By ten o'clock Timothy had swung off the motorway onto side roads across a rolling upland of little towns and villages, wooded valleys and tumbling rivers. Here, acting on the instructions of his automatic pilot, he slowed down for corners and braked where necessary and swept up hills and onto moors where sheep miraculously crossed the road just ahead of him or just behind and there were few signs of habitation. Somewhere ahead of him lay safety from the demons in his skull and somewhere ahead was a paradisiacal land where there was infinite happiness. The images were ever-changing but the same message of escape in alternate forms sustained him for the drive. On and on he went into a world he had never known before and would never be able to find again. And all the time Timothy Bright remained unconscious of his actions and his surroundings. His hand on the throttle twisted this way and that, slackening the speed on the bends and accelerating on the straights. He didn't know. His inner experiences dominated his being. At some point during the night his bodily sensations joined forces with the mental images to convince him he was on fire and needed to take his skin off to escape being burnt. He stopped the bike in a wooded area by a stream and stripped off his clothes and hurled them down the bank before mounting the Suzuki again and riding on into his internal landscape entirely naked. Ten miles further on he came to the Six Lanes End where it joined the Parson's Road to the north. Timothy Bright shot across the intersection and took the private road belonging to the Twixt and Tween Waterworks Company. With a fine disregard for its uneven surface he shot the Suzuki up it. Cattle grids rattled briefly beneath him and he was up onto Scabside Fell beside drystone walls and open grassland. Ahead of him a great stone dam held back the waters of the reservoir. It was here that the night ride ended.
As he accelerated on what looked to him like the blue, blue sky an elderly sheep that had been sleeping on the warmth of the road grew vaguely aware of a distant danger and rose to its feet. To Timothy Bright it was merely a little cloud. The next moment the sheep was airborne and hurtling with the motorbike over the deepest part of the reservoir. In another direction Timothy Bright, still sublimely unconscious of his surroundings, shot through the air and landed in a coppice of young fir trees on the far bank. As he drifted limply through them and landed on the pine needles underneath, he knew no fear. For a while he lay in the darkness until the conviction that piggy-chops had begun drove him to his feet and out of the coppice. Now he was a bird, or would have been if the ground hadn't kept getting in the way. Three times he fell over on the tarmac and added to the damage he had already suffered. And once he got his foot stuck in the iron bars of a grid which he mistook for a giant clam. But this time the total disassociation produced by the Toad had begun to wear off. Having escaped from the terrible grip of the clam he felt strangely cold.
He had to get home, though the home he had to get to had no clear identity. Home was simply where a house was, and ahead of him he could see a building outlined against the sky. In the half-world between mental agitation and partial perception he made his way towards it and found himself confronted by a solid stone wall and some iron gates. It was exactly what he wanted. He tried the gates and found them locked. Something dark was on the other side and might be looking at him. That didn't matter. Nothing mattered except getting into a warm bed. Timothy Bright grasped the wrought-iron gates and began to climb. He was going to fly from the top. On the other side a large Rottweiler waited eagerly. Trained from its infancy to kill, it was looking forward to the opportunity.
At the top of the gate Timothy Bright hesitated momentarily. He was a bird once again and this time he definitely intended to fly. Letting go of the spikes around him, he stood for a second with his arms outstretched. For a moment he was very briefly airborne. As he plunged downwards the Rottweiler, like the sheep on the dam, had a vague awareness of danger. Then 190 lb of yuppie dropped on it from a height of ten feet. As the great dog's legs buckled beneath it and the deep breath it had taken was expelled from its various orifices together with portions of its dinner, the dog knew it had made a mistake. Its jaws slammed together, its teeth locked on themselves and it was desperately short of breath. With a final effort to avoid suffocation, it tried to get its legs together. Splayed out on either side of its body, they wouldn't come. Only when Timothy Bright rolled to one side did it manage to break free. But the Rottweiler was a broken beast. With a plaintive whistle and a hobble it slunk round the corner of the house to its kennel.
Timothy Bright lay a little longer on the cobbled forecourt. He too had had the breath knocked out of him though to a lesser extent than the Rottweiler, but the urge to go to bed was stronger than ever. He got unsteadily to his feet and found the front door which flickered under a light in front of him. He turned the handle and the door opened. The hall light was on. Timothy moved towards the darkened stairs and climbed them with infinite weariness. Ahead of him there was a door. He opened it and went inside and found the bed. As he climbed into it someone on the far side stirred and said, 'God, you stink of dog,' and went back to sleep. Timothy Bright did too.
Chapter 5
In the conference dining-room at the Underview Hotel in Tween the Chief Constable, Sir Arnold Gonders, presided over a celebratory dinner for the Twixt and Tween Serious Crime Squad. Ostensibly the dinner was being held to mark the retirement of Detective Inspector Holdell, who had been with the Squad since it had first been set up. In fact the real celebration had to do with the decision of the Director of Public Prosecutions in London not to proceed with the trial of twenty-one members of the Squad for falsifying evidence, fabricating confessions, accepting bribes, the use of unwarranted violence, and wholesale perjury, which crimes had sent several dozen wholly innocent individuals to prison for sentences as long as eighteen years while allowing as many guilty criminals to sleep comfortably at home and dream of other dreadful crimes to commit.
The Chief Constable was particularly pleased by the outcome. He had spent the day in London and had had a private meeting with the Home Secretary and the DPP to hear the decision. As he put it to his Deputy, Harry Hodge, 'I told them straight. The morale of the Force is the priority. "Top Priority," I said. "And if you want to undermine that morale, you just go ahead and drag my lads into court. You won't have me as Chief Constable if you do and you'd better know that now." Well, they got the message and no mistake.'
Which was not exactly what had happened.
The decision had been taken two weeks before and even then it had needed the DPP's strongest arguments to persuade the Home Secretary that a trial would not be in the public interest. He had explained the problem over lunch at the Carlton Club. 'Start opening that particular can of fucking worms,' he said, 'and Pandora's Box will look like the good times.'