The Midden (9 page)

'That ought to keep the bastard quiet for a bit,' said Sir Arnold only to have his hopes
dashed as Timothy Bright shifted on the floor and groaned. For a moment the Chief Constable
hesitated. Then he handed Lady Vy the torch and turned to the steps.

'Just see he doesn't move,' he said and hurried up to the kitchen. He returned with a plastic
basting syringe, a measuring glass, and a bottle of whisky.

'Oh my God, what are you going to do now?'

'Shut up,' said the Chief Constable. 'And hold that torch steady. I don't want to get the
measures wrong.'

'What's that syringe thing for?' asked Lady Vy.

'Well, it's not for basting chickens,' said Sir Arnold. 'It's for giving the bastard something
to keep him quiet. Like two ounces of Scotch every two hours with a couple of your Valiums and
some of those pink pills you take at night. That way the bugger won't know where he is or has
been or what time of day it is.'

Lady Vy looked at the bundle on the cellar floor and doubted if the whisky was necessary. The
other sedatives certainly weren't. 'Give him those pills and he won't know anything ever again,'
she said, 'and I don't think you ought to pump Scotch into him with that thing. He'll almost
certainly choke to death.'

'I'm not going to pump it in. Dribble it, more likely. OK?'

But Lady Vy was staring at him. 'You're mad. Absolutely raving. You propose to dribble two
ounces of whisky mixed with Valium...Dear God.'

'No,' said the Chief Constable firmly. 'And at this moment in time I don't want to be told.
Now then, hold this thing.' He held the plastic syringe up.

'I am not holding anything,' said Lady Vy just as firmly. 'You can do what you like but I am
not going to be an accessory to murder.'

'Oh yes you are,' said the Chief Constable with a terrible look on his face. Lady Vy held the
syringe.

Five minutes later Timothy Bright had successfully taken his first dose of Valium and whisky.
Lady Vy's pink anti-depressants hadn't been added to this lethal brew after all.

"That should guarantee he doesn't wake up for a bit,' said Sir Arnold as they climbed the
cellar steps. 'Keep him unconscious until I've had a chance to come up with something.'

He locked the cellar door.

For the rest of the night he tried to sleep on the couch in his study. As he tossed between
brief sleep and appalled wakefulness, he searched his memory for a particularly vindictive
villain who could have set this trap up. There were just too many criminals with a grudge against
him. And how come the press gang hadn't turned up on the doorstep? Presumably because he'd called
the Quick Response Squad off. The squad's arrival would have been the excuse for a massive
publicity invasion. But they needed the QRS boys to lead them to the Old Boathouse. Sir Arnold
was glad it was so isolated. All the same, something was fucking weird. He'd phone around in the
morning to see if anyone had been tipped off for a spectacular happening. No, he wouldn't.
Silence, absolute, complete and total silence was always the best response. Silence, and with
God's help he would find a way out of this nightmare. Just so long as the bastard didn't die.

Between clean sheets in the big bedroom upstairs Lady Vy cursed herself for a fool. The water
from the punctured hot-water tank had crept under the door of the bathroom and was soaking
through the carpet into the floor. She should have listened to Daddy all those years ago. He had
always said you had to be a sadistic cretin to be a successful policeman, and he'd been spot
on.

At Pud End Henry Gould woke with the horrid sensation that he had done something terrible. It
took him a moment or two to remember what it was, and when he did he was genuinely worried. 'Oh
Lord,' he muttered as he got up hurriedly, 'what an asinine trick to pull' When he went
downstairs it was to find his uncle sitting over his breakfast coffee in the old farm kitchen
with the radio beside him. He was looking particularly cheerful for a man who had almost
certainly just lost a nephew. Henry had no doubt about that. In the sober light of the morning he
felt sure his cousin must have been killed. No one stoked to the synapses with bufo sonoro could
possible ride an enormously powerful motorbike for any distance and live. Toad was the most
powerful mind-bender.

'No need to look so gloomy,' Victor told him. 'I've been listening to the local radio since
six but they've made no mention of any accident involving a motorcycle, and they always do to
encourage the others. Timothy is probably sleeping it off in some hedgerow. That sort always have
the devil on their side.'

