The Midden (27 page)

On this hilarious note the Inspector wished his men good luck and the surveillance teams set
out across the fell. It was 11.30. Four miles away on the road behind the Middenhall Unit C
reported that no cars had travelled through their observation points since 9.30 and could they
please pack up. Since they were having to use the public phone box in Iddbridge the call only got
through to Rascombe when a detective from Stagstead drove up to the Mobile HQ at 01.41.

'Of course they can't go home now,' said Rascombe irritably. 'They have replacement officers
to take over at the end of each stint.'

'Yes, sir, I know that,' said the detective, 'but the road is up for repair by the river and
no one can use it anyway. There's no real need to watch it at all.'

But Inspector Rascombe was not to be persuaded. 'All the more reason for keeping our eyes on
it,' he said. 'If anyone comes down it when it's closed, it must mean they are using it for some
very sinister purpose. Stands to reason.'

'But nobody is using it. How can they?'

'Never mind how,' said the Inspector. 'Just tell them to keep an extra eye open from now.'

'Cyclops-style, sir?' said the detective and hurried out into the night before the Inspector
could work the remark out and tell him not to be fucking impertinent.

In his room the Major played with his old radio. He was puzzled. He was picking up the
strangest messages, none of which made sense to him. Inspector Rascombe's admonitions about radio
silence were being ignored. The Major was astonished to learn, with quite surprising clarity and
a flow of obscenities, that someone called Rittson had just fallen in a 'fucking stinking stream
or something'. In fact it turned out to be a sheep-dipping bath and the Major was beginning to
wonder what extraordinary event he had just been privy to when the person called Rittson was told
furiously to maintain radio silence.

'Must be the Marines over on Meltsea Marshes,' the Major thought, and turned off his radio and
went to sleep.

Out on the fell the ten constables moved forward in a strange series of small rushes as
Inspector Rascombe had ordered. First two men would stumble forward and halt in a semi-crouching
position while another four moved up and past them to be followed by the rest. In this curious
and supposedly sheeplike fashion they moved forward against the driving rain and the searing
wind. Around them genuine sheep scurried away into the darkness, only to stop and stare back at
their weird imitators. And so the small group crossed the open ground, scrambled over drystone
walls and, in the case of Detective Constable Rittson, fell into the sheep-dip.

By 2 a.m. they had reached their first objective, the wood on the far side of the lake, and
were peering across the water at the Middenhall. The building was almost entirely in darkness and
only one light burned in the house itself. But on the outside floodlights shone out onto the lake
and were reflected there among the waterlilies. 'Bloody difficult to see anything with those
fucking lights,' said the detective called Mark, 'and they can spot us dead easy.' They crawled
back into the wood and tried the other side. The lights were still quite bright.

'He said we had to go up to the farmhouse,' said Larkin. 'So I reckon we'd better.' He and
Spender set off round the lake and over the little bridge by the sluice gate and made their way
up the drive towards the Midden. Behind them Rutherford had decided there was a patch of dark
shadow at the corner of the Middenhall where the dustbins were and, leaving Mark to try the other
side where there were a number of azalea bushes, he scurried across the lawn and had got to
within ten yards of the house when something moved in front of him.

Unable to see what exactly it was, he obeyed orders and went into sheep mode, crouching down
on all fours and at the same time trying to keep his eyes watching his front. In fact he had
disturbed a family of badgers. There was a clang as a dustbin lid fell, a grunt and a slight
noise of scrabbling. Detective Constable Rutherford turned and trundled himself away across the
lawn and back over the wooden bridge. 'No bloody good,' he told the others. 'They've got someone
round the back on the look-out. I reckon we'd best be off.'

The first phase of Operation Kiddlywink had been a complete failure.

By Friday even Inspector Rascombe was becoming discouraged. Three of his squad were off sick,
one with a nasty condition of the skin caused by the sheep-dip, one with a twisted ankle. The
third had gone down with pleurisy. As he reported to the Chief Constable, 'That place is so out
of the way and awkward to cover we're having real difficulty.'

