The Midden (31 page)

The notion that whatever was going on down at the Middenhall required the attention of quite
so many dogs as that damned great van seemed to suggest was not a reassuring one. Major MacPhee
was afraid of dogs. He had once been bitten on the ankle by a Jack Russell and that had been bad
enough. To be savaged by an entire squad of police dogs filled him with the most appalling
apprehension. The prospect never entered Miss Midden's mind, and it wouldn't have bothered her if
it had. Rather more disturbing was the sound of agonized screams that wafted up from the
Middenhall on the occasional breeze. Miss Midden opened the back door and listened. The firing
had started again. And the screaming. She shut the door and thought very carefully.

'Oh, what are we going to do, dear?' asked Major MacPhee 'Something terrible is happening.
It's too, too dreadful. People shooting and the police '

'You are going to make some very strong tea,' Miss Midden ordered, 'and pull yourself
together. I am going to make a phone call.'

'But the police are already here...' the Major began but Miss Midden was already at the phone
and dialling her cousin, Lennox, the family solicitor.

'I don't give a damn if you were about to go for a round of golf, Lennox,' she told him when
he complained that he couldn't possibly come out now, it was the Annual Competition at Urnmouth,
'and tomorrow won't do...No, I can't tell you what is happening but a police convoy has gone down
there with dogs and there is a great deal of firing going on...Yes, I did say "firing" and yes, I
did mean gunfire. I'll open the front door and you can hear it for yourself.' She held the phone
to the open door and looked out in time to see the first of the Child Abuse Trauma Specialists'
minibuses pass. The grimly caring faces of the women inside it shook her to the core. 'Fuck me,'
she said.

'What?' said the deeply shocked Lennox. 'What did you say? No, don't repeat it. I heard that
very distinctly.'

'And the gunfire, the screams?'

Lennox Midden said he had heard them pretty distinctly too. He'd be over as soon as he could.
Miss Midden put the phone down and thought again. She had to do something about Timothy Bright
get him out of the house, for one thing, before an investigation by the CID into whatever was
going on at the Middenhall began in earnest. She picked up the phone and this time called
Carryclogs House.

'I'd like to speak to Miss Phoebe,' she told the serving wench, as old Turnbird had insisted
on calling the housekeeper, Dora.

'Miss Phoebe's gone to Church,' the wench told her. 'She should be back any time now.'

Miss Midden thanked her and went upstairs to persuade Timothy Bright that he must go at once
to Carryclogs. He didn't need any persuading. What he had heard and then seen from his window in
the old nursery had convinced him that the people with razors had arrived to give him
piggy-chops. He couldn't think what else could be happening. And the Major was happy to take him
over. He hadn't liked the look of those women in the minibuses, and now the stream of cars
backing up at the bottom of the farm track, any more than Miss Midden had.

'But I'll never get the car out onto the road,' he pointed out.

Miss Midden had to agree. 'Then you'll just have to walk. The exercise will do you both good,'
she said. 'I'll stay and hold the fort here.'

The metaphor was apt. As the Major and Timothy Bright set out across the fell, the sounds of
battle increased. Buffalo Midden had drawn fire from a bedroom window and had then retreated to
the other end of the building where he might get that bastard hiding behind the lead truck.
Failing that, he meant to hit that walkie-talkie thing lying on the ground in front of it. From
the arrow slit in the east turret he took aim and fired. The walkie-talkie exploded. Bits of it
hit Inspector Cecil Rascombe and smashed his glasses. Out of touch with the rest of the AQRT and
with reality, the erstwhile Standartenführer SS played dead. It was just as well. Something even
more catastrophic was about to occur.

It was a little thing but its consequences were to be immense. Only the cook, cowering with
the rest of the indoor staff in the cool safety of the cellar, was aware that in her flight she
had left two very large frying-pans containing a great many slices of bacon on the gas stove. As
it was a Sunday, when some of the residents insisted on bacon and eggs at least once a week with
fried bread and mushrooms and damn the cholesterol, she had been getting breakfast ready for them
when Buffalo started shooting. But even she, a perceptive cook if not a very good one, had no
idea what two pounds of fatty bacon (the late Leonard Midden, now lying with the late Mrs Midden
over the window-sill of their bedroom, had always maintained on the most dubious medical grounds
that fatty bacon was good for the uterus and had insisted on the most fatty bacon for his wife)
would do when heated beyond endurance on a propane gas stove in the way of smoke. And flame. It
was singularly delinquent of the girl who had come in from Stagstead to help to have put the
kettle containing the potato chip oil next to the frying pans. As bacon smoke filled the kitchen
the oil joined in. There was an explosion of flame and the first roar of what was to become known
as the Middenhall holocaust.

Even then the situation might have been saved. That it wasn't was due to the well-meaning
intervention of Mrs Laura Midden Rayter, who fought her way through the smoke with extraordinary
fortitude but no understanding of what a bucket of water thrown into a chip-oil fire would do.
She soon found out. This time there was no misunderstanding the roar as two gallons of flaming
cooking oil went into orbit. The great scrubbed deal kitchen table joined the conflagration,
within a minute the cupboards and shelves were blazing, and Mrs Laura Midden Rayter, having left
the door into the hall open in her attempt to escape, had a brief glimpse of the arras Black
Midden had used to decorate the panelled walls of the dining-room beginning to burn with all the
rapidity its motif deserved. Upstairs various panic-stricken colonial Middens pinned down by the
shots of the police marksmen, some of whom had managed to escape from behind the rockery to reach
the safety of the trees on either side of the great house, tried to get to the huge oak staircase
before it went up in smoke. And flames. They failed. The staircarpet was already ablaze and the
heat in the hall was too intense. The great oil painting of Black Midden by Sargent over the
marble fireplace presented a foretaste of hell. Never a lovely or even vaguely handsome man, even
after Sargent had exercised all his cosmetic artistry, the portrait now had a truly infernal look
about it. Not that any of the guests stayed around long enough to examine it at all carefully.
There was an urgency about their desire to escape the Middenhall that even exceeded the
insistence they had shown in getting rooms there when they had arrived. Nobody had stopped them
then. Getting out was an entirely different matter. As the flames engulfed the entire ground
floor and even the billiard table began to burn, they found the stairs to the second floor and
went up them. It was an unwise move. Only Frank Midden, a retired and rather lame ostrich farmer
from the Cape, had the good sense to hurl himself onto the roof of the verandah and roll down it.
He didn't care if he was shot. It was better than being burnt alive in that awful house.

Above him in one of the roof turrets even Buffalo was coming to a similar conclusion. A ball
of flame, a positive fireball, issuing with a terrible whoosh, alerted him, in so far as anything
was capable of alerting the idiotic old man, that his enemies were employing a new and dreadful
method to flush him out. It was hardly the method he had anticipated but it showed how ruthless
terrorists were. They were deliberately burning the Middenhall to the ground, presumably as some
sort of propaganda victory like blowing up that Pan-Am Jumbo. Since Buffalo had blown up any
number of jumbos he had once driven a herd of elephants across a minefield he had constructed
from mines collected in Mozambique to see what would happen he knew what blowing up jumbos meant.
Or thought he did. Well, two could play that game and he intended to go, if go he must and it was
beginning to look like it with a bang. Bugger the whimpers. And he had just seen two men in those
sinister black overalls make a dash under cover of smoke from the kitchen window to take up
positions behind the huge propane tank that supplied the heating and cooking gas to the
Middenhall. Snatching a Very pistol from the satchel that held his ammunition, he aimed it at the
propane tank.

Then he hesitated. He wasn't sure about a Very pistol's penetrating power. He'd seen what it
did to a warthog, and he'd once brought down a circling vulture with the thing by pretending to
be dead and waiting for it to come down and have a snack, but even to Buffalo's simple and
murderous mind there was a very great difference between warthogs (ugly bastards, they were) and
vultures and propane gas tanks. It might be wiser to hole the tank with the rifle first, and then
fire the Very pistol's flare at the escaping gas. Much better. Bigger bang and damn-all
whimper.

