The Midden (10 page)

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.

By the time he had seen all the guests leave, Sir Arnold's exhaustion was almost total. Only
terror kept him going terror and black coffee. But during the afternoon a new stimulant entered
the picture. It came with the realization that whoever had brought that filthy lout to the house
and his bed must have had an accomplice on the inside. All the facts, in so far as he could
marshal them, pointed to that incontrovertible conclusion. Sir Arnold in his awful condition
certainly couldn't controvert it. He clung instead to certain facts, the first of which was that
someone, and if he could lay his hands on that someone...some shit had unlocked the iron gates to
let some other shits in with the young bastard now in the cellar and, when they had left, had
locked the gates again. There was no other way they could have got in. The walls and the
steel-shuttered windows on the reservoir side of the house made any other route impossible. When
it came to self-protection, the Chief Constable did himself well.

That was the first point and it was confirmed by the second, the pitiful state of the
Rottweiler. If Sir Arnold felt awful and he did the dog was in an even worse state. True, its
legs had recovered and it could walk well, at any rate hobble but in nearly every other respect
it had the look of an animal that had made the mistake of taking on a thoroughly ill-tempered
JCB. Its jaws were in a particularly nasty state and, when once or twice it tried to bark or make
some sort of audible protest, it merely achieved what looked like a yawn. No sound issued from
its massive throat, though when it hobbled, it wheezed. In more favourable circumstances Sir
Arnold would have got his wife to call the vet, but that was out of the question. Circumstances
were the least favourable he had ever known and he had no intention of allowing any damned vet to
come poking around the place. He had even less of allowing Lady Vy or that beastly Bea to go
anywhere. Genscher would have to suffer in silence. All the same, the dog provided further
evidence that Bea had helped the swine who had put that lout in his bed. The dog knew her and had
evidently come to like the cow. In his disgusted opinion it ought to have savaged her the first
time she set foot on the premises. Instead it had trusted her. Sir Arnold wasted no sympathy on
the animal. It had only itself to blame for its present condition. The damned woman must have
taken a crowbar to the brute.

Following this line of reasoning, he wondered what she had taken to Lady Vy. Probably a
near-lethal dose of anti-depressants. Like twice her normal dose. And this on top of her usual
bottle of gin. Well, two could play that game, and he wasn't going to have anyone interfering
with his plans for the disposal of the bloke in the sheets.

He was now left with the practical problem of getting the bloke out of the cellar and
depositing him somewhere else. Once that had been achieved successfully any attempt to blackmail
him would be a right give-away. That bloody Bea wouldn't be able to say a thing. The opportunity
would have passed. It was a nice thought.

Sir Arnold applied his mind to the solution of this problem. First the place would have to be
somewhere near enough for him to be able to get there and back in an hour. Sometime between 2
a.m. and 3 would be ideal. And this time Auntie Bea would be the one to have something to make
her sleep. Say 80 mg of Valium in her tonic. That would undoubtedly do the trick. Or in the gin?
No, tonic was better. She would drink more of the tonic. He went through to the sitting-room and
got a bottle and made up the potion. And it wouldn't hurt if Vy got a dose too. He didn't want
her interfering in his plan or even knowing what it was. He knew his wife. She had an infinite
capacity for forgetting the unpleasant facts of her experience and for concentrating on only
those things that gave her pleasure. With the help of enough gin she could forget any sort of
crime. He wasn't going to worry about Vy.

His thoughts, such as they were, reverted to the Middenhall. If only he could be absolutely
sure Miss Midden had gone away and the old farmhouse was unoccupied it would make the ideal spot
to dump the bastard. It was close enough to be convenient and at the same time far enough away to
remove all suspicion from the Old Boathouse. Best of all was the proximity of all those very
dubious Midden family eccentrics in the Hall itself. In a way it would be easier to dump the
fellow in the garden there but there was always the danger he might die of exposure in the night
air. No, he'd have to go inside a building, preferably a house, where he'd definitely be found
fairly quickly. And the farmhouse was sufficiently close to the Middenhall proper to cast
suspicion on its strange inhabitants. Let Miss Midden come home and find that little lot in her
bed and it would be very interesting to get her reaction.

In spite of his fatigue the Chief Constable almost smiled at the thought. Once again he phoned
the farm and got no reply. He tried the Middenhall itself and asked for the Major. 'I'm afraid
he's away for the weekend,' a woman told him.