddy do? He's almost eighty and he hasn't been at all well '

'Tosh,' said Auntie Bea masterfully. 'Your father is a very fit old man and he loves nothing better than demonstrating his power of influence. If you tell him what Arnold has been doing '

'Oh, but I couldn't,' said Vy. Auntie Bea's gloved hand closed firmly on her wrist and the fingers tightened on her painfully. She looked through half tears into Bea's eyes. 'You're asking too much of me.'

'Suppose I said I was going to be asking so much more of you later on,' Auntie Bea hissed softly. She moistened her lips with her tongue and Vy felt hopelessly weak. 'And I am. You will go to your father in the morning and tell him everything. Everything, do you hear?'

Lady Vy nodded. Her soft blue eyes had misted over. 'Everything? About us too?' she asked in a girlish whisper.

The gloved fingers bit deeper into her wrist. 'No, not about us,' snapped Bea fiercely. 'Of course not about us. About Arnold and the young man in your bed.'

'Oh no, Bea, I couldn't. Don't you see Daddy would believe I'd asked him to come to bed with me. He wouldn't believe I hadn't. He's never believed anything I've said. He thinks I'm '

'Yes, dear,' said Auntie Bea hurriedly, and considered this new problem. Sir Edward Gilmott-Gwyre's stated views on the place of women in the kitchen, and silent women at that, were well known. It was even rumoured that he had stopped his eldest daughter from having an abortion on the grounds that if she must behave like an elephant in musth she had better learn to live with the consequences. The fact that only male elephants got in musth was of no influence on Sir Edward's opinion that all women were by nature driven by obscure and sinister sexual urges which had to be tamed or, better still, ignored. Lady Vy had particular reasons as well for fearing his anger.

'Now, listen, darling,' Bea went on, using her eyes to will Vy's obedience and still grasping her wrist, 'you must tell him straight away that Arnold put the boy there himself with the deliberate intention of involving you in his own crimes.'

'But Bea, I don't see how.'

'Doesn't it tell you anything about Arnold's proclivities that the boy was naked and tied up in bed linen and that Arnold kept drugging him with Valium?'

'Well, I suppose he could be a bit that way,' Vy admitted. 'He can get very violent and I'm sure he has a bit of fluff in Tween somewhere.'

'But is it just a bit of fluff? What about a pretty boy?'

'Oh I don't know. It's all so confusing,' said Lady Vy, pining for a change in the conversation. 'I was so looking forward to going shopping for that coat at Tamara's. Do you really think it will suit me?'

But Auntie Bea was not to be diverted by the siren calls of very expensive dressmakers in Davies Street. She was about to come up with the trump card. 'What you don't seem to realize is that the media are already onto Arnold,' she said. 'They've got the scent of a major scandal, much more serious than the last one, and you have to act before it breaks and you are dragged in along with Arnold and the others.'

'What new scandal? What's it about? You've got to tell me.'

'Only if you promise to go and see your father in the morning. Promise?'

For a moment Lady Vy hesitated, but the gin and the need to know were too much for her. 'Promise,' she said but Auntie Bea still refused to tell her.

'You must go and tell him everything you know about Arnold. You've got to do it to save yourself. Your father will know what to do.' Auntie Bea signalled for the bill.

They went back to Bea's flat by taxi. 'Now you're going to have to sleep on your own tonight,' Auntie Bea said. 'I want you to think carefully what you're going to say tomorrow and you're going to tell me in the morning.'

And with a light kiss she was gone. Lady Vy went to bed with a sigh. She didn't like to have to think about nasty things. And going to see Daddy was a very nasty thing indeed.

Things were hotting up all over the place. At twelve-thirty that night the telephone rang at Voleney House until Ernestine Bright got up and answered it in her dressing-gown. 'Do you know what time it is?' she demanded in her haughtiest tone of voice and was horrified when Fergus phoning from Drumstruthie said that as a matter of fact he did.

