‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked with a low quivering voice.
Miss Midden indicated the bathroom door. ‘Open it. And then stand aside,’ she ordered.
‘But . . . but . . . suppose . . .’ he began.
‘Don’t suppose anything. Just open that bloody door and stand aside,’ she said. ‘And if anyone is fool enough to try anything they are going to get two barrels.’ She said this loudly. ‘Now do it.’
Major MacPhee went forward and turned the door handle and shoved. The door flew open and he scuttled away into a corner of the bedroom and put his hands over his ears. Miss Midden had the gun up to her shoulder and was moving cautiously towards the bathroom. It was very small and now she saw the dirty feet protruding from the shower. She moved round to the side. Still keeping the shotgun to her shoulder she peered in. On the plastic tray of the shower, with the curtain crumpled beside him, was huddled a young man. His face was covered with dried blood, his chest was bloody too and water dripping from the shower had made a patch of clear skin with a runnel down past his navel. But he was alive. His eyes staring wildly at her from the mask of blood told her that. Alive and frightened, almost as frightened as the Major. All the men seemed to be frightened. But this one was wounded and his fear was understandable.
‘Who are you?’ she asked and lowered the gun. The question seemed to give the young man comfort. There might even have been hope in his eyes now. ‘I said who are you? What’s your name?’
‘Timothy,’ said Timothy Bright.
‘Can you stand up? If you can’t, just lie there and I’ll call an ambulance.’
The fear returned to Timothy Bright’s eyes but he got to his feet and stood naked in the shower.
‘Now come through here,’ she said. ‘Come through here and sit on the bed.’
Timothy Bright stepped out of the shower and did as he was told. In the light of the room Miss Midden could see him more clearly. He was quite a young man and well-built. She leant the shotgun against the corner of the Major’s bookcase. She had no fear of the man who called himself Timothy.
‘How did you get yourself in this state?’ she asked, and parted the matted hair to get a better look at the wound on his head.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Someone beat you up? Must have done.’ The scalp wound wasn’t so bad after all, and scalp wounds always bled profusely.
‘I don’t know.’
‘All right, lie down and let me have a look at your eyes.’ She looked into each one, turning his head towards the window. ‘And you don’t know how this happened?’
‘I don’t remember anything.’
‘Concussion. I’ll call the ambulance. You need to be in hospital. And I’ll call the police too.’
She pulled the duvet over him and was about to go through to the hall where the phone was when Timothy Bright stopped her. He had suddenly recalled what the piggy-chops man with the razor had said: ‘One more thing you got to remember. You go anywhere near the police, even go past a cop shop or think of picking up the phone, like your mobile, you won’t just get piggy-chops. You won’t have a fucking cock to fuck with again first. No balls, no prick. And that’s for starters. You’ll have piggy-chops days later. Slowly. Very slowly. Get that in your dumb fucking head now.’ And Timothy Bright had. Even now, when he had no idea what had happened to him or where he was or who this woman was who had forced him out of the little bathroom at the point of a double-barrelled shotgun and was saying he might have concussion and ought to be in hospital, that terrible threat was as vivid as it had been at the moment it was uttered. And the cut-throat razor had quivered where the man with slicked-back hair had thrown it so expertly.
‘No, not the police, not the police or an ambulance,’ he gasped. ‘I’m all right. I really am. All right.’
Miss Midden turned back to the bed and looked at him. ‘No ambulance? No police? And you say you’re all right? That’s one thing you’re not. Are you on the run or something?’ There was very little sympathy in her voice now. Timothy Bright shook his head.
From the corner the Major eyed him intently. He was a connoisseur of little sordid criminals and their fears. He couldn’t make this one out at all. Snob. Upper crust. Not your standard lager lout. This one had background. Even in his naked and filthy extremis this one carried a degree of assurance the Major would never begin to achieve. Envy intensified his insight, the social insight that had been his chief weapon in the battle to keep his head above the raging maelstrom of his own self-contempt. This one wasn’t all right, but what he was the Major couldn’t tell. Not queer either. He’d have spotted that straightaway. But he wasn’t all right.
Miss Midden stepped back into the room and picked up the gun she had left against the bookcase. Standing over the bed she asked, ‘Just what has been going on? You’d better tell me or I am going to phone for the police. Spit it out, sonny. What have you been up to?’
Timothy Bright fought to find a plausible explanation. He didn’t know what he had been up to. Perhaps he did have concussion. He couldn’t remember anything coherently. Something to do with going to Spain. Something about Uncle Benderby. He’d been on his bike. ‘I had a motorbike,’ he said, and tried to remember.
‘Go on. You had a motorbike. What happened to it?’
Timothy Bright had no idea.
‘How did you get in here then?’ Miss Midden demanded.
But again he had no answer for her.
‘You may not know but I’m going to find out. Me or the police. It’s up to you.’
Timothy Bright lay on the bed and whimpered.
‘Men,’ said Miss Midden. ‘Pathetic.’ She turned on her heel and walked out of the room. In the dining-room she looked at the mud on the floor and then at the open window. She went to the front door and out onto the gravel and looked at the flower-bed under the window. There were footmarks there, and some white petunias the Major had planted had been crushed by someone’s feet.
