The Midden

Chapter 8

At Pud End Henry Gould woke with the horrid sensation that he had done something terrible. It took him a moment or two to remember what it was, and when he did he was genuinely worried. 'Oh Lord,' he muttered as he got up hurriedly, 'what an asinine trick to pull' When he went downstairs it was to find his uncle sitting over his breakfast coffee in the old farm kitchen with the radio beside him. He was looking particularly cheerful for a man who had almost certainly just lost a nephew. Henry had no doubt about that. In the sober light of the morning he felt sure his cousin must have been killed. No one stoked to the synapses with bufo sonoro could possible ride an enormously powerful motorbike for any distance and live. Toad was the most powerful mind-bender.

'No need to look so gloomy,' Victor told him. 'I've been listening to the local radio since six but they've made no mention of any accident involving a motorcycle, and they always do to encourage the others. Timothy is probably sleeping it off in some hedgerow. That sort always have the devil on their side.'

'I certainly hope so. Goodness only knows what that Toad stuff is. From the way it worked I'm surprised he could get on the bike, let alone ride the thing.'

But it was later in the morning when Victor Gould went up to air the spare room that he realized Timothy Bright had left a brown paper package and a large briefcase. He carried them through to the cupboard under the stairs and deposited them there with the thought that Timothy would certainly be returning to claim them. It was a fairly dreadful thought but at least he was temporarily absent.

Timothy Bright would have shared Henry's consternation had he been in any condition to. As it was he slept on happily unconscious of his situation and with the remains of the Toad doing new things to his neurons now that it had been freshened up with Valium and whisky. He was fortunately unaware that he was strapped up inside two bloodstained sheets and a pillow case wedged into a distant corner of the Old Boathouse cellar, and that he himself looked very much like one of the sacks of coal that had once occupied a space there.

Above his head and out in the garden the guests at the Gonders drinks party wandered about clutching glasses of a rather acid white wine that had been sold by Ernest Lamming to Sir Arnold as 'a first-rate little Vouvray' which had a certain accuracy about it though the Chief Constable now wished he hadn't bought quite so much of the stuff. In particular he wasn't feeling at all like drinking anything very much himself. He'd had three hours disrupted sleep and had woken with the feeling that he had not only drunk far too much but that he must have been hallucinating during the night. What appeared to have happened, namely that he had probably murdered some bastard who had been sleeping with Vy, couldn't possibly have been the case. In fact all the events of the night had such a nightmarish quality about them that he would willingly have spent the entire day in solitude trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Instead he was forced to adopt a bonhomie he didn't in the least feel. Anyway he wasn't drinking that battery-acid Vouvray. He'd stick to vodka and tonic and hope it helped his head.

It was an indication of the remarkable social changes that had taken place in the eighties that the guests were such a very unmixed bunch. In earlier days there would have seemed something distinctly suspect about a Chief Constable who had quite so many friends in the property development and financial worlds and so very few among what had once been known as the gentry. This was particularly true in Twixt and Tween. The county had once been famous for the great industries and shipyards of Tween and the grouse moors and huge estates of the great landowners of Twixt. At the Gonders party there were none of the old ironmasters, and the only industries represented were service ones. None of the landowners would have mixed at all happily with the guests at the Old Boathouse. Then again there were no trade unionists. Sir Arnold Gonders had learnt the political catechism of Thatcherism very well indeed: only money mattered and preferably the newest money that talked about little else and cared for nothing. There were a great many people from the TV and showbiz world. 'Communication is the real art of a Chief Constable,' Sir Arnold had once pontificated. 'We must keep the people on our side.' It was a revealing comment suggesting that society was irremediably divided.