The Chief Constable imagined they were. His own private investigations weren't getting
anywhere either, and he was beginning to think Auntie Bloody Bea had thought the whole caper up
on her own to take Lady Vy away from him. This opinion was reinforced by an acrimonious telephone
call from his father-in-law in the course of which Sir Edward had told him in certain terms
exactly what he thought of him and had let drop the information that for once his daughter was
showing good sense by setting up house with a raving lesbian. There had been other intimations of
trouble ahead in Sir Edward's outburst. He was lunching shortly at Number 10 and he intended to
raise the matter of the Chief Constable's deplorable tendencies with the PM. It had been a most
unpleasant monologue, punctuated by denials that he put drugged youths in his wife's bed and that
he was 'into' garbage bags, parcel tape and used bed sheets.

'Are you seriously expecting me to believe you didn't insert a basting syringe into the
bugger's mouth and dose him with a mixture of Valium and whisky?' Sir Edward shouted.

The Chief Constable was. Most emphatically. He'd never heard such a dreadful accusation.

'Well, I do believe it,' his father-in-law stormed, 'because that idiot daughter of mine
hasn't the brain of a head-louse and she couldn't have invented that story in a month of Sundays.
You drugged the bugger and you tied him up in tape. And I know you did. And if you think...'

Sir Arnold did. He spent hours at night compiling the names, addresses and sums of money
involved that seemed his only protection now. All the same, he did nothing to discourage
Inspector Rascombe. The idiot couldn't do any harm and he just might dig up something in his
investigations in the Stagstead area.

Even Miss Midden had other things on her mind by that time. Every year in early August the
Porterhouse Mission to the East End sent a number of children to the Middenhall. It had been a
practice that dated back to the period shortly after the War when the Dean had brought reading
parties up to the fell country and had stayed over at Carryclogs Hall with Brigadier General
Turnbird, himself an old Porterhouse man and a very muscular Christian. The youngsters had
originally been housed in bell-tents in the grounds of Carryclogs where, apart from some
desultory hymn-singing and the occasional Bible-reading by the General's daughter Phoebe, they
had had the run of the estate and the river Idd, which was quite shallow at that point.

'It is good for our townies to have a glimpse of Arcady,' the General had once explained to a
deputation of neighbouring farmers who had come to complain that sheep had been stampeded over
walls, cows had been subjected to vicious attacks with catapults, and a number of stooks of hay
had been set alight by boys smoking while playing hide and seek. The farmers hadn't caught the
reference to Arcady and wouldn't have given a damn if they had.

In the end their opinions and the rents they paid prevailed. Even before the General died the
Mission had moved over to the Middenhall, which was sufficiently isolated to spare the farmers
their previous depredations. There within the confines of the estate wall the multi-sexed and
many-coloured group, some of whom came from Muslim families and consequently did not benefit from
Miss Phoebe's readings, spent a fortnight exploring the woods and one another's bodies before
going back to their homes in the now largely middle-class area on the Isle of Dogs where the
Porterhouse Mission still operated. In fact, if it hadn't been for Miss Midden's insistence,
which fitted in with the Dean's own inclinations, that the contingent of Porterhouse
undergraduates who accompanied each year's batch be doubled in size to deal with the children, it
is doubtful if the yearly visit could have continued. At least a dozen times in the past two
summers elderly residents had returned to their rooms after dinner to find their belongings had
been ransacked and items stolen, and on one awful occasion Mrs Louisa Midden had been approached
by a fourteen-year-old with a very unnatural offer. Mr Joseph Midden, her husband and himself a
retired gynaecologist of some repute, had been so appalled as much by his wife's moment of
hesitation before refusing as by the actual offer that Dr Mortimer had had to be summoned to deal
with his arrhythmia.

Now, as the coach carrying the children came down the drive, Miss Midden felt a strange sense
of unease. The presence of so many inquisitive young minds in the grounds was a danger she should
have foreseen. She would have to do something about the air-raid shelter in the walled garden.
She had been so preoccupied with Timothy Bright's affairs that she had entirely forgotten the
Mission. As the tents were erected on the far side of the lake Miss Midden put padlocks on all
the doors in the walls of the kitchen garden and decided to make her next journey. She had a long
talk with Timothy Bright in the privacy of the sitting-room, and made a phone call. Then she
drove to the bus station and travelled south again.

