'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.'
Sir Arnold had tried to argue that he only wanted to put barbed wire up to keep other people's sheep out and that Jimmy Hall could use the land if he wanted to. It was no good. Miss Midden had answered that barbed wire too often defined the boundaries of liberty and set unwarranted limits on people's free movement. The common land had remained unfenced.
There were other grievances. One of his patrol cars had chased a vehicle that was obviously being driven by a drunk down the drive into the Middenhall estate. An elderly man who was seen stumbling across the lawn was pinioned to the ground and handcuffed. Anywhere else in the Twixt and Tween area that sort of police action would have roused no comment. On several housing estates on the outskirts of Tween it might just have provided the local youths with an excuse for a punch-up with the cops, but that was to be expected. What came as an unnerving shock to the Chief Constable was for a supposedly law-abiding member of the middle classes to use the law to make a mockery of two of his officers in court when the whole thing could have been avoided by a quiet word with him.
But Miss Midden hadn't done that. Instead she had pursued a vendetta with the two constables most unreasonably. After all, they had merely taken the supposed driver back to the Stagstead Police Station when he had refused a breath-test (and had already assaulted them both in pursuance of their duty) and the police doctor had taken a blood sample which had clearly shown that the defendant's blood alcohol level was way over the limit. As a result the defendant, Mr Armitage Midden, an elderly white hunter who had recently returned from Kenya where he had been known as 'Buffalo' Midden, had been charged with dangerous driving, driving with a faulty rear light, assaulting two police officers, and drunken driving. Bail had been granted the next day when the said Mr Midden had spent a salutarily uncomfortable night in the cells and had been driven back to the Middenhall by Miss Midden herself. She had been thoroughly unpleasant to all the officers in the Stagstead police station.
But it was only when the case came to court that the police learnt the defendant was (a) without a licence to drive, (b) had such an aversion to motor cars that he had once walked from Cape Town to Cairo, and finally (c) had earned his formidable reputation as a superb shot by being a lifelong teetotaller. In short, it had been an excruciatingly embarrassing case for the Chief Constable, the two arresting officers, and the police surgeon, and had done nothing to enhance the reputation of the Twixt and Tween Constabulary. Miss Midden had gone to her cousin, Lennox, and had insisted he brief an extremely sardonic and experienced barrister from London. And quite clearly she had instructed him to put the police conduct in the most protracted and worst possible light. The barrister's cross-examination of the police witnesses had been particularly painful for the Chief Constable, who had inadvisedly allowed himself to be called to give evidence in support of his own constables and the Twixt and Tween Constabulary. Looking back on the case Sir Arnold considered he had been deliberately inveigled into appearing and made to look an idiot and worse. He had testified to the police surgeon's absolute probity before the case was stopped by the judge. And finally there had been Buffalo Midden's splendid war record he had been awarded the DSO with bar and the MC for conspicuous bravery in Burma. In the public gallery Miss Midden had enjoyed her triumph. The Chief Constable had been careful not to look at her but he could imagine her feelings. They'd been the very opposite of his.
But now he was not concerned with Miss Midden's arrogance. In the middle of the party his thoughts kept returning to the fellow in the cellar. He was particularly irritated and alarmed by Ernest Lamming who kept insisting that Sir Arnold had a splendid selection of wine and who wanted to see it was being kept in the proper conditions.
'I mean I don't sell plonk. Only the genuine article and there's some lovely stuff you got like that '56 Bergerac and the '47 Fitou. That's worth a bob or two now if you've been looking after it properly. I mean I want to see you got those bottles on their sides and all that. If you've got them standing up, the corks will dry out and your investment is down the plughole.'
'Actually I moved it back to the Sweep's Place house,' Sir Arnold told him. 'I didn't like to leave valuable wine like that out here with the house being empty all week.'
