The Midden

Chapter 7

The first problem was to get back into the bedroom and have it out with Vy. She was to blame for what had happened. Any reasonable husband coming home and finding some filthy young gigolo in bed with his wife would have acted in a similarly violent manner. In a way what he had done had been rather complimentary to her and showed the right amount of jealousy. There was certainly no need for her to have behaved in that irrational way with the gun. He might have been killed and then where would she have been? On the other hand he had no intention of going back into the bedroom until she'd promised not to do anything dangerous again. Outside the bedroom door he stopped. 'Darling, darling,' he called softly. 'It's me. You know. Me. Pooh Bear and Wiggly Toes and...'

Inside the bedroom Lady Vy had found her contact lenses and the nature of her mistake. 'Oh, for God's sake, not at a time like this. Not with '

Sir Arnold hurled himself through the door. Gun or no gun, he had to stop her before she said any more. 'Hush,' he yelled in what he supposed was a whisper. And then, more for the benefit of the two women downstairs than for Lady Vy herself. 'Now, dear, you mustn't blame yourself. We all make mistakes.'

'Blame myself? Blame myself? I wake up to find you beating someone to death with a bed lamp and '

'No, dear, no, that's not quite true,' he said in a whisper that was practically a bellow. Then, sotto voce, 'Walls have ears, for Chrissake.'

Lady Vy looked at him dementedly. 'Walls have ears? You stand there in the altogether and tell me in some godawful whisper that walls have ears? Are you clean off your trolley?'

Sir Arnold signalled frantically towards the door. 'We don't need any witnesses,' he said in a conversational tone.

'You may not,' said Lady Vy. 'In fact I'm sure you don't, but as far as I'm concerned '

Sir Arnold crossed to the bed and drew back the sheet that was covering Timothy Bright's naked body. 'Shut up and listen to me,' he hissed. 'I come home and find you tucked up with this. With some foul toyboy you've been having it off with in my fucking bed and the sod has the gall to sleep here and snore '

He stopped and stared down at Timothy's scarred knees, hands and arms, not to mention a seriously bruised chest and mangled face, and revised his opinion of Vy. If passionate love was what the poor devil and Vy had been making, he was exceedingly glad he had never succeeded in arousing her sexually to such extraordinary lengths. For a fraction of a second it occurred to him that his wife had been seeing too many Dracula movies. Or cannibal ones. Only the lack of blood on her face-cream convinced him otherwise. He preferred not to look at the brute's head. The scalp wound was still leaking blood onto the pillow. In any case Lady Vy had his attention now.

'What do you mean "toyboy" and "having it off", you vile creature?' she spat with a hauteur that was almost genuine. 'Do you think I would dream of sleeping with a...a callow youth, a mere child?'

Sir Arnold looked back at the bloke on the bed. It had never occurred to him that his wife could think of someone in his late twenties as a mere child. Or callow, whatever that meant. It didn't seem natural, somehow. He tried to get back to the issue. 'What do you expect me to think? If you came home unexpectedly at whatever hour it was in the middle of the night and found a naked girl in bed with me, what would you think?'

'I'd know perfectly well you hadn't been having normal sex with her,' Lady Vy hurled back at him. 'I suppose fellatio might do something for you but you can count me out. It's too late in my life for that sort of thing.'

Sir Arnold ignored this obvious attempt to sidetrack him. 'All right,' he demanded. 'Who is he? Just tell me who he is.'

'Who he is?'

'I think I've got a right to know that much.'

'You're asking me...? I don't know.'

'You don't know. You must know. I mean...' Sir Arnold goggled at her. 'I mean you don't have some little shit in bed with you without finding out who he is. It's...it's...'

'If you really must know I thought it was you,' said Lady Vy with revived hauteur.

The Chief Constable gaped at her open-mouthed. 'Me? One moment you say I can't get it up without a mouth job and the next I'm the blighter who has just fucked you rigid.'

For a moment Lady Vy looked as though she might go for the revolver again. 'I keep telling you,' she shouted, 'nobody did anything. I didn't even know he was there.'

'You must have known. People don't just climb into bed with you and you don't know.'

'All right, I suppose I was vaguely aware of someone getting into the bed but naturally I thought it was you. I mean he stank of dog and booze. How the hell was I to know it was someone else?'

Sir Arnold tried to draw himself up. 'I do not stink of dog and booze when I come to bed.'