'Yes, I do know it's damned well after midnight,' he said, 'and I wouldn't be phoning now if it weren't important. Where is that boy of yours, Timothy?'

'I suppose he's in London. That's where he usually is.'

'I realize that, and I wouldn't be phoning you if I could find him there. I need to know very urgently where he is now.'

'You don't sound your usual self, Fergus,' Ernestine told him. 'A man of your age shouldn't drink spirits. It's bad for your blood pressure. Now, if you like to call in the morning '

'We can refrain from the admonitory if you don't mind,' said Uncle Fergus. 'I want you to know that I have not been drinking. I also want you to know that I have Boskie here and '

'Boskie there?' said Ernestine, genuinely shocked now. 'Aunt Boskie? But you told us she was at death's door last month. She can't be with you.'

'I assure you she is and she certainly isn't dying, are you Boskie?' From the sounds there was little doubt that Boskie, for all her ninety-one years, wasn't yet dead. 'Now then, Ernestine, she wants to talk to that son of yours.'

'But why? What does she want with Timothy?'

'My impression, if you really want to know, is that she wants to kill him,' said Fergus.' If I were in her position, which thank God I am not, I would wish a really painful death, like boiling alive, for the little shit. Anyway here's Boskie and she can tell you for herself.'

There were various noises on the phone. Ernestine tried to get in first. 'Hullo Boskie,' she said, clutching her dressing-gown to her and wishing she'd put slippers on. It was really rather chilly.

But the coldness was nothing to the ice in Boskie's tone when they had finally accommodated her hearing-aid to the requirements of the telephone. 'Is that you, Ernestine?' she demanded. 'I said "Is that you?" She's not saying anything. I said she's not saying anything, Fergus.'

'I am saying something,' Ernestine bawled down the phone and was rewarded by a squawk from Boskie who told Fergus there was no need to shout, she could hear quite well for her age. To Ernestine, holding the reverberating telephone away from her ear, the portents of this midnight call were not at all obvious. Evidently Timothy had done something to annoy old Boskie

She was interrupted by old Boskie yelling that if her Guillermo were still alive he'd know what to do to that dirty little...Ernestine held the phone even further away, then tried to intervene on her son's behalf. 'This is Ernestine, Boskie dear,' she screamed. In the kitchen the dogs had begun to bark. 'Boskie dear,' she repeated, 'this is ' Again the phone reverberated quite alarmingly as Boskie screamed at the other end.

'There's some vile creature on the line calling me "Boskie dear." Impertinent slut. Tell her to go away, Fergus, I want to talk to that fool Ernestine. If there is one thing I detest in a woman, it is foolishness. That Ernestine...' After what sounded like a scuffle in the hall at Drumstruthie the phone was dragged away from the old lady and Fergus came on the line.

'That was Boskie,' he said rather unnecessarily.

'I know that,' said Ernestine angrily, 'and you can tell the old woman from me that '

'I don't think I'll tell her that at all,' Fergus interrupted. 'In fact, in your shoes I should bend over backwards to be nice to dear Boskie. You want to know why?'

'Why?' said Ernestine unwisely.

'Because your darling little Timothy has just sold all her shares, all one hundred and fifty-eight thousand poundsworth of her shares, and has disappeared '

'But he can't have,' said Ernestine desperately. 'He's not allowed to sell someone else's shares.'

'No, Ernestine, that's quite right. I'm so glad you have taken that on board,' said Fergus. 'And now the dear boy has scarpered, vanished, done a runner, disappeared, you can call it what you like. I know what Boskie's calling it.'

Ernestine had a pretty shrewd idea too. A wailing noise in the background seemed to suggest that Boskie was having some sort of seizure. Ernestine tried to get a grip on the situation. 'She must be making a mistake. Timothy wouldn't do a thing like that, and besides how could he, even if he wanted to? The shares must have been in Boskie's name.'