'I certainly hope so. Goodness only knows what that Toad stuff is. From the way it worked I'm
surprised he could get on the bike, let alone ride the thing.'

But it was later in the morning when Victor Gould went up to air the spare room that he
realized Timothy Bright had left a brown paper package and a large briefcase. He carried them
through to the cupboard under the stairs and deposited them there with the thought that Timothy
would certainly be returning to claim them. It was a fairly dreadful thought but at least he was
temporarily absent.

Timothy Bright would have shared Henry's consternation had he been in any condition to. As it
was he slept on happily unconscious of his situation and with the remains of the Toad doing new
things to his neurons now that it had been freshened up with Valium and whisky. He was
fortunately unaware that he was strapped up inside two bloodstained sheets and a pillow case
wedged into a distant corner of the Old Boathouse cellar, and that he himself looked very much
like one of the sacks of coal that had once occupied a space there.

Above his head and out in the garden the guests at the Gonders drinks party wandered about
clutching glasses of a rather acid white wine that had been sold by Ernest Lamming to Sir Arnold
as 'a first-rate little Vouvray' which had a certain accuracy about it though the Chief Constable
now wished he hadn't bought quite so much of the stuff. In particular he wasn't feeling at all
like drinking anything very much himself. He'd had three hours disrupted sleep and had woken with
the feeling that he had not only drunk far too much but that he must have been hallucinating
during the night. What appeared to have happened, namely that he had probably murdered some
bastard who had been sleeping with Vy, couldn't possibly have been the case. In fact all the
events of the night had such a nightmarish quality about them that he would willingly have spent
the entire day in solitude trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Instead he was forced
to adopt a bonhomie he didn't in the least feel. Anyway he wasn't drinking that battery-acid
Vouvray. He'd stick to vodka and tonic and hope it helped his head.

It was an indication of the remarkable social changes that had taken place in the eighties
that the guests were such a very unmixed bunch. In earlier days there would have seemed something
distinctly suspect about a Chief Constable who had quite so many friends in the property
development and financial worlds and so very few among what had once been known as the gentry.
This was particularly true in Twixt and Tween. The county had once been famous for the great
industries and shipyards of Tween and the grouse moors and huge estates of the great landowners
of Twixt. At the Gonders party there were none of the old ironmasters, and the only industries
represented were service ones. None of the landowners would have mixed at all happily with the
guests at the Old Boathouse. Then again there were no trade unionists. Sir Arnold Gonders had
learnt the political catechism of Thatcherism very well indeed: only money mattered and
preferably the newest money that talked about little else and cared for nothing. There were a
great many people from the TV and showbiz world. 'Communication is the real art of a Chief
Constable,' Sir Arnold had once pontificated. 'We must keep the people on our side.' It was a
revealing comment suggesting that society was irremediably divided.

Certainly in the Twixt and Tween Constabulary area if people did not know which side Sir
Arnold Gonders was on, a glance at the guest list would have given them some insight. Len Bload
of Bload and Babshott, Public Relations and Financial Consultants to the County Council, was
there with his wife, Mercia, the ex-model and masseuse who had risen to a directorship of B and
B. Len Bload always addressed the Chief Constable as 'My boy,' and obviously looked on Sir Arnold
as an active member of his team. 'We've all got to look after one another is the way I look at
it, my boy. We don't who will? Tell me that,' Len Bload had said more times than Lady Vy could
bear to recall. She also disliked women who talked quite so openly about hand sex as Mercia
Bload. Then there were the Sents. If she disliked the Bloads, she positively detested the Sents.
Harry Sent was a dealer. 'Don't ask me in what. Everything. You name it, I got it. Some place I
got to got it. You know my motto? "I'll have it Sent." Get it? I'll have it. Sent. Great logo I
got out of Lennie for free. You know why?' Lady Vy certainly didn't want to but noblesse was
supposed to oblige. 'Because one time I'm screwing Heaven I got to think of Mercia to get it up
at all. Ain't that so, Heaven?' Mrs Sent smiled sourly and nodded. 'I fuck better with that photo
of Mercia in a bikini on the pillow, right?' A shadow of something approaching pain crossed Olga
Sent's face. Lady Vy would have sympathized with her the misery of being called 'Heaven' by a man
as gross as Harry Sent would have broken a weaker woman if she had not once heard Mrs Sent
describe her as 'that Gonders cow. So snobbish and no money with it. Drop dead is what I wish for
her.' Lady Vy had complained to Sir Arnold at the time about the remark but all he'd said was,
'Got to keep in with the locals, you know.' Which was a bit rich, considering old Sent claimed to
have escaped from Poland to fight with the Free Polish Army. And someone had once accurately
described Olga as looking like a concentration-camp guard who should have been hanged for Crimes
against Humanity.

