The Midden

Chapter 28

The scene that greeted Lennox Midden though greeted was hardly the most appropriate word on his arrival at the Middenhall (there was so much traffic he'd had to walk over half a mile) was not one to reassure a decent suburban solicitor who had woken only a few hours earlier expecting to play in the Urnmouth Golf Club's Annual Competition. There was nothing of the smooth greens, the broad fairways, and the bantering camaraderie in the clubhouse afterwards of men who believe that hitting a small white ball into the distance gives life meaning. A great gulf was fixed, an abyss, between that comfortable world and what was happening at the Middenhall. There were snatches of green through the smoke where the lawns ran down to the lake, but they were not smooth. Lumps of concrete blown from the crenellations and the ornate turrets of the roof lay embedded in the turf, with the occasional dead or wounded police marksman lying poignantly among them. Smashed trucks and police cars burnt vigorously on the drive. The vast verandah burnt too, while the shell of the great building steamed and smoked hideously, flames suddenly erupting from its depths like some volcano on heat. A German survivor of the final Russian assault at Stalingrad, or an American soldier surveying the devastation unnecessarily and barbarously inflicted on the Iraqi convoy north of Kuwait City, would have found the sights and smells familiar.

Lennox Midden in his plus-fours didn't. He had never been in the presence of death and destruction on this scale before, and with each dread step he took along the road and down the drive, past stragglers of the Child Abuse Trauma Specialists, past wounded policemen, past hideous but stalwart prostitutes with smoke-blackened faces, past maddened German Shepherds with smouldering tails and burnt whiskers, even past Buffalo Midden, unrecognizable beneath his coating of pig manure but still wanting to know the way to Piccadilly Circus, Lennox Midden's faith in the suburban values faltered. By the time he reached the bottom of the drive, where firemen had gathered to watch in awe what they had come to extinguish, the solicitor's hopes had vanished. There was nothing to be saved from the Middenhall. Chunks of the upper storeys were still crashing at intervals into the inferno below, sending up clouds of dust and smoke. The smell was appalling. Even to Lennox it was obvious that more than his great grandfather's fantastic mansion had been burnt. The stench of barbecued relatives, those Middens from Africa and India and faraway turbulent places who had sought safety and comfort for their retirement in the house, hung nauseatingly on the summer air.

Lennox Midden couldn't understand it at all, but being a lawyer he looked round for someone to blame. And to sue. He learnt what he needed from Frank Midden, the ostrich farmer who had sensibly leapt from his bedroom window and rolled down the verandah roof to land on the top of a police van.

'Those bastards started it,' Frank moaned (he was lame in his other leg now and didn't care) and pointed at the body of a police marksman in his black overalls. 'They drove down the drive in those vans like madmen and started shooting at anyone they could see. I saw them kill Mrs Devizes at the window of her room and all she was asking was what they were doing. Don't suppose she'll ever know now.'

'But they're policemen,' said Lennox, who had seen the markings on the vans, 'they must have had some reason for starting to shoot.'

Frank Midden wasn't having it. 'Reason? Policemen? If they're British policemen, I'm going back to South Africa. Our lot are bad enough but these bastards are...' He couldn't find words to describe what he thought of them. Lennox Midden didn't need to hear any more. If the Twixt and Tween Constabulary had been responsible for this murderous attack on people and property, they were going to pay for it. He was more concerned about the property which, while it could never have found a buyer, had cost a fortune to build. Now, in its smouldering state, it was of incalculable value. The dead Middens had their uses too. His legal mind, honed to perfection by years of litigation in matters of compensation and damages, couldn't begin to imagine what this little lot was going to bring in. Or, as he put it, with more accurate irony than he dreamt, to Miss Midden when he found her still on the phone at the farmhouse, 'Talk about bringing home the bacon.'

Miss Midden kept her thoughts to herself. She had no real idea what had started the catastrophic events of the morning or why Buffalo had begun firing his rifle but, whatever it was, she was macabrely grateful. The curse of the Middenhall had been broken.

So had Inspector Rascombe's spectacles. Not that he needed them to see in a blurred way, his mind was pretty blurred too, that he had been partly responsible for the destruction of a huge house, the deaths of at least half a dozen police marksmen from the Armed Quick Response Team, and, to judge by the dreadful smell, some of the previous occupants of the fucking place. As he dragged himself though the mud out of the artificial lake where he had taken refuge, he had the sense to know his career as a police officer was at an end. God alone knew what the Chief Constable would say when he heard about this debacle and, from the sound of several helicopters now flying overhead, he'd probably heard already and was rabidly seeking whom he might fuck the 'might', whom he would devour. The Inspector's only hope, and it was a very, very slight though sincere one, was that Sir Arnold Gonders had had an apoplectic fit or a fatal heart attack.