Certainly in the Twixt and Tween Constabulary area if people did not know which side Sir Arnold Gonders was on, a glance at the guest list would have given them some insight. Len Bload of Bload and Babshott, Public Relations and Financial Consultants to the County Council, was there with his wife, Mercia, the ex-model and masseuse who had risen to a directorship of B and B. Len Bload always addressed the Chief Constable as 'My boy,' and obviously looked on Sir Arnold as an active member of his team. 'We've all got to look after one another is the way I look at it, my boy. We don't who will? Tell me that,' Len Bload had said more times than Lady Vy could bear to recall. She also disliked women who talked quite so openly about hand sex as Mercia Bload. Then there were the Sents. If she disliked the Bloads, she positively detested the Sents. Harry Sent was a dealer. 'Don't ask me in what. Everything. You name it, I got it. Some place I got to got it. You know my motto? "I'll have it Sent." Get it? I'll have it. Sent. Great logo I got out of Lennie for free. You know why?' Lady Vy certainly didn't want to but noblesse was supposed to oblige. 'Because one time I'm screwing Heaven I got to think of Mercia to get it up at all. Ain't that so, Heaven?' Mrs Sent smiled sourly and nodded. 'I fuck better with that photo of Mercia in a bikini on the pillow, right?' A shadow of something approaching pain crossed Olga Sent's face. Lady Vy would have sympathized with her the misery of being called 'Heaven' by a man as gross as Harry Sent would have broken a weaker woman if she had not once heard Mrs Sent describe her as 'that Gonders cow. So snobbish and no money with it. Drop dead is what I wish for her.' Lady Vy had complained to Sir Arnold at the time about the remark but all he'd said was, 'Got to keep in with the locals, you know.' Which was a bit rich, considering old Sent claimed to have escaped from Poland to fight with the Free Polish Army. And someone had once accurately described Olga as looking like a concentration-camp guard who should have been hanged for Crimes against Humanity.

On the other hand there were a great many people in the county who had come only once to the Chief Constable's parties, and had found reasons never to come to another. Sir Percival Knottland, the Lord Lieutenant, was one such absentee. He still hadn't got over meeting at a Gonders party a man who had advised him to invest in a particular pizza chain 'because there's a lot more than cheese and anchovies involved, you know what I mean.' The Lord Lieutenant thought he did and had complained to the Chief Constable, but Sir Arnold had assured him confidentially that the fellow was all right. 'To be frank, he is one of our top grasses. Couldn't do without him. Got to keep him sweet.'

'But he advised me to invest in Pietissima Pizza Parlours,' said the Lord Lieutenant. 'Something about there being icing on the cake. Did I know what he meant? It sounded most suspicious to me. Shouldn't you be investigating this pizza company very carefully?'

The Chief Constable had taken his arm confidentially. 'Between ourselves, I have. Solid investment as far as I can tell. I put ten thousand in myself. Should double your money in six months.'

'And you really don't think these Pietissima Parlours are being used to distribute drugs?' the Lord Lieutenant asked.

'Good gracious, I hope not. Still, I can't guarantee it. Everybody's into that game nowadays. I'll ask my drug lads, but I shouldn't worry. Money is money, after all.'

The Lord Lieutenant had been so appalled that he had written to the Prime Minister only to get an extremely brusque letter back telling him in effect to stick to his role as Lord Lieutenant a role which, it was implied, was entirely ceremonial and redundant and leave the work of policing the community to the professionals like Sir Arnold Gonders who was doing such an excellent job etc. The Lord Lieutenant had taken the advice and had steered well clear of the Chief Constable ever since.

So had Judge Julius Foment, whose faith in the British police had been shattered by the discovery that he had been relying on the evidence of detectives in Twixt and Tween to sentence perfectly innocent individuals to long terms of imprisonment for crimes the police knew perfectly well they could not possibly have committed. As a child refugee from Nazi persecution the Judge had been horrified by the change that had come over the British police. He had even thought of selling his own house on the far side of the reservoir when the Gonderses moved into the boathouse. He hadn't, but he did not even reply to their invitations.

There were other people who stayed away. They were the genuine locals, the farmers and ordinary people in the villages round about who could be of no advantage to the Gonderses or their guests but belonged to an older and more indigenous tradition. Of these the most antipathetic to the human flotsam on the Gonderses' lawn that Sunday were the Middens, Marjorie Midden at the Middenhall and her brother, Christopher, who farmed thirty miles away at Strutton.

