The Midden (19 page)

After that he felt slightly better. He began to think more constructively. He'd wait until the
next day to go into the office. He had a perfectly good excuse not to go in today. He had to keep
out of the way of those media hounds who wanted to interview him about the DPP's decision. And he
had a hangover to beat all hangovers. Harry Hodge, his deputy, would cover for him. In the
meantime he'd start his own investigation to discover who had set him up by using that bloody Bea
cow. It had occurred to him that the bastard had to be someone who knew his movements and had
known he wasn't going to be at the Old Boathouse that night. That was an important discovery.

The Chief Constable considered it and came to no very clear conclusion except that his return
must have screwed up the plan somehow just as Miss Midden's return hadn't done him any good
either. It was as he was driving along the Parson's Road that another idea occurred to him. He
pulled up at a roadside telephone and checked there was no one anywhere about. Then he dialled
the Stagstead Police Station. When the duty officer answered, the Chief Constable muffled his
voice with his hand and spoke in a high disguised voice. It was a short message, short and to the
point, and he repeated it only once before putting the phone down and hurrying on. Miss Midden
was going to get another nasty surprise.

In fact it was the Chief Constable who would have been very nastily surprised if he could have
heard the conversation that had taken place in his house in Sweep's Place, Tween, between Auntie
Bea and Lady Vy when they got back that morning shortly before lunch.

'My darling, if I'd only known,' said Bea, 'if I'd known what he was putting you through, I
would never have allowed it.'

'I didn't know what to do,' said Vy tearfully, 'I felt so alone. He told me he'd see all the
ghastly gutter papers got the story if I told anyone. I couldn't bear to think of the scandal.
And there was a young man in the bed. I couldn't deny that.'

Bea looked at her narrowly. 'Oh he's a cunning devil, there's no doubt about that,' she said.
'I have to give him his cunning. But two can play that game and after all he wasn't very
subtle.'

'Darling, you're talking way above my head. What are you saying?'

'Ask yourself this question,' said Bea. 'There was a young man in your bed, I don't doubt
that. But where is he now?'

'I've no idea,' said Lady Vy. 'I went down to the cellar and he'd disappeared in the
night.'

'Exactly. Arnold got you to help tie him up in the cellar so that you were even more of an
accomplice. Isn't that the case?'

'I suppose it must be,' said Lady Vy. 'I hadn't thought of that.'

'And you say he was tied really tight? In two plastic bags?'

'Well, actually he couldn't get him into the garbage bags. He had to use the sheets off the
bed. And lots of tape. You've no idea how much tape he tied round him.'

'And yet the young man disappears. Doesn't that strike you as peculiar?'

Lady Vy tried to stretch her tiny brain. It was reassuring to have Aunt Bea telling her
things, but sometimes she couldn't understand what she was saying. 'The whole thing struck me as
peculiar,' she said. 'I mean I've never found a young man in bed like that before. He was quite
nice looking too if you didn't look at the blood.'

Auntie Bea controlled her temper with difficulty. 'No, dear, what I meant was...well, didn't
it seem very strange that he should have escaped so quickly after you had helped tie him so
securely?'

'Yes, I suppose it did,' said Lady Vy. 'And Arnold drugged him too to keep him quiet.'

'Oh sure. Arnold said he drugged him. Arnold said he did this and he did that but the only
thing you really know is that you helped tie him up and then when you went to look for him the
next day he had escaped. What a miraculous thing to happen, wasn't it? Or it would have been if
Arnold hadn't untied him himself and helped him on his way.'

'But why should he have done that?' asked Vy, still stumbling about in her attempt to plumb
the mystery.

'Because, dearest, because this was all an elaborate plan to make sure you didn't leave him
and wouldn't make things awkward for dear Arnold at any time in the future.'

'But why should I...' Vy began before coming to her own conclusion. 'Oh, Bea dear, do you
really think...?'