'Could have fooled me,' said Lady Vy. 'Come to think of it, it did.' She groped over the side of the bed for the gin bottle. Sir Arnold grabbed it from her and swigged. 'And now,' she continued when she'd got it back, 'now you've gone and murdered him.'

'Not murdered, for God's sake,' he said, 'manslaughter. Quite different. In cases of manslaughter judges frequently '

Lady Vy smiled horribly. 'Arnie dear,' she said with a degree of malice that had been fermenting for years, 'it doesn't seem to have got through to the thing you call your brain that you are finished, finito, done for and all washed up. Your career is over. All those lovely directorships with big salaries for favours received, all those nice jobs the good old boys like Len Bload were going to hand you for running the Property Protection Service you call your constabulary, all gone bye-bye now. You're up above the Plimsoll line in excreta, as Daddy used to put it. And it doesn't matter what some senile old judge, hand-picked by the DPP to keep you out of prison, says. You're all washed up, baby.'

Sir Arnold Gonders heard her only subliminally, and in any case he didn't need telling. There were some crimes even a Chief Constable couldn't commit with anything approaching impunity, and one of them had to be battering a young man to death with a blunt instrument in his own bed. To make matters worse he couldn't look to the ex-prime minister for help. She wasn't in power any longer.

He took Timothy Bright's wrist and felt for the pulse. It was, all things considered, surprisingly strong. The next moment he was rummaging in the wardrobe for a torch.

'What are you going to do now?' Lady Vy demanded as he shone the light into one of Timothy's eyeballs and looked at his iris.

'Drugged,' he said finally. 'Drugged to the top of his skull.'

'Perhaps,' said Lady Vy, turning a bit weepy now. 'But look what you've done to the top of his skull.'

Sir Arnold preferred not to. 'Take a urine test off this one and it would burn a hole in the bottle,' he said.

'Are you sure? I mean it seems so unlikely.'

The Chief Constable put the torch down and turned on her. 'Unlikely? Unlikely? Anything more unlikely than coming home to...Never mind. Look at his knees, look at his hands. What do they tell you?'

'He seems rather well...well-proportioned now that you come to mention it.'

'Fuck his proportions,' snarled the Chief Constable. 'The skin has been scraped off them. The bugger's been dragged along the ground. And where are his clothes?' He looked round the room and then, putting on a dressing-gown, went downstairs.

There were no clothes to be found. By the time he got back to the bedroom the Chief Constable knew what had happened and was trying to come to terms with the prospect before him. 'This is a setup, that's what it is. I'm being framed. Those press bastards will arrive any minute now and '

'Oh God, we've invited people over for drinks at twelve,' Lady Vy interrupted, her social priorities coming to the fore. 'With that MP you're so friendly with. Do you think...'

The Chief Constable stared into another abyss. 'We've got to move quickly,' he said. 'This bastard isn't going to be here when they come. He's going down to the boiler-room.'

It was Lady Vy's turn to stare into hell. 'But it's oil-fired. You can't possibly dispose of him in the boiler. How can you think of such things?'

'I didn't, for Chrissake. I'm not going to burn him. I'm going to put him on ice until the heat's off, that's all.' And leaving his wife trying to cope with these weird contradictions, Sir Arnold hurried downstairs again. When he returned he had some parcel tape and two plastic bin liners.

'What are you going to do?' Lady Vy asked. Sir Arnold left the room again and this time rummaged in the bathroom. He returned with a length of Elastoplast. Lady Vy goggled at him. 'What...What are you '

'Shut up and make yourself useful,' he snapped. 'We're going to tie this bastard up so tightly he won't know where the hell he's been.'

'My dear Arnold, you don't really think I'm going to assist you in this horrible scheme.'

The Chief Constable stopped trying to get Timothy's legs into a bin liner and straightened up. 'Listen to me,' he said with a terrible intensity. 'I don't want to hear any more of your "dear Arnold" toffee-nosed crap. And you'd better get this straight. If I go down the social sewer because of this, don't think you're going to stay clean, because you aren't. This time you're going to dirty your hands.'

Lady Vy tried to draw herself up. 'Well, really. Anyone would think I had something to do with his being here.'