In fact the Chief Constable hadn't heard what malignant fate had in store for him that Sunday. He had been spared that knowledge by giving the congregation of the Church of the Holy Monument in Boggington, some thirty miles to the north of Tween, the benefit of his colloquies with God. They consisted very largely of a series of admonitions which made God sound like the Great Lady herself at her most mercenary.

'I say unto you that unless we maintain the bonds of free enterprise and free endeavour we shall be bounden to do the Devil's work,' he announced from the pulpit. 'Our business in the world is to augment the goodness that is God's love with the fruition of free enterprise and to put aside those things which the Welfare State handed us on a plate and thus deprived us of the need to which we must pay homage. That need, dear brothers and sisters in God, is to take care of ourselves as individuals and so save the rest of the community doing it out of the taxpayer's pocket. Only this week I have been encouraged to see how many Watch Committees and Neighbourhood Watches have been set up to augment the splendid work being done by the Police everywhere and in particular by the men under my command. It is not often that I have a chance or, I might say, the opportunity to do the Lord's work in the way he would have me do, namely, like your goodselves, to encourage others to free themselves from the shackles of passivity and acceptance and to go forth into the world to bring the positive and active blessings of health, wealth and happiness to those less fortunate than ourselves. This is not to say that we must bow the knee to social need or so-called deprivation. Instead we must make of ourselves and our gifts in business and in wealth whatsoever we can. As the Lord has told me, there are as many numerous spin-offs on the way to Heaven as there are handouts on the slippery road to Hell. It is one thing to give a penny to a beggar: it is another to beg oneself. And so I say to you, dear friends, assist the police wherever you can in the prevention of crime and in the pursuit of justice but never forget that the way of righteousness is the way of self-service and not the other way round. And so let us pray.'

In front of him the congregation solemnly bowed their heads as the Chief Constable, calling on all his powers of rhetoric, launched into a prayer for the anti-vehicle-theft campaign and ancillary individual schemes. It was a great performance.

'I think you missed your vocation, Sir Arnold,' said the Minister afterwards as the Chief Constable left. 'Still, when you finally give up the wonderful work you are doing as Chief Constable you may feel the call to the ministry. There are many opportunities for a man of vision.'

'Indeed,' said Sir Arnold, who didn't enjoy references to his retirement, 'but I see myself in an altogether more humble role, Reverend, as a poor sinner who finds joy in his heart bringing the message of the good book to '

'Quite so, Sir Arnold, quite so,' said the Minister, anxious to stem the flow of the Chief Constable's oratory before it got going. 'Splendid sermon. Splendid.'

He turned away to attend to one of the congregation and Sir Arnold went down the steps to his car. As he drove back to Sweep's Place he considered how best to use the moral virtue that talking about God always stimulated in him. 'That ought to put paid to anything like Job got,' he thought to himself. 'Even God wouldn't want to interfere with the maintenance of Law and Order on my patch.'

His hope didn't last long. Turning the car radio on he caught a news flash and very nearly smashed into a bus shelter as a result.

'The battle at Middenhall, which was the subject of police action this morning, is over. The building is in flames and there has been an enormous explosion. Police casualties are said to number nine dead. There are no figures for the occupants of the mansion itself. We shall be bringing you fresh updates as soon as we can.'

The Chief Constable pulled into the side of the road and stared at the radio. Nine coppers dead? Nine of his lads? It wasn't possible. Not his lads. They weren't lads any more. They were corpses. Dear shit, and Job thought he'd been given a hard time, the whingeing swine. But Sir Arnold knew why he'd cursed the day. He did too. The day he'd ever made that fucking moron Rascombe Head of the Serious Crime Squad. That was the day Sir Arnold cursed. And God, of course, for having created Rascombe in the first place. The old swine should have had more sense. Even as a sperm it must have been possible to spot that he hadn't got the brains of a...well, a sperm at any rate. And what sort of gormless ovum had invited him in? Must have been off its tod, that fucking ovum. If Sir Arnold Gonders had had his way he'd have wrung that evil little sperm's neck and kicked that moronic ovum into the street. And if that had failed, and he rather thought it might have been too difficult, he wouldn't have hesitated to use a knitting-needle to get at that vile sperm and ovum. Or, better still, give Mrs Rascombe a uterine washout with some Harpic or Domestos, something that would make her think twice about having it off with Rascombe's bloody dad ever again.

