The Midden

Chapter 6

It had begun to rain and the moon was gone by the time Sir Arnold Gonders stumbled out of the police car at the Old Boathouse. He was worn out, drunk and in a filthy temper.

'Will you be all right, sir?' the Sergeant asked as the Chief Constable stood outside the iron gates and finally found his keys.

'I would be if those fucking reporters hadn't wrecked the bloody evening,' he snarled and opened the gate.

'Yes sir, the media's a bloody menace,' said the Sergeant and drove off across the dam to the main road at Six Lanes End. Behind him the Chief Constable, having locked the gates again, was wondering why Genscher, the Rottweiler, who appeared to be limping, was wheezing so asthmatically.

'Mustn't wake her Ladyship, must we, old chap?' he said hoarsely and went across to the front door. After fumbling with the key he was infuriated to find he didn't need it. That bloody Vy again. She was always leaving the place unlocked. And he'd warned her time and again about burglars. 'I love that, coming from you, dear,' she'd retorted. 'The great Protector himself who's always going on about making the world safe for the ordinary citizen. And with Genscher in the yard only a madman would dream of coming in. Be your age.' Which was typical of the way the woman was always treating him.

Anyway he wasn't going to take chances of waking her now. Not that it would be easy with all those pills she took, and the booze. Standing in the hall Sir Arnold felt for the light switch and found fresh plaster. Vy had evidently had the switch moved. She was always getting builders or plumbers in and changing everything round. Not that he wanted the light. Mustn't wake Vy. Just to make sure, he took his shoes off and stumbled as quietly as he could up the stairs.

It was then that he heard the snores. He'd complained about her snoring before, but this was something totally different. Sounded like she was farting in a mud bath. One thing was certain. He wasn't sleeping in the same bed with that fucking noise. He'd use the spare room. He went into the bathroom to have a pee and couldn't find the light cord. Bloody builders hadn't put it where it ought to be. Sir Arnold undressed in the dark and then went out onto the landing and was about to go into the spare room when he remembered that Aunt Bea was probably in there. He wasn't going to risk getting into bed with that foul old bag. No way. He fumbled back along the passage, all the time cursing his wife. It was typical of her that the light switches had been moved. Always wanting everything to be different. Outside the bedroom door he hesitated again. Dear God, that was a fearful sound. Then it crossed his mind that something might be really wrong. Perhaps Vy had taken an overdose of those damned pills the doctor had prescribed for her depression. She could be hyperventilating. She was certainly doing something extraordinary. And wasn't snoring dangerous? He'd read that recently. For a moment a dark hope rose in the Chief Constable's mind. He was tempted to let her snore on. In the meantime he'd better take a Vitamin C and his half of Disprin.

Sir Arnold groped his way back to the bathroom and found the Redoxon. Or thought he did. A few moments later he knew he hadn't. The fucking things were Auntie Bloody Bea's denture cleaners. In the darkness Sir Arnold Gonders spat desperately into the basin and thought dementedly about his wife and her rotten relatives. And she had the gall to blame him for her nerves. They were the result, she claimed, of being married to a man with such a close relationship with all those dreadful criminals he worked with. She'd been ambiguous about which criminals she'd meant, but he had always been conscious that she and her family believed she had married beneath her and really couldn't have done anything else short of marrying one of the classier Royals. The Gilmott-Gwyres were appalling snobs. On the other hand she also felt very badly about his relationship with God, and if God Almighty wasn't socially upmarket, Sir Arnold Gonders would like to know who was.

Unfortunately Lady Vy's nerves had recently been made very much worse by some clown in the Communications Repair Section who had twice programmed her car phone so that it had put her through to some very shady establishments down by the docks. The next time Vy had used the phone she had been answered by the sod who ran The Holy Temple of Divine Being or on occasion, the second occasion in her case, The Pearly Gates of Paradise. Lady Vy, trying to get through to her sister who was supposed to be still alive, had been horrified to find a clear indication that her husband actually did phone God and that the blighter was manifestly an Oriental bent on offering her 'any sexual application, herb or vibrating what-not that will bring you Heavenly satisfaction. Money-back guarantee. Massage and manual assistance also available.' Her reaction to this first call had been to write off her Jaguar and two other cars by going down the up slipway onto the M85. On the second occasion, three weeks later, she told God, or whoever was in charge of The Pearly Gates of Paradise and it could be the Angel Gabriel himself for all she cared, to fuck off, you shit. As a result she had had a terrible crisis of conscience before she'd even got home at the thought that she might indeed have been speaking to God. 'You're always having talks with the bloody man,' she had screamed hysterically at Sir Arnold, 'and for all I know...But why me? Why pick on me of all miserable sinners?'