'Seems a reasonable assumption. And I'll fill it out for you. You and your Auntie Bea are into S and M. Pick him up some place he looks as if he might come from Harrogate and you fill him with intravenous crack or Sweetie B gives him a spinal tap of Columbian ice with that hypodermic of hers and you drag him here and have some fun. Get the picture?'

Lady Vy was beginning to. 'You'd never dare. You'd never dare do anything...I mean Daddy '

'Try me,' said Sir Arnold. 'Just try me. And your bloody Daddy is going to like his picture in the fucking Sun with a headline EARL'S DAUGHTER IN LESBIAN LOVE TRAP and all about you and the butch-dyke with her heroin habit and

'But Bea's an aromatherapist and stress counsellor. She's '

'Just made for the Sun and the News of the World, she is. And the aroma she's going to be giving off unless you start helping is going to make this dogshit smell like Chanel No. 5. Now then, hold this bloody bag open while I get his legs in.'

But it was obvious that Timothy Bright was too large and intractable for the garbage bag. In the end they dragged the sheets off the bed and rolled him up in them. Sir Arnold picked up the parcel tape and set to work with such thoroughness that the thing they dragged with immense difficulty down to the cellar looked like a mummified body with holes for its nose. Finally they dropped Timothy into the very darkest corner of the cellar beyond the old stone wine racks.

'That ought to keep the bastard quiet for a bit,' said Sir Arnold only to have his hopes dashed as Timothy Bright shifted on the floor and groaned. For a moment the Chief Constable hesitated. Then he handed Lady Vy the torch and turned to the steps.

'Just see he doesn't move,' he said and hurried up to the kitchen. He returned with a plastic basting syringe, a measuring glass, and a bottle of whisky.

'Oh my God, what are you going to do now?'

'Shut up,' said the Chief Constable. 'And hold that torch steady. I don't want to get the measures wrong.'

'What's that syringe thing for?' asked Lady Vy.

'Well, it's not for basting chickens,' said Sir Arnold. 'It's for giving the bastard something to keep him quiet. Like two ounces of Scotch every two hours with a couple of your Valiums and some of those pink pills you take at night. That way the bugger won't know where he is or has been or what time of day it is.'

Lady Vy looked at the bundle on the cellar floor and doubted if the whisky was necessary. The other sedatives certainly weren't. 'Give him those pills and he won't know anything ever again,' she said, 'and I don't think you ought to pump Scotch into him with that thing. He'll almost certainly choke to death.'

'I'm not going to pump it in. Dribble it, more likely. OK?'

But Lady Vy was staring at him. 'You're mad. Absolutely raving. You propose to dribble two ounces of whisky mixed with Valium...Dear God.'

'No,' said the Chief Constable firmly. 'And at this moment in time I don't want to be told. Now then, hold this thing.' He held the plastic syringe up.

'I am not holding anything,' said Lady Vy just as firmly. 'You can do what you like but I am not going to be an accessory to murder.'

'Oh yes you are,' said the Chief Constable with a terrible look on his face. Lady Vy held the syringe.

Five minutes later Timothy Bright had successfully taken his first dose of Valium and whisky. Lady Vy's pink anti-depressants hadn't been added to this lethal brew after all.

"That should guarantee he doesn't wake up for a bit,' said Sir Arnold as they climbed the cellar steps. 'Keep him unconscious until I've had a chance to come up with something.'

He locked the cellar door.

For the rest of the night he tried to sleep on the couch in his study. As he tossed between brief sleep and appalled wakefulness, he searched his memory for a particularly vindictive villain who could have set this trap up. There were just too many criminals with a grudge against him. And how come the press gang hadn't turned up on the doorstep? Presumably because he'd called the Quick Response Squad off. The squad's arrival would have been the excuse for a massive publicity invasion. But they needed the QRS boys to lead them to the Old Boathouse. Sir Arnold was glad it was so isolated. All the same, something was fucking weird. He'd phone around in the morning to see if anyone had been tipped off for a spectacular happening. No, he wouldn't. Silence, absolute, complete and total silence was always the best response. Silence, and with God's help he would find a way out of this nightmare. Just so long as the bastard didn't die.

Between clean sheets in the big bedroom upstairs Lady Vy cursed herself for a fool. The water from the punctured hot-water tank had crept under the door of the bathroom and was soaking through the carpet into the floor. She should have listened to Daddy all those years ago. He had always said you had to be a sadistic cretin to be a successful policeman, and he'd been spot on.