The resulting bang, which was heard as far away as Tween, had all the characteristics of a
blended thunderclap and an exploding oil refinery. Something like the Oklahoma City bomb went off
at the back of the Middenall. Even Phoebe Turnbird, dragging the unresisting Detective Markin
with an arm-lock that occasionally lifted him off the ground, was struck by the explosion. Other
people were less fortunate. They were struck by pieces of the Middenhall itself. Two vast
ornamental Corinthian columns on the facade broke loose and crashed onto some of the trucks and
police cars on the drive (it was at this point that Inspector Rascombe realized that his top
priorities had fuck-all to do with rescuing kiddies from having their throats cut on altars, and
made a dash for the lake); a mock Tudor chimney of unnatural proportions toppled onto and through
the leaded roof (which hadn't been strengthened by the fireball from the kitchen); several Child
Abuse Trauma Specialists had reason for genuine concern, but weren't cared for by their
comrades-in-arms who went screaming hysterically up the drive pursued by maddened German Shepherd
police dogs sensibly released by their handlers from the overheated van; only the prostitutes
stood their ground and did anything useful. They had seen police dogs in action and, being
uneducated and high on heroin, they were also unconcerned. But they did care. They helped those
earnest caring women who despised them, those who could stand up on their feet, and led them away
and bandaged their wounds as best they could, as a result of which some of the wounded CATS
contracted AIDS.

The police marksmen previously behind the propane tank neither cared nor were concerned. Ashes
to ashes and dust to dust just about summed up their condition. They were part of the mushroom
cloud that rose over the remains of Black Midden's architectural gravestone. Buffalo Midden rose
with them but, remarkably, in one piece. He landed in a huge pile of manure that had been
fermenting nicely on the far side of the kitchen garden and emerged half an hour later uncertain
what had happened and wondering why it was he seemed to smell so strongly of pig and singed
hair.

He wandered away from the inferno unsteadily and stopped to ask one of the Armed Quick
Response Team, one he had shot and killed, the way to Piccadilly Circus. 'Rude bastard. Can't get
a civil word out of anyone in this accursed country,' he muttered as he stumbled away.

Behind him the Middenhall blazed and slowly folded in on itself. And on the other unfortunate
Middens who had seen it as their home from home with free board and lodging and all the
trimmings, like being as rude to domestic servants as they had been accustomed to be in the
tropics. There were few servants left for them to be rude to if they had lived. The cook and her
daughter and the other helpers in the kitchen were saved by the water tank above them, which
burst and flooded the cellar. Even so they were almost boiled alive. The arrival of a fleet of
fire engines did nothing to assist. They couldn't get past the cars blocking the drive and the
lodge gates. In any case there was nothing they could have done. The Middenhall, that brick,
stone, and mortar construction of abysmal taste, that monument to Imperial vanity and stupidity
and greed, had become the mausoleum Black Midden had intended, though not in the way he had
hoped. It would go down in the history of Twixt and Tween. It had already gone down in just about
every other respect. The great billiard table a massive piece of slate was all that remained had
crashed into the wine cellar destroying the last vestiges of a fine collection of port, claret
and sweet dessert wines he and his successors had laid down there and the colonial Middens had
not been able to find and drink.

And through it all, through the mayhem and the maelstrom of disaster that had engulfed the
Middenhall and its inhabitants, Miss Midden sat impassively by the phone in the hall of the old
Midden farmhouse and talked insistently and incessantly to an old school friend in Devon about
things that were not happening around her, about happy memories of other days when she and Hilda
had hitchhiked to Land's End. She was establishing an unbreakable alibi. No one would ever be
able to say she had been responsible for the destruction of the loathsome house that had broken
her father.

The scene that greeted Lennox Midden though greeted was hardly the most appropriate word on
his arrival at the Middenhall (there was so much traffic he'd had to walk over half a mile) was
not one to reassure a decent suburban solicitor who had woken only a few hours earlier expecting
to play in the Urnmouth Golf Club's Annual Competition. There was nothing of the smooth greens,
the broad fairways, and the bantering camaraderie in the clubhouse afterwards of men who believe
that hitting a small white ball into the distance gives life meaning. A great gulf was fixed, an
abyss, between that comfortable world and what was happening at the Middenhall. There were
snatches of green through the smoke where the lawns ran down to the lake, but they were not
smooth. Lumps of concrete blown from the crenellations and the ornate turrets of the roof lay
embedded in the turf, with the occasional dead or wounded police marksman lying poignantly among
them. Smashed trucks and police cars burnt vigorously on the drive. The vast verandah burnt too,
while the shell of the great building steamed and smoked hideously, flames suddenly erupting from
its depths like some volcano on heat. A German survivor of the final Russian assault at
Stalingrad, or an American soldier surveying the devastation unnecessarily and barbarously
inflicted on the Iraqi convoy north of Kuwait City, would have found the sights and smells
familiar.