The Midden (29 page)

'Fuck me, this has got to be the drag queen of all time,' the detective muttered as he filmed
the Dean and Phoebe moving to the jetty and getting into the little rowing-boat. Phoebe rowed
with a vigour that was definitely out of keeping with her outfit. The Dean sat nervously in the
stern and looked sinister. He was carrying a large brass cross and the late Brigadier General's
family Bible, both of which were part of the tradition that went with the Mission's stay.

'What did you say?' demanded Inspector Rascombe in the Communications Centre.

The surveillance detective found it difficult to put into words. He had never much liked
Rascombe but this time the swine had hit the nail on the head. 'I think they're going to have a
Black bloody Mass,' he said. 'There's this priest bloke with a fucking great cross and a hell of
a big old book being rowed across the lake by Mr Universe in a white frock. Got arms on him like
an all-in wrestler. You've never seen anything like it. I haven't, anyway.'

'And you're getting it all on film?'

'I'm trying to. They're still some way off. Drove up in an old Daimler. Got any leads on that?
Looks like a fucking hearse.'

'Jesus,' said the Inspector, simultaneously appalled and delighted at what was apparently
happening, 'that's probably what it is too. They're going to do a human bloody sacrifice with one
of the kiddies. Don't lose them.'

'Lose them? You've got to be joking. You couldn't lose that drag merchant on a pitch-black
night. Not in that white frock and hat.'

'I didn't mean that. I mean keep filming, and for God's sake don't let them see you. This is
going to hit prime-time TV on all channels. I'll get the Child Care do-gooders up and ready and I
don't care if it is Sunday.'

'Best if you got the Armed Quick Response brigade in, and fast,' said the detective. 'They're
getting out of the boat and some of the other blokes have arranged an altar thing in front of the
tents. Gawd, this is horrible. I've got kids of my own.'

For a moment the Inspector hesitated. He didn't want to take the blame for allowing a kiddy to
be murdered naked on that altar. 'Listen,' he said, 'the moment they have the poor little bugger
up there stripped and naked and the priest sod's had his say, you are to up and hit them. Do you
hear what I said?'

'I heard,' said the detective, 'I heard. But if you think I'm going to tangle with that
monster in the frock and come out alive, you don't know what I'm looking at.'

There was a pause, then a gasp. Inspector Rascombe was too busy to hear that gasp. He was now
fully occupied in trying to order up a platoon of battle-hardened Child Abuse Trauma Specialists
through Police Headquarters in Twixt and getting nowhere fast because, he was told, it was Sunday
and the strain of being called fucking shits by enraged and innocent parents all week and the
CATS by colleagues in Social Services took its toll by the weekend and they liked to lie
in...

'I know what they like and I know about their lying. I've heard them in court so don't give me
that. This is a Top Priority Order. You tell Social Services Emergency and they can fucking get
out of bed too that we've got a Witchcraft Black Mass going on up here and the priest is doing
the Communion bit at this very moment...Yes, I know the cross has got to be upside-down. What the
hell's that got to do with the price of eggs? It's the little kiddy lying naked on the altar I'm
worried about. No, they're not going to bugger him, not yet at any rate, They're going to slit
the poor little sod's throat first and drink his blood out of the chalice. Get that into your
thick head. Over and out.'

At Police Headquarters the operator had got it only too well. He was over and out. Over the
apparatus in front of him and out for the count.

Inspector Rascombe turned back to the Surveillance Unit. The gasping had stopped. 'What now?'
he demanded. 'Have they got the kiddy naked on the altar yet?'

'Kiddy? No, not as far as I can see. They're waiting for a woman who is jogging round the lake
and, blimey, is she worth waiting for. I mean this one is the real thing. A right smasher in a
silver cat suit. Got boobs on her like '

The Inspector didn't want to hear what her boobs were like. For all he cared she could be
Dolly Parton with knobs on.

