The Midden

Chapter 23

By the time Miss Midden got home that night it was well past midnight and she was exhausted. And elated.

'I think a nightcap is called for,' she said, and took a bottle of sloe gin she had made before Christmas and poured herself a glass. Then she looked doubtfully at the Major. The poor man was looking so wistfully at the bottle, and he had behaved himself with Timothy Bright.

'All right,' she said. 'You too. Get yourself a glass. We've cause for celebration. I don't know how much money is in that hold-all but at a rough guess I'd say getting on for half a million pounds. There's a parcel in there which must contain money as well. He was to take it to Spain and deliver it to someone there. So, cheers. And don't look so stunned. It's only money.'

The Major was stunned, so stunned that he hadn't touched his sloe gin. 'Half a million? Half a million?' he stammered. And she said it was only money. Major MacPhee had never been in the presence of so much money in his entire life. And he had never been in the presence of a woman who could treat such an enormous sum with such disdain. He couldn't find words to express his shock.

'It may be less and it may be more,' Miss Midden went on. 'What does it matter? It's a great deal of money. That's all.'

'What are you going to do with it?' he managed to ask.

Miss Midden sat down at the kitchen table and grinned. It was an exultant grin with a hint of malice. The Major was a weak man and he needed to know that he wasn't going to lay his hands on any of the cash. 'I am going to sleep with the shotgun beside the bed. That's the first thing I'm going to do,' she said. 'And after that we shall see.'

She finished her sloe gin, picked up the hold-all, and went through to her office to fetch the gun and a mole-trap. Mole-traps were useful for catching things other than moles. Like hands.

Once in her bedroom she emptied the hold-all and put the money in a cardboard box on top of her old mahogany wardrobe. After that she stuffed the bag with empty shoe boxes and some old clothes. Finally she put the mole-trap, now set and open, in the middle with a piece of paper over it. She also locked the door and wedged a chair under the doorknob. Then she went to bed.

Outside, the weather had begun to change. A night wind blew across the open fell and with it there came rain, gusts of rain which blew against the window. Miss Midden slept soundly. She had begun to accomplish what she had set herself to do. It had very little to do with money.

It was still raining in the morning when a motorcycle turned up and a man with a brown paper parcel came to the back door. Miss Midden opened the door reluctantly. 'Package for Major MacPhee,' he said and handed it over with a receipt for Miss Midden to sign. She put the parcel on the kitchen table and watched him ride off. Then she went up to the old nursery with Timothy Bright's breakfast.

'I'll get you some clothes,' she said. 'The Major isn't your size. He's too small, but I think there are some things of my grandfather's that will fit you.'

Timothy Bright thanked her and started on his porridge and bacon and eggs. At least the food, wherever he might be, was good. He hadn't eaten so well for ages. And even his terror had left him. He was beginning to feel safe.

Miss Midden returned with a pair of blue dungarees, an old shirt without a collar, and a sweater that had holes in the elbows. There was also a pair of boots that looked as though they had been used in the garden and had rusty studs on the soles. The boots were several sizes too big for him and had no laces.

'But don't think about leaving the house,' she told him, 'or showing yourself at the windows. I want only one other person to know you are here.'

'What other person?' Timothy Bright asked in alarm.

'The one who brought you here,' said Miss Midden, and went downstairs to find the Major standing at the kitchen table looking at the brown paper parcel.

'Well, don't just stand there. Open it and look at the goodies inside,' she said.

'But I don't know what it is. I haven't sent away for anything. I can't think who sent it to me.'

Miss Midden started doing the washing-up. 'One of your admirers down at the hell-hole,' she suggested. 'Some old flame. Mrs Consuelo McKoy, probably. She thinks you're a real Major. That comes from living in California too long. Fantasyland.'

Behind her the Major got some scissors and cut through the parcel tape. For a moment he was silent and then she heard him gasp. She turned and looked at the things lying on the table. They were not goodies. They were anything but goodies. They were revolting. Miss Midden had never seen anything like them in her life. And she certainly never wanted to see anything like them again as long as she lived. She looked up at the Major with utter disgust.

'You filthy animal!' she snarled. 'You utterly revolting...you bloody pervert. Into children. Little children. You are the lowest form of animal life...not animal. Animals don't go in for torturing little children. Bah!'

But Major MacPhee was shaking his head and had gone a horrid patchy colour. 'I never sent off for these,' he stammered, 'I swear I didn't. I really didn't. I don't know where they come from. I don't like this sort of thing. I never...'