It was a thoroughly unnecessary question. Aunt Bea was thinking very hard indeed. She had
already concocted a rational explanation for the succession of weird events that had taken place.
They all pointed to the same conclusion: she must take Vy away from the malign influence of her
husband. If there had been any doubt about the matter before the weekend, and there hadn't been,
she now felt sure she was saving Vy from a man who was prepared to use any sort of crime for his
own vile ends. Being bitten in the groin by Sir Arnold had not exactly inclined Bea to see him in
an even faintly sympathetic light and now she had the evidence she needed to break him. And she
would be protecting darling Vy at the same time. She got up and took Lady Vy by the hand. 'My
darling, I want you to go upstairs and pack your things. Now you're not to argue with me. I am
going to take care of everything. Just do what I tell you.'

'But, Bea darling, I can't just leave '

'You're not leaving, dear. You are merely coming down to London with me today. No argument.
We're going to see your father.'

And with this dubious reassurance Sir Edward Gilmott-Gwyre was not someone she normally wanted
to see Lady Vy went up to the bedroom and began to pack. 'I must leave Arnold a note just the
same,' she thought, and wrote a short one to the effect that she had had to go down to London to
see Daddy because he hadn't been well and she'd be back in a few days.

'Now come along, Vy dear,' Auntie Bea called. Lady Vy went downstairs obediently and left the
note on the table by the front door. Aunt Bea saw it there, opened the envelope, read the note
and put it quietly into her handbag. Sir Arnold could worry himself sick. And Vy wasn't coming
back, so there was no need to deceive him. On this nice moral note she went out to the Mercedes
and presently they were on their way south. By the time the Chief Constable parked the Land Rover
in the garage, they were halfway to London.

That evening Miss Midden and the Major moved Timothy Bright, wearing only a towel, up to the
old nursery. The term 'nursery' was a euphemism. The bars in the window were substantial and the
door thick because one of Miss Midden's ancestors in the late eighteenth century, one Elias
Midden, acting on the same extravagant impulse that had prompted Black Midden to build his
domiciliary mausoleum, had bought a small bear from some gipsies at Twixt Fair. Elias, who had
just won the wrestling match and been proclaimed Champion of the Fells, had drunk a great deal of
beer to celebrate and had supposed that the bear was fully grown and also that it would be fun to
match his strength against the beast of an evening. In fact the gipsies had been anxious to get
rid of that bear. They had bought it from some sailors on the quay at Tween and the sailors had
brought the bear back from a voyage to Canada where one of them had shot its mother. In short,
the bear was a very young one and it grew into a very big one. Having paid a great deal of money
for the animal Elias Midden was anxious to provide it with the best accommodation and to have it
close to hand for evening bouts.

His wife did not share his enthusiasm. She disliked sharing the farmhouse with a young and
growing bear, even if it was kept muzzled. She had threatened to leave Elias and his bear and
take the children with her unless he kept it safely locked up. Reluctant to give the animal up,
and conscious that he would be laughed at by every farmer between Stagstead and...well just about
everywhere if he drove his wife out of the house on account of the bear people would say coarse
things about his relationship with it Elias Midden had built a very strong room in which to keep
it. It was just as well. As the weeks and months passed the bear grew. It grew to the point where
even Elias, a proud man with a magnificent physique, had to admit defeat. That bear was not for
wrestling. It was extremely strong and extremely nasty. And it became huge, so huge and so nasty
that feeding it became a hazardous procedure. In building the bear room on the assumption that it
was fully grown and amiable he had not made a hatch in the door through which to pass it its food
and since the heavy door opened into the room rather than out of it (Mrs Midden had sensibly
suggested that precaution she had a horror of the bear bursting out of that room in the middle of
the night and doing dreadful things to her and the children) Elias risked his life every time he
opened it. The final straw, and the term was literal, came when he lost three fingers of his
right hand between the door and the door jamb trying to push some litter through. 'It's all your
fault,' he had bellowed at his wife. 'If you hadn't complained about the smell.'

Mrs Midden had retorted that he'd been fool enough to waste a great deal of money and had
bought a pup or whatever young grizzlies were called into the bargain and she knew now how the
family had got its name and she wasn't sharing her house with a bear that couldn't go outside to
do its business and the smell was appalling and not the sort of thing a decent woman with a
reputation for keeping a clean home to consider could put up with and he'd got to do something or
else...

