The Midden (30 page)

At the head of the column of Armed Quick Response Teams (AQRTs) hurtling towards the
Middenhall that morning, Inspector Rascombe was not exactly himself. Sleepless nights in the
Communications Centre, and the sounds of rifle fire ahead of him, and the urgency of his mission
to save the little kiddies from having their throats cut on an altar by the queen of the night in
drag, or whatever it was in the frock, had awakened in the Inspector's mind a new vision of
himself. He saw himself not as a mere police inspector of the Serious Crime Squad but (and this
may have had something to do with a book he had been reading by Alan Clark about the war in
Russia, called Barbarossa) as Standartenführer Sigismund Rascombe of the Waffen SS Sturmgruppe
AQRT acting under orders from the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht to storm the Middenhall or die in
the attempt. It was a most unfortunate delusion to possess or be possessed by. Inspector Rascombe
did not lack the fanatical fervour of a Standartenführer if anything he had about as much of it
as would have made him a thoroughly obedient SS mass murderer in Russia, though at the lowest
possible level of command. None at all would have been better. He'd have made a bad cook or
baggage-handler. He lacked any degree of intelligence or capacity for organizing anything other
than a major catastrophe.

He not only didn't have the faintest clue what he was leading his men into, he hardly knew
where the Middenhall was. He had never seen it, it was no more than a mark on the Ordnance Survey
map in his borrowed British Telecom van (here he muddled up Standartenführers with General
Montgomery who worked from a sort of caravan) and his Surveillance Units hadn't bothered to try
to describe it to him. It was in any case beyond description. (Even Sir John Betjeman hadn't
attempted that awesome task and had retired to his hotel room in Stagstead for two days to
recover after only looking at it for ten minutes from the bottom of the drive. ) When finally the
Inspector did see the great building it was not what he had expected.

The Armed Quick Response Team leaping from their vehicles with rifles weren't what Buffalo
Midden had expected either. He had just managed to get his Union Jack to the top of the flagpole
when they arrived, and he drew the worst possible conclusion. He thought he had fought off the
attack of the Muslim-Zionist-Black-IRA terrorists, but he had been over-optimistic. The sods had
come back in force. Buffalo hastily withdrew from the rooftop and hurried to his room to collect
his shotgun, a revolver and a fresh supply of cartridges for the Lee Enfield. Then, to distract
the bastards below and mislead them as to his eventual firing position, he put a bullet through
the front tyre of each of the vehicles, holed the radiator of the lead one and retreated to the
second floor where he could command the back and front of the Middenhall by scurrying to the
turrets so conveniently equipped with arrow slits on the four corners of the building. Nobody in
his, her or its right mind, not even Black Midden at his most megalomanic, had ever supposed
those slits had any military purpose. They were mere ornamentation on the hideous building.
Buffalo Midden knew better. From his warped point of view they were perfect for picking off the
enemy. As the Armed Quick Response marksmen ran for cover he shot three of them, each in a
different part of the garden and the anatomy, and then turned his attention on the relief party
that was trying to reach the remaining and groaning Surveillance man still alive behind the
pig-pen. By the time he had finished there were three wounded policemen behind that pen and he
had pinned another eight down behind the rockery. It was time to change tactics.

He hurried down the curved staircase to the ground floor to deal with any terrorist trying to
infiltrate the kitchen. There was no need. The cook and the entire domestic staff had already
taken shelter in the cellar and the other guests, with the exception of Consuelo, were milling
about in the corridors and hall asking each other what was happening. Buffalo Midden added to the
confusion by shouting that they were being attacked by IRA terrorists and must fight to the
death. Mrs Devizes already had died, though whether she had been fighting or merely peering
shortsightedly out of the window when she was shot by a police marksman was a matter of some
debate at the inquest. The police marksman was not there to give evidence. His moment of
satisfaction had been shortlived. Buffalo, firing from behind the library sofa, took him out
through the open window and then scuttled through to the breakfast-room to put paid to another
dark-overalled figure who was sneaking round to the back door. Mr Joseph Midden, the retired
gynaecologist, had been killed trying to enquire from a wounded policeman what he was doing lying
on the drive. His wife's attempts to save him from falling out of the window had been in all
likelihood misinterpreted.