Miss Midden said nothing. She was thinking hard. For once she was inclined to believe the Major. If he had sent off for them, he wouldn't have been fool enough to open the parcel in her presence. She was sure of that. He'd have taken it off to his room and gloated over these revolting photographs and magazines in private. On the other hand...Hand!

'Don't touch them,' she said. 'I'll get a box and a piece of cloth. Just don't handle them.'

In fact she used a pair of gloves and put the filthy stuff, the product of sick and profit-conscious minds and a product for sick and evil minds, into a cardboard box very carefully.

The bewildered Major watched her and kept shaking his head sorrowfully. 'Not me, not me,' he repeated, almost on the point of tears.

'More to the point, why you?' said Miss Midden. 'Ask yourself that question. First him under your bed, naked and knocked about. And now this obscenity.' She stopped. This was getting really dangerous. Someone was setting the Major up. And she'd be with him. She was damned if she would. And with all that money in the house it was even more dangerous. She would have to move quickly.

'We've come back early,' she announced. 'Weather changed or something. Anyway we are back. Put that filth in the back of the car and cover it with a...No, put the box in a dustbin bag.' And leaving the Major wondering what was going on in her mind, she dashed upstairs and hurled the contents of the hold-all out onto the bed where the mole-trap went off. Then she packed the money back into the bag and went downstairs. She put her old hat on, and a raincoat, and went across to the barn.

Five minutes later she was down at the Middenhall. There was no one about. They were late risers and she was able to sneak past the front door and round to the back of the house without being seen. In the walled garden, during the war, there had been a deep air-raid shelter with concrete steps going down into the darkness. The entrance was covered with brambles and a self-sown buddleia, and grass grew over the mound. As far as she knew nobody had ever found the entrance but she had known it was there since she was small. It had terrified her then when she once went down it with her cousin Lennox. There had been water lying six inches deep in the passages and the cold and dark and Lennox's claim that it had been used for torturing prisoners had given her the horrors.

But now she needed that deep and hidden shelter. She clambered through the undergrowth, cleared away the earth over the iron door, and finally opened it. Then she fetched a torch from the car and the hold-all and went down into the darkness. The water was still there perhaps the same water she had waded through thirty-two years before. This time Miss Midden was unafraid. She was determined. Someone had thrown down a challenge to her. There was nothing better for her. She loved the fight.

At the very end of the passage, past rooms with rusted iron bunks on either side, the torch picked out what she had been looking for. It was a long narrow slot halfway up the concrete wall. Lennox had said it was for putting the dead bodies of men who had been shot down there. What use it had really had she had no idea. But it was out of sight of the door and anyone peering in would never spot it unless they came right into the room. She slid her hand along it and found it was dry. It would do. Then she pushed the hold-all in and went back for the box of obscene magazines and photographs and brought them down too, first removing the box from the plastic dustbin bag and putting in the hold-all containing the money to keep it dry in the sodden atmosphere of the old shelter. When that was done she splashed back and climbed the steps to the entrance and very carefully stared through the shrubs to make sure no one was about. After that the earth and grass went back over the iron door and by the time she returned to the old car there was hardly a sign that anything had been disturbed. Miss Midden went back to the house. It hadn't even been necessary to tell anyone at the Middenhall that she was home from her holiday. She had seen no one.

For the rest of the day she worked in the house and planned her next move. Outside the sheets of rain came down and the wind blew so that even the sheep seemed to huddle under the bank and the thorn trees along the old drove road. By nightfall the rain had grown even heavier and the wind continued to howl through the copse behind the Midden and across the chimney tops.

For the officers engaged in Operation Kiddlywink it was not a night to be out in. But Inspector Rascombe was adamant. A dark, wet and windy night was just the sort the paedophiles at the Middenhall would choose to stay indoors and watch pornographic videos. They certainly would not be on the look-out for teams of policemen dressed in arctic camouflage suits borrowed from the Royal Marines and intended to make them look like sheep safely grazing across Scabside Fell. He had assembled his men on the Parson's Road. From there they had to cross two miles of rough country to the Middenhall, and the night was very dark, wet and windy indeed.

'Now, when the advance party has established itself in the park opposite the house and the auxiliaries are ready to move forward to the farm, I want you to move with the utmost care. Rutherford, you and Mark will go forward round the lake here...'

