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.