He wasn't far wrong. Consuelo McKoy could by no stretch of the imagination be called the real
thing. She had used her years, and there were a great many of them, and vast sums of her
husband's money to enrich some of the most proficient plastic surgeons from Santa Barbara to LA.
At several hundred yards she looked a million dollars and she had spent far more to achieve that
illusion. She had the gloriously lissom figure of a girl of eighteen, which, considering she was
eighty-two rising eighty-three, was no mean achievement, particularly on the part of the late Mr
McKoy. What liposuction hadn't done for her thighs and silicone implants for her breasts her
latest nipples were extraordinarily effective the silver cat suit did. It constrained her and
preserved the illusion that her navel was where it always had been instead of appearing, rather
peculiarly, in her cleavage. Even in Santa Barbara she had been something else. At the Middenhall
she was something else again, a vision of such unutterable beauty that at two hundred yards in
the morning sunlight it took the surveillance detective's breath away. He kept the camera
running.

It was an action he would live to regret. It was only when she came round the lake and he was
able to zoom in on her face that he began to realize something was terribly wrong. It didn't seem
to gel with her body. In fact, it didn't gel at all. Even the finest cosmetic surgeons, using
portions of skin stretched to the utmost from her throat and neck and even unravelled from her
chest, had failed to make good the ravages of time and marital bitterness. Not that Consuelo
McKoy, née Midden, had ever had a beautiful face. At eighteen her mind, never far from the cash
register in her father's shop, had bred a mean and hungry look which should have warned Corporal
McKoy what he was letting himself in for. Being an incredibly innocent and full-blooded man with
a romantic passion for things English, he failed to look too closely into her eyes. He chose
instead to think of them as the windows of the soul. To some extent they were. In Consuelo's case
they would have been if she had a soul that needed windows. She didn't. She had about as much
soul as a scorpion disturbed by the entry of a bare foot into an empty desert boot. Her eyes were
dark and small, lasers of such malignancy that her mother, a placid woman not given to much
imaginative fluency, had once said they made her think of the bit on the end of a dentist's
drill, they were that spiteful.

To Detective Constable Markin, zooming in on that taut suntanned leathery mask, those eyes
were proof that hell existed and that what was about to be done on the makeshift altar by the old
bastard in the weird black hat was authentically diabolical. The hair on his neck seemed to have
caught prickly cold. As the Dean began reading from the Turnbird family Bible the constable
babbled into the mobile. 'For fucksake hurry,' he bleated, 'they've started. Shit, this is awful.
I don't want to watch. Oh God.'

But Rascombe and the Quick Response Team were already converging on the Middenhall. Their cars
and vans raced along the narrow roads, killed a sheepdog and two cats outside Charlie Harrison's
farm and sped on without stopping.

It was just as well. At that very moment Mr Armitage Midden, or 'Buffalo' Midden as he
preferred to be called, who had spent sixty years decimating herds of elephants, rhinos, lions,
wildebeest and, of course, buffaloes across the length and breadth of Africa and who claimed to
have spoored more animals than any other white hunter north of the Zambesi, was moving with
deadly stealth across the leads of the Middenhall roof with an unlicensed Lee Enfield .303 rifle.
From his bedroom window he had seen Unit B stir in the undergrowth behind the kitchen garden and
take up a position in a small corrugated structure that had once served as a privy for the
under-gardeners. Unfortunately he couldn't see what weapons, if any, they were carrying but men
in camouflage jackets who slithered through the grass and then dashed for the outhouse were
clearly bent on some dreadful and murderous course of action. Buffalo Midden had spent the
previous evening reading an article on the IRA and terrorists in general that had chilled his
blood. The Red Menace of Bolshevism might be dead though he doubted it, it was merely lying in
wait for the Civilized World like a wounded buffalo under a lone thorn tree where one would least
expect it but a World Conspiracy, comprising Zionists in alliance with Ayatollahs, Irishmen and
of course Blacks and every other demon, still existed in his imagination. And now on this
beautiful summer morning it was exercising its deadly skills against the Middenhall.

Buffalo Midden had already worked out why. The Middenhall was the perfect place. Isolated, cut
off from the world and equipped with military huts and shelters, it had all the necessary
requirements for a terrorist base. Alone on the roof of the awful house he lay in the shadow of a
towering chimney and took the most precise aim on that privy and the murderous swine inside it.
With all his old expertise he gently eased the trigger back. It was a hair trigger, one he had
adjusted to his own specifications, and he knew it well. So, a fraction of a second later, did
the two policemen in that corrugated-iron privy. Of course they didn't know precisely what was
happening but they had a pretty good idea what was going to happen if they stayed there. They
were going to die. The bullet had hardly slammed through the door of the privy and out through
the back before they were out of there and running like hell for cover.

