When at last he subsided beneath her and it became obvious that he was beaten, she unwisely raised the skirt and smiled down at his flushed and sweating face. The Chief Constable, peering beyond her pudenda, saw that smile and, in one final assertion of his own diminished ego and just about everything else, jerked his head to one side and sank his teeth into her groin. That the teeth were not his own and that what he had hoped would be her groin wasn't hardly mattered to the Chief Constable. With a fearful yell Auntie Bea lifted from the bed, seemed to hover on a cushion of pain and then crashed back towards Sir Arnold. This time there was no mistaking her intent. She was going to murder the swine.
It was precisely at this moment that Lady Vy returned with the smoking revolver. She had come back to tell Sir Arnold that the bloody fellow in the cellar had somehow managed to escape after first winding yards of insulating tape around the family pet's head, and she was in no mood to find her husband quite evidently making very peculiar love to her Auntie Bea. More to the point her Auntie Bea, to judge from the look on her face, was finding the proceedings such a delicious agony of passion that her tongue was protruding from her mouth while she uttered grunts and cries of satisfaction. This sight was too much for Lady Vy following so closely on the discovery in the kitchen of Mrs Thouless lying full length on the floor by the cellar door with her dress strangely disarranged and moaning about some great beast. With a courage that came from years of conviction that she was morally superior to any servant and must of course demonstrate this in a crisis, particularly when she was armed with a loaded revolver, Lady Vy had stepped over Mrs Thouless and unhesitatingly fired into the cellar. This time Genscher had no doubt why it had been muzzled so horribly. While it hadn't actually read about the fate of the Tsar and his family, it did recognize that the cellar made an ideal killing-ground and that, having failed to hang him when they had the chance, the master and now the mistress were bent on shooting him. As the bullet ricocheted round the walls, Genscher whimpered silently and took refuge in one of the wine racks.
Lady Vy turned the light on and came slowly down the steps holding the revolver in front of her.' Come out and face the music,' she shouted. 'I know you're down here. Come out or I'll fire.'
But the Rottweiler knew better than to move. It cringed at the very back of the stone wine rack and waited for death. Surprisingly it passed him by, and the next moment Lady Vy was hurrying up the steps again.
Now as she entered the bedroom she was too startled by what was taking place there to utter the message she had brought.
'Bea darling, how could you?' she asked piteously, and fanned her face with the muzzle of the revolver.
Auntie Bea turned an awful face towards her friend. 'I haven't finished yet,' she snarled, misinterpreting the past tense. 'But when I have '
'You mustn't,' screamed Lady Vy. 'I won't let you demean yourself in this horrible way. And with him of all people.'
'What do you mean "with him"? I can't think of anyone else I want to '
'I can't bear it, Bea. Don't say it. I won't listen.'
Sir Arnold, taking advantage of this interchange, managed to get an intake of air and squawked, 'Help, help me,' rather feebly.
Auntie Bea bore down on him. 'Die, you monster, die,' she shouted, and dragged the skirt tightly over his mottled face.
Lady Vy sank onto the floor beside the bed. 'Oh Bea darling, me darling, not him,' she sobbed.
Auntie Bea tried to understand this bizarre request. She knew Vy to be a submissive woman but she had never been asked to kill a loving friend before. The request struck her as being positively perverse and decidedly tasteless.
This was more than could be said for the Chief Constable. Fighting off death by suffocation in the folds of black leather, he would willingly have swapped places with his wife or anyone else who felt inclined to die in such a dreadful fashion. And as for being tasteless that was not what he'd have called it either. If anything quite the reverse, but that was not of much concern to him at the moment. Staring into the black hell that was Auntie Bea's idea of bas couture, he was appalled at the thought of his imminent obituary. It would read like something in one of the magazines God was always telling him not to borrow from the Porn Squad's store of confiscated material. He couldn't for the life of him imagine how the Sun and the News of the World editorial staff would find words sufficiently ambiguous to satisfy both the Press Complaints Commission and the salacious appetites of most of their readers. Not that he had more than a passing interest in his post-mortem reputation. He was dying a terrible death, if not at the hands at least at the legs of a woman he had particular reason to loathe. As he began to pass out he was vaguely aware of Vy's voice.
'But you swore to me you hated men, Bea,' she screamed in a fit of hysterical jealousy. 'You promised me you would never ever, ever, touch a man and now look what you're doing.'
'I'm trying to,' Auntie Bea screamed back, grappling with the skirt, 'but he isn't dead yet.'
'Isn't dead yet?' repeated Lady Vy in a voice so vacuous that even the Chief Constable wasn't sure he had heard right. What did the fucking woman think he was doing? Having a whale of a time?
Finally it dawned on Lady Vy that the situation was not as she supposed. 'Oh God, no, no, you mustn't, Bea darling,' she bawled. 'Don't you see what this will do to us?'
'I don't care what it does to us,' Auntie Bea shouted back, 'all I care right now is what it does to him. You should see what the monster's done to me.'
The invitation was too much for the distraught Lady Vy. 'Show me, oh show me, darling,' she said, and hurled herself onto what the Chief Constable had come to regard as his deathbed. As she scrabbled at Auntie Bea's curious skirt his face emerged, almost as black as the garment itself. Sir Arnold gulped relatively fresh air and stared through bloodshot, bulging eyes up into the face of his moronic wife. For the first time in twenty-two years it had some appeal for him. And what she was doing had even more. Lady Vy was dragging the skirt off Bea's legs. For a moment it seemed she was about to join him in the filthy thing but Aunt Bea's attention had switched. She was less interested in killing her assailant than in finding out if she was likely to bleed to death from his bite. She fell back onto the bed and the Chief Constable and Lady Vy were just seeing what he had done, when there was a sound from the bedroom doorway.
'I've come to give my notice,' Mrs Thouless announced in a loud voice. 'I'm not staying in a house where there are such strange goings-on. I mean, begging your pardon, ma'am, for interrupting but that thing downstairs has come out of the cellar again and it isn't a fit sight for a decent woman to see first thing in the morning.'
With an insouciance that came from years of dealing with embarrassing moments and awkward servants, Lady Vy flounced off the bed and advanced on the poor housekeeper. 'How dare you come in here without knocking?' she demanded.