by Tom Sharpe
Sir Arnold preferred not to. ‘Take a urine test off this one and it would burn a hole in the bottle,’ he said.
‘Are you sure? I mean it seems so unlikely.’
The Chief Constable put the torch down and turned on her. ‘Unlikely? Unlikely? Anything more unlikely than coming home to . . . Never mind. Look at his knees, look at his hands. What do they tell you?’
‘He seems rather well . . . well-proportioned now that you come to mention it.’
‘Fuck his proportions,’ snarled the Chief Constable. ‘The skin has been scraped off them. The bugger’s been dragged along the ground. And where are his clothes?’ He looked round the room and then, putting on a dressing-gown, went downstairs.
There were no clothes to be found. By the time he got back to the bedroom the Chief Constable knew what had happened and was trying to come to terms with the prospect before him. ‘This is a set-up, that’s what it is. I’m being framed. Those press bastards will arrive any minute now and –’
‘Oh God, we’ve invited people over for drinks at twelve,’ Lady Vy interrupted, her social priorities coming to the fore. ‘With that MP you’re so friendly with. Do you think . . .’
The Chief Constable stared into another abyss. ‘We’ve got to move quickly,’ he said. ‘This bastard isn’t going to be here when they come. He’s going down to the boiler-room.’
It was Lady Vy’s turn to stare into hell. ‘But it’s oil-fired. You can’t possibly dispose of him in the boiler. How can you think of such things?’
‘I didn’t, for Chrissake. I’m not going to burn him. I’m going to put him on ice until the heat’s off, that’s all.’ And leaving his wife trying to cope with these weird contradictions, Sir Arnold hurried downstairs again. When he returned he had some parcel tape and two plastic bin liners.
‘What are you going to do?’ Lady Vy asked. Sir Arnold left the room again and this time rummaged in the bathroom. He returned with a length of Elastoplast. Lady Vy goggled at him. ‘What . . . What are you –’
‘Shut up and make yourself useful,’ he snapped. ‘We’re going to tie this bastard up so tightly he won’t know where the hell he’s been.’
‘My dear Arnold, you don’t really think I’m going to assist you in this horrible scheme.’
The Chief Constable stopped trying to get Timothy’s legs into a bin liner and straightened up. ‘Listen to me,’ he said with a terrible intensity. ‘I don’t want to hear any more of your “dear Arnold” toffee-nosed crap. And you’d better get this straight. If I go down the social sewer because of this, don’t think you’re going to stay clean, because you aren’t. This time you’re going to dirty your hands.’
Lady Vy tried to draw herself up. ‘Well, really. Anyone would think I had something to do with his being here.’
‘Seems a reasonable assumption. And I’ll fill it out for you. You and your Auntie Bea are into S and M. Pick him up some place – he looks as if he might come from Harrogate – and you fill him with intravenous crack or Sweetie B gives him a spinal tap of Columbian ice with that hypodermic of hers and you drag him here and have some fun. Get the picture?’
Lady Vy was beginning to. ‘You’d never dare. You’d never dare do anything . . . I mean Daddy –’
‘Try me,’ said Sir Arnold. ‘Just try me. And your bloody Daddy is going to like his picture in the fucking Sun with a headline EARL’S DAUGHTER IN LESBIAN LOVE TRAP and all about you and the butch-dyke with her heroin habit and . . .’
‘But Bea’s an aromatherapist and stress counsellor. She’s –’
‘Just made for the Sun and the News of the World, she is. And the aroma she’s going to be giving off unless you start helping is going to make this dogshit smell like Chanel No. 5. Now then, hold this bloody bag open while I get his legs in.’
But it was obvious that Timothy Bright was too large and intractable for the garbage bag. In the end they dragged the sheets off the bed and rolled him up in them. Sir Arnold picked up the parcel tape and set to work with such thoroughness that the thing they dragged with immense difficulty down to the cellar looked like a mummified body with holes for its nose. Finally they dropped Timothy into the very darkest corner of the cellar beyond the old stone wine racks.
‘That ought to keep the bastard quiet for a bit,’ said Sir Arnold only to have his hopes dashed as Timothy Bright shifted on the floor and groaned. For a moment the Chief Constable hesitated. Then he handed Lady Vy the torch and turned to the steps.
‘Just see he doesn’t move,’ he said and hurried up to the kitchen. He returned with a plastic basting syringe, a measuring glass, and a bottle of whisky.
‘Oh my God, what are you going to do now?’
