The Midden (18 page)

'How did you get yourself in this state?' she asked, and parted the matted hair to get a
better look at the wound on his head.

'I don't know.'

'Someone beat you up? Must have done.' The scalp wound wasn't so bad after all, and scalp
wounds always bled profusely.

'I don't know.'

'All right, lie down and let me have a look at your eyes.' She looked into each one, turning
his head towards the window. 'And you don't know how this happened?'

'I don't remember anything.'

'Concussion. I'll call the ambulance. You need to be in hospital. And I'll call the police
too.'

She pulled the duvet over him and was about to go through to the hall where the phone was when
Timothy Bright stopped her. He' had suddenly recalled what the piggy-chops man with the razor had
said: 'One more thing you got to remember. You go anywhere near the police, even go past a cop
shop or think of picking up the phone, like your mobile, you won't just get piggy-chops. You
won't have a fucking cock to fuck with again first. No balls, no prick. And that's for starters.
You'll have piggy-chops days later. Slowly. Very slowly. Get that in your dumb fucking head now.'
And Timothy Bright had. Even now, when he had no idea what had happened to him or where he was or
who this woman was who had forced him out of the little bathroom at the point of a
double-barrelled shotgun and was saying he might have concussion and ought to be in hospital,
that terrible threat was as vivid as it had been at the moment it was uttered. And the cut-throat
razor had quivered where the man with slicked-back hair had thrown it so expertly.

'No, not the police, not the police or an ambulance,' he gasped. 'I'm all right. I really am.
All right.'

Miss Midden turned back to the bed and looked at him. 'No ambulance? No police? And you say
you're all right? That's one thing you're not. Are you on the run or something?' There was very
little sympathy in her voice now. Timothy Bright shook his head.

From the corner the Major eyed him intently. He was a connoisseur of little sordid criminals
and their fears. He couldn't make this one out at all. Snob. Upper crust. Not your standard lager
lout. This one had background. Even in his naked and filthy extremis this one carried a degree of
assurance the Major would never begin to achieve. Envy intensified his insight, the social
insight that had been his chief weapon in the battle to keep his head above the raging maelstrom
of his own self-contempt. This one wasn't all right, but what he was the Major couldn't tell. Not
queer either. He'd have spotted that straightaway. But he wasn't all right.

Miss Midden stepped back into the room and picked up the gun she had left against the
bookcase. Standing over the bed she asked, 'Just what has been going on? You'd better tell me or
I am going to phone for the police. Spit it out, sonny. What have you been up to?'

Timothy Bright fought to find a plausible explanation. He didn't know what he had been up to.
Perhaps he did have concussion. He couldn't remember anything coherently. Something to do with
going to Spain. Something about Uncle Benderby. He'd been on his bike. 'I had a motorbike,' he
said, and tried to remember.

'Go on. You had a motorbike. What happened to it?'

Timothy Bright had no idea.

'How did you get in here then?' Miss Midden demanded. But again he had no answer for her.

'You may not know but I'm going to find out. Me or the police. It's up to you.'

Timothy Bright lay on the bed and whimpered.

'Men,' said Miss Midden. 'Pathetic' She turned on her heel and walked out of the room. In the
dining-room she looked at the mud on the floor and then at the open window. She went to the front
door and out onto the gravel and looked at the flower-bed under the window. There were footmarks
there, and some white petunias the Major had planted had been crushed by someone's feet.

Miss Midden went back into the house and tried the sitting-room on the other side of the hall.
There was nothing there to indicate anyone had been into it. Nothing in the hall either. She
mounted the stairs and looked into every room. There was not a sign of any disturbance. And there
were no clothes to be found anywhere. Her office was just as it had always been. And the kitchen.
Not a trace of clothes. She went out into the back yard and walked slowly round the house, even
looking into the byre and the shed but there were no jeans or shoes or shirt. Everything was just
as she had left it. Mystified, she went back into the house and was about to go into the
dining-room when she heard voices. She stopped. The Major was asking questions.

