The Midden

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 '