The Midden

'Not at the...well, if you want to call them kiddies,' said the detective, 'you can, but they don't strike me as being '

'Never mind what they strike you as. Get it on the camera. Him blowing kisses to the kiddies.'

'I'm doing that. But he isn't blowing kisses at the kiddies. He's blowing them at someone in the house. Up at some window. Hang on. There's not a soul at any window. I don't know what he's doing.'

'I bloody do,' shouted the Inspector, 'and I know what he's going to do. A long stretch of very nasty bird, the beast.'

But it was at 8.45 that Inspector Rascombe's most virulent hopes were finally satisfied, when Phoebe Turnbird arrived in her car with the Dean of Porterhouse. He was wearing a black cloak over his cassock and had on his head a shovel-hat. It was not his normal garb, but the late Brigadier General Turnbird had always insisted that the cloak, and particularly the shovel-hat, helped to impress the townies from the East End with the importance attached to religious ceremonies and, in memory of his old friend, the Dean kept to the custom. Phoebe by contrast had on the summeriest of summer dresses, a shimmering white frock that she thought gave her a strikingly youthful air. To complete this ensemble she had crowned her crowning glory with an extraordinary picture hat and, rather shortsightedly, had put on a particularly vivid lipstick.

'There are those wonderful undergraduates down there sleeping under canvas,' she had told the mirror in her room, and in any case it was lovely to have a man about the house, even if it was only the old Dean. Being given to fits of poetry she murmured, 'My youth, my beauty and my charm Can surely do nobody harm. It is such a lovely day I must look gay.'

It certainly looked that way to the surveillance unit, though they left out the youth and beauty bit. Charm was out of the question. Phoebe Turnbird, even in the saddle at half a mile, was sufficiently and distractingly uncharming to have saved the lives of a good many foxes who had found a second or even a third and fourth wind in their desperate flight from death. And she tended to rush her fences.

'Fuck me, this has got to be the drag queen of all time,' the detective muttered as he filmed the Dean and Phoebe moving to the jetty and getting into the little rowing-boat. Phoebe rowed with a vigour that was definitely out of keeping with her outfit. The Dean sat nervously in the stern and looked sinister. He was carrying a large brass cross and the late Brigadier General's family Bible, both of which were part of the tradition that went with the Mission's stay.

'What did you say?' demanded Inspector Rascombe in the Communications Centre.

The surveillance detective found it difficult to put into words. He had never much liked Rascombe but this time the swine had hit the nail on the head. 'I think they're going to have a Black bloody Mass,' he said. 'There's this priest bloke with a fucking great cross and a hell of a big old book being rowed across the lake by Mr Universe in a white frock. Got arms on him like an all-in wrestler. You've never seen anything like it. I haven't, anyway.'

'And you're getting it all on film?'

'I'm trying to. They're still some way off. Drove up in an old Daimler. Got any leads on that? Looks like a fucking hearse.'

'Jesus,' said the Inspector, simultaneously appalled and delighted at what was apparently happening, 'that's probably what it is too. They're going to do a human bloody sacrifice with one of the kiddies. Don't lose them.'

'Lose them? You've got to be joking. You couldn't lose that drag merchant on a pitch-black night. Not in that white frock and hat.'

'I didn't mean that. I mean keep filming, and for God's sake don't let them see you. This is going to hit prime-time TV on all channels. I'll get the Child Care do-gooders up and ready and I don't care if it is Sunday.'

'Best if you got the Armed Quick Response brigade in, and fast,' said the detective. 'They're getting out of the boat and some of the other blokes have arranged an altar thing in front of the tents. Gawd, this is horrible. I've got kids of my own.'

For a moment the Inspector hesitated. He didn't want to take the blame for allowing a kiddy to be murdered naked on that altar. 'Listen,' he said, 'the moment they have the poor little bugger up there stripped and naked and the priest sod's had his say, you are to up and hit them. Do you hear what I said?'

'I heard,' said the detective, 'I heard. But if you think I'm going to tangle with that monster in the frock and come out alive, you don't know what I'm looking at.'

There was a pause, then a gasp. Inspector Rascombe was too busy to hear that gasp. He was now fully occupied in trying to order up a platoon of battle-hardened Child Abuse Trauma Specialists through Police Headquarters in Twixt and getting nowhere fast because, he was told, it was Sunday and the strain of being called fucking shits by enraged and innocent parents all week and the CATS by colleagues in Social Services took its toll by the weekend and they liked to lie in...

'I know what they like and I know about their lying. I've heard them in court so don't give me that. This is a Top Priority Order. You tell Social Services Emergency and they can fucking get out of bed too that we've got a Witchcraft Black Mass going on up here and the priest is doing the Communion bit at this very moment...Yes, I know the cross has got to be upside-down. What the hell's that got to do with the price of eggs? It's the little kiddy lying naked on the altar I'm worried about. No, they're not going to bugger him, not yet at any rate, They're going to slit the poor little sod's throat first and drink his blood out of the chalice. Get that into your thick head. Over and out.'

At Police Headquarters the operator had got it only too well. He was over and out. Over the apparatus in front of him and out for the count.

Inspector Rascombe turned back to the Surveillance Unit. The gasping had stopped. 'What now?' he demanded. 'Have they got the kiddy naked on the altar yet?'

'Kiddy? No, not as far as I can see. They're waiting for a woman who is jogging round the lake and, blimey, is she worth waiting for. I mean this one is the real thing. A right smasher in a silver cat suit. Got boobs on her like '

The Inspector didn't want to hear what her boobs were like. For all he cared she could be Dolly Parton with knobs on.

He wasn't far wrong. Consuelo McKoy could by no stretch of the imagination be called the real thing. She had used her years, and there were a great many of them, and vast sums of her husband's money to enrich some of the most proficient plastic surgeons from Santa Barbara to LA. At several hundred yards she looked a million dollars and she had spent far more to achieve that illusion. She had the gloriously lissom figure of a girl of eighteen, which, considering she was eighty-two rising eighty-three, was no mean achievement, particularly on the part of the late Mr McKoy. What liposuction hadn't done for her thighs and silicone implants for her breasts her latest nipples were extraordinarily effective the silver cat suit did. It constrained her and preserved the illusion that her navel was where it always had been instead of appearing, rather peculiarly, in her cleavage. Even in Santa Barbara she had been something else. At the Middenhall she was something else again, a vision of such unutterable beauty that at two hundred yards in the morning sunlight it took the surveillance detective's breath away. He kept the camera running.

It was an action he would live to regret. It was only when she came round the lake and he was able to zoom in on her face that he began to realize something was terribly wrong. It didn't seem to gel with her body. In fact, it didn't gel at all. Even the finest cosmetic surgeons, using portions of skin stretched to the utmost from her throat and neck and even unravelled from her chest, had failed to make good the ravages of time and marital bitterness. Not that Consuelo McKoy, née Midden, had ever had a beautiful face. At eighteen her mind, never far from the cash register in her father's shop, had bred a mean and hungry look which should have warned Corporal McKoy what he was letting himself in for. Being an incredibly innocent and full-blooded man with a romantic passion for things English, he failed to look too closely into her eyes. He chose instead to think of them as the windows of the soul. To some extent they were. In Consuelo's case they would have been if she had a soul that needed windows. She didn't. She had about as much soul as a scorpion disturbed by the entry of a bare foot into an empty desert boot. Her eyes were dark and small, lasers of such malignancy that her mother, a placid woman not given to much imaginative fluency, had once said they made her think of the bit on the end of a dentist's drill, they were that spiteful.