'But you haven't even got a cellar there,' said Lamming. 'Out here was just right for it. The cellar here was specially built to keep the champagne and suchlike the waterworks millionaires drank when they came out on a spree at the end of the last century.'
Sir Arnold had been saved by the intervention of one of the new waterworks millionaires, Ralph Pulborough, whose salary had just been increased by 98 per cent while water charges had gone up 50 per cent.
'Now look here, Ernest, fair dos and all that. I don't want to hear any more snide remarks about water rates and so on,' he said,' and I object to being called a waterworks millionaire. I was a millionaire long before I went into water, and you know it. If you want efficiency you have to pay for it. That's the law of the market. It's the same with that plonk you sell.'
'I do not sell plonk,' Lamming retorted angrily. 'You won't find a better bottle of Blue Nun this side of Berlin than what I sell. And your water's nothing to write home about. There was a dead sheep floating out there by the dam when I drove over just now. And the tap water is so bad we've had to install a reverse osmosis diaphragm for Ruby to have a clean bath.'
'My dears, a reverse osmosis diaphragm,' minced Pulborough, 'how very appropriate for her. Did it hurt very much at first? I simply must ask her.'
Sir Arnold hurried out of earshot and went in search of Sammy Bathon, the TV interviewer and entrepreneur, who had recently established a chain of betting shops with the help of the Government's Aid to Industry Scheme. Sammy Bathon was a chap with his ear close to the ground and, if anything had been going the rounds about a Press coup that failed last night, he'd be the one to know.
He found him discussing the advantages of cryogenics with the Rev. Herbert Bentwhistle. 'Sure, sure, Father, I'm not knocking the Holy Book but where does it say anything about leaving things to chance? So I have eternal life without liquid nitrogen by being a good boy. I prefer my way. Bigger chance for Sammy with the nitrogen maybe.' He winked at Sir Arnold but the eye behind it did not suggest any secret information about the intruder.
It was a remark he caught as he passed the group round Egeworth, the MP for West Twixt, that interested the Chief Constable most. 'She's a confounded nuisance, Miss Midden is,' Egeworth was saying. 'Spends half her life preventing developments that would serve the community. I wish to God someone would shut her up.'
'You mean she's been poking her nose into the housing scheme at Ablethorpe?' someone said. 'You preserve a few trees and lose the chance of a development grant. Where's the sense in that?'
'That's the trouble with these so-called old families. They seem to think the past matters. They don't think of the future.'
Sir Arnold went into his study and shut the door. He was exhausted and he had to think of his own future. The vodka had been of only temporary help. Why wouldn't they hurry up and go so that he could get some shut-eye and give that bastard his next dose of whisky and whatever? He sat down and thought about Miss Marjorie Midden. Her and that Major MacPhee. If only he could find out if it was one of her weekends away birdwatching or visiting gardens. The Midden would be an ideal place to dump that sod in the cellar. There were all those old weirdos living at the Middenhall and, while he wasn't prepared to venture down the drive to the Hall itself, the Midden farmhouse where the old cow lived with Major MacPhee was conveniently isolated. It would be nice to get her to take the rap for the young toyboy. It was a lovely idea. In the meantime he'd just make a phone call.
He dialled Miss Midden's number. There was no reply. He'd call the Middenhall later to check she was really away. As he passed the kitchen door he heard Auntie Bea talking to Mrs Thouless the housekeeper. 'I really don't see why Arnold had to say that he'd taken the wine to Sweep's Place when it's patently untrue. And as for a '47 Fitou! Can you imagine how frightful it must be?'
Fortunately the housekeeper was deaf. She was talking to herself about glass and blood all over the bedroom floor and the mirror broken and all that water. Sir Arnold hurried upstairs to check that there were no bloodstains on the wall about the bed. There weren't, and the marks on the carpet were all his own. He was also glad to see that Vy had passed out on the bed. She had spent the party drinking gin and Appletiser and pretending it was champagne. It hadn't worked. The gin had won.