Sitting in his Jag outside one of the mining villages of Twixt and Tween he had helped so ruthlessly to turn into a workless place, the Chief Constable saw the bright summer day differently from other people. It was a dark overcast day with great thunderclouds spread out across it, black and menacing, as black and menacing as the row of miners' cottages, meagre and pitiless places with empty cans of lager in the gutters of the street. Some had boarded windows and some were occupied by miserable men who would never work again, who if they were old had miner's lung, and by their brutish offspring. But even they, in their miserable hovels, would find joy in the downfall of the man who had ordered his men to break their picket lines and any heads that got in the way, and to hell with the consequences. The bastards in those houses would probably hold street parties to celebrate his disgrace and drink themselves sick to his unhealth. The Chief Constable drove on hurriedly to escape this terrifying vision of his future. He had many illusions about many things but he knew his friends and political allies. They would drop him like a hot cake, hot dogshit more like, the Bloads and the Sents and the high-and-fucking-mighty he had helped like Pulborough, the Waterworks magnate. Fair-weather bastards all of them, and the Gonders weather had turned very foul indeed. In his imagination it had begun to rain and the wind was blowing it into his face.

Another news flash. The police casualty rate had gone up to thirteen and the estimated number of dead in the Middenhall was now put at ten. The Chief Constable was disgusted. The Armed Quick Response Team clearly couldn't even shoot to kill straight. Attempts to reach the Chief Constable had failed but his Deputy, Henry Hodge, speaking from his home, had admitted that he knew of no authorization for an armed raid on the Middenhall. It was news to him.

'Stupid little fucker,' the Chief Constable shouted at the radio, 'couldn't he have kept himself to "No bloody comment"?'

It was a stupid question to ask. Even Sir Arnold could see that. The bastard wanted Sir Arnold's job, that's why he was passing the buck and landing him in the shit. And there was no way he was going to get into his house in Sweep's Place. It would be blocked by reporters and people from the BBC with cameras and mikes who'd always been out for his blood. Well, they'd got it now. With all the keen cunning of a cornered plague rat, Sir Arnold sought for a way out of the trap he was in. And found it. In violent illness.

Somewhere along the line of his sordid and brutal life he had heard that eating a tube of toothpaste gave one some pretty ghastly and seemingly authentic symptoms. He stopped at an open supermarket and bought two large tubes of differing kinds one brand might not do the trick and a bottle of tonic water. He'd be found slumped in his car somewhere very near the Tween General Infirmary he didn't want to die and be rushed in and treated. With fresh determination and fortitude the Chief Constable drove into Tween and, having parked just outside the gates of the hospital, managed with the utmost difficulty to get those tubes of toothpaste down with the help of the tonic. It was a move he was going to regret. The effect was almost instantaneous. And horrible. He stumbled from the Jag and collapsed on the road. He wasn't shamming. He hadn't known he had an ulcer. He knew it now with a vengeance. Hiatus hernia it wasn't. Could be fluoride poisoning though. Christ, he hadn't thought of that. As he crawled towards the hospital gates he knew he was going to die. He had to be dying. That damned malingering skunk had been bullshitting about toothpaste, lying through his fucking teeth. It had been a terrible mistake.

An hour later he knew just what a mistake it had been, in more senses than one.

'First time I've ever known a case of attempted suicide with toothpaste,' said the doctor who had pumped his stomach out. 'He must have been out of his mind.'

This opinion was shared in Whitehall. Even the Prime Minister, who had seen the inferno at the Middenhall on television (those helicopters had done sterling service for the media) and who would cheerfully have strangled Sir Arnold with his own bare little hands, found the news that the Chief Constable, having attempted suicide by eating at least two tubes of toothpaste, was still alive quite astonishing. He was also horrified to learn from the Head of Internal Intelligence that the Special Branch men flown up from London to check the contents of the house in Sweep's Place had unearthed scores of videotapes taken in a brothel in which important members of the local party, prominent businessmen, and important contributors to central party funds figured largely. There had also been a great deal of damaging information on Sir Arnold's hard disk and database.

'He'll have to go,' he told the Home Secretary. 'I don't care what arguments you put to me, I will not have such a corrupt person in a position of high public responsibility. I won't.' It was a strong statement from such a weak man. But the Home Secretary had no intention of opposing the Prime Minister. He too would willingly have strangled the Chief Constable, not only for what he had done to the Middenhall, but more personally for what he had done to the Home Secretary. Someone ought to have warned him about that establishment at Urnmouth and the fact that he might be filmed in his role of Marlene Dietrich. To put it mildly, Sir Arnold Gonders' future was not going to be a pleasant one.

'On the other hand, we mustn't rock the local party boat too much,' the Prime Minister went on. He really was a very weak man.

The Home Secretary couldn't bring himself to agree. He was in a very ugly mood. He'd have torpedoed the bloody boat and machine-gunned any survivors.