‘Shut up,’ said the Chief Constable. ‘And hold that torch steady. I don’t want to get the measures wrong.’
‘What’s that syringe thing for?’ asked Lady Vy.
‘Well, it’s not for basting chickens,’ said Sir Arnold. ‘It’s for giving the bastard something to keep him quiet. Like two ounces of Scotch every two hours with a couple of your Valiums and some of those pink pills you take at night. That way the bugger won’t know where he is or has been or what time of day it is.’
Lady Vy looked at the bundle on the cellar floor and doubted if the whisky was necessary. The other sedatives certainly weren’t. ‘Give him those pills and he won’t know anything ever again,’ she said, ‘and I don’t think you ought to pump Scotch into him with that thing. He’ll almost certainly choke to death.’
‘I’m not going to pump it in. Dribble it, more likely. OK?’
But Lady Vy was staring at him. ‘You’re mad. Absolutely raving. You propose to dribble two ounces of whisky mixed with Valium . . . Dear God.’
‘No,’ said the Chief Constable firmly. ‘And at this moment in time I don’t want to be told. Now then, hold this thing.’ He held the plastic syringe up.
‘I am not holding anything,’ said Lady Vy just as firmly. ‘You can do what you like but I am not going to be an accessory to murder.’
‘Oh yes you are,’ said the Chief Constable with a terrible look on his face. Lady Vy held the syringe.
Five minutes later Timothy Bright had successfully taken his first dose of Valium and whisky. Lady Vy’s pink anti-depressants hadn’t been added to this lethal brew after all.
‘That should guarantee he doesn’t wake up for a bit,’ said Sir Arnold as they climbed the cellar steps. ‘Keep him unconscious until I’ve had a chance to come up with something.’
He locked the cellar door.
For the rest of the night he tried to sleep on the couch in his study. As he tossed between brief sleep and appalled wakefulness, he searched his memory for a particularly vindictive villain who could have set this trap up. There were just too many criminals with a grudge against him. And how come the press gang hadn’t turned up on the doorstep? Presumably because he’d called the Quick Response Squad off. The squad’s arrival would have been the excuse for a massive publicity invasion. But they needed the QRS boys to lead them to the Old Boathouse. Sir Arnold was glad it was so isolated. All the same, something was fucking weird. He’d phone around in the morning to see if anyone had been tipped off for a spectacular happening. No, he wouldn’t. Silence, absolute, complete and total silence was always the best response. Silence, and with God’s help he would find a way out of this nightmare. Just so long as the bastard didn’t die.
Between clean sheets in the big bedroom upstairs Lady Vy cursed herself for a fool. The water from the punctured hot-water tank had crept under the door of the bathroom and was soaking through the carpet into the floor. She should have listened to Daddy all those years ago. He had always said you had to be a sadistic cretin to be a successful policeman, and he’d been spot on.
8
At Pud End Henry Gould woke with the horrid sensation that he had done something terrible. It took him a moment or two to remember what it was, and when he did he was genuinely worried. ‘Oh Lord,’ he muttered as he g
ot up hurriedly, ‘what an asinine trick to pull.’ When he went downstairs it was to find his uncle sitting over his breakfast coffee in the old farm kitchen with the radio beside him. He was looking particularly cheerful for a man who had almost certainly just lost a nephew. Henry had no doubt about that. In the sober light of the morning he felt sure his cousin must have been killed. No one stoked to the synapses with bufo sonoro could possible ride an enormously powerful motorbike for any distance and live. Toad was the most powerful mind-bender.
‘No need to look so gloomy,’ Victor told him. ‘I’ve been listening to the local radio since six but they’ve made no mention of any accident involving a motorcycle, and they always do to encourage the others. Timothy is probably sleeping it off in some hedgerow. That sort always have the devil on their side.’
‘I certainly hope so. Goodness only knows what that Toad stuff is. From the way it worked I’m surprised he could get on the bike, let alone ride the thing.’
But it was later in the morning when Victor Gould went up to air the spare room that he realized Timothy Bright had left a brown paper package and a large briefcase. He carried them through to the cupboard under the stairs and deposited them there with the thought that Timothy would certainly be returning to claim them. It was a fairly dreadful thought but at least he was temporarily absent.
*
Timothy Bright would have shared Henry’s consternation had he been in any condition to. As it was he slept on happily unconscious of his situation and with the remains of the Toad doing new things to his neurons now that it had been freshened up with Valium and whisky. He was fortunately unaware that he was strapped up inside two bloