Then he hesitated. He wasn't sure about a Very pistol's penetrating power. He'd seen what it did to a warthog, and he'd once brought down a circling vulture with the thing by pretending to be dead and waiting for it to come down and have a snack, but even to Buffalo's simple and murderous mind there was a very great difference between warthogs (ugly bastards, they were) and vultures and propane gas tanks. It might be wiser to hole the tank with the rifle first, and then fire the Very pistol's flare at the escaping gas. Much better. Bigger bang and damn-all whimper.
The resulting bang, which was heard as far away as Tween, had all the characteristics of a blended thunderclap and an exploding oil refinery. Something like the Oklahoma City bomb went off at the back of the Middenall. Even Phoebe Turnbird, dragging the unresisting Detective Markin with an arm-lock that occasionally lifted him off the ground, was struck by the explosion. Other people were less fortunate. They were struck by pieces of the Middenhall itself. Two vast ornamental Corinthian columns on the facade broke loose and crashed onto some of the trucks and police cars on the drive (it was at this point that Inspector Rascombe realized that his top priorities had fuck-all to do with rescuing kiddies from having their throats cut on altars, and made a dash for the lake); a mock Tudor chimney of unnatural proportions toppled onto and through the leaded roof (which hadn't been strengthened by the fireball from the kitchen); several Child Abuse Trauma Specialists had reason for genuine concern, but weren't cared for by their comrades-in-arms who went screaming hysterically up the drive pursued by maddened German Shepherd police dogs sensibly released by their handlers from the overheated van; only the prostitutes stood their ground and did anything useful. They had seen police dogs in action and, being uneducated and high on heroin, they were also unconcerned. But they did care. They helped those earnest caring women who despised them, those who could stand up on their feet, and led them away and bandaged their wounds as best they could, as a result of which some of the wounded CATS contracted AIDS.
The police marksmen previously behind the propane tank neither cared nor were concerned. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust just about summed up their condition. They were part of the mushroom cloud that rose over the remains of Black Midden's architectural gravestone. Buffalo Midden rose with them but, remarkably, in one piece. He landed in a huge pile of manure that had been fermenting nicely on the far side of the kitchen garden and emerged half an hour later uncertain what had happened and wondering why it was he seemed to smell so strongly of pig and singed hair.
He wandered away from the inferno unsteadily and stopped to ask one of the Armed Quick Response Team, one he had shot and killed, the way to Piccadilly Circus. 'Rude bastard. Can't get a civil word out of anyone in this accursed country,' he muttered as he stumbled away.
Behind him the Middenhall blazed and slowly folded in on itself. And on the other unfortunate Middens who had seen it as their home from home with free board and lodging and all the trimmings, like being as rude to domestic servants as they had been accustomed to be in the tropics. There were few servants left for them to be rude to if they had lived. The cook and her daughter and the other helpers in the kitchen were saved by the water tank above them, which burst and flooded the cellar. Even so they were almost boiled alive. The arrival of a fleet of fire engines did nothing to assist. They couldn't get past the cars blocking the drive and the lodge gates. In any case there was nothing they could have done. The Middenhall, that brick, stone, and mortar construction of abysmal taste, that monument to Imperial vanity and stupidity and greed, had become the mausoleum Black Midden had intended, though not in the way he had hoped. It would go down in the history of Twixt and Tween. It had already gone down in just about every other respect. The great billiard table a massive piece of slate was all that remained had crashed into the wine cellar destroying the last vestiges of a fine collection of port, claret and sweet dessert wines he and his successors had laid down there and the colonial Middens had not been able to find and drink.
And through it all, through the mayhem and the maelstrom of disaster that had engulfed the Middenhall and its inhabitants, Miss Midden sat impassively by the phone in the hall of the old Midden farmhouse and talked insistently and incessantly to an old school friend in Devon about things that were not happening around her, about happy memories of other days when she and Hilda had hitchhiked to Land's End. She was establishing an unbreakable alibi. No one would ever be able to say she had been responsible for the destruction of the loathsome house that had broken her father.
Chapter 28
The scene that greeted Lennox Midden though greeted was hardly the most appropriate word on his arrival at the Middenhall (there was so much traffic he'd had to walk over half a mile) was not one to reassure a decent suburban solicitor who had woken only a few hours earlier expecting to play in the Urnmouth Golf Club's Annual Competition. There was nothing of the smooth greens, the broad fairways, and the bantering camaraderie in the clubhouse afterwards of men who believe that hitting a small white ball into the distance gives life meaning. A great gulf was fixed, an abyss, between that comfortable world and what was happening at the Middenhall. There were snatches of green through the smoke where the lawns ran down to the lake, but they were not smooth. Lumps of concrete blown from the crenellations and the ornate turrets of the roof lay embedded in the turf, with the occasional dead or wounded police marksman lying poignantly among them. Smashed trucks and police cars burnt vigorously on the drive. The vast verandah burnt too, while the shell of the great building steamed and smoked hideously, flames suddenly erupting from its depths like some volcano on heat. A German survivor of the final Russian assault at Stalingrad, or an American soldier surveying the devastation unnecessarily and barbarously inflicted on the Iraqi convoy north of Kuwait City, would have found the sights and smells familiar.
Lennox Midden in his plus-fours didn't. He had never been in the presence of death and destruction on this scale before, and with each dread step he took along the road and down the drive, past stragglers of the Child Abuse Trauma Specialists, past wounded policemen, past hideous but stalwart prostitutes with smoke-blackened faces, past maddened German Shepherds with smouldering tails and burnt whiskers, even past Buffalo Midden, unrecognizable beneath his coating of pig manure but still wanting to know the way to Piccadilly Circus, Lennox Midden's faith in the suburban values faltered. By the time he reached the bottom of the drive, where firemen had gathered to watch in awe what they had come to extinguish, the solicitor's hopes had vanished. There was nothing to be saved from the Middenhall. Chunks of the upper storeys were still crashing at intervals into the inferno below, sending up clouds of dust and smoke. The smell was appalling. Even to Lennox it was obvious that more than his great grandfather's fantastic mansion had been burnt. The stench of barbecued relatives, those Middens from Africa and India and faraway turbulent places who had sought safety and comfort for their retirement in the house, hung nauseatingly on the summer air.