As bodies began to accumulate, Inspector Rascombe's military fantasies evaporated. So had most
of the Armed Quick Response Team. Those who had survived Buffalo's murderous fire had taken
refuge in various secluded parts of the garden waiting to get the bastards in that fucking house,
and the Inspector was cowering behind the leading vehicle unable to coordinate the next phase of
Operation Kiddlywink because his walkie-talkie was lying out in the open and he had sufficient
sense not to try to reach it. It was Constable Markin, on the far side of the lake, who made the
call for help. There's a bloody massacre going on here,' he yelled into his mobile. 'Blokes are
dropping like flies. For fucksake do something.'

It was a mistake to have shouted. The Dean had just decided it would be prudent to get the
Mission children and Miss Turnbird away to a place of greater safety he didn't give a damn what
happened to that foul woman in the cat suit, if that's what she was when Phoebe heard Detective
Constable Markin's plea for assistance and drew her own conclusions about men in camouflage
jackets lying under piles of leaves. They were as wrong as his conclusions about her sex
(actually gender was, for once, a better word for Phoebe Turnbird's state of nature sex she
hadn't) but, in the circumstances, understandable. Being the brave woman she was, and one who had
never in a lifetime of hunting allowed the horse she was riding to refuse a fence or a drystone
wall with a ditch on the other side (one or two had tried and had learnt better), Phoebe Turnbird
brought all her unrequited passion for men to bear on Detective Constable Markin. Sexual
frustration lent weight to her fury.

It was an unequal battle. A policeman under a pile of leaves who is suffering from a perfectly
natural bout of homophobia is not at his best when attacked by powerful women descended from a
line of Turnbirds that could prove its ancestry back to Saxon times. A Turnbird had fought at the
Battle of Hastings with Harold, and that same ancestral spirit inspired Phoebe now. She would die
to get her man. In fact it was Detective Constable Markin who damn near died. It is not pleasant
to be kicked in the head by a fifteen-stone woman of thirty-five who talks to mirrors and writes
poetry before going out to make life hell for foxes and other vermin. That the thing under the
pile of leaves was vermin Phoebe Turnbird had not the slightest doubt and, if anything was needed
to prove how verminous it was, its supine lack of resistance provided that proof. That it kept
moaning about not being buggered please I don't want

Aids didn't exactly increase her respect or liking for the creature. To stifle this flow of
filth Phoebe Turnbird knelt on the constable and ground his blackened face into the soggy earth.
Around them the kiddies shouted encouragement, and one of the older ones was taken into the
bushes by Consuelo McKoy to be shown something he hadn't seen before.

But it was on the drive down to the Middenhall under the avenue of chestnut trees that new and
more fearful developments were taking place. The Child Abuse Trauma Specialists were arriving in
surprising numbers. They came from all over Britain and had been attending a conference in Tween
devoted to 'The Sphincter: Its Diagnostic Role in Parental Rape Inspections'. There were
witchcraft experts from Scotland, sodomy specialists from South Wales, oral-sex-in-infancy
counsellors, mutual masturbation advisers for adolescents, a number of clitoris stimulation
experts, four vasectomists (female), and finally fifteen whores who had come to tell the
conference what men really wanted. If they were anything to go by, what men wanted was anything,
but anything, with two legs, a short skirt and a mouthful of rotten teeth. And one that whined
about being socially deprived. 'Disadvantaged' was the word of the conference. Sphincters were
disadvantaged, sodomists were disadvantaged there had been a prolonged debate on the subject of
which were the more disadvantaged and on the whole the sodomists got the greater support largely
because, in the experience of the delegates, sodomists didn't pose any threat to women under the
age of sixty-five. Consuelo McKoy could have told them differently.

What she was getting under a dense thicket on the edge of the estate was not what she had
expected or was enjoying. The kiddy from the Isle of Dogs might not have been able to distinguish
with absolute assurance between a vagina and a sphincter, though that was to be doubted, but he
knew which he preferred in Consuelo's case. Her screams, muted by distance and by her inability
to open her mouth too wide if she were to avoid scalping herself, went unheard.

In any case even if they had heard those screams the Child Abuse experts would have ignored
them. Granny Abuse came under another department. They milled about looking for the children they
had come to counsel and their faces were alive with desperate care. Or, to be precise, dead with
desperate care. They were concerned. They had come to deal with misery and helplessness and to
dole out their own misery and helplessness in even greater measure. A miasma of mixed emotions
and bitter hatred of anything faintly fond or normal seemed to hang over them. Cruelty and sadism
were their specialities and they were infected with them. Suffused with guilt about massacres and
droughts in faraway places, they appeased their worthless consciences by doing worthless things.
And blamed society for everything. Or God. Or men and parents who loved and disciplined their
children to be polite and civil and to work at school. Above all they blamed sex but never ceased
to slobber on their own proclivities.

Now, dragged by duty from one another's beds in the most expensive conference hotel in Tween,
few of them had had time to wash. Not that they would have washed if there'd been all the time in
the world. They liked their own smells. They reminded them of their calling, those smells of
stinking fish did, and they revelled in their rejection of the hygienic. The coven from Aberdeen
was particularly noisome, and some of the oral sex counsellors still had pubic hair on their
chins. As their cars piled up behind one another down the drive and blocked the lodge gates the
women debated what to do. They held a conference, and one or two of the more determined ones
actually looked around for some children to counsel and expend their care and concern on.

There were none to be seen. With a prescience that did him credit, the Dean and the
undergraduates had driven them past Miss Turnbird far into the wood and had forced them to hide
by the boundary wall out of harm's way. Only some of the prostitutes did anything useful, one of
them giving a peculiar form of last rite to a dying marksman. He'd never been shot before and
he'd never been into fellatio. But the whore didn't know that. She was following her calling. So
were the creatures under the chestnut trees. They had brought the atmosphere of a failed hospice
to the Middenhall. They couldn't have brought it to a better place.

To Miss Midden the sound of gunfire from the Middenhall was not altogether surprising. That
old fool Buffalo had frequently boasted he was going to teach those youngsters from the slums
about spooring and killing things like rhinos on the hoof at a thousand yards and generally being
manly. Doubtless that's what he was doing. She turned over and went back to sleep. She had got
home from London late, well after midnight, and she wanted to lie in. Whatever old Buffalo was
doing wasn't any of her business.

On the other hand the roar of SS Standartenführer Sigismund Rascombe's Storm Group's vans as
they pelted past the farm did seem to suggest that something bloody odd was going on. Miss Midden
put on a dressing-gown and went downstairs to the kitchen to find the Major looking fearfully out
of the back window at the Union Jack which could be seen fluttering from the flagpole above the
rim of trees. 'Buffalo,' said Miss Midden, and put the kettle on. 'Bound to be that old idiot
being a geriatric boy scout. Thinks he's Baden-Powell, I daresay.'

The Major wasn't so sure. His experience of military life might be largely imaginary and
second-hand but he knew enough to realize that the direction of the gunfire and its intensity
suggested that Buffalo Midden, far from showing the Mission children what a Lee Enfield could do
to a charging rhino or something of that sort, was engaged in shooting at them. And while this
was understandable the Major had once been surprised by a number of the little brutes while
practising self-abuse overlooking their tents and he didn't like them any more than those guests
whose rooms had been burgled but shooting at the little bastards was carrying things too far.
He'd been particularly alarmed by the sight of Rascombe's armed column. It hadn't consisted of
the armoured half-tracks of the Inspector's imagination, but there had been an urgency about its
passing that gave it an altogether different authenticity. Major MacPhee recognized police vans
when he saw them. He'd been in enough of them in his time. And he had been particularly alarmed
by the presence of a singularly large van with 'Police Dog Section' painted on the side.