The time had come to act.

The same thought was in Inspector Rascombe's mind. The arrival of a coach containing thirty
children indicated such an enormous orgy of paedophilia that he could hardly believe the report
that came in to him from the surveillance team on the Middenhall road.

'Thirty? Thirty children and some young men and women? In a coach? Christ, this looks like...I
don't know what it looks like. But it's definitely the biggest one, this, has to be. I think
we've got them this time, lads.'

As a result of this information the Inspector, reporting directly to the Chief Constable,
asked if he could make the investigation Top Priority.

Sir Arnold hardly heard him. He was reading a letter from a firm of solicitors informing him
that his wife intended to begin proceedings for divorce on grounds that would end his career. His
Top Priority now was to stop the bitch. But he agreed, and Inspector Rascombe summoned a meeting
of the Serious Crime Squad to outline the second phase of Operation Kiddlywink.

As usual, Sergeant Bruton raised awkward questions. He had been studying the details of the
people living at the Middenhall. They were all in their seventies or older. 'That place is full
of geriatrics,' he said.

Inspector Rascombe was unimpressed. 'So what?' he said. 'It's old men like that fancy little
children. The only way they can get it up, the filthy bastards. We may be on the verge of
uncovering the first Senior Citizens Sex Scandal.'

'But half of them are married or widows. There are three unmarried old biddies up there,' the
Sergeant objected. 'They can't all be into child abuse.'

The Inspector considered this for a moment and found an answer. 'Maybe not, but it could be
they've been threatened and are too frightened to talk. Hard-core perverts with a sadistic streak
would frighten the lights out of old ladies.'

Plans for surveillance penetration of the Middenhall went ahead. 'It's a clear night on the
weather forecast. So we'll close in around 01.00. I want the two-man surveillance teams in on the
ground where they can video the action and install listening equipment which will relay
information when to hit the place. One unit will be here in the wood and the other will be behind
the house.

You've got rations for forty-eight hours and we should have the case wrapped up by then.' That
was Friday.

On Saturday Miss Midden struck. At 8 a.m. she left her boarding house in Clapham and presented
herself at Judge Benderby Bright's town house in Brooke Street. The door was opened by a
manservant, an ex-Metropolitan policeman who doubled as a bodyguard. Judge Bright's life had been
threatened too often to let him feel safe except on the high seas. Even a Force Ten gale was mild
compared to the feelings he had aroused among the members of families whose relatives had been
sentenced to the maximum terms he could impose. He was not a popular man.

The bodyguard studied Miss Midden critically. 'What do you want?' he asked.

'I have come to see Judge Bright. It is important. And no, I have no appointment.'

'Well, you've come at the wrong time. Judge Bright is still in bed. He rises late on Saturdays
but if you will leave your name and address '

Miss Midden interrupted him. 'Go and wake him and say to him, "Auntie Boskie's shares." I
shall wait here on the doorstep and he will see me,' she said.' "Auntie Boskie's shares".' She
turned her back and the man shut the door.

Inside he hesitated. Miss Midden didn't look like a nutter, but one never knew. On the other
hand she had an air of authority about her and an impressive confidence. He picked up the house
phone and woke the Judge, and, having apologized profusely, repeated Miss Midden's message and
the fact that she wanted to see the Judge. The effect was hardly what he had expected.

'Don't let her get away,' Judge Bright shouted. 'Bring her in the house at once. I'll be down
instantly.'

The manservant went back to the door and opened it. 'You're to come in,' he said and prepared
to grab her if she tried to run for it.

'I know,' said Miss Midden and stepped past him. She was carrying the hold-all.

'I'm afraid I have to search that, ma'am,' he said.

'You may open it and look inside and you can feel the outside,' said Miss Midden. 'You will
take nothing out.'