The Midden

'When you were first in the CID, I suppose,' said the Chief Constable encouragingly.

Rascombe wasn't fooled. 'No, they don't give up easy, sir,' he said. 'They like to think that being on the Force and all that and seeing so many villains make a bit, you know what I mean, weakens a man's resolve. So they come on again and I suppose sometimes they score. Course, other times they get their mittens in a fucking rat-trap. That's what my little lot did. Still wondering what the fuck hit them, as a matter of fact, down Parkhurst. Fourteen and ten they got. I sometimes think of them at night sitting in front of the telly.' Detective Inspector Rascombe smiled reminiscently.

'Fourteen and ten?' said the Chief Constable. 'You don't mean Bugsy Malone and the Sundance Kid tried to fit you up?' The Inspector nodded. 'And you landed "them with two kilos of coke for their pains? Oh dear, oh dear, Rascombe, and I always thought they'd done it too. Still, it does you credit. It does indeed. Fancy hanging that lot on them. That is a lovely one. Mind you, they deserved it for trying to bend a copper. By my book there's nothing dirtier than trying to turn one of us. Well, I daresay we can see they don't get any parole too. As I always say, a job done properly is a job worth doing.' And the Chief Constable made a note in his diary to have a word with a man he knew who was on the parole board for the Isle of Wight. 'Now, where were we?'

Detective Inspector Rascombe decided on a tactful approach. 'About suspicions that someone's on the move?' he suggested.

The Chief Constable approved. 'Something like that,' he said and came to a decision. 'Just a word that came my way. Nothing certain, and of course there may be nothing to it.'

'Course. Most often isn't,' said the Inspector encouragingly. 'Still, it's often these little words that put a major thing our way, I always say. Anyone I know?'

Sir Arnold fell back on discretion. 'No one I know either. That's the bother.' He paused. 'Does the term "Child-minder" mean anything to you?'

'Only the obvious, like,' said Rascombe. 'You wouldn't be thinking of...'

'Could be, Rascombe, could very well be,' said the Chief Constable, 'and if it is, we've got to stamp it out before it becomes another fucking Orkney. And I do mean stamp. I'm not having Twixt and Tween go down in history as another place the paedophiles had a ball. That stuff is horrible.'

'Vile, sir, loathsomely vile,' said Rascombe, having to veer away from the idea that somebody had been trying to fit the Chief Constable up with a crime. There could be no doubting Sir Arnold's horror at the thought of a paedophile's ball. 'Have you got any idea where to look, sir?'

The Chief Constable stared out the window at the city. 'One place you can forget is the Social Services Child Abuse unit,' he said. 'Breathe a word of this there and it'll be right across the county in no time at all.'

'Agreed, sir, those do-gooders foul things up something terrible.'

'You can say that again,' Sir Arnold agreed, with the private thought that just about anybody could foul things up for him, never mind do-gooders. On the other hand the idea of paedophiles was an excellent one: the very mention of child molesters had an emotional appeal that blinded people to obvious facts. Muddy waters wasn't in it. And there was something else. A really nice goodie. Tailor-made for trouble. 'What I want you to look for is any report, anything that suggests something's wrong. Doesn't matter how insignificant it looks, check it out...And if I'm right in my hunch, and mind, that's all it is, if I'm right and what I heard has any significance at all...'

He paused and looked at Rascombe for a moment as though deciding that the Inspector was indeed the man to handle the issue. 'The words were "up behind Stagstead." He's an old army chap and he's got this very convenient place for taking the photos of them. That's one source and it was purely accidental with a crossed line on the phone. In the normal way I wouldn't have taken any notice of it except that the bloke speaking had one of those voices you can't put a face to but I could swear that somewhere along the line I'd met him before with a bit of the old nasty stuff, you follow. I might have put the phone down but I didn't and then the other fellow said something that did strike me, "Do you think it ought to go in Gide Bleu?" What do you make of that?'

'Guide Bleu, isn't it, sir? Not Gide, surely.'

'Well, of course in the normal way I'd have said he'd been mispronouncing too, except he sounded too toffee-nosed to make that sort of mistake. But the key thing was the other slimy-tongued bloke repeated it, "I think they want to keep off any list like the Gide Bleu. Got to be careful." I lost them after that.'

'That Gide Bleu sounds a bit off, sir,' said the Inspector.

'More off than you'd imagine,' said Sir Arnold, silently thanking Auntie Bea for putting him in the way of this literary disinformation. She'd been encouraging Vy to brush up her French with La Porte étroite and the Chief Constable had been stung into admitting that he didn't know who Gide was. 'You are such a philistine,' Vy had said as they went to bed that night. Well, the old bag had handed him a good tip now.

'You see, Inspector,' the Chief Constable continued, 'I went back and looked this bloke Gide up and what did I find, a really horrible old faggot with a penchant for Arab boys. Wrote books about them. One of them is called The Narrow Door and it don't take two guesses to know why. Filthy sod. So you see the Gide Bleu is something else again.'

Inspector Rascombe was looking impressed. "This could be something really big, sir,' he said. 'I mean after all the bad publicity we've been given lately with the SCS and all that, we could win ourselves a bit of popular support putting a lot of sex perverts behind bars.'

'My thoughts exactly,' said the Chief Constable.

'Another thing that occurs to me, sir,' the Inspector went on, encouraged by Sir Arnold's attitude, 'is that if I am thinking about the right area up behind Stagstead, there are some wealthy people up there with big houses and estates and so on...' He faltered and looked at the Chief Constable with a feeling that he was walking on very thin ice. After all, the old bugger had a place up there too. But Sir Arnold was quite relaxed, though he did look more than a bit weary.

'I know what you're going to say, Inspector, and I appreciate your tact and fine feelings, but you mustn't think of me,' the Chief Constable said. 'You have your duty to do and you must ignore my position in the community. Now you understand why I have entrusted you with this particular job. It is vital I take a wholly unbiased attitude and you're the man I can safely leave the whole matter with. All you've got to do is check out any known sex offenders on the computer and see if there's been anything unusual in that area.'

And with the certain knowledge that Major MacPhee's name would come up on the computer, and that any detailed enquiry at Stagstead would bring to light the anonymous phone call about the Midden and boys being buggered, the Chief Constable dismissed Detective Inspector Rascombe and went back to work on a sermon he had promised to give to the Church of the Holy Monument the following Sunday. He intended to stress the mysterious way in which God worked to achieve His ends. As usual, the Chief Constable had no doubt whose ends those were. He didn't have any doubt whatsoever that the ways themselves were filled with mystery.

He had got halfway through the sermon, and was stressing the need for punishment of offenders as a foretaste of things to come in the afterlife, when he began to have a nagging feeling that he was missing something important on the more practical side of his own life. There was something he ought to be doing if he was not to spend the rest of his life in fear of blackmail. He had to find out who really had been responsible for trying to fit him up with that young bastard. He would see if he could trap Auntie Bea, but first there were genuine areas of enquiry to look into. That wasn't all, either. Sir Arnold shook his head fitfully and got up to make himself a cup of strong black coffee. He really must start thinking clearly.