To the Chief Constable, peering over Aunt Bea's knee with all the enthusiasm of a man temporarily reprieved from death and one who no longer cared with any real intensity what his public reputation might be, Mrs Thouless' intervention was a Godsend. On the other hand, if Lady Vy came all high and mighty, the damned housekeeper might walk out of the house straightaway. It was not a prospect to be borne. 'Dear Mrs Thouless,' he called out, 'you mustn't leave us.'
From the doorway the housekeeper became aware of the very dubious nature of her employers' marital arrangements. She stared short-sightedly at Sir Arnold's head and then at Auntie Bea and finally up at Lady Vy. 'Ooh mum,' she said, all trace of a Scotch accent entirely gone. 'Ooh mum I don't know what...'
Lady Vy forestalled her. 'Now pull yourself together, Mrs T.,' she said. 'I know it's been a trying morning and you've had a long weekend but there is no need to overdramatize. Just go downstairs and make us all a nice pot of tea.'
'Yes, mum, if you say so, mum,' said Mrs Thouless with her jaw sagging, and went off down the landing utterly bemused.
Lady Vy turned her attention back to more urgent matters and picked up the revolver again. 'I must say,' she said with a renewed air of social confidence, 'it's come to a pretty pass when the staff march into bedrooms without knocking. I can't think what the country's coming to.'
On the bed Auntie Bea responded to the call of her upbringing. 'My dear,' she said, 'I have exactly the same trouble at Washam. It's almost impossible to get anyone to stay and they demand quite exorbitant wages and two nights off a week.' And with a final obscene flick of her skirt she signalled to the Chief Constable that he could go now.
Sir Arnold scrambled off the bed and hurried through to the bathroom and was presently busy with a toothbrush and some cold water. There was no hot. There had been no time to have the tank repaired. He was staring into the bathroom mirror and wondering what message God had intended to have put him through such an awful ordeal, when it dawned on him that Mrs Thouless had said something important. What was it? '...that thing has come out of the cellar again...' What thing? And why wasn't whatever it was a fit sight for a decent woman to see? For the first time that morning the Chief Constable suddenly saw things in a longer perspective of time than the previous five minutes. Someone had been down into the cellar and found the young bastard gone. Of course. That explained everything, and in particular Auntie Bloody Bea's murderous assault on him. She had found her accomplice had disappeared and had come upstairs to kill him in revenge. Or something. The Chief Constable's late night and fearful weekend had taken their toll of his capacity for rational thought. All he could be certain of was that he was in an isolated house with three women, one of whom he detested, another he despised, and a third who was presently making a pot of tea in the kitchen. Of the three only Mrs Thouless held even the faintest of charms for him and they were entirely of a practical order. He was about to hurry from the bathroom and get down to the relative safety of the kitchen when he remembered the shot. And Vy had taken the bloody gun downstairs with her. What the hell had she been firing at? Without thinking clearly Sir Arnold stumbled out of the bathroom to find his wife swabbing Auntie Bea's groin with eau-de-Cologne and discussing the advisability of a tetanus shot.
'Or rabies,' said Lady Vy, looking villainously at her husband.
Sir Arnold gave up all thought of questioning her. Instead he went down to the kitchen to see for himself what had been going on there. He found Mrs Thouless, quite recovered and restored to her own domestic role, unwinding the demoralized Rottweiler's insulated muzzle. Sir Arnold sipped his cup of tea and cursed the dog, his wife, his wife's murderous lover, and most of all the swine who had deposited a drugged lout in his bed.
Chapter 14
After a while Sir Arnold concentrated his thoughts on some method of getting his revenge. He could confront that bloody lesbian bitch upstairs and demand to know what the hell she had hoped to achieve by having the lout brought to the Old Boathouse. It didn't make sense. On the other hand she had just tried to murder him and had very nearly succeeded. Would have succeeded if Vy hadn't, for once, come in at the right moment. So fucking Bea had to be mad. Mad, insane, out of her tiny, way off her trolley and a homocidal maniac. (The Chief Constable hadn't got the word wrong: 'homocidal' was exact.) And in addition she had an accomplice. He had no doubt about that either. She couldn't possibly have left the Old Boathouse and driven somewhere to find the young lout and drug him, and then driven back and carried him upstairs on her own. That was out of the question. She had been drinking with Vy all evening. He'd asked Vy that and she'd told him the truth. He was sure of that. His wife had been just as astonished to find the bastard in bed with her as he'd been himself. So there was someone out there and here the Chief Constable's mind, never far from paranoia, turned lurid with fury. And fear. A conspiracy had been hatched to destroy him. Hatched? Hatched wasn't strong enough, and besides it was too reminiscent of eggs and hens and things that were natural. There was absolutely nothing natural about drugging some young bastard to the eyeballs before stripping him naked and shoving him into a respectable Chief Constable's marital bed. It was an act of diabolical unnaturalness, of pure evil and malice aforethought. Hatched it wasn't. This vile act had been plotted, premeditated and planned to destroy his reputation. If this little lot had got out he'd have been ruined. If it got out now he'd still be ruined. In fact now that he came to think of it, he was in a far worse position than before because he had beaten the young bastard over the head and had kept him tied up in the cellar for twenty-four hours. He might even have killed the sod. For all he knew the bastard was dead and at this very moment under that narrow bed at the Midden rigor mortis might have set in.
A cold sweat broke out on the Chief Constable's face and he went through to his study to try to think. Sitting there at his desk feeling like death he searched his mind for a motive. Blackmail was the first and most obvious. But why, in God's name, should the beastly Bea want to blackmail him? There was no need. The woman had enough money of her own, or so he had always understood from Vy. Mind you, Vy had the brain of a mentally challenged peahen but she was good at smelling incomes. One of her upper-class virtues. No, Auntie Bea's motive had to be something else. Pure hatred for him? She had that all right. In spades. Not that the Chief Constable cared. A great many people hated him. He was used to being hated. He rather liked it, in fact. It gave him a sense of power and authority. In his mind hatred went with respect and fear. To be feared and respected gave him a sense of worth. It assured him that he meant something.
On the other hand, he was damned if he could see what anything else meant. There had to be some other more sinister motive. No one would go to all this trouble simply to ruin him. No, Auntie Bea was merely a willing accomplice, a subordinate who could open gates and keep Genscher quiet. In all likelihood she had been blackmailed, or at least persuaded, into acting as the insider. She wouldn't have needed much persuading either. Yes, that was much more like it. There was somebody out there here the Chief Constable's horizons expanded to include every villain in Twixt and Tween who had deliberately set out to destroy him. Or, and this seemed a more rational explanation, to hold him to ransom by threatening to expose him. That was much more likely. Well, that was going to take some doing now. Unless, of course, that young bloke was dead, in which case the fat would really be in the fire. Again the cold sweat broke out on his pallid face. The Chief Constable gave up trying to think. He was too exhausted. Making sure that Vy and Bea were now in the kitchen having breakfast, he went upstairs and climbed into bed. He needed sleep.