'Because, dearest, because this was all an elaborate plan to make sure you didn't leave him and wouldn't make things awkward for dear Arnold at any time in the future.'
'But why should I...' Vy began before coming to her own conclusion. 'Oh, Bea dear, do you really think...?'
It was a thoroughly unnecessary question. Aunt Bea was thinking very hard indeed. She had already concocted a rational explanation for the succession of weird events that had taken place. They all pointed to the same conclusion: she must take Vy away from the malign influence of her husband. If there had been any doubt about the matter before the weekend, and there hadn't been, she now felt sure she was saving Vy from a man who was prepared to use any sort of crime for his own vile ends. Being bitten in the groin by Sir Arnold had not exactly inclined Bea to see him in an even faintly sympathetic light and now she had the evidence she needed to break him. And she would be protecting darling Vy at the same time. She got up and took Lady Vy by the hand. 'My darling, I want you to go upstairs and pack your things. Now you're not to argue with me. I am going to take care of everything. Just do what I tell you.'
'But, Bea darling, I can't just leave '
'You're not leaving, dear. You are merely coming down to London with me today. No argument. We're going to see your father.'
And with this dubious reassurance Sir Edward Gilmott-Gwyre was not someone she normally wanted to see Lady Vy went up to the bedroom and began to pack. 'I must leave Arnold a note just the same,' she thought, and wrote a short one to the effect that she had had to go down to London to see Daddy because he hadn't been well and she'd be back in a few days.
'Now come along, Vy dear,' Auntie Bea called. Lady Vy went downstairs obediently and left the note on the table by the front door. Aunt Bea saw it there, opened the envelope, read the note and put it quietly into her handbag. Sir Arnold could worry himself sick. And Vy wasn't coming back, so there was no need to deceive him. On this nice moral note she went out to the Mercedes and presently they were on their way south. By the time the Chief Constable parked the Land Rover in the garage, they were halfway to London.
Chapter 17
That evening Miss Midden and the Major moved Timothy Bright, wearing only a towel, up to the old nursery. The term 'nursery' was a euphemism. The bars in the window were substantial and the door thick because one of Miss Midden's ancestors in the late eighteenth century, one Elias Midden, acting on the same extravagant impulse that had prompted Black Midden to build his domiciliary mausoleum, had bought a small bear from some gipsies at Twixt Fair. Elias, who had just won the wrestling match and been proclaimed Champion of the Fells, had drunk a great deal of beer to celebrate and had supposed that the bear was fully grown and also that it would be fun to match his strength against the beast of an evening. In fact the gipsies had been anxious to get rid of that bear. They had bought it from some sailors on the quay at Tween and the sailors had brought the bear back from a voyage to Canada where one of them had shot its mother. In short, the bear was a very young one and it grew into a very big one. Having paid a great deal of money for the animal Elias Midden was anxious to provide it with the best accommodation and to have it close to hand for evening bouts.
His wife did not share his enthusiasm. She disliked sharing the farmhouse with a young and growing bear, even if it was kept muzzled. She had threatened to leave Elias and his bear and take the children with her unless he kept it safely locked up. Reluctant to give the animal up, and conscious that he would be laughed at by every farmer between Stagstead and...well just about everywhere if he drove his wife out of the house on account of the bear people would say coarse things about his relationship with it Elias Midden had built a very strong room in which to keep it. It was just as well. As the weeks and months passed the bear grew. It grew to the point where even Elias, a proud man with a magnificent physique, had to admit defeat. That bear was not for wrestling. It was extremely strong and extremely nasty. And it became huge, so huge and so nasty that feeding it became a hazardous procedure. In building the bear room on the assumption that it was fully grown and amiable he had not made a hatch in the door through which to pass it its food and since the heavy door opened into the room rather than out of it (Mrs Midden had sensibly suggested that precaution she had a horror of the bear bursting out of that room in the middle of the night and doing dreadful things to her and the children) Elias risked his life every time he opened it. The final straw, and the term was literal, came when he lost three fingers of his right hand between the door and the door jamb trying to push some litter through. 'It's all your fault,' he had bellowed at his wife. 'If you hadn't complained about the smell.'
Mrs Midden had retorted that he'd been fool enough to waste a great deal of money and had bought a pup or whatever young grizzlies were called into the bargain and she knew now how the family had got its name and she wasn't sharing her house with a bear that couldn't go outside to do its business and the smell was appalling and not the sort of thing a decent woman with a reputation for keeping a clean home to consider could put up with and he'd got to do something or else...
Elias Midden had said he intended to do something about the bloody bear. In fact he did nothing. He wasn't opening that door again for all the tea in China. The bear could lump it. The bear did. It had been living on a restricted diet before, but now it starved. Its last snack had been those three fingers. Day after day and night after night it battered that door and scratched at it. It tried the walls too and it bent the bars on the window. In the end it died and Elias put it about that he had killed it in a fair fight, losing his fingers in the encounter. He buried the emaciated corpse and double dug several barrowloads of bear's excreta into the kitchen garden, where it did more good than it had done in the house. Then, because his wife still refused to enter the bear's den, he scrubbed it out and repainted the walls. He didn't touch the door. It remained scratched and bitten and battered so that he could show visitors just how fierce the bear he had killed had been.
It was left to later and more refined Middens to alter the name of the room to 'the old nursery'. With its bent bars and battered door the name had a nicely macabre touch to it and the young Middens who slept in it suffered terrifying nightmares which in more enlightened times would have required the attentions of psychotherapists, trauma relief specialists and stress counsellors. It was there in that bear room that Black Midden had first dreamt of a ferocious life in Africa where there were no bears. Now it was where Timothy Bright was confined.
'You can stay in there until you tell us who you are and how you came to break into my house,' Miss Midden told him after he'd eaten. 'If you don't want to stay, you have only to say the word and I shall call the police.'
Timothy Bright said he definitely didn't want the police but could he have his clothes please.
'When we find them,' Miss Midden said, and locked the door. Then she went downstairs and sat in the fading evening light wondering which of the arrogant and idiotic Middens down at the Hall was responsible for this crime. In other circumstances she would have suspected the Major, but he'd been with her and his state of terror on finding the young man had been genuine. On the other hand he would be able to tell her, if anyone could, which of the inmates at the hell-hole had sado-masochistic tendencies. Not that she wanted to talk to the silly little man. She was still furious with him and her contempt at his cowardice was immense. All the same, she had to ask him. She found him looking at his soiled bed. There was a nasty smell in the room too. 'Dogshit,' said Miss Midden. 'That's what that is.' But no one down at the hell-hole had a dog.