Miss Midden slipped into the room to listen.

This was a very different Major from the one she had left cowering in the corner. And what he
was doing was most useful. He was talking sympathetically to the young man. MacPhee's feelings,
as shallow as they were squalid, were soon calmed and now that the immediate danger was over he
was looking for some advantage from the situation.

'You've been done over really badly so that's why you can't remember,' he said, 'but it'll
come back to you. I have had the same experience myself. Only two days ago I was cycling along
minding my own business when this tractor came out without looking. I had to have six stitches
and I couldn't remember even having them. You probably came off your motorbike...I hope you were
wearing a crash helmet. You'd have been killed otherwise. Something must have gone through it.
Ever so dangerous, motorbikes are. What sort is yours?'

'A Suzuki.'

'Is that a very fast one?'

'I've done a hundred and forty on her,' Timothy said.

'Oh, how could you? I mean that's twice the speed limit. You were lucky the cops didn't time
you. Is that why you don't want the police?'

Timothy Bright jumped at the excuse. 'Yes. I don't want to lose my licence.'

'And what about your family? They'll want to know you're all right. Where do they live?'

'They've got a place...I don't know,' said Timothy Bright.

Miss Midden tiptoed away. The Major was earning his keep after all. Naked and injured young
men were his cup of tea. She needed a real cup herself and time to think what to do. Her first
impulse to call the emergency services had evaporated. The young man Timothy wasn't as badly hurt
as he looked. He was talking quite clearly, was probably suffering from mild concussion and not
the fractured skull she had first feared.

She had other reasons for not involving the authorities. She had never got on with the people
in County Hall whose gainful employment consisted in finding reasons for being there. There had
been a man and a woman from the Health Department who had calmly walked into the kitchen down at
the Middenhall on the assumption the place was an old people's home and in the altercation that
followed had accused her of not having a licence to run a nursing home and having no
authorization to...Miss Midden had chased them off the premises and had got her cousin Lennox,
the solicitor, to issue a formal complaint to the County Council on the grounds of trespass. Not
that that had deterred the officials. A man from the Fire Department had arrived shortly
afterwards, this time with an official document declaring his right to inspect the 'Middenhall
Guest House or Hotel' to ensure that it had the requisite fire escapes and internal fire doors.
Miss Midden had disabused him of the notion that it was anything more than a private house and
had abused him personally in the process. He had gone away with a good many fleas in his ear and
Lennox Midden had had to write another letter. Another time the Twixt and Tween Water Board,
claiming jurisdiction over all water in the county, in particular the stream that fed the
artificial lake Black Midden had constructed, had sent inspectors to check that no noxious
substances were flowing from it down to the reservoir. The only noxious substance they had
encountered had been Miss Midden herself. Again Lennox had been forced to point out that the lake
had been constructed in 1905 and that any noxious chemicals entering the reservoir were almost
certainly coming from the slurry of a dairy farmer six miles away on the Lampeter Road.

Altogether Miss Midden had had interfering busybodies in, official positions up to the
eyeballs. And when it came to the police her feelings were incandescent. They had chased old
Buffalo across the lawn and had held him in the cells at Stagstead overnight after roughing him
up and accusing him of drunken driving. And that damned Chief Constable had tried to fence the
common land known as Folly Moss for his own private use. She had fought him over the issue and
won, just as she had won in court over Buffalo Midden. She'd won and humiliated the corrupt
brute. He'd be only too delighted to have his men in the house asking questions and poking their
noses into her private affairs. They'd want to know where the Major had got his injuries
and...No, the last people she wanted to bring in were the police. And in any case the young man
clearly didn't want them anywhere near him. He had been terrified by the prospect of her calling
them. Presumably he was some sort of criminal, or a junkie. Miss Midden sat at the kitchen table
and poured herself another cup of tea.