Elias Midden had said he intended to do something about the bloody bear. In fact he did
nothing. He wasn't opening that door again for all the tea in China. The bear could lump it. The
bear did. It had been living on a restricted diet before, but now it starved. Its last snack had
been those three fingers. Day after day and night after night it battered that door and scratched
at it. It tried the walls too and it bent the bars on the window. In the end it died and Elias
put it about that he had killed it in a fair fight, losing his fingers in the encounter. He
buried the emaciated corpse and double dug several barrowloads of bear's excreta into the kitchen
garden, where it did more good than it had done in the house. Then, because his wife still
refused to enter the bear's den, he scrubbed it out and repainted the walls. He didn't touch the
door. It remained scratched and bitten and battered so that he could show visitors just how
fierce the bear he had killed had been.

It was left to later and more refined Middens to alter the name of the room to 'the old
nursery'. With its bent bars and battered door the name had a nicely macabre touch to it and the
young Middens who slept in it suffered terrifying nightmares which in more enlightened times
would have required the attentions of psychotherapists, trauma relief specialists and stress
counsellors. It was there in that bear room that Black Midden had first dreamt of a ferocious
life in Africa where there were no bears. Now it was where Timothy Bright was confined.

'You can stay in there until you tell us who you are and how you came to break into my house,'
Miss Midden told him after he'd eaten. 'If you don't want to stay, you have only to say the word
and I shall call the police.'

Timothy Bright said he definitely didn't want the police but could he have his clothes
please.

'When we find them,' Miss Midden said, and locked the door. Then she went downstairs and sat
in the fading evening light wondering which of the arrogant and idiotic Middens down at the Hall
was responsible for this crime. In other circumstances she would have suspected the Major, but
he'd been with her and his state of terror on finding the young man had been genuine. On the
other hand he would be able to tell her, if anyone could, which of the inmates at the hell-hole
had sado-masochistic tendencies. Not that she wanted to talk to the silly little man. She was
still furious with him and her contempt at his cowardice was immense. All the same, she had to
ask him. She found him looking at his soiled bed. There was a nasty smell in the room too.
'Dogshit,' said Miss Midden. 'That's what that is.' But no one down at the hell-hole had a
dog.

'It has to be someone who knew I was away,' she told the Major, 'and the only people who knew
for certain are down there.'

'Do you want me to go down and find out what I can?' he asked, but Miss Midden shook her head.
'One look at you and whoever did this would sleep easy. You're the perfect suspect with your
black eye and stitches.'

'But I can prove I got them in Glasgow in that pub.'

'Which pub?'

The Major tried to remember. He had been in so many pubs and had been so very drunk. 'There
you are. You don't even know,' said Miss Midden. 'And what did you call yourself at the hospital?
I bet you didn't call yourself MacPhee because you are no more a Scot than I am.'

'Jones,' the Major admitted.

'And that overworked doctor didn't like you in the least. So she isn't going to be at all
helpful. And that's not all. We don't know when that young man got into the house and we don't
know when whatever happened to him did happen. You could have been trying to establish some sort
of alibi. Only a madman would get himself beaten up in a pub. Or a frightened and guilty person.
You go down to the Hall and the police will get an anonymous call from a certain person down
there who knows the man is in this house and may think he's dead. And what about your
record?'

'Record?' said the Major beginning to tremble.

'Don't tell me you haven't been inside. With your nasty tendencies? Oh yes, you've been had up
before now. Probably for peering through a hole in a public lavatory. Or worse. You don't fool
me. The police would be only too happy to lay their hands on you. Well, you needn't worry.
They're not going to if I have anything to do with it.'

'What are we going to do then?' he asked.

'What we aren't going to do is show ourselves. We are not here. We are going to sit tight and
see who comes up to check on that young man and find out if he is still alive. That's what we are
going to do. They came through the dining-room window. The next time they come I'll be waiting
for them. And now I'm going to put the car out of sight in the barn. This could be fun.'