The Midden (8 page)

'Has something dreadful happened?' she enquired, at the same time studying his anatomy with
only slight interest and considerable disgust. 'I thought I heard shots and then all those
incredible lights came on and that dreary siren. Can't you switch it off?'

'No,' said the Chief Constable. 'And nothing serious has happened.'

'Well, I certainly can,' said Auntie Bea. Behind her in the study the phone had begun to ring.
For a moment they grappled in the doorway and then the Chief Constable broke loose and hurried to
the study. In the kitchen Bea found the mains switch and the siren wailed down. She came back
with the housekeeper and stood in the study doorway. The Chief Constable had answered the
phone.

'This is Harry Hodge, the Deputy Chief Constable here,' said a strangely controlled voice.

'I know that. I know exactly who it is,' Sir Arnold yelled back.

'Good, good,' said the voice, still exercising an unnerving calm. 'Are you all right? I
repeat, are you all right? Take your time replying.'

Sir Arnold didn't. It was bad enough standing in the study bollock naked with a middle-aged
woman in a startling kimono staring at him and at the blood on the floor...'Of course I'm fucking
well all right. The button got pressed accidentally is all.'

'Good, very good,' said the Deputy Chief Constable, maintaining his cool. 'I quite understand.
Now are you all right? I repeat, are you all '

'Listen, Hodge, what do you mean you understand? I'm standing here starkers and you...' Here
he turned on Auntie Bea. 'Fuck off, for Chrissake.'

'Try and keep calm,' said the wretched Hodge in the same nerveless tone. 'Everything is under
control. Now then. Are you all right? I repeat '

'You ask me again if I'm all right, Hodge, and so help me God I'll break your fucking neck.
I've told you I don't know how many times I'm all right. How many more times have I got to tell
you?'

Over the line he could hear the Deputy Chief Constable asking more or less the same question.
Sir Arnold remembered the drill. 'Hodge,' he said, with a new controlled calm that was as
peculiar in its own way as that of his Deputy, 'Hodge, I am all right. I repeat, I am all right.
Repeat. I am all right.'

'Well, that's all right then,' said Hodge almost regretfully. 'It was a false alarm then?
Shall I call off the QRS lads?'

'The who?' The past few minutes had slowed the Chief Constable still further.

'The Quick Response Squad,' Hodge said, a new doubt creeping back into his voice.

'Those swine?' yelled the Chief Constable. 'Of course call them off at once. Why do you think
I phoned you?'

'Phone me, sir? Phoned me? I don't want to question your judgement at a time like this but in
actual fact I phoned you. Are you sure you are quite all right?'

The Chief Constable made a supreme effort. 'Hodge, please believe me when I say I am perfectly
all right, all right, all right. Got it? I am entirely all right and I want to get back to
bed.'

'If you say so, sir. All the same, it seems a pity not to take the opportunity to use this as
a training exercise.'

'No. Repeat, no. Repeat, no, on no account. Over and fucking out.' And putting the phone down
the Chief Constable turned back to even more immediate problems.

The first problem was to get back into the bedroom and have it out with Vy. She was to blame
for what had happened. Any reasonable husband coming home and finding some filthy young gigolo in
bed with his wife would have acted in a similarly violent manner. In a way what he had done had
been rather complimentary to her and showed the right amount of jealousy. There was certainly no
need for her to have behaved in that irrational way with the gun. He might have been killed and
then where would she have been? On the other hand he had no intention of going back into the
bedroom until she'd promised not to do anything dangerous again. Outside the bedroom door he
stopped. 'Darling, darling,' he called softly. 'It's me. You know. Me. Pooh Bear and Wiggly Toes
and...'

Inside the bedroom Lady Vy had found her contact lenses and the nature of her mistake. 'Oh,
for God's sake, not at a time like this. Not with '

Sir Arnold hurled himself through the door. Gun or no gun, he had to stop her before she said
any more. 'Hush,' he yelled in what he supposed was a whisper. And then, more for the benefit of
the two women downstairs than for Lady Vy herself. 'Now, dear, you mustn't blame yourself. We all
make mistakes.'

'Blame myself? Blame myself? I wake up to find you beating someone to death with a bed lamp
and '

'No, dear, no, that's not quite true,' he said in a whisper that was practically a bellow.
Then, sotto voce, 'Walls have ears, for Chrissake.'