'Oh, quite simply. He forged her signature on a power of attorney,' Fergus told her.

'I don't believe it,' said Ernestine. 'Tim would never do a thing like that. What did you say? Oh you do. Well, you'll just have to prove it. Boskie is obviously demented.'

'That's the first sensible thing you have said,' Fergus agreed. 'Unfortunately her dementia is not of the senile variety. She happens to be looking better than I've seen her for some time. I wouldn't say she's a picture of health but for a woman of ninety...well, let's just say she's not suffering from low blood pressure. Now, if you don't mind, I'd like to speak to Bletchley.'

'You can't. He's not here.'

'Oh, of course it's the weekend,' said Fergus. 'I suppose he's with...Is he golfing again?'

'I don't know what you mean,' said Ernestine, resuming her hauteur in an attempt to regain some confidence.

'No, all right, all right,' said Fergus, acknowledging there were some things better left unsaid. 'Well, if you can get through to him, get him to understand that I'm holding Boskie back from calling the Commissioner of Police at Scotland Yard personally, but I won't be able to contain the situation very much longer. Just tell Bletchley that that money has to be found and repaid. Repeat, has to be. I mean it, Ernestine. This is definitely not a joke. Boskie's sons are flying home from Detroit and Malaga to '

Ernestine put the phone down and sat in a huddle on the chair. She was not aware of the cold any more. Presently she picked the phone up and dialled Timothy's number in London. The signal indicated there would be no answer. In the end she went through to her husband's study and found a number she had never used before. She dialled and a sleepy woman's voice replied.

'I want to speak to Mr Bletchley Bright,' said Ernestine firmly, 'and please don't waste time by saying he isn't there. This is an emergency.'

She waited while the message was passed and finally her husband came on the line. 'What in God's name are you doing?' he demanded angrily.

'You had better come home, dear,' said Ernestine coldly.

'Home? Now? Why? What's the matter? Has someone died?'

'In a way, yes, you could put it like that,' said Ernestine. 'If you want to know more, phone Fergus at Drumstruthie, but I think it would be better to do it here. I'll wait up for you.' She put the phone down and went through to the kitchen to make herself a nice...a cup of tea. Nice it wasn't.

By morning the search for Timothy Bright had begun.

In the old nursery at the Midden Timothy Bright lay in bed staring at the terrible scratch-marks on the thick wooden door and wondered where on earth he was. And all the time he tried to remember what had happened to him. He could recall being on the motorcycle going down to Uncle Victor's cottage, but that seemed a long time ago. Even the ride was isolated from the events that had led up to it and for a while he couldn't remember why he had gone down to Fowey. But gradually, as the effects of the drugs and his concussion wore off, he began to get glimmerings of that awful past. One sudden insight would suddenly lead to a much fuller recollection so that he jumped back to the casino and Mr Markinkus wanting to be paid in full in ten days. Then another jump, this time forward, to the man with the cut-throat razor in a wine bar and borrowing Aunt Boskie's shares. And selling them.

It was at this point that terror intervened to prevent him thinking at all and he lay back on the mattress almost green with fear. The knowledge that he had sold Aunt Boskie's shares filled him with greater panic than the threats by Mr Markinkus and Brian Smith. He could see now it had been the worst thing to do. He could always have evaded those cheap spivs by falling back behind the ranks of the family. Brights would always take care of their own if things got really awkward. They did it to protect the family name. But now it was different. He had sold Aunt Boskie's shares and couldn't give the money back and he would never be forgiven. His panic surged to such new levels he almost saw himself for what he was before the clouds of self-delusion and pity closed again and he was poor Timothy who had been hard done by. And what had happened to all that money he had taken from the bank? It had to be somewhere. Timothy Bright summoned up every scrap of memory he could to solve the mystery. He had put the money neatly into a big briefcase. He remembered that. And he had...No, he couldn't be sure he had taken the briefcase down to the bike. He had the impression that someone had phoned just then...No, something had happened. He tried the other end of the journey. Had he had the briefcase with him then? He had been so conscious of the parcel that looked like a shoe box which must have contained money too. In that case he must have taken the briefcase as well. And it must still be at Uncle Victor's. Oh God, he had to get down there and...He was interrupted by the arrival of Miss Midden.