From the first Sir Arnold had found himself up against Miss Midden. She lived in an old farmhouse behind the rambling Victorian house known as the Middenhall where she had lodgers. She had opposed him over the fencing of the common land known as Folly Moss on the grounds that it had provided free grazing for the villagers of Great Pockrington for a thousand years. Sir Arnold's argument that there was only one family living at Pockrington now and that the man worked in the brickyards at Torthal and had no interest in grazing anything on Folly Moss was met by Miss Midden's retort that there had once been two hundred families at Pockrington and the state of the world being what it was who was to say there might not be as many families there in the future.

'Jimmy Hall may mean very little to the Chief Constable,' she had said at a public meeting, 'but he represents the rights of the common man to the common land. Rights have to be fought for and are not going to be set aside while I'm around.'

Sir Arnold had tried to argue that he only wanted to put barbed wire up to keep other people's sheep out and that Jimmy Hall could use the land if he wanted to. It was no good. Miss Midden had answered that barbed wire too often defined the boundaries of liberty and set unwarranted limits on people's free movement. The common land had remained unfenced.

There were other grievances. One of his patrol cars had chased a vehicle that was obviously being driven by a drunk down the drive into the Middenhall estate. An elderly man who was seen stumbling across the lawn was pinioned to the ground and handcuffed. Anywhere else in the Twixt and Tween area that sort of police action would have roused no comment. On several housing estates on the outskirts of Tween it might just have provided the local youths with an excuse for a punch-up with the cops, but that was to be expected. What came as an unnerving shock to the Chief Constable was for a supposedly law-abiding member of the middle classes to use the law to make a mockery of two of his officers in court when the whole thing could have been avoided by a quiet word with him.

But Miss Midden hadn't done that. Instead she had pursued a vendetta with the two constables most unreasonably. After all, they had merely taken the supposed driver back to the Stagstead Police Station when he had refused a breath-test (and had already assaulted them both in pursuance of their duty) and the police doctor had taken a blood sample which had clearly shown that the defendant's blood alcohol level was way over the limit. As a result the defendant, Mr Armitage Midden, an elderly white hunter who had recently returned from Kenya where he had been known as 'Buffalo' Midden, had been charged with dangerous driving, driving with a faulty rear light, assaulting two police officers, and drunken driving. Bail had been granted the next day when the said Mr Midden had spent a salutarily uncomfortable night in the cells and had been driven back to the Middenhall by Miss Midden herself. She had been thoroughly unpleasant to all the officers in the Stagstead police station.

But it was only when the case came to court that the police learnt the defendant was (a) without a licence to drive, (b) had such an aversion to motor cars that he had once walked from Cape Town to Cairo, and finally (c) had earned his formidable reputation as a superb shot by being a lifelong teetotaller. In short, it had been an excruciatingly embarrassing case for the Chief Constable, the two arresting officers, and the police surgeon, and had done nothing to enhance the reputation of the Twixt and Tween Constabulary. Miss Midden had gone to her cousin, Lennox, and had insisted he brief an extremely sardonic and experienced barrister from London. And quite clearly she had instructed him to put the police conduct in the most protracted and worst possible light. The barrister's cross-examination of the police witnesses had been particularly painful for the Chief Constable, who had inadvisedly allowed himself to be called to give evidence in support of his own constables and the Twixt and Tween Constabulary. Looking back on the case Sir Arnold considered he had been deliberately inveigled into appearing and made to look an idiot and worse. He had testified to the police surgeon's absolute probity before the case was stopped by the judge. And finally there had been Buffalo Midden's splendid war record he had been awarded the DSO with bar and the MC for conspicuous bravery in Burma. In the public gallery Miss Midden had enjoyed her triumph. The Chief Constable had been careful not to look at her but he could imagine her feelings. They'd been the very opposite of his.

But now he was not concerned with Miss Midden's arrogance. In the middle of the party his thoughts kept returning to the fellow in the cellar. He was particularly irritated and alarmed by Ernest Lamming who kept insisting that Sir Arnold had a splendid selection of wine and who wanted to see it was being kept in the proper conditions.

'I mean I don't sell plonk. Only the genuine article and there's some lovely stuff you got like that '56 Bergerac and the '47 Fitou. That's worth a bob or two now if you've been looking after it properly. I mean I want to see you got those bottles on their sides and all that. If you've got them standing up, the corks will dry out and your investment is down the plughole.'

