The Midden (28 page)

The man looked inside and understood precisely what she meant. He hadn't seen so many
banknotes since an attempted raid on a bank in Putney. He showed Miss Midden into the
sitting-room and before he could leave Judge Bright arrived in a dressing-gown. He was, as usual,
in a filthy temper and he didn't like being woken with enigmatic messages about Boskie's shares.
It had been bad enough late the previous night to be phoned by a demented Ernestine with the news
that Bletchley had bungled his suicide attempt and had merely blown most of his teeth away with a
very large starting pistol. 'The damned fool must be mad,' he had told her. 'Why didn't he use a
shotgun and do the thing properly?'

'I think he tried, but he couldn't get his big toe onto the trigger. It's really too awful. He
doesn't look at all well. I don't know what to do.'

'Go and get him a proper revolver,' said the Judge. 'A forty-five should do the trick, even
with a skull as thick as his is.'

Now he turned an eye, the same terrible eye that had struck terror into several thousand of
the nastiest villains in England, on Miss Midden. He judged her to be a very ordinary woman. He
was wrong.

'Do sit down,' said Miss Midden.

'What?' demanded the Judge. It was less a question than an explosion. Outside the door the
ex-policeman trembled and wondered whether to rush in or not.

Miss Midden struck again. 'I said "Do sit down",' she said. 'And stop staring at me like that.
You'll do yourself a mischief.'

The Judge sat down. In a long and frequently forceful life he had never been told to sit down
by an unknown woman in his own house. And she was right about doing himself a mischief. His heart
was doing something eccentric, like racing and missing beats.

'Now then,' she went on when he had made himself slightly less uncomfortable, 'I have a
question to ask you.'

She stopped. Judge Benderby Bright was making the most peculiar noises. It sounded as if he
was choking. His colour wasn't any too good either.

'I want to know whether you want to see your nephew Timothy again.'

The Judge goggled at her. Want to see that infernal little shit again? The woman must be mad.
He'd kill the bastard. That's what he'd do if he ever laid eyes on the damnable swine who had
stolen all Boskie's shares. See him again?

'I can see that you don't,' said Miss Midden. "That's as plain as the nose on your face.'

The nose on the Judge's face was not plain, not in his opinion at any rate. It was thin and
distinguished. It was also white and taut with fury. 'Who the hell are you?' he yelled. 'You come
into my house with some infernal nonsense about my sister's shares and '

'Oh, do stop behaving like a fool,' Miss Midden shouted back. 'Just look in that
hold-all.'

For a moment, an awful and extended moment, the Judge thought about hitting her. He had never
hit a woman before, but there was a time and a place for everything, and the drawing-room at nine
o'clock on a Saturday morning, before he'd even had a cup of tea, seemed a suitable time to him.
With admirable restraint he controlled himself.

'Go on,' said Miss Midden. 'Don't just sit there looking like a totem pole on heat. Take a
dekko.'

Judge Benderby Bright wasn't hearing straight. He couldn't be. Nobody, and he meant nobody, in
his entire life had treated him in this appalling manner before. He had been subject to the most
disgusting abuse from men and women in the dock. He could deal with that he rather enjoyed
sending them down for contempt. But this was a completely new and dreadful experience for him. He
did what he was told and peered lividly into the bag. He peered for a long time and then he
looked up.

'Where...where the bloody hell did you get...' he began but Miss Midden was on her feet. She
had a look on her face he hadn't seen since his mother found him feeling the parlourmaid up in
the pantry one late afternoon. It had unnerved him then, and Miss Midden's look unnerved him
now.

'Don't you speak to me like that. I'm not some poor wretch in the dock or one of the
barristers you can berate,' she said. 'Now, does the name Llafranc mean anything to you? You
berth your yacht the Lex Britannicus in the marina there.'

It was hardly a question but the Judge nodded obediently all the same.

'Very fortunately for you, Timothy has saved you from becoming an unwitting drug-runner. You
will find all the details in this envelope. I have made him write them all down. You can check on
their veracity. I'm sure you are capable of that. And the money in that bag is what your nephew
stole from his aunt. You will see that she gets it back. And now I must be going.'