'Have you got a surname yet?' she demanded.

'It's Bright. I'm Timothy Bright. Look here, can't you get me my clothes?'

'No,' said Miss Midden. 'You came here naked and you're going to stay that way until I find out why you came and who with and what exactly has been going on. You can use the towel to make yourself faintly decent.'

'But I can't stay here. I mean I don't know who you are or where this is and it's terribly important...' He stopped. He mustn't tell this woman anything more. He shouldn't have told her his name.

'What's so terribly important?' she asked.

'Nothing,' said Timothy Bright defiantly.

'Which is what you'll be having for breakfast,' said Miss Midden and went out and locked the door.

Timothy Bright got up off the mattress and looked through the bars at the open fell. There was no one in sight. Some sheep were grazing by the bank of an old track that ran away over a slight rise towards some distant blue hills. Far away the sunlight glinted on the water of the reservoir, but the sight did nothing to stir his memory. Instead another memory had surfaced. It had something to do with Uncle Benderby's yacht...Oh God, the brown paper parcel! He'd had to take it to Spain. As the memories, all of them quite dreadful, bubbled up, Timothy Bright became almost immobilized. At least where he was, in this room, he was safe for the time being. He didn't want to think any more. He lay down under the bloodstained duvet and tried to sleep.

In his office at Police Headquarters the Chief Constable pushed the report on the weekend's activities away from him and wondered how he could possibly broach the subject of the anonymous phone call about the Midden Farm without arousing suspicion that he had made it himself. There was obviously no way unless...He sent for the Head of the Serious Crime Squad.

'Ah, Rascombe,' he said. 'A splendid bash on Saturday night. My congratulations. Thoroughly enjoyed it. Did you have any more trouble from the media?'

'The Saphegie brothers took their minds off our affairs, sir.'

'The Saphegie brothers? Are they back in business? I thought they had decided to buy their time,' said the Chief Constable.

'Oh, they've paid up all right, sir. Keep to the timetable nicely. But knowing the way the press works, I thought I'd give them the Puddley murder to get their teeth into. Take their mind off our little business.'

'But the Saphegie boys had nothing to do with the Puddley job,' said the Chief Constable, groping towards some sort of understanding.

'That's the point, sir,' Rascombe told him. 'It's no skin off their nose to have the press thinking they do. Enhances their reputation. In the circles they move in it counts, being linked in with a really nasty murder like that. I had a word with them first. Got them to agree, like.'

'Very obliging, I must say,' said the Chief Constable.

Rascombe grinned. 'Like they say, sir, there's no such thing as bad publicity.'

Sir Arnold Gonders said nothing. The absurdity of the maxim had never struck him with quite such force as it did at this moment. However, if the Saphegie brothers, who specialized in debt collection to the point where it spilled over into a protection racket, wanted to be connected in the public mind with the battery-acid murder of an entire family, that was their business. Sir Arnold's interest was quite the reverse. Somehow he had to pin the blame for the intruder on Miss Midden.

'Nothing else I ought to know about?' he asked, and gave the Inspector a very keen look. 'Nothing out of the ordinary anywhere?'

It was the sort of question and look Inspector Rascombe recognized, and in the usual way he would have known how to respond. This time he was at a total loss. 'Any particular area, sir?' he enquired.

