'Oh, what are we going to do, dear?' asked Major MacPhee 'Something terrible is happening. It's too, too dreadful. People shooting and the police '
'You are going to make some very strong tea,' Miss Midden ordered, 'and pull yourself together. I am going to make a phone call.'
'But the police are already here...' the Major began but Miss Midden was already at the phone and dialling her cousin, Lennox, the family solicitor.
'I don't give a damn if you were about to go for a round of golf, Lennox,' she told him when he complained that he couldn't possibly come out now, it was the Annual Competition at Urnmouth, 'and tomorrow won't do...No, I can't tell you what is happening but a police convoy has gone down there with dogs and there is a great deal of firing going on...Yes, I did say "firing" and yes, I did mean gunfire. I'll open the front door and you can hear it for yourself.' She held the phone to the open door and looked out in time to see the first of the Child Abuse Trauma Specialists' minibuses pass. The grimly caring faces of the women inside it shook her to the core. 'Fuck me,' she said.
'What?' said the deeply shocked Lennox. 'What did you say? No, don't repeat it. I heard that very distinctly.'
'And the gunfire, the screams?'
Lennox Midden said he had heard them pretty distinctly too. He'd be over as soon as he could. Miss Midden put the phone down and thought again. She had to do something about Timothy Bright get him out of the house, for one thing, before an investigation by the CID into whatever was going on at the Middenhall began in earnest. She picked up the phone and this time called Carryclogs House.
'I'd like to speak to Miss Phoebe,' she told the serving wench, as old Turnbird had insisted on calling the housekeeper, Dora.
'Miss Phoebe's gone to Church,' the wench told her. 'She should be back any time now.'
Miss Midden thanked her and went upstairs to persuade Timothy Bright that he must go at once to Carryclogs. He didn't need any persuading. What he had heard and then seen from his window in the old nursery had convinced him that the people with razors had arrived to give him piggy-chops. He couldn't think what else could be happening. And the Major was happy to take him over. He hadn't liked the look of those women in the minibuses, and now the stream of cars backing up at the bottom of the farm track, any more than Miss Midden had.
'But I'll never get the car out onto the road,' he pointed out.
Miss Midden had to agree. 'Then you'll just have to walk. The exercise will do you both good,' she said. 'I'll stay and hold the fort here.'
The metaphor was apt. As the Major and Timothy Bright set out across the fell, the sounds of battle increased. Buffalo Midden had drawn fire from a bedroom window and had then retreated to the other end of the building where he might get that bastard hiding behind the lead truck. Failing that, he meant to hit that walkie-talkie thing lying on the ground in front of it. From the arrow slit in the east turret he took aim and fired. The walkie-talkie exploded. Bits of it hit Inspector Cecil Rascombe and smashed his glasses. Out of touch with the rest of the AQRT and with reality, the erstwhile Standartenführer SS played dead. It was just as well. Something even more catastrophic was about to occur.
It was a little thing but its consequences were to be immense. Only the cook, cowering with the rest of the indoor staff in the cool safety of the cellar, was aware that in her flight she had left two very large frying-pans containing a great many slices of bacon on the gas stove. As it was a Sunday, when some of the residents insisted on bacon and eggs at least once a week with fried bread and mushrooms and damn the cholesterol, she had been getting breakfast ready for them when Buffalo started shooting. But even she, a perceptive cook if not a very good one, had no idea what two pounds of fatty bacon (the late Leonard Midden, now lying with the late Mrs Midden over the window-sill of their bedroom, had always maintained on the most dubious medical grounds that fatty bacon was good for the uterus and had insisted on the most fatty bacon for his wife) would do when heated beyond endurance on a propane gas stove in the way of smoke. And flame. It was singularly delinquent of the girl who had come in from Stagstead to help to have put the kettle containing the potato chip oil next to the frying pans. As bacon smoke filled the kitchen the oil joined in. There was an explosion of flame and the first roar of what was to become known as the Middenhall holocaust.
Even then the situation might have been saved. That it wasn't was due to the well-meaning intervention of Mrs Laura Midden Rayter, who fought her way through the smoke with extraordinary fortitude but no understanding of what a bucket of water thrown into a chip-oil fire would do. She soon found out. This time there was no misunderstanding the roar as two gallons of flaming cooking oil went into orbit. The great scrubbed deal kitchen table joined the conflagration, within a minute the cupboards and shelves were blazing, and Mrs Laura Midden Rayter, having left the door into the hall open in her attempt to escape, had a brief glimpse of the arras Black Midden had used to decorate the panelled walls of the dining-room beginning to burn with all the rapidity its motif deserved. Upstairs various panic-stricken colonial Middens pinned down by the shots of the police marksmen, some of whom had managed to escape from behind the rockery to reach the safety of the trees on either side of the great house, tried to get to the huge oak staircase before it went up in smoke. And flames. They failed. The staircarpet was already ablaze and the heat in the hall was too intense. The great oil painting of Black Midden by Sargent over the marble fireplace presented a foretaste of hell. Never a lovely or even vaguely handsome man, even after Sargent had exercised all his cosmetic artistry, the portrait now had a truly infernal look about it. Not that any of the guests stayed around long enough to examine it at all carefully. There was an urgency about their desire to escape the Middenhall that even exceeded the insistence they had shown in getting rooms there when they had arrived. Nobody had stopped them then. Getting out was an entirely different matter. As the flames engulfed the entire ground floor and even the billiard table began to burn, they found the stairs to the second floor and went up them. It was an unwise move. Only Frank Midden, a retired and rather lame ostrich farmer from the Cape, had the good sense to hurl himself onto the roof of the verandah and roll down it. He didn't care if he was shot. It was better than being burnt alive in that awful house.
Above him in one of the roof turrets even Buffalo was coming to a similar conclusion. A ball of flame, a positive fireball, issuing with a terrible whoosh, alerted him, in so far as anything was capable of alerting the idiotic old man, that his enemies were employing a new and dreadful method to flush him out. It was hardly the method he had anticipated but it showed how ruthless terrorists were. They were deliberately burning the Middenhall to the ground, presumably as some sort of propaganda victory like blowing up that Pan-Am Jumbo. Since Buffalo had blown up any number of jumbos he had once driven a herd of elephants across a minefield he had constructed from mines collected in Mozambique to see what would happen he knew what blowing up jumbos meant. Or thought he did. Well, two could play that game and he intended to go, if go he must and it was beginning to look like it with a bang. Bugger the whimpers. And he had just seen two men in those sinister black overalls make a dash under cover of smoke from the kitchen window to take up positions behind the huge propane tank that supplied the heating and cooking gas to the Middenhall. Snatching a Very pistol from the satchel that held his ammunition, he aimed it at the propane tank.