At this point a constable opened the door of the British Telecom van the Inspector had borrowed as his Headquarters and the wind blew the Ordnance Survey map up the wall. The Inspector and Sergeant Bruton managed to get it straight again and Rascombe continued his briefing.

'As I was saying, you will rendezvous with Markin and Spender here at the bottom of the drive and attempt to make a visual survey of the house both back and front. Are there any questions?'

Sergeant Bruton had a great many, but he knew better than to ask them. Instead, a detective constable wanted to know what he ought to do in the event that he was stopped and asked by one of the suspects what he was doing.

'In the first place I very much hope that the exercises we have practised will prevent any such eventuality, and in the second I look to you all to act on your own initiative. The only thing I would not say is you are police officers. That is imperative if we are not to cause the suspects to go to ground in a big way. You can be hikers who've lost your way or anything that seems reasonable at the time. Just don't say you're ice-cream salesmen.'

On this hilarious note the Inspector wished his men good luck and the surveillance teams set out across the fell. It was 11.30. Four miles away on the road behind the Middenhall Unit C reported that no cars had travelled through their observation points since 9.30 and could they please pack up. Since they were having to use the public phone box in Iddbridge the call only got through to Rascombe when a detective from Stagstead drove up to the Mobile HQ at 01.41.

'Of course they can't go home now,' said Rascombe irritably. 'They have replacement officers to take over at the end of each stint.'

'Yes, sir, I know that,' said the detective, 'but the road is up for repair by the river and no one can use it anyway. There's no real need to watch it at all.'

But Inspector Rascombe was not to be persuaded. 'All the more reason for keeping our eyes on it,' he said. 'If anyone comes down it when it's closed, it must mean they are using it for some very sinister purpose. Stands to reason.'

'But nobody is using it. How can they?'

'Never mind how,' said the Inspector. 'Just tell them to keep an extra eye open from now.'

'Cyclops-style, sir?' said the detective and hurried out into the night before the Inspector could work the remark out and tell him not to be fucking impertinent.

In his room the Major played with his old radio. He was puzzled. He was picking up the strangest messages, none of which made sense to him. Inspector Rascombe's admonitions about radio silence were being ignored. The Major was astonished to learn, with quite surprising clarity and a flow of obscenities, that someone called Rittson had just fallen in a 'fucking stinking stream or something'. In fact it turned out to be a sheep-dipping bath and the Major was beginning to wonder what extraordinary event he had just been privy to when the person called Rittson was told furiously to maintain radio silence.

'Must be the Marines over on Meltsea Marshes,' the Major thought, and turned off his radio and went to sleep.

Out on the fell the ten constables moved forward in a strange series of small rushes as Inspector Rascombe had ordered. First two men would stumble forward and halt in a semi-crouching position while another four moved up and past them to be followed by the rest. In this curious and supposedly sheeplike fashion they moved forward against the driving rain and the searing wind. Around them genuine sheep scurried away into the darkness, only to stop and stare back at their weird imitators. And so the small group crossed the open ground, scrambled over drystone walls and, in the case of Detective Constable Rittson, fell into the sheep-dip.

By 2 a.m. they had reached their first objective, the wood on the far side of the lake, and were peering across the water at the Middenhall. The building was almost entirely in darkness and only one light burned in the house itself. But on the outside floodlights shone out onto the lake and were reflected there among the waterlilies. 'Bloody difficult to see anything with those fucking lights,' said the detective called Mark, 'and they can spot us dead easy.' They crawled back into the wood and tried the other side. The lights were still quite bright.

'He said we had to go up to the farmhouse,' said Larkin. 'So I reckon we'd better.' He and Spender set off round the lake and over the little bridge by the sluice gate and made their way up the drive towards the Midden. Behind them Rutherford had decided there was a patch of dark shadow at the corner of the Middenhall where the dustbins were and, leaving Mark to try the other side where there were a number of azalea bushes, he scurried across the lawn and had got to within ten yards of the house when something moved in front of him.

Unable to see what exactly it was, he obeyed orders and went into sheep mode, crouching down on all fours and at the same time trying to keep his eyes watching his front. In fact he had disturbed a family of badgers. There was a clang as a dustbin lid fell, a grunt and a slight noise of scrabbling. Detective Constable Rutherford turned and trundled himself away across the lawn and back over the wooden bridge. 'No bloody good,' he told the others. 'They've got someone round the back on the look-out. I reckon we'd best be off.'

The first phase of Operation Kiddlywink had been a complete failure.