'Actually I moved it back to the Sweep's Place house,' Sir Arnold told him. 'I didn't like to leave valuable wine like that out here with the house being empty all week.'

'But you haven't even got a cellar there,' said Lamming. 'Out here was just right for it. The cellar here was specially built to keep the champagne and suchlike the waterworks millionaires drank when they came out on a spree at the end of the last century.'

Sir Arnold had been saved by the intervention of one of the new waterworks millionaires, Ralph Pulborough, whose salary had just been increased by 98 per cent while water charges had gone up 50 per cent.

'Now look here, Ernest, fair dos and all that. I don't want to hear any more snide remarks about water rates and so on,' he said,' and I object to being called a waterworks millionaire. I was a millionaire long before I went into water, and you know it. If you want efficiency you have to pay for it. That's the law of the market. It's the same with that plonk you sell.'

'I do not sell plonk,' Lamming retorted angrily. 'You won't find a better bottle of Blue Nun this side of Berlin than what I sell. And your water's nothing to write home about. There was a dead sheep floating out there by the dam when I drove over just now. And the tap water is so bad we've had to install a reverse osmosis diaphragm for Ruby to have a clean bath.'

'My dears, a reverse osmosis diaphragm,' minced Pulborough, 'how very appropriate for her. Did it hurt very much at first? I simply must ask her.'

Sir Arnold hurried out of earshot and went in search of Sammy Bathon, the TV interviewer and entrepreneur, who had recently established a chain of betting shops with the help of the Government's Aid to Industry Scheme. Sammy Bathon was a chap with his ear close to the ground and, if anything had been going the rounds about a Press coup that failed last night, he'd be the one to know.

He found him discussing the advantages of cryogenics with the Rev. Herbert Bentwhistle. 'Sure, sure, Father, I'm not knocking the Holy Book but where does it say anything about leaving things to chance? So I have eternal life without liquid nitrogen by being a good boy. I prefer my way. Bigger chance for Sammy with the nitrogen maybe.' He winked at Sir Arnold but the eye behind it did not suggest any secret information about the intruder.

It was a remark he caught as he passed the group round Egeworth, the MP for West Twixt, that interested the Chief Constable most. 'She's a confounded nuisance, Miss Midden is,' Egeworth was saying. 'Spends half her life preventing developments that would serve the community. I wish to God someone would shut her up.'

'You mean she's been poking her nose into the housing scheme at Ablethorpe?' someone said. 'You preserve a few trees and lose the chance of a development grant. Where's the sense in that?'

'That's the trouble with these so-called old families. They seem to think the past matters. They don't think of the future.'

Sir Arnold went into his study and shut the door. He was exhausted and he had to think of his own future. The vodka had been of only temporary help. Why wouldn't they hurry up and go so that he could get some shut-eye and give that bastard his next dose of whisky and whatever? He sat down and thought about Miss Marjorie Midden. Her and that Major MacPhee. If only he could find out if it was one of her weekends away birdwatching or visiting gardens. The Midden would be an ideal place to dump that sod in the cellar. There were all those old weirdos living at the Middenhall and, while he wasn't prepared to venture down the drive to the Hall itself, the Midden farmhouse where the old cow lived with Major MacPhee was conveniently isolated. It would be nice to get her to take the rap for the young toyboy. It was a lovely idea. In the meantime he'd just make a phone call.

He dialled Miss Midden's number. There was no reply. He'd call the Middenhall later to check she was really away. As he passed the kitchen door he heard Auntie Bea talking to Mrs Thouless the housekeeper. 'I really don't see why Arnold had to say that he'd taken the wine to Sweep's Place when it's patently untrue. And as for a '47 Fitou! Can you imagine how frightful it must be?'

Fortunately the housekeeper was deaf. She was talking to herself about glass and blood all over the bedroom floor and the mirror broken and all that water. Sir Arnold hurried upstairs to check that there were no bloodstains on the wall about the bed. There weren't, and the marks on the carpet were all his own. He was also glad to see that Vy had passed out on the bed. She had spent the party drinking gin and Appletiser and pretending it was champagne. It hadn't worked. The gin had won.