Miss Midden stepped back into the room and picked up the gun she had left against the bookcase. Standing over the bed she asked, 'Just what has been going on? You'd better tell me or I am going to phone for the police. Spit it out, sonny. What have you been up to?'
Timothy Bright fought to find a plausible explanation. He didn't know what he had been up to. Perhaps he did have concussion. He couldn't remember anything coherently. Something to do with going to Spain. Something about Uncle Benderby. He'd been on his bike. 'I had a motorbike,' he said, and tried to remember.
'Go on. You had a motorbike. What happened to it?'
Timothy Bright had no idea.
'How did you get in here then?' Miss Midden demanded. But again he had no answer for her.
'You may not know but I'm going to find out. Me or the police. It's up to you.'
Timothy Bright lay on the bed and whimpered.
'Men,' said Miss Midden. 'Pathetic' She turned on her heel and walked out of the room. In the dining-room she looked at the mud on the floor and then at the open window. She went to the front door and out onto the gravel and looked at the flower-bed under the window. There were footmarks there, and some white petunias the Major had planted had been crushed by someone's feet.
Miss Midden went back into the house and tried the sitting-room on the other side of the hall. There was nothing there to indicate anyone had been into it. Nothing in the hall either. She mounted the stairs and looked into every room. There was not a sign of any disturbance. And there were no clothes to be found anywhere. Her office was just as it had always been. And the kitchen. Not a trace of clothes. She went out into the back yard and walked slowly round the house, even looking into the byre and the shed but there were no jeans or shoes or shirt. Everything was just as she had left it. Mystified, she went back into the house and was about to go into the dining-room when she heard voices. She stopped. The Major was asking questions.
Miss Midden slipped into the room to listen.
Chapter 16
This was a very different Major from the one she had left cowering in the corner. And what he was doing was most useful. He was talking sympathetically to the young man. MacPhee's feelings, as shallow as they were squalid, were soon calmed and now that the immediate danger was over he was looking for some advantage from the situation.
'You've been done over really badly so that's why you can't remember,' he said, 'but it'll come back to you. I have had the same experience myself. Only two days ago I was cycling along minding my own business when this tractor came out without looking. I had to have six stitches and I couldn't remember even having them. You probably came off your motorbike...I hope you were wearing a crash helmet. You'd have been killed otherwise. Something must have gone through it. Ever so dangerous, motorbikes are. What sort is yours?'
'A Suzuki.'
'Is that a very fast one?'
'I've done a hundred and forty on her,' Timothy said.
'Oh, how could you? I mean that's twice the speed limit. You were lucky the cops didn't time you. Is that why you don't want the police?'
Timothy Bright jumped at the excuse. 'Yes. I don't want to lose my licence.'
'And what about your family? They'll want to know you're all right. Where do they live?'
'They've got a place...I don't know,' said Timothy Bright.
Miss Midden tiptoed away. The Major was earning his keep after all. Naked and injured young men were his cup of tea. She needed a real cup herself and time to think what to do. Her first impulse to call the emergency services had evaporated. The young man Timothy wasn't as badly hurt as he looked. He was talking quite clearly, was probably suffering from mild concussion and not the fractured skull she had first feared.
She had other reasons for not involving the authorities. She had never got on with the people in County Hall whose gainful employment consisted in finding reasons for being there. There had been a man and a woman from the Health Department who had calmly walked into the kitchen down at the Middenhall on the assumption the place was an old people's home and in the altercation that followed had accused her of not having a licence to run a nursing home and having no authorization to...Miss Midden had chased them off the premises and had got her cousin Lennox, the solicitor, to issue a formal complaint to the County Council on the grounds of trespass. Not that that had deterred the officials. A man from the Fire Department had arrived shortly afterwards, this time with an official document declaring his right to inspect the 'Middenhall Guest House or Hotel' to ensure that it had the requisite fire escapes and internal fire doors. Miss Midden had disabused him of the notion that it was anything more than a private house and had abused him personally in the process. He had gone away with a good many fleas in his ear and Lennox Midden had had to write another letter. Another time the Twixt and Tween Water Board, claiming jurisdiction over all water in the county, in particular the stream that fed the artificial lake Black Midden had constructed, had sent inspectors to check that no noxious substances were flowing from it down to the reservoir. The only noxious substance they had encountered had been Miss Midden herself. Again Lennox had been forced to point out that the lake had been constructed in 1905 and that any noxious chemicals entering the reservoir were almost certainly coming from the slurry of a dairy farmer six miles away on the Lampeter Road.
Altogether Miss Midden had had interfering busybodies in, official positions up to the eyeballs. And when it came to the police her feelings were incandescent. They had chased old Buffalo across the lawn and had held him in the cells at Stagstead overnight after roughing him up and accusing him of drunken driving. And that damned Chief Constable had tried to fence the common land known as Folly Moss for his own private use. She had fought him over the issue and won, just as she had won in court over Buffalo Midden. She'd won and humiliated the corrupt brute. He'd be only too delighted to have his men in the house asking questions and poking their noses into her private affairs. They'd want to know where the Major had got his injuries and...No, the last people she wanted to bring in were the police. And in any case the young man clearly didn't want them anywhere near him. He had been terrified by the prospect of her calling them. Presumably he was some sort of criminal, or a junkie. Miss Midden sat at the kitchen table and poured herself another cup of tea.
She was still sitting there an hour later when the Major reappeared with the news that Timothy Bright had cleaned himself up in the bathroom and said he was hungry and could he have something to drink. Miss Midden turned an angry eye on him and said, 'Water.' She got up and opened the Aga and got out some eggs to make an omelette. She was feeling hungry herself and the Major definitely needed food. He looked ghastly and he deserved to. And now it appeared he was upset because the young man had broken an eau-de-Cologne bottle in his washbasin and had torn the shower curtain. Pathetic. But he had managed to wheedle some more information out of the young man. 'He's some sort of financier in the City. He doesn't remember where exactly.'
'Financier? Financier, my foot!' said Miss Midden, whose ideas were distinctly old-fashioned and who imagined financiers to be middle-aged men in dark pin-striped suits.