Lady Vy looked at him dementedly. 'Walls have ears? You stand there in the altogether and tell
me in some godawful whisper that walls have ears? Are you clean off your trolley?'

Sir Arnold signalled frantically towards the door. 'We don't need any witnesses,' he said in a
conversational tone.

'You may not,' said Lady Vy. 'In fact I'm sure you don't, but as far as I'm concerned '

Sir Arnold crossed to the bed and drew back the sheet that was covering Timothy Bright's naked
body. 'Shut up and listen to me,' he hissed. 'I come home and find you tucked up with this. With
some foul toyboy you've been having it off with in my fucking bed and the sod has the gall to
sleep here and snore '

He stopped and stared down at Timothy's scarred knees, hands and arms, not to mention a
seriously bruised chest and mangled face, and revised his opinion of Vy. If passionate love was
what the poor devil and Vy had been making, he was exceedingly glad he had never succeeded in
arousing her sexually to such extraordinary lengths. For a fraction of a second it occurred to
him that his wife had been seeing too many Dracula movies. Or cannibal ones. Only the lack of
blood on her face-cream convinced him otherwise. He preferred not to look at the brute's head.
The scalp wound was still leaking blood onto the pillow. In any case Lady Vy had his attention
now.

'What do you mean "toyboy" and "having it off", you vile creature?' she spat with a hauteur
that was almost genuine. 'Do you think I would dream of sleeping with a...a callow youth, a mere
child?'

Sir Arnold looked back at the bloke on the bed. It had never occurred to him that his wife
could think of someone in his late twenties as a mere child. Or callow, whatever that meant. It
didn't seem natural, somehow. He tried to get back to the issue. 'What do you expect me to think?
If you came home unexpectedly at whatever hour it was in the middle of the night and found a
naked girl in bed with me, what would you think?'

'I'd know perfectly well you hadn't been having normal sex with her,' Lady Vy hurled back at
him. 'I suppose fellatio might do something for you but you can count me out. It's too late in my
life for that sort of thing.'

Sir Arnold ignored this obvious attempt to sidetrack him. 'All right,' he demanded. 'Who is
he? Just tell me who he is.'

'Who he is?'

'I think I've got a right to know that much.'

'You're asking me...? I don't know.'

'You don't know. You must know. I mean...' Sir Arnold goggled at her. 'I mean you don't have
some little shit in bed with you without finding out who he is. It's...it's...'

'If you really must know I thought it was you,' said Lady Vy with revived hauteur.

The Chief Constable gaped at her open-mouthed. 'Me? One moment you say I can't get it up
without a mouth job and the next I'm the blighter who has just fucked you rigid.'

For a moment Lady Vy looked as though she might go for the revolver again. 'I keep telling
you,' she shouted, 'nobody did anything. I didn't even know he was there.'

'You must have known. People don't just climb into bed with you and you don't know.'

'All right, I suppose I was vaguely aware of someone getting into the bed but naturally I
thought it was you. I mean he stank of dog and booze. How the hell was I to know it was someone
else?'

Sir Arnold tried to draw himself up. 'I do not stink of dog and booze when I come to bed.'

'Could have fooled me,' said Lady Vy. 'Come to think of it, it did.' She groped over the side
of the bed for the gin bottle. Sir Arnold grabbed it from her and swigged. 'And now,' she
continued when she'd got it back, 'now you've gone and murdered him.'

'Not murdered, for God's sake,' he said, 'manslaughter. Quite different. In cases of
manslaughter judges frequently '

Lady Vy smiled horribly. 'Arnie dear,' she said with a degree of malice that had been
fermenting for years, 'it doesn't seem to have got through to the thing you call your brain that
you are finished, finito, done for and all washed up. Your career is over. All those lovely
directorships with big salaries for favours received, all those nice jobs the good old boys like
Len Bload were going to hand you for running the Property Protection Service you call your
constabulary, all gone bye-bye now. You're up above the Plimsoll line in excreta, as Daddy used
to put it. And it doesn't matter what some senile old judge, hand-picked by the DPP to keep you
out of prison, says. You're all washed up, baby.'

Sir Arnold Gonders heard her only subliminally, and in any case he didn't need telling. There
were some crimes even a Chief Constable couldn't commit with anything approaching impunity, and
one of them had to be battering a young man to death with a blunt instrument in his own bed. To
make matters worse he couldn't look to the ex-prime minister for help. She wasn't in power any
longer.