She was still sitting there an hour later when the Major reappeared with the news that Timothy
Bright had cleaned himself up in the bathroom and said he was hungry and could he have something
to drink. Miss Midden turned an angry eye on him and said, 'Water.' She got up and opened the Aga
and got out some eggs to make an omelette. She was feeling hungry herself and the Major
definitely needed food. He looked ghastly and he deserved to. And now it appeared he was upset
because the young man had broken an eau-de-Cologne bottle in his washbasin and had torn the
shower curtain. Pathetic. But he had managed to wheedle some more information out of the young
man. 'He's some sort of financier in the City. He doesn't remember where exactly.'

'Financier? Financier, my foot!' said Miss Midden, whose ideas were distinctly old-fashioned
and who imagined financiers to be middle-aged men in dark pin-striped suits.

'A yuppie sort,' the Major went on. 'They sit in front of computer screens and telephone
people. You must have seen them on TV.'

It was a silly thing to say. Miss Midden didn't watch television, didn't have one in the house
and wouldn't allow the Major to have one in his room. 'If you want to watch that stuff, you can
go down to the hell-hole and watch it with them,' she had said each time he had asked to have a
set in his room. The exercise will do you good.'

'Why's he so scared of the police?' she asked now. 'Did you find that out too?'

'He's terrified because someone has threatened to do something horrible to him if he goes
anywhere near them.'

'Near the police?' The Major nodded.

'So he's involved in something shady. Charming. Now I've got two of you in the house. What I
want to know is how he got here in the first place.'

'He doesn't know himself. He has a motorbike. A very fast one. Perhaps he crashed it and '

'And then takes all his clothes off and climbs in through the window and...' Miss Midden
stopped. She had just remembered that she had put the chain on before leaving for the weekend and
when she had gone out just now the door had been partly open but the chain was still on the hook.
The young lout hadn't got into the house on his own. And why had he gone to sleep under the
Major's bed? Somebody had brought him, and that someone had stepped on the flower-bed to open the
window. Finally that person had known she had gone away for the weekend. Her thoughts, as she
broke the eggs into the bowl and began to beat them, focused on the people down at the
Middenhall. No one else knew she had gone away to the Solway Firth. Come to that, no one even at
the Middenhall knew she had returned. Miss Midden beat the eggs with the whisk in a new
frenzy.

Sir Arnold Gonders' thoughts followed a parallel course, and had rather more in common with
the frenziedly whisked eggs. He woke from his sleep only partly refreshed. If anything his total
exhaustion earlier had to some extent deadened his perception of the danger he was in. Now the
full force of it hit him. He might well have murdered...surely manslaughter was a justified plea.
No, it wasn't. Not in his case. He was the Chief Constable, the supreme keeper of law and order
in Twixt and Tween and the media would have a field day tearing him to pieces. Oh yes, he had
cultivated them in the past, some of them at any rate, the commercial TV people in particular, to
get his own back on the Panorama shits at the BBC who'd given him and the lads a hard time over
that murdering rapist who had done a tidy stretch of a life sentence before it was found his
sperm didn't match that found in his victims. But the Chief Constable had been around long enough
to know that there was no loyalty in the media and that the stab in the back was established
practice. He thought of all the papers who'd go to town on him too, the Guardian and the
Independent, God rot them, then the Daily Telegraph with that bloody tough editor. Even The Times
would join in. As for the Mirror and the Sun...It didn't bear thinking about.

As he shaved, as he tried to eat breakfast, as he dragged Genscher, now in a state of total
funk, to the Land Rover, as he drove down across the dam to Six Lanes End and along the motorway
to Tween, the Chief Constable's thoughts raced. He'd have the tyres on the Land Rover changed to
make certain that no one could trace any remnant of mud from Miss Midden's back yard to them. He
might have left the imprint of the tyres on the old drove road. Christ, why hadn't he thought of
all these things the night before? In the back the Rottweiler lurched and bounced and tried to
keep away from the bloodstained sheets and the parcel tape in the corner. Sir Arnold got rid of
them separately in two bins several miles apart, the tape in the first and the soiled sheets in
the second.