And before the Judge could ask who she was or how she came to be involved with his beastly
nephew, Miss Midden had passed out of the house. Behind her she left a bewildered old man who
could only remember that she had faced him down in his own drawing-room. She'd been wearing what
looked like an old tweed skirt with a stain on it. And a scruffy anorak. It was weird.

Sir Arnold Gonders wandered the house in Sweep's Place and pondered his fate. That it was a
fate he had no doubt. A fate that had crept up on him silently and with an awful purpose. It had
to have some meaning. Everything had a meaning for the Chief Constable. He turned inevitably to
God. He fell on his knees in his study and he prayed as he had never prayed before. He prayed for
divine help, for inspiration, for some sign that would show him what to do in this, the greatest
crisis of his life. Or, if God wouldn't meet that request, would he please tell him what he had
done wrong to bring down on himself this terrible fate. The Chief Constable didn't actually
compare himself to the Pharaoh who got it in the neck from God with plagues of locusts and years
of dearth and so on, because clearly that Gyppo had been a right bastard and deserved everything
the Good Lord chose to hand out. But he thought about him occasionally and hoped and prayed he
wasn't going to have years of this sort of thing. He thought far more about Job. And he did
compare himself with Job. After all, Job had been a thoroughly respectable bloke, pillar of
society no doubt and with plenty of readies and so on, and yet look what he'd had inflicted on
him.

The Chief Constable checked up on the misfortunes God had heaped on Job and was appalled. It
had been a wipe-out for the poor bugger. Oxen and asses gone the Sabeans fell on them and took
them away after slaughtering the servants; then God sent fire and consumed the sheep and more
servants; three bands of Chaldeans lifted the camels and bumped off even more servants (at this
point Sir Arnold thanked God he hadn't been employed by Job and wondered how he had ever got
anyone to work for him again); and, as if that wasn't enough, the sons and daughters had copped
it in some sort of hurricane. Must have had a hell of a big funeral, though why Job should have
shaved his head for the occasion was quite beyond the Chief Constable. And still God hadn't
stopped. It was only natural that Job's health had suffered. In Sir Arnold's opinion it was
amazing the bloke hadn't gone off his head. Instead he got boils just about everywhere 'from the
sole of his foot to his crown'. And of course they didn't have antibiotics in those days. Sir
Arnold had once had a boil on the back of his neck and he knew how bloody painful that had been.
He couldn't begin to think what it was like to have them on the soles of the feet. And as if that
wasn't enough his three so-called friends had called on him and kept him awake for seven days and
seven nights and hadn't even said 'Cheer up' or anything useful. The Chief Constable had seen
what keeping someone awake for a week did to a bloke. Mind you, they had taken it in turns to
shout questions at the sod but then again that had given the villain something to think about.
Sir Arnold would much prefer to be shouted at every now and again to having three bloody friends
sitting there looking at him and saying nothing. Enough to drive a chap clean off his trolley.
And all Job had done was open his mouth and curse the day. What the hell had the day got to do
with it?

The Chief Constable couldn't go on. It was too dreadful to contemplate and, if memory served
him correctly, Mrs Job hadn't been exactly helpful either, the rotten cow. Said Job had bad
breath or something. Hardly surprising. With all those boils he'd probably stunk all over.
Certainly no sane woman would want to go near him.

Sir Arnold skipped to the end of the Book of Job and was amazed and delighted to see that Job
did pretty well after all he'd been through. Fourteen thousand sheep and six thousand camels and
a thousand oxen and the same number of asses. And his wife had been ready and willing. Would be
after all those months of doing without it. Seven sons and seven daughters and the girls really
nice lookers. And to cap it all, Job lived for a hundred and forty years, which was amazing after
all he'd been through. Must have been on ginseng or something. On the whole the Chief Constable
found the Book of Job almost comforting. Like doing three years bird and coming out to a few
million quid. Just so long as God didn't tell Satan to give him the boil treatment. Boils on the
bottom of one's feet weren't funny.

