The Midden

'A yuppie sort,' the Major went on. 'They sit in front of computer screens and telephone people. You must have seen them on TV.'

It was a silly thing to say. Miss Midden didn't watch television, didn't have one in the house and wouldn't allow the Major to have one in his room. 'If you want to watch that stuff, you can go down to the hell-hole and watch it with them,' she had said each time he had asked to have a set in his room. The exercise will do you good.'

'Why's he so scared of the police?' she asked now. 'Did you find that out too?'

'He's terrified because someone has threatened to do something horrible to him if he goes anywhere near them.'

'Near the police?' The Major nodded.

'So he's involved in something shady. Charming. Now I've got two of you in the house. What I want to know is how he got here in the first place.'

'He doesn't know himself. He has a motorbike. A very fast one. Perhaps he crashed it and '

'And then takes all his clothes off and climbs in through the window and...' Miss Midden stopped. She had just remembered that she had put the chain on before leaving for the weekend and when she had gone out just now the door had been partly open but the chain was still on the hook. The young lout hadn't got into the house on his own. And why had he gone to sleep under the Major's bed? Somebody had brought him, and that someone had stepped on the flower-bed to open the window. Finally that person had known she had gone away for the weekend. Her thoughts, as she broke the eggs into the bowl and began to beat them, focused on the people down at the Middenhall. No one else knew she had gone away to the Solway Firth. Come to that, no one even at the Middenhall knew she had returned. Miss Midden beat the eggs with the whisk in a new frenzy.

Sir Arnold Gonders' thoughts followed a parallel course, and had rather more in common with the frenziedly whisked eggs. He woke from his sleep only partly refreshed. If anything his total exhaustion earlier had to some extent deadened his perception of the danger he was in. Now the full force of it hit him. He might well have murdered...surely manslaughter was a justified plea. No, it wasn't. Not in his case. He was the Chief Constable, the supreme keeper of law and order in Twixt and Tween and the media would have a field day tearing him to pieces. Oh yes, he had cultivated them in the past, some of them at any rate, the commercial TV people in particular, to get his own back on the Panorama shits at the BBC who'd given him and the lads a hard time over that murdering rapist who had done a tidy stretch of a life sentence before it was found his sperm didn't match that found in his victims. But the Chief Constable had been around long enough to know that there was no loyalty in the media and that the stab in the back was established practice. He thought of all the papers who'd go to town on him too, the Guardian and the Independent, God rot them, then the Daily Telegraph with that bloody tough editor. Even The Times would join in. As for the Mirror and the Sun...It didn't bear thinking about.

As he shaved, as he tried to eat breakfast, as he dragged Genscher, now in a state of total funk, to the Land Rover, as he drove down across the dam to Six Lanes End and along the motorway to Tween, the Chief Constable's thoughts raced. He'd have the tyres on the Land Rover changed to make certain that no one could trace any remnant of mud from Miss Midden's back yard to them. He might have left the imprint of the tyres on the old drove road. Christ, why hadn't he thought of all these things the night before? In the back the Rottweiler lurched and bounced and tried to keep away from the bloodstained sheets and the parcel tape in the corner. Sir Arnold got rid of them separately in two bins several miles apart, the tape in the first and the soiled sheets in the second.

After that he felt slightly better. He began to think more constructively. He'd wait until the next day to go into the office. He had a perfectly good excuse not to go in today. He had to keep out of the way of those media hounds who wanted to interview him about the DPP's decision. And he had a hangover to beat all hangovers. Harry Hodge, his deputy, would cover for him. In the meantime he'd start his own investigation to discover who had set him up by using that bloody Bea cow. It had occurred to him that the bastard had to be someone who knew his movements and had known he wasn't going to be at the Old Boathouse that night. That was an important discovery.

The Chief Constable considered it and came to no very clear conclusion except that his return must have screwed up the plan somehow just as Miss Midden's return hadn't done him any good either. It was as he was driving along the Parson's Road that another idea occurred to him. He pulled up at a roadside telephone and checked there was no one anywhere about. Then he dialled the Stagstead Police Station. When the duty officer answered, the Chief Constable muffled his voice with his hand and spoke in a high disguised voice. It was a short message, short and to the point, and he repeated it only once before putting the phone down and hurrying on. Miss Midden was going to get another nasty surprise.

In fact it was the Chief Constable who would have been very nastily surprised if he could have heard the conversation that had taken place in his house in Sweep's Place, Tween, between Auntie Bea and Lady Vy when they got back that morning shortly before lunch.

'My darling, if I'd only known,' said Bea, 'if I'd known what he was putting you through, I would never have allowed it.'

'I didn't know what to do,' said Vy tearfully, 'I felt so alone. He told me he'd see all the ghastly gutter papers got the story if I told anyone. I couldn't bear to think of the scandal. And there was a young man in the bed. I couldn't deny that.'

Bea looked at her narrowly. 'Oh he's a cunning devil, there's no doubt about that,' she said. 'I have to give him his cunning. But two can play that game and after all he wasn't very subtle.'

'Darling, you're talking way above my head. What are you saying?'

'Ask yourself this question,' said Bea. 'There was a young man in your bed, I don't doubt that. But where is he now?'

'I've no idea,' said Lady Vy. 'I went down to the cellar and he'd disappeared in the night.'

'Exactly. Arnold got you to help tie him up in the cellar so that you were even more of an accomplice. Isn't that the case?'

'I suppose it must be,' said Lady Vy. 'I hadn't thought of that.'

'And you say he was tied really tight? In two plastic bags?'

'Well, actually he couldn't get him into the garbage bags. He had to use the sheets off the bed. And lots of tape. You've no idea how much tape he tied round him.'

'And yet the young man disappears. Doesn't that strike you as peculiar?'

Lady Vy tried to stretch her tiny brain. It was reassuring to have Aunt Bea telling her things, but sometimes she couldn't understand what she was saying. 'The whole thing struck me as peculiar,' she said. 'I mean I've never found a young man in bed like that before. He was quite nice looking too if you didn't look at the blood.'

Auntie Bea controlled her temper with difficulty. 'No, dear, what I meant was...well, didn't it seem very strange that he should have escaped so quickly after you had helped tie him so securely?'

'Yes, I suppose it did,' said Lady Vy. 'And Arnold drugged him too to keep him quiet.'

'Oh sure. Arnold said he drugged him. Arnold said he did this and he did that but the only thing you really know is that you helped tie him up and then when you went to look for him the next day he had escaped. What a miraculous thing to happen, wasn't it? Or it would have been if Arnold hadn't untied him himself and helped him on his way.'

'But why should he have done that?' asked Vy, still stumbling about in her attempt to plumb the mystery.