On the other hand there were a great many people in the county who had come only once to the
Chief Constable's parties, and had found reasons never to come to another. Sir Percival
Knottland, the Lord Lieutenant, was one such absentee. He still hadn't got over meeting at a
Gonders party a man who had advised him to invest in a particular pizza chain 'because there's a
lot more than cheese and anchovies involved, you know what I mean.' The Lord Lieutenant thought
he did and had complained to the Chief Constable, but Sir Arnold had assured him confidentially
that the fellow was all right. 'To be frank, he is one of our top grasses. Couldn't do without
him. Got to keep him sweet.'

'But he advised me to invest in Pietissima Pizza Parlours,' said the Lord Lieutenant.
'Something about there being icing on the cake. Did I know what he meant? It sounded most
suspicious to me. Shouldn't you be investigating this pizza company very carefully?'

The Chief Constable had taken his arm confidentially. 'Between ourselves, I have. Solid
investment as far as I can tell. I put ten thousand in myself. Should double your money in six
months.'

'And you really don't think these Pietissima Parlours are being used to distribute drugs?' the
Lord Lieutenant asked.

'Good gracious, I hope not. Still, I can't guarantee it. Everybody's into that game nowadays.
I'll ask my drug lads, but I shouldn't worry. Money is money, after all.'

The Lord Lieutenant had been so appalled that he had written to the Prime Minister only to get
an extremely brusque letter back telling him in effect to stick to his role as Lord Lieutenant a
role which, it was implied, was entirely ceremonial and redundant and leave the work of policing
the community to the professionals like Sir Arnold Gonders who was doing such an excellent job
etc. The Lord Lieutenant had taken the advice and had steered well clear of the Chief Constable
ever since.

So had Judge Julius Foment, whose faith in the British police had been shattered by the
discovery that he had been relying on the evidence of detectives in Twixt and Tween to sentence
perfectly innocent individuals to long terms of imprisonment for crimes the police knew perfectly
well they could not possibly have committed. As a child refugee from Nazi persecution the Judge
had been horrified by the change that had come over the British police. He had even thought of
selling his own house on the far side of the reservoir when the Gonderses moved into the
boathouse. He hadn't, but he did not even reply to their invitations.

There were other people who stayed away. They were the genuine locals, the farmers and
ordinary people in the villages round about who could be of no advantage to the Gonderses or
their guests but belonged to an older and more indigenous tradition. Of these the most
antipathetic to the human flotsam on the Gonderses' lawn that Sunday were the Middens, Marjorie
Midden at the Middenhall and her brother, Christopher, who farmed thirty miles away at
Strutton.

From the first Sir Arnold had found himself up against Miss Midden. She lived in an old
farmhouse behind the rambling Victorian house known as the Middenhall where she had lodgers. She
had opposed him over the fencing of the common land known as Folly Moss on the grounds that it
had provided free grazing for the villagers of Great Pockrington for a thousand years. Sir
Arnold's argument that there was only one family living at Pockrington now and that the man
worked in the brickyards at Torthal and had no interest in grazing anything on Folly Moss was met
by Miss Midden's retort that there had once been two hundred families at Pockrington and the
state of the world being what it was who was to say there might not be as many families there in
the future.

'Jimmy Hall may mean very little to the Chief Constable,' she had said at a public meeting,
'but he represents the rights of the common man to the common land. Rights have to be fought for
and are not going to be set aside while I'm around.'