Miss Midden, sick with disgust and revulsion that she should ever have taken the creature MacPhee under her wing, had left the house and, passing through the narrow gate in the garden wall, was striding across the open fell towards Carryclogs House. Sheep rose and scattered at her coming. Miss Midden hardly noticed them. She too was absorbed in a private world of anger and frustration. She was almost sorry the Major was still alive. She had seen him breathing. She was also totally unable to understand what had come over the dreadful little man. He'd behaved badly often enough on his so-called 'benders' in Glasgow, but in the house, her house, he had always remained sober and obsequiously well-mannered. And now this had happened. Her only conclusion was that he must be mad, mad and beyond help. Not that it was going to do him any good. She had enough problems with the people down at the Middenhall without adding his alcoholic mania to them. As soon as he was able to move she would have him out of the house, lock, stock and barrel, even if she had to do it at the point of her shotgun. Certainly he would be gone before nightfall.
As she came in sight of Carryclogs House, Miss Midden veered away. She had no intention of revealing her feelings or the state of affairs to Phoebe Turnbird. Her own sentimentality was burden enough and she wasn't going to allow Phoebe the pleasure of sympathizing with her. And gloating. At twelve o'clock Miss Midden sat down on an outcrop of rock overlooking the reservoir and ate the sandwiches she had brought with her. Then she lay back in the grass and looked up at the cloudless sky. At least it was clean and blue. Presently she dozed off, exhausted by her late night and her feelings.
Chapter 13
Sir Arnold Gonders hadn't had a pleasant day either. Or night. It had been nearly four by the time he left the Land Rover by the byre and walked up to the house where he was alarmed to see a light on in Auntie Bea's bedroom. "That bloody woman,' he muttered bitterly and wondered what on earth, in addition to a massive dose of Valium in gin, was needed to keep her asleep at night. Avoiding the front door, he sneaked round to the study windows to let himself in. Sir Arnold crept upstairs and was presently fast asleep. He had done all that he could do. The rest was up to fate.
In fact it was in large measure up to Genscher. The Rottweiler had spent a ghastly night in the cellar desperately trying to deal with the insulating-tape muzzle. In his brutal attempt to prevent the dog from exercising any right to bark or, more dangerously, to bite when he was kicked in the scrotum, Sir Arnold, never a brave man, had made it almost impossible for Genscher to breathe as well, and the dog had spent hours trying to scratch the beastly tape off before evidently deciding that it was likely to lose its nose as well. Unable to whine or do anything at all constructive backing away from its nose had done not the slightest good and had only resulted in its banging its bruised backside against the wall it had dementedly climbed the steps to appeal for help by head-butting the cellar door. By seven o'clock the house was reverberating to the thud of one hundred and fifty pounds of maddened Rottweiler hurling itself against the door every few seconds. Even Mrs Thouless, usually a sound sleeper and one whose deafness prevented her from being included in the nastinesses of the household, was shaken to the conclusion that something very like an air raid was taking place in the vicinity. Since she had been brought up during the war in Little Kineburn under the very shadow of the great dam when it had been widely supposed the Germans would bomb the dam and loose the waters of the reservoir onto the tiny village, Mrs Thouless was particularly nervous about air raids. By 6.20 she was driven from her bed and went into the kitchen in her dressing-gown with a view to possibly taking refuge in the cellar. By then Genscher's efforts to attract attention had diminished slightly. All the same, the cellar door shuddered every time the dbg launched itself at it. Mrs Thouless looked at the door. She wasn't at all sure about it. Then very cautiously she unlocked it and lifted the latch.
A moment later she knew with absolute certainty that there was no danger of being drowned or bombed in her bed. A far worse horror had bowled her over in the shape of a huge and demented Rottweiler with twenty metres of insulating tape wrapped in a grotesque black knot round its head. Mrs Thouless, never fond of dogs at the best of times and particularly wary of large German ones, found the experience and the apparition too much for her semi-deferential servility, and screamed. If anything more was required to send Genscher into an even greater state of panic, it was the sound of those screams. Nowhere indoors was safe. Only the outdoors would do. Without hesitation it hit the back door and recoiled against Sir Arnold's golf clubs which clattered onto the tiled floor. A further crash, mingled with Mrs Thouless' Scottish screams, followed as the great beast, its head lolling under the weight of so much insulating tape, mistook the Welsh dresser for an easier door and hurtled into it. But Genscher's course was run. In the midst of cascading plates and saucers the Rottweiler, now notably short of oxygen and breathing stentoriously through its bloodied nostrils, slithered across Mrs Thouless' recumbent body and fell back into the darkness of the cellar.
Upstairs, the din in the kitchen had woken even the exhausted Chief Constable from a deep and welcome sleep. He sat up in bed to find Lady Vy in her dressing-gown, clutching his .38 Scott & Webley, marching towards the door with her black eyeshade pushed back menacingly on her forehead.
'What the fuck's going on?' he asked hoarsely.
"Another of your dumb tricks, no doubt,' said his wife, and pushed open the door with her foot. Downstairs Mrs Thouless' screams had redoubled and the crockery bouncing on the tiled floor suggested that someone was breaking up the entire kitchen.
It was this, far more than the housekeeper's screams for help, that enraged Lady Vy. 'Oh my pedestal plates,' she yelled and hurled herself down the stairs.
Behind her, hideous in a diaphanous nightie hastily tucked into a black leather skirt, Auntie Bea lurched out of her room in the mistaken belief that her beloved Vy was being battered by the revolting Sir Arnold. 'Let go of her,' she shouted as she entered the bedroom, girding her loins with the skirt she had so hastily put on. 'Let go, you vile creature. Haven't you done enough harm already with your foul ways?'
Sir Arnold, who was crouched over the side of the bed in the process of locating his slippers, was unable to make any suitable reply before finding himself enveloped in black leather as she hurled herself at him. For half a minute they wrestled on the bed before Auntie Bea pinned him down and, realizing her error, was wondering what to do next. What she could see of Sir Arnold, one eye squinting malevolently over the edge of the black skirt while the other was possibly savouring the delights that lay below it, did not make her anxious to relinquish the hold she had on him. To lend weight to this already weighty advantage there was the knowledge that she would never again be in a position to make him taste some of his own medicine. With a hideous relish she leered down at him and then with a swift hand thrust his entire head under, the skirt.
It was an unwise indulgence. Sir Arnold, weakened as he was by the incomprehensible horrors of the weekend, was still sufficiently strong to resist the ghastly prospect of going down on his wife's lesbian lover, which was, he supposed, what she intended. In the folds of the black leather it was difficult to know, and the alternative that she intended to smother him was possibly even worse. The alternatives left the Chief Constable no choice. With all the desperate strength of a man embedded in a heavy woman's crotch, Sir Arnold Gonders took an awful breath and thrust himself upwards. It was a hideous experience but for a moment he glimpsed daylight. His bald head broke through the waistband of the skirt, only to be plunged down into darkness as Auntie Bea, for the first time in her life experiencing the sort of pleasure a man, albeit a terrified and frantic one, could give, forced him back. For a few more minutes the melee went on as with each new surge by the panic-stricken Sir Arnold she felt the delights of dominance and Sir Arnold experienced the horrors.