It had all been most harrowing and Sir Arnold had counted himself lucky that he knew exactly who she had been talking to Glenda used some of the bastard's gadgets and had told the swine he'd put him out of business and circulation for a long time if he ever played God again. This hadn't helped Lady Vy. She had never been the same woman since and had threatened him with divorce if he ever said God was love again in her hearing. Sir Arnold had blamed that bloody Indian, and his wife had blamed herself for ever marrying a policeman. In the end her doctor had persuaded her to consult a psychiatrist who had advised her that she was suffering from a very natural condition in women of her age and from lack of sexual satisfaction. The Chief Constable, who had had his men bug the psychiatrist's office in the hope that she'd admit to committing adultery, had temporarily agreed with this diagnosis. The woman was obviously depressed and lacked sexual satisfaction and he'd sometimes wondered what the result would have been if she had been subjected to the sort of test female shot-putters in the Olympics were given. The psychiatrist's next suggestion, that she must insist on her conjugal rights at least twice a week together with Vy's raucous laughter and protest that he couldn't get an erection once a year let alone twice a week, was far less to his liking. The confounded woman's appeal for him had always sprung from her social connections rather than anything approaching sexual fancy. In fact even before the Lord had shown him the error of his ways he had been far more attracted by lithe and girlish figures like Glenda's and not by Vy's muscular and ill-proportioned torso. All the same, spurred on by her diabolical laughter and by massive doses of Vitamin E, he had done his damnedest to satisfy her marital needs. Fortunately the anti-depressants combined with her nightly intake of gin to render her too doped to want sex or even to know when she hadn't had it. Still, Sir Arnold didn't want to lose her entirely she had influence through her father, Sir Edward Gilmott-Gwyre, and she gave him a social acceptability he would otherwise lack. But now, to judge by the hideous snores, she was in serious trouble.

He pushed himself away from the bathroom wall and staggered down the passage again and had opened the bedroom door before another alarming thought hit him. He'd never heard her make a noise like this. And naturally she had thought he'd be staying in Tween as he usually did after a heavy night. Perhaps that horrible butch Aunt Bea was sleeping in his bed. If she was, the old slut was in for a nasty surprise. He might not like his wife, but he was damned if he was going to have a lesbian take his place in his own bedroom. The Chief Constable moved towards the bed very cautiously with his hand out and as he groped about towards those snores, his fingers touched some hair. In the darkness Sir Arnold Gonders froze in his shambling tracks. That wasn't Vy's hair he'd know her curls anywhere and it wasn't Bea's either, hers was short and straight. The stuff he'd just felt was long and greasy. It was a man's hair and, come to that, those were a man's snores. There was no mistaking the fact. There was no mistaking something else either. The smell.

He knew now why Genscher was limping and wheezing. He also knew that he was dealing with an exceptionally dangerous intruder. All his life he'd known something like this was going to happen if Vy left the bloody door open in his drunken and exhausted state he wasn't thinking at all clearly. The possibility of the house being taken over by the IRA flashed through the Chief Constable's disordered mind. He had to get to his gun in the bedside drawer, the gun and the panic button. With the utmost caution he felt for the bedside table and began to ease the drawer open. The damned thing was stuck. He pulled harder and the thing came a short way out with a loud squeak. The next moment there was a movement on the bed. Sir Arnold hesitated no longer. If he couldn't get to his gun...his hand groped around inside the drawer but there was no gun and no panic button. Grasping the wooden bedside lamp by its top he swung the base down onto the snores. A horrid thud, the bulb in the lamp shattered, the plug came out of the wall socket and the snores stopped. In the darkness Sir Arnold stepped back to the main light switch by the door, trod on a piece of broken bulb, cut his foot and swore.

By the time he'd managed to turn the light on it was fairly clear that things were more dreadful than even he had anticipated. For one thing Lady Vy was awake she had been kicked into a semblance of life by the reflex convulsion of Timothy Bright's legs and without her contact lenses was having difficulty telling who was who. Beside her in the bed what she imagined was Sir Arnold lay bleeding horribly from a scalp wound while a naked man with some sort of club in his hand was swearing horribly over by the door. To Lady Vy's boozy anti-depressed mind it seemed obvious she was about to be raped and murdered. Acting with remarkable speed for a woman in her condition, she scrabbled for the Chief Constable's revolver which she'd kept handy in her own bedside drawer. It was her ultimate line of defence and she meant to use it. Her first shot hit the mirror in the Victorian wardrobe to the murderer's right. Lady Vy tried to aim more carefully for the second and as she did so she was vaguely conscious that her attacker was yelling at her in a faintly familiar voice. 'For fuck's sake put that fucking gun down '

The second shot missed him on the other side and, having gone in one side of the hot-water boiler and out the other, ricocheted round the en-suite bathroom. There was no need for a third shot. Sir Arnold had scampered through the door and slammed it behind him. Lady Vy reached for the panic button which had been installed to alert every police station within a radius of fifty miles that the Chief Constable's weekend residence had been entered by intruders.