He took Timothy Bright's wrist and felt for the pulse. It was, all things considered,
surprisingly strong. The next moment he was rummaging in the wardrobe for a torch.

'What are you going to do now?' Lady Vy demanded as he shone the light into one of Timothy's
eyeballs and looked at his iris.

'Drugged,' he said finally. 'Drugged to the top of his skull.'

'Perhaps,' said Lady Vy, turning a bit weepy now. 'But look what you've done to the top of his
skull.'

Sir Arnold preferred not to. 'Take a urine test off this one and it would burn a hole in the
bottle,' he said.

'Are you sure? I mean it seems so unlikely.'

The Chief Constable put the torch down and turned on her. 'Unlikely? Unlikely? Anything more
unlikely than coming home to...Never mind. Look at his knees, look at his hands. What do they
tell you?'

'He seems rather well...well-proportioned now that you come to mention it.'

'Fuck his proportions,' snarled the Chief Constable. 'The skin has been scraped off them. The
bugger's been dragged along the ground. And where are his clothes?' He looked round the room and
then, putting on a dressing-gown, went downstairs.

There were no clothes to be found. By the time he got back to the bedroom the Chief Constable
knew what had happened and was trying to come to terms with the prospect before him. 'This is a
setup, that's what it is. I'm being framed. Those press bastards will arrive any minute now and
'

'Oh God, we've invited people over for drinks at twelve,' Lady Vy interrupted, her social
priorities coming to the fore. 'With that MP you're so friendly with. Do you think...'

The Chief Constable stared into another abyss. 'We've got to move quickly,' he said. 'This
bastard isn't going to be here when they come. He's going down to the boiler-room.'

It was Lady Vy's turn to stare into hell. 'But it's oil-fired. You can't possibly dispose of
him in the boiler. How can you think of such things?'

'I didn't, for Chrissake. I'm not going to burn him. I'm going to put him on ice until the
heat's off, that's all.' And leaving his wife trying to cope with these weird contradictions, Sir
Arnold hurried downstairs again. When he returned he had some parcel tape and two plastic bin
liners.

'What are you going to do?' Lady Vy asked. Sir Arnold left the room again and this time
rummaged in the bathroom. He returned with a length of Elastoplast. Lady Vy goggled at him.
'What...What are you '

'Shut up and make yourself useful,' he snapped. 'We're going to tie this bastard up so tightly
he won't know where the hell he's been.'

'My dear Arnold, you don't really think I'm going to assist you in this horrible scheme.'

The Chief Constable stopped trying to get Timothy's legs into a bin liner and straightened up.
'Listen to me,' he said with a terrible intensity. 'I don't want to hear any more of your "dear
Arnold" toffee-nosed crap. And you'd better get this straight. If I go down the social sewer
because of this, don't think you're going to stay clean, because you aren't. This time you're
going to dirty your hands.'

Lady Vy tried to draw herself up. 'Well, really. Anyone would think I had something to do with
his being here.'

'Seems a reasonable assumption. And I'll fill it out for you. You and your Auntie Bea are into
S and M. Pick him up some place he looks as if he might come from Harrogate and you fill him with
intravenous crack or Sweetie B gives him a spinal tap of Columbian ice with that hypodermic of
hers and you drag him here and have some fun. Get the picture?'

Lady Vy was beginning to. 'You'd never dare. You'd never dare do anything...I mean Daddy '

'Try me,' said Sir Arnold. 'Just try me. And your bloody Daddy is going to like his picture in
the fucking Sun with a headline EARL'S DAUGHTER IN LESBIAN LOVE TRAP and all about you and the
butch-dyke with her heroin habit and

'But Bea's an aromatherapist and stress counsellor. She's '

'Just made for the Sun and the News of the World, she is. And the aroma she's going to be
giving off unless you start helping is going to make this dogshit smell like Chanel No. 5. Now
then, hold this bloody bag open while I get his legs in.'

But it was obvious that Timothy Bright was too large and intractable for the garbage bag. In
the end they dragged the sheets off the bed and rolled him up in them. Sir Arnold picked up the
parcel tape and set to work with such thoroughness that the thing they dragged with immense
difficulty down to the cellar looked like a mummified body with holes for its nose. Finally they
dropped Timothy into the very darkest corner of the cellar beyond the old stone wine racks.