By 2 a.m. they had reached their first objective, the wood on the far side of the lake, and were peering across the water at the Middenhall. The building was almost entirely in darkness and only one light burned in the house itself. But on the outside floodlights shone out onto the lake and were reflected there among the waterlilies. 'Bloody difficult to see anything with those fucking lights,' said the detective called Mark, 'and they can spot us dead easy.' They crawled back into the wood and tried the other side. The lights were still quite bright.
'He said we had to go up to the farmhouse,' said Larkin. 'So I reckon we'd better.' He and Spender set off round the lake and over the little bridge by the sluice gate and made their way up the drive towards the Midden. Behind them Rutherford had decided there was a patch of dark shadow at the corner of the Middenhall where the dustbins were and, leaving Mark to try the other side where there were a number of azalea bushes, he scurried across the lawn and had got to within ten yards of the house when something moved in front of him.
Unable to see what exactly it was, he obeyed orders and went into sheep mode, crouching down on all fours and at the same time trying to keep his eyes watching his front. In fact he had disturbed a family of badgers. There was a clang as a dustbin lid fell, a grunt and a slight noise of scrabbling. Detective Constable Rutherford turned and trundled himself away across the lawn and back over the wooden bridge. 'No bloody good,' he told the others. 'They've got someone round the back on the look-out. I reckon we'd best be off.'
The first phase of Operation Kiddlywink had been a complete failure.
Chapter 24
By Friday even Inspector Rascombe was becoming discouraged. Three of his squad were off sick, one with a nasty condition of the skin caused by the sheep-dip, one with a twisted ankle. The third had gone down with pleurisy. As he reported to the Chief Constable, 'That place is so out of the way and awkward to cover we're having real difficulty.'
The Chief Constable imagined they were. His own private investigations weren't getting anywhere either, and he was beginning to think Auntie Bloody Bea had thought the whole caper up on her own to take Lady Vy away from him. This opinion was reinforced by an acrimonious telephone call from his father-in-law in the course of which Sir Edward had told him in certain terms exactly what he thought of him and had let drop the information that for once his daughter was showing good sense by setting up house with a raving lesbian. There had been other intimations of trouble ahead in Sir Edward's outburst. He was lunching shortly at Number 10 and he intended to raise the matter of the Chief Constable's deplorable tendencies with the PM. It had been a most unpleasant monologue, punctuated by denials that he put drugged youths in his wife's bed and that he was 'into' garbage bags, parcel tape and used bed sheets.
'Are you seriously expecting me to believe you didn't insert a basting syringe into the bugger's mouth and dose him with a mixture of Valium and whisky?' Sir Edward shouted.
The Chief Constable was. Most emphatically. He'd never heard such a dreadful accusation.
'Well, I do believe it,' his father-in-law stormed, 'because that idiot daughter of mine hasn't the brain of a head-louse and she couldn't have invented that story in a month of Sundays. You drugged the bugger and you tied him up in tape. And I know you did. And if you think...'
Sir Arnold did. He spent hours at night compiling the names, addresses and sums of money involved that seemed his only protection now. All the same, he did nothing to discourage Inspector Rascombe. The idiot couldn't do any harm and he just might dig up something in his investigations in the Stagstead area.
Even Miss Midden had other things on her mind by that time. Every year in early August the Porterhouse Mission to the East End sent a number of children to the Middenhall. It had been a practice that dated back to the period shortly after the War when the Dean had brought reading parties up to the fell country and had stayed over at Carryclogs Hall with Brigadier General Turnbird, himself an old Porterhouse man and a very muscular Christian. The youngsters had originally been housed in bell-tents in the grounds of Carryclogs where, apart from some desultory hymn-singing and the occasional Bible-reading by the General's daughter Phoebe, they had had the run of the estate and the river Idd, which was quite shallow at that point.
'It is good for our townies to have a glimpse of Arcady,' the General had once explained to a deputation of neighbouring farmers who had come to complain that sheep had been stampeded over walls, cows had been subjected to vicious attacks with catapults, and a number of stooks of hay had been set alight by boys smoking while playing hide and seek. The farmers hadn't caught the reference to Arcady and wouldn't have given a damn if they had.
In the end their opinions and the rents they paid prevailed. Even before the General died the Mission had moved over to the Middenhall, which was sufficiently isolated to spare the farmers their previous depredations. There within the confines of the estate wall the multi-sexed and many-coloured group, some of whom came from Muslim families and consequently did not benefit from Miss Phoebe's readings, spent a fortnight exploring the woods and one another's bodies before going back to their homes in the now largely middle-class area on the Isle of Dogs where the Porterhouse Mission still operated. In fact, if it hadn't been for Miss Midden's insistence, which fitted in with the Dean's own inclinations, that the contingent of Porterhouse undergraduates who accompanied each year's batch be doubled in size to deal with the children, it is doubtful if the yearly visit could have continued. At least a dozen times in the past two summers elderly residents had returned to their rooms after dinner to find their belongings had been ransacked and items stolen, and on one awful occasion Mrs Louisa Midden had been approached by a fourteen-year-old with a very unnatural offer. Mr Joseph Midden, her husband and himself a retired gynaecologist of some repute, had been so appalled as much by his wife's moment of hesitation before refusing as by the actual offer that Dr Mortimer had had to be summoned to deal with his arrhythmia.
Now, as the coach carrying the children came down the drive, Miss Midden felt a strange sense of unease. The presence of so many inquisitive young minds in the grounds was a danger she should have foreseen. She would have to do something about the air-raid shelter in the walled garden. She had been so preoccupied with Timothy Bright's affairs that she had entirely forgotten the Mission. As the tents were erected on the far side of the lake Miss Midden put padlocks on all the doors in the walls of the kitchen garden and decided to make her next journey. She had a long talk with Timothy Bright in the privacy of the sitting-room, and made a phone call. Then she drove to the bus station and travelled south again.
The time had come to act.
The same thought was in Inspector Rascombe's mind. The arrival of a coach containing thirty children indicated such an enormous orgy of paedophilia that he could hardly believe the report that came in to him from the surveillance team on the Middenhall road.