Miss Midden went back into the house and tried the sitting-room on the other side of the hall. There was nothing there to indicate anyone had been into it. Nothing in the hall either. She mounted the stairs and looked into every room. There was not a sign of any disturbance. And there were no clothes to be found anywhere. Her office was just as it had always been. And the kitchen. Not a trace of clothes. She went out into the back yard and walked slowly round the house, even looking into the byre and the shed but there were no jeans or shoes or shirt. Everything was just as she had left it. Mystified, she went back into the house and was about to go into the dining-room when she heard voices. She stopped. The Major was asking questions.
Miss Midden slipped into the room to listen.
16
This was a very different Major from the one she had left cowering in the corner. And what he was doing was most useful. He was talking sympathetically to the young man. MacPhee’s feelings, as shallow as they were squalid, were soon calmed and now that the immediate danger was over he was looking for some advantage from the situation.
‘You’ve been done over really badly so that’s why you can’t remember,’ he said, ‘but it’ll come back to you. I have had the same experience myself. Only two days ago I was cycling along minding my own business when this tractor came out without looking. I had to have six stitches and I couldn’t remember even having them. You probably came off your motorbike . . . I hope you were wearing a crash helmet. You’d have been killed otherwise. Something must have gone through it. Ever so dangerous, motorbikes are. What sort is yours?’
‘A Suzuki.’
‘Is that a very fast one?’
‘I’ve done a hundred and forty on her,’ Timothy said.
‘Oh, how could you? I mean that’s twice the speed limit. You were lucky the cops didn’t time you. Is that why you don’t want the police?’
Timothy Bright jumped at the excuse. ‘Yes. I don’t want to lose my licence.’
‘And what about your family? They’ll want t
o know you’re all right. Where do they live?’
‘They’ve got a place . . . I don’t know,’ said Timothy Bright.
Miss Midden tiptoed away. The Major was earning his keep after all. Naked and injured young men were his cup of tea. She needed a real cup herself and time to think what to do. Her first impulse to call the emergency services had evaporated. The young man Timothy wasn’t as badly hurt as he looked. He was talking quite clearly, was probably suffering from mild concussion and not the fractured skull she had first feared.
She had other reasons for not involving the authorities. She had never got on with the people in County Hall whose gainful employment consisted in finding reasons for being there. There had been a man and a woman from the Health Department who had calmly walked into the kitchen down at the Middenhall on the assumption the place was an old people’s home and in the altercation that followed had accused her of not having a licence to run a nursing home and having no authorization to . . . Miss Midden had chased them off the premises and had got her cousin Lennox, the solicitor, to issue a formal complaint to the County Council on the grounds of trespass. Not that that had deterred the officials. A man from the Fire Department had arrived shortly afterwards, this time with an official document declaring his right to inspect the ‘Middenhall Guest House or Hotel’ to ensure that it had the requisite fire escapes and internal fire doors. Miss Midden had disabused him of the notion that it was anything more than a private house and had abused him personally in the process. He had gone away with a good many fleas in his ear and Lennox Midden had had to write another letter. Another time the Twixt and Tween Water Board, claiming jurisdiction over all water in the county, in particular the stream that fed the artificial lake Black Midden had constructed, had sent inspectors to check that no noxious substances were flowing from it down to the reservoir. The only noxious substance they had encountered had been Miss Midden herself. Again Lennox had been forced to point out that the lake had been constructed in 1905 and that any noxious chemicals entering the reservoir were almost certainly coming from the slurry of a dairy farmer six miles away on the Lampeter Road.
Altogether Miss Midden had had interfering busybodies in official positions up to the eyeballs. And when it came to the police her feelings were incandescent. They had chased old Buffalo across the lawn and had held him in the cells at Stagstead overnight after roughing him up and accusing him of drunken driving. And that damned Chief Constable had tried to fence the common land known as Folly Moss for his own private use. She had fought him over the issue and won, just as she had won in court over Buffalo Midden. She’d won and humiliated the corrupt brute. He’d be only too delighted to have his men in the house asking questions and poking their noses into her private affairs. They’d want to know where the Major had got his injuries and . . . No, the last people she wanted to bring in were the police. And in any case the young man clearly didn’t want them anywhere near him. He had been terrified by the prospect of her calling them. Presumably he was some sort of criminal, or a junkie. Miss Midden sat at the kitchen table and poured herself another cup of tea.
She was still sitting there an hour later when the Major reappeared with the news that Timothy Bright had cleaned himself up in the bathroom and said he was hungry and could he have something to drink. Miss Midden turned an angry eye on him and said, ‘Water.’ She got up and opened the Aga and got out some eggs to make an omelette. She was feeling hungry herself and the Major definitely needed food. He looked ghastly and he deserved to. And now it appeared he was upset because the young man had broken an eau-de-Cologne bottle in his washbasin and had torn the shower curtain. Pathetic. But he had managed to wheedle some more information out of the young man. ‘He’s some sort of financier in the City. He doesn’t remember where exactly.’