Nor was the message he received from London summoning him to Whitehall. It was pointedly brief
and coincided with another letter from Vy's solicitors containing a full and sworn statement by
the bitch asserting that he had repeatedly raped her, had insisted on sodomizing her on their
honeymoon and had encouraged her to have sex with the wives of his friends...'Bloody lying cow,'
the Chief Constable roared and saw the hand of Auntie Fucking Bea behind it all. She was screwing
him just as she was almost certainly screwing his wife. Or something. The letter ended with the
suggestion that Sir Arnold agree to allow his wife to divorce him on the grounds of adultery and
pay all her costs to quote avoid unnecessary and most unfavourable publicity unquote.

What Sir Arnold said wasn't quotable. The costs of Lapline & Goodenough, Solicitors, were
already exorbitant. He'd have to sell the Old Boathouse to meet the bill. Only then did he
realize, and regret most vehemently, that he had made the purchase in Vy's name to avoid the
accusation that he was taking advantage of his friendship with Ralph Pulborough, the new Director
of the Twixt and Tween Waterworks Company. In short, Sir Arnold was in no position or state of
mind to attend to police business. He was otherwise engaged.

Inspector Rascombe, on the other hand, was having a thoroughly engaging time. He had been
particularly delighted to learn from the surveillance detective in the wood that an old bugger as
naked as the day was long had emerged at half past seven from the Middenhall and had walked
slowly across the lawn in the altogether before plunging into the lake and swimming on his back,
repeat on his back, displaying his dooda for all the world, and in particular thirty children in
the tents, to see.

'His what?' the Inspector had demanded over the mobile.

'His whatnot,' the detective constable told him. 'His dong, for Christ's sake. He's just come
out of the water now and is drying himself.'

'What, in front of all those little kiddies? The bastard! Get it on film.'

'We've done that already,' said the surveillance man. 'Got the whole performance, but I
wouldn't call them little kiddies exactly. I mean some of them are hulking great louts.'

"Those shits like them all sizes, the swine,' said the Inspector. 'What's he doing now, the
old sod?'

'Going into the house bollock naked waving his hand...Hang on, he's blowing fucking kisses
'

'What?' bellowed the Inspector so loudly that a neighbouring rabbit went thumping away through
the wood. 'Blowing kisses at the kiddies? He's going to do years for this.'

'Not at the...well, if you want to call them kiddies,' said the detective, 'you can, but they
don't strike me as being '

'Never mind what they strike you as. Get it on the camera. Him blowing kisses to the
kiddies.'

'I'm doing that. But he isn't blowing kisses at the kiddies. He's blowing them at someone in
the house. Up at some window. Hang on. There's not a soul at any window. I don't know what he's
doing.'

'I bloody do,' shouted the Inspector, 'and I know what he's going to do. A long stretch of
very nasty bird, the beast.'

But it was at 8.45 that Inspector Rascombe's most virulent hopes were finally satisfied, when
Phoebe Turnbird arrived in her car with the Dean of Porterhouse. He was wearing a black cloak
over his cassock and had on his head a shovel-hat. It was not his normal garb, but the late
Brigadier General Turnbird had always insisted that the cloak, and particularly the shovel-hat,
helped to impress the townies from the East End with the importance attached to religious
ceremonies and, in memory of his old friend, the Dean kept to the custom. Phoebe by contrast had
on the summeriest of summer dresses, a shimmering white frock that she thought gave her a
strikingly youthful air. To complete this ensemble she had crowned her crowning glory with an
extraordinary picture hat and, rather shortsightedly, had put on a particularly vivid
lipstick.

'There are those wonderful undergraduates down there sleeping under canvas,' she had told the
mirror in her room, and in any case it was lovely to have a man about the house, even if it was
only the old Dean. Being given to fits of poetry she murmured, 'My youth, my beauty and my charm
Can surely do nobody harm. It is such a lovely day I must look gay.'

It certainly looked that way to the surveillance unit, though they left out the youth and
beauty bit. Charm was out of the question. Phoebe Turnbird, even in the saddle at half a mile,
was sufficiently and distractingly uncharming to have saved the lives of a good many foxes who
had found a second or even a third and fourth wind in their desperate flight from death. And she
tended to rush her fences.