To Sir Arnold Gonders the next half hour was a foretaste of hell. As the siren on the roof began to wail and the entire building was brilliantly floodlit by halogen lamps in the garden while simultaneously a dozen police stations were alerted to a Top Priority Emergency, he knew that his career was on the brink of an abyss. He hurled himself down the darkened staircase and was halfway to the telephone in his study when the hall lights came on and he was confronted by the elderly Scots housekeeper in her dressing-gown.

'Och Sir Arnold, do you ken wha's ganging on?' she asked.

The Chief Constable brushed her aside with the bloodied bedside lamp. The stupid old cow, of course he didn't know what was going on. Once in his study he dropped the lamp on a valuable Persian rug and grabbed the phone. The number, the coded number to cancel the alert? What the hell was it? Finally, in desperation, he dialled 999 and was asked which of the Emergency Services he required. It was a rather more relevant question than he realized at the time, though the house had yet to catch fire.

'Police,' he barked and was put through to a recorded message asking him to be patient as Police Services were stretched to the limit. Sir Arnold knew that. He had dictated the message to his secretary himself.

'While you are waiting to be attended to,' the soothing female voice went on, 'we at Twixt and Tween Police Services would like you to know about the ancillary assistance we are able to offer the public. Officers are always on hand to conduct Road Safety Classes at schools of all levels, Primary, Secondary, Further and Independent. We also hold regular classes in Self-Defence for Senior Citizens and Persons of the Female Gender. These are available at '

'Fuck off, you bitch,' shouted the Chief Constable and slammed the phone down. A new and even more awful possibility had just entered his mind. Vy and a young man in bed...A toyboy! He had to think of some way of stopping scores of policemen converging on the house in which he had almost certainly murdered his wife's lover. But first he had to find a way of turning that infernal siren off. Livid with a fresh terror he dashed back across the hall to the kitchen in search of the fuses and was blundering about in the pantry where they had been. The fucking things had been moved. That Vy and her electricians. And what was the point of having Emergency Services if you couldn't get through to the sods. The other inhabitants of the house weren't helping. As he turned back towards the study with the intention of blasting that bleeding siren on the roof into silence with his shotgun he came face to face with Auntie Bea.

'Has something dreadful happened?' she enquired, at the same time studying his anatomy with only slight interest and considerable disgust. 'I thought I heard shots and then all those incredible lights came on and that dreary siren. Can't you switch it off?'

'No,' said the Chief Constable. 'And nothing serious has happened.'

'Well, I certainly can,' said Auntie Bea. Behind her in the study the phone had begun to ring. For a moment they grappled in the doorway and then the Chief Constable broke loose and hurried to the study. In the kitchen Bea found the mains switch and the siren wailed down. She came back with the housekeeper and stood in the study doorway. The Chief Constable had answered the phone.

'This is Harry Hodge, the Deputy Chief Constable here,' said a strangely controlled voice.

'I know that. I know exactly who it is,' Sir Arnold yelled back.

'Good, good,' said the voice, still exercising an unnerving calm. 'Are you all right? I repeat, are you all right? Take your time replying.'

Sir Arnold didn't. It was bad enough standing in the study bollock naked with a middle-aged woman in a startling kimono staring at him and at the blood on the floor...'Of course I'm fucking well all right. The button got pressed accidentally is all.'

'Good, very good,' said the Deputy Chief Constable, maintaining his cool. 'I quite understand. Now are you all right? I repeat, are you all '

'Listen, Hodge, what do you mean you understand? I'm standing here starkers and you...' Here he turned on Auntie Bea. 'Fuck off, for Chrissake.'

'Try and keep calm,' said the wretched Hodge in the same nerveless tone. 'Everything is under control. Now then. Are you all right? I repeat '

'You ask me again if I'm all right, Hodge, and so help me God I'll break your fucking neck. I've told you I don't know how many times I'm all right. How many more times have I got to tell you?'

Over the line he could hear the Deputy Chief Constable asking more or less the same question. Sir Arnold remembered the drill. 'Hodge,' he said, with a new controlled calm that was as peculiar in its own way as that of his Deputy, 'Hodge, I am all right. I repeat, I am all right. Repeat. I am all right.'

'Well, that's all right then,' said Hodge almost regretfully. 'It was a false alarm then? Shall I call off the QRS lads?'

'The who?' The past few minutes had slowed the Chief Constable still further.

'The Quick Response Squad,' Hodge said, a new doubt creeping back into his voice.

'Those swine?' yelled the Chief Constable. 'Of course call them off at once. Why do you think I phoned you?'

'Phone me, sir? Phoned me? I don't want to question your judgement at a time like this but in actual fact I phoned you. Are you sure you are quite all right?'

The Chief Constable made a supreme effort. 'Hodge, please believe me when I say I am perfectly all right, all right, all right. Got it? I am entirely all right and I want to get back to bed.'

'If you say so, sir. All the same, it seems a pity not to take the opportunity to use this as a training exercise.'

'No. Repeat, no. Repeat, no, on no account. Over and fucking out.' And putting the phone down the Chief Constable turned back to even more immediate problems.