‘Financier? Financier, my foot!’ said Miss Midden, whose ideas were distinctly old-fashioned and who imagined financiers to be middle-aged men in dark pinstriped suits.
‘A yuppie sort,’ the Major went on. ‘They sit in front of computer screens and telephone people. You must have seen them on TV.’
It was a silly thing to say. Miss Midden didn’t watch television, didn’t have one in the house and wouldn’t allow the Major to have one in his room. ‘If you want to watch that stuff, you can go down to the hell-hole and watch it with them,’ she had said each time he had asked to have a set in his room. ‘The exercise will do you good.’
‘Why’s he so scared of the police?’ she asked now. ‘Did you find that out too?’
‘He’s terrified because someone has threatened to do something horrible to him if he goes anywhere near them.’
‘Near the police?’
The Major nodded.
‘So he’s involved in something shady. Charming. Now I’ve got two of you in the house. What I want to know is how he got here in the first place.’
‘He doesn’t know himself. He has a motorbike. A very fast one. Perhaps he crashed it and –’
‘And then takes all his clothes off and climbs in through the window and . . .’ Miss Midden stopped. She had just remembered that she had put the chain on before leaving for the weekend and when she had gone out just now the door had been partly open but the chain was still on the hook. The young lout hadn’t got into the house on his own. And why had he gone to sleep under the Major’s bed? Somebody had brought him, and that someone had stepped on the flower-bed to open the window. Finally that person had known she had gone away for the weekend. Her thoughts, as she broke the eggs into the bowl and began to beat them, focused on the people down at the Middenhall. No one else knew she had gone away to the Solway Firth. Come to that, no one even at the Middenhall knew she had returned. Miss Midden beat the eggs with the whisk in a new frenzy.
*
Sir Arnold Gonders’ thoughts followed a parallel course, and had rather more in common with the frenziedly whisked eggs. He woke from his sleep only partly refreshed. If anything his total exhaustion earlier had to some extent deadened his perception of the danger he was in. Now the full force of it hit him. He might well have murdered . . . surely manslaughter was a justified plea. No, it wasn’t. Not in his case. He was the Chief Constable, the supreme keeper of law and order in Twixt and Tween and the media would have a field day tearing him to pieces. Oh yes, he had cultivated them in the past, some of them at any rate, the commercial TV people in particular, to get his own back on the Panorama shits at the BBC who’d given him and the lads a hard time over that murdering rapist who had done a tidy stretch of a life sentence before it was found his sperm didn’t match that found in his victims. But the Chief Constable had been around long enough to know that there was no loyalty in the media and that the stab in the back was established practice. He thought of all the papers who’d go to town on him too, the Guardian and the Independent, God rot them, then the Daily Telegraph with that bloody tough editor. Even The Times would join in. As for the Mirror and the Sun . . . It didn’t bear thinking about.
As he shaved, as he tried to eat breakfast, as he dragged Genscher, now in a state of total funk, to the Land Rover, as he drove down across the dam to Six Lanes End and along the motorway to Tween, the Chief Constable’s thoughts raced. He’d have the tyres on the Land Rover changed to make certain that no one could trace any remnant of mud from Miss Midden’s back yard to them. He might have left the imprint of the tyres on the old drove road. Christ, why hadn’t he thought of all these things the night before? In the back the Rottweiler lurched and bounced and tried to keep away from the bloodstained sheets and the parcel tape in the corner. Sir Arnold got rid of them separately in two bins several miles apart, the tape in the first and the soiled sheets in the second.
After that he felt slightly better. He began to think more constructively. He’d wait until the next day to go into the office. He had a perfectly good excuse not to go in today. He had to keep out of the way of those media hounds who wanted to interview him about the DPP’s decision. And he had a hangover to beat a
ll hangovers. Harry Hodge, his deputy, would cover for him. In the meantime he’d start his own investigation to discover who had set him up by using that bloody Bea cow. It had occurred to him that the bastard had to be someone who knew his movements and had known he wasn’t going to be at the Old Boathouse that night. That was an important discovery.
The Chief Constable considered it and came to no very clear conclusion except that his return must have screwed up the plan somehow just as Miss Midden’s return hadn’t done him any good either. It was as he was driving along the Parson’s Road that another idea occurred to him. He pulled up at a roadside telephone and checked there was no one anywhere about. Then he dialled the Stagstead Police Station. When the duty officer answered, the Chief Constable muffled his voice with his hand and spoke in a high disguised voice. It was a short message, short and to the point, and he repeated it only once before putting the phone down and hurrying on. Miss Midden was going to get another nasty surprise.
*
In fact it was the Chief Constable who would have been very nastily surprised if he could have heard the conversation that had taken place in his house in Sweep’s Place, Tween, between Auntie Bea and Lady Vy when they got back that morning shortly before lunch.
‘My darling, if I’d only known,’ said Bea, ‘if I’d known what he was putting you through, I would never have allowed it.’
‘I didn’t know what to do,’ said Vy tearfully, ‘I felt so alone. He told me he’d see all the ghastly gutter papers got the story if I told anyone. I couldn’t bear to think of the scandal. And there was a young man in the bed. I couldn’t deny that.’