Sir Arnold considered for a moment. Rascombe was a good copper, the sort of copper he himself had been, and anyhow he had enough on him to ensure that the Detective Inspector stayed loyal. Even so, the Chief Constable hesitated. It was best to keep certain things under his hat. On the other hand that damned Bea knew and in all likelihood had been party to whoever had dumped the bugger. The Chief Constable still couldn't get his mind round that problem at all sanely, and then there was Mrs Thouless. By this time she had probably been down to get the bread and milk at Solwell, in which case half the neighbourhood almost certainly knew by now. There was nothing for it. It was time to strike back and at least muddy the waters a bit. 'Ever had anyone try to fit you up, Rascombe?' he asked.

The Inspector smiled. 'It's been known,' he said, and understood the Chief's reluctance. He had heard something about Edgar Hoover too, now that he came to think of it. It was difficult to imagine Sir Arnold Fucking Gonders in drag all the same. Horrid.

'When you were first in the CID, I suppose,' said the Chief Constable encouragingly.

Rascombe wasn't fooled. 'No, they don't give up easy, sir,' he said. 'They like to think that being on the Force and all that and seeing so many villains make a bit, you know what I mean, weakens a man's resolve. So they come on again and I suppose sometimes they score. Course, other times they get their mittens in a fucking rat-trap. That's what my little lot did. Still wondering what the fuck hit them, as a matter of fact, down Parkhurst. Fourteen and ten they got. I sometimes think of them at night sitting in front of the telly.' Detective Inspector Rascombe smiled reminiscently.

'Fourteen and ten?' said the Chief Constable. 'You don't mean Bugsy Malone and the Sundance Kid tried to fit you up?' The Inspector nodded. 'And you landed "them with two kilos of coke for their pains? Oh dear, oh dear, Rascombe, and I always thought they'd done it too. Still, it does you credit. It does indeed. Fancy hanging that lot on them. That is a lovely one. Mind you, they deserved it for trying to bend a copper. By my book there's nothing dirtier than trying to turn one of us. Well, I daresay we can see they don't get any parole too. As I always say, a job done properly is a job worth doing.' And the Chief Constable made a note in his diary to have a word with a man he knew who was on the parole board for the Isle of Wight. 'Now, where were we?'

Detective Inspector Rascombe decided on a tactful approach. 'About suspicions that someone's on the move?' he suggested.

The Chief Constable approved. 'Something like that,' he said and came to a decision. 'Just a word that came my way. Nothing certain, and of course there may be nothing to it.'

'Course. Most often isn't,' said the Inspector encouragingly. 'Still, it's often these little words that put a major thing our way, I always say. Anyone I know?'

Sir Arnold fell back on discretion. 'No one I know either. That's the bother.' He paused. 'Does the term "Child-minder" mean anything to you?'

'Only the obvious, like,' said Rascombe. 'You wouldn't be thinking of...'

'Could be, Rascombe, could very well be,' said the Chief Constable, 'and if it is, we've got to stamp it out before it becomes another fucking Orkney. And I do mean stamp. I'm not having Twixt and Tween go down in history as another place the paedophiles had a ball. That stuff is horrible.'

'Vile, sir, loathsomely vile,' said Rascombe, having to veer away from the idea that somebody had been trying to fit the Chief Constable up with a crime. There could be no doubting Sir Arnold's horror at the thought of a paedophile's ball. 'Have you got any idea where to look, sir?'

The Chief Constable stared out the window at the city. 'One place you can forget is the Social Services Child Abuse unit,' he said. 'Breathe a word of this there and it'll be right across the county in no time at all.'

'Agreed, sir, those do-gooders foul things up something terrible.'

'You can say that again,' Sir Arnold agreed, with the private thought that just about anybody could foul things up for him, never mind do-gooders. On the other hand the idea of paedophiles was an excellent one: the very mention of child molesters had an emotional appeal that blinded people to obvious facts. Muddy waters wasn't in it. And there was something else. A really nice goodie. Tailor-made for trouble. 'What I want you to look for is any report, anything that suggests something's wrong. Doesn't matter how insignificant it looks, check it out...And if I'm right in my hunch, and mind, that's all it is, if I'm right and what I heard has any significance at all...'