Buffalo Midden fired again. And again. And again. He was enjoying himself. The policemen
weren't. Pinned down behind a concrete pig-pen which, fortunately for the pig, was unoccupied,
they listened to the bullets ricocheting round the interior of the sty and radioed frantically
for help. One of them had been hit in the shoulder and the other had had a bullet through his
leg. At eighty-five, Buffalo Midden's eyesight was no longer 20/20 but it was sufficiently acute
to hit a pig-pen at a hundred and fifty yards and the old Lee Enfield he had always maintained
was all he needed to bring down a charging bull elephant so that it slumped at his feet fired a
sufficiently powerful .303 bullet to make life behind the pigpen a decidedly unpleasant
affair.

On the far side of the lake the sound of that rifle raised some degree of apprehension. It was
not equipped with a silencer. Buffalo liked to boast that when he fired the beast he fired at
wouldn't hear anything again this side of the end of eternity and that the shot would so startle
the herd of whatever he was killing that his next target would be moving like the clappers, which
was much the most sporting way of shooting things. As the firing died away (Buffalo was moving to
a position that would give him a better chance of hitting the swine cowering behind the pig-pen)
the Dean and his peculiar congregation turned and looked at the Middenhall.

So did Detective Constable Markin. He was a firearms expert himself and he knew a
heavy-calibre rifle when he heard one. For a moment he imagined that that moron Rascombe had
thrown the whole weight of the Armed Quick Response Team against the house where it wasn't
needed. It was needed on his side of the lake where the Black Mass was taking place. He was just
wondering what to do when the firing resumed. This time it was accompanied by screams.

Buffalo had found his mark once again and this time he was satisfied. He had heard that sort
of scream before many times and it portended death, a terrible and agonizing death. He stood up
exultantly and hurried from the roof. There was a Union Flag in his room and he intended to run
it up the flagpole Black Midden had erected to celebrate the Coronation of George V.

Looking back on the events of that Sunday, Miss Midden was wont to say that the Armed Quick
Response Team, or whatever those buffoons were called, had arrived in the nick of time. It is not
clear what nick of time, or possibly which nick of time, she was referring to, just as it wasn't
clear to anyone taking part in whatever it was that was taking place around them whatever it was
they were taking part in. Not even Detective Constable Markin, who had witnessed just about
everything (he couldn't see what was happening or had happened round the other side of the
ghastly house but he had a shrewd idea that fucking hearse was going to come in handy after all)
that seemed to have occurred since first light began, but even he, when it came to the inquests,
and there were several, couldn't under oath, or cross-examination of the most persistent and
thoroughly unpleasant kind, actually put his hand on his heart and swear to present a faintly
lucid account of what he had seen. He had to admit that he had lain under a pile of leaves with a
video camera and a mobile (they called it a walkie-talkie in court and the videos he had made
were shown over and over and over again) and he was a trained and intelligent and observant
police officer but it still didn't add up to a row of sane beans or perhaps he ought to say a
sane row of beans. Anyway it hadn't, didn't and never would make any sense to him. All he knew
was that an old bloke in the altogether had come out for a swim and...How the hell was he to know
the thing under that hat and in that frock was a woman? (Fortunately Phoebe Turnbird was not in
court at that particular moment. She was otherwise engaged. Literally though briefly. ) And if
small, fat, waddling clergymen went around wearing cloaks and weird flat shovel-hats, and he
hadn't known what they were called at the time, carrying whacking great leather-bound bibles and
bloody great brass crosses and got into boats and were rowed across lakes to a whole lot of
children whom he had been officially informed by a superior officer were about to be buggered and
abused, which was why he was there in the first place, how the hell was he to know they were
genuine clergymen and the Dean of Porterhouse College, Cambridge, an ancient and important
educational establishment etc? Asked if he needed trauma relief counselling or had had any, he
said he didn't. The only relief he needed was to get the hell out of the Twixt and Tween
Constabulary into another job where he wouldn't be required to try to assess situations he didn't
and still couldn't make head or tail of even if that particular situation had had a head or a
tail. The detective's was a garbled account but an accurate one, and it was infinitely more
perceptive than that of Inspector Rascombe who had precipitated the whole appalling disaster and
was responsible for its outcome.