It was an unequal battle. A policeman under a pile of leaves who is suffering from a perfectly natural bout of homophobia is not at his best when attacked by powerful women descended from a line of Turnbirds that could prove its ancestry back to Saxon times. A Turnbird had fought at the Battle of Hastings with Harold, and that same ancestral spirit inspired Phoebe now. She would die to get her man. In fact it was Detective Constable Markin who damn near died. It is not pleasant to be kicked in the head by a fifteen-stone woman of thirty-five who talks to mirrors and writes poetry before going out to make life hell for foxes and other vermin. That the thing under the pile of leaves was vermin Phoebe Turnbird had not the slightest doubt and, if anything was needed to prove how verminous it was, its supine lack of resistance provided that proof. That it kept moaning about not being buggered please I don't want
Aids didn't exactly increase her respect or liking for the creature. To stifle this flow of filth Phoebe Turnbird knelt on the constable and ground his blackened face into the soggy earth. Around them the kiddies shouted encouragement, and one of the older ones was taken into the bushes by Consuelo McKoy to be shown something he hadn't seen before.
But it was on the drive down to the Middenhall under the avenue of chestnut trees that new and more fearful developments were taking place. The Child Abuse Trauma Specialists were arriving in surprising numbers. They came from all over Britain and had been attending a conference in Tween devoted to 'The Sphincter: Its Diagnostic Role in Parental Rape Inspections'. There were witchcraft experts from Scotland, sodomy specialists from South Wales, oral-sex-in-infancy counsellors, mutual masturbation advisers for adolescents, a number of clitoris stimulation experts, four vasectomists (female), and finally fifteen whores who had come to tell the conference what men really wanted. If they were anything to go by, what men wanted was anything, but anything, with two legs, a short skirt and a mouthful of rotten teeth. And one that whined about being socially deprived. 'Disadvantaged' was the word of the conference. Sphincters were disadvantaged, sodomists were disadvantaged there had been a prolonged debate on the subject of which were the more disadvantaged and on the whole the sodomists got the greater support largely because, in the experience of the delegates, sodomists didn't pose any threat to women under the age of sixty-five. Consuelo McKoy could have told them differently.
What she was getting under a dense thicket on the edge of the estate was not what she had expected or was enjoying. The kiddy from the Isle of Dogs might not have been able to distinguish with absolute assurance between a vagina and a sphincter, though that was to be doubted, but he knew which he preferred in Consuelo's case. Her screams, muted by distance and by her inability to open her mouth too wide if she were to avoid scalping herself, went unheard.
In any case even if they had heard those screams the Child Abuse experts would have ignored them. Granny Abuse came under another department. They milled about looking for the children they had come to counsel and their faces were alive with desperate care. Or, to be precise, dead with desperate care. They were concerned. They had come to deal with misery and helplessness and to dole out their own misery and helplessness in even greater measure. A miasma of mixed emotions and bitter hatred of anything faintly fond or normal seemed to hang over them. Cruelty and sadism were their specialities and they were infected with them. Suffused with guilt about massacres and droughts in faraway places, they appeased their worthless consciences by doing worthless things. And blamed society for everything. Or God. Or men and parents who loved and disciplined their children to be polite and civil and to work at school. Above all they blamed sex but never ceased to slobber on their own proclivities.
Now, dragged by duty from one another's beds in the most expensive conference hotel in Tween, few of them had had time to wash. Not that they would have washed if there'd been all the time in the world. They liked their own smells. They reminded them of their calling, those smells of stinking fish did, and they revelled in their rejection of the hygienic. The coven from Aberdeen was particularly noisome, and some of the oral sex counsellors still had pubic hair on their chins. As their cars piled up behind one another down the drive and blocked the lodge gates the women debated what to do. They held a conference, and one or two of the more determined ones actually looked around for some children to counsel and expend their care and concern on.
There were none to be seen. With a prescience that did him credit, the Dean and the undergraduates had driven them past Miss Turnbird far into the wood and had forced them to hide by the boundary wall out of harm's way. Only some of the prostitutes did anything useful, one of them giving a peculiar form of last rite to a dying marksman. He'd never been shot before and he'd never been into fellatio. But the whore didn't know that. She was following her calling. So were the creatures under the chestnut trees. They had brought the atmosphere of a failed hospice to the Middenhall. They couldn't have brought it to a better place.
Chapter 27
To Miss Midden the sound of gunfire from the Middenhall was not altogether surprising. That old fool Buffalo had frequently boasted he was going to teach those youngsters from the slums about spooring and killing things like rhinos on the hoof at a thousand yards and generally being manly. Doubtless that's what he was doing. She turned over and went back to sleep. She had got home from London late, well after midnight, and she wanted to lie in. Whatever old Buffalo was doing wasn't any of her business.
On the other hand the roar of SS Standartenführer Sigismund Rascombe's Storm Group's vans as they pelted past the farm did seem to suggest that something bloody odd was going on. Miss Midden put on a dressing-gown and went downstairs to the kitchen to find the Major looking fearfully out of the back window at the Union Jack which could be seen fluttering from the flagpole above the rim of trees. 'Buffalo,' said Miss Midden, and put the kettle on. 'Bound to be that old idiot being a geriatric boy scout. Thinks he's Baden-Powell, I daresay.'
The Major wasn't so sure. His experience of military life might be largely imaginary and second-hand but he knew enough to realize that the direction of the gunfire and its intensity suggested that Buffalo Midden, far from showing the Mission children what a Lee Enfield could do to a charging rhino or something of that sort, was engaged in shooting at them. And while this was understandable the Major had once been surprised by a number of the little brutes while practising self-abuse overlooking their tents and he didn't like them any more than those guests whose rooms had been burgled but shooting at the little bastards was carrying things too far. He'd been particularly alarmed by the sight of Rascombe's armed column. It hadn't consisted of the armoured half-tracks of the Inspector's imagination, but there had been an urgency about its passing that gave it an altogether different authenticity. Major MacPhee recognized police vans when he saw them. He'd been in enough of them in his time. And he had been particularly alarmed by the presence of a singularly large van with 'Police Dog Section' painted on the side.
The notion that whatever was going on down at the Middenhall required the attention of quite so many dogs as that damned great van seemed to suggest was not a reassuring one. Major MacPhee was afraid of dogs. He had once been bitten on the ankle by a Jack Russell and that had been bad enough. To be savaged by an entire squad of police dogs filled him with the most appalling apprehension. The prospect never entered Miss Midden's mind, and it wouldn't have bothered her if it had. Rather more disturbing was the sound of agonized screams that wafted up from the Middenhall on the occasional breeze. Miss Midden opened the back door and listened. The firing had started again. And the screaming. She shut the door and thought very carefully.