He paused and looked at Rascombe for a moment as though deciding that the Inspector was indeed the man to handle the issue. 'The words were "up behind Stagstead." He's an old army chap and he's got this very convenient place for taking the photos of them. That's one source and it was purely accidental with a crossed line on the phone. In the normal way I wouldn't have taken any notice of it except that the bloke speaking had one of those voices you can't put a face to but I could swear that somewhere along the line I'd met him before with a bit of the old nasty stuff, you follow. I might have put the phone down but I didn't and then the other fellow said something that did strike me, "Do you think it ought to go in Gide Bleu?" What do you make of that?'

'Guide Bleu, isn't it, sir? Not Gide, surely.'

'Well, of course in the normal way I'd have said he'd been mispronouncing too, except he sounded too toffee-nosed to make that sort of mistake. But the key thing was the other slimy-tongued bloke repeated it, "I think they want to keep off any list like the Gide Bleu. Got to be careful." I lost them after that.'

'That Gide Bleu sounds a bit off, sir,' said the Inspector.

'More off than you'd imagine,' said Sir Arnold, silently thanking Auntie Bea for putting him in the way of this literary disinformation. She'd been encouraging Vy to brush up her French with La Porte étroite and the Chief Constable had been stung into admitting that he didn't know who Gide was. 'You are such a philistine,' Vy had said as they went to bed that night. Well, the old bag had handed him a good tip now.

'You see, Inspector,' the Chief Constable continued, 'I went back and looked this bloke Gide up and what did I find, a really horrible old faggot with a penchant for Arab boys. Wrote books about them. One of them is called The Narrow Door and it don't take two guesses to know why. Filthy sod. So you see the Gide Bleu is something else again.'

Inspector Rascombe was looking impressed. "This could be something really big, sir,' he said. 'I mean after all the bad publicity we've been given lately with the SCS and all that, we could win ourselves a bit of popular support putting a lot of sex perverts behind bars.'

'My thoughts exactly,' said the Chief Constable.

'Another thing that occurs to me, sir,' the Inspector went on, encouraged by Sir Arnold's attitude, 'is that if I am thinking about the right area up behind Stagstead, there are some wealthy people up there with big houses and estates and so on...' He faltered and looked at the Chief Constable with a feeling that he was walking on very thin ice. After all, the old bugger had a place up there too. But Sir Arnold was quite relaxed, though he did look more than a bit weary.

'I know what you're going to say, Inspector, and I appreciate your tact and fine feelings, but you mustn't think of me,' the Chief Constable said. 'You have your duty to do and you must ignore my position in the community. Now you understand why I have entrusted you with this particular job. It is vital I take a wholly unbiased attitude and you're the man I can safely leave the whole matter with. All you've got to do is check out any known sex offenders on the computer and see if there's been anything unusual in that area.'

And with the certain knowledge that Major MacPhee's name would come up on the computer, and that any detailed enquiry at Stagstead would bring to light the anonymous phone call about the Midden and boys being buggered, the Chief Constable dismissed Detective Inspector Rascombe and went back to work on a sermon he had promised to give to the Church of the Holy Monument the following Sunday. He intended to stress the mysterious way in which God worked to achieve His ends. As usual, the Chief Constable had no doubt whose ends those were. He didn't have any doubt whatsoever that the ways themselves were filled with mystery.

He had got halfway through the sermon, and was stressing the need for punishment of offenders as a foretaste of things to come in the afterlife, when he began to have a nagging feeling that he was missing something important on the more practical side of his own life. There was something he ought to be doing if he was not to spend the rest of his life in fear of blackmail. He had to find out who really had been responsible for trying to fit him up with that young bastard. He would see if he could trap Auntie Bea, but first there were genuine areas of enquiry to look into. That wasn't all, either. Sir Arnold shook his head fitfully and got up to make himself a cup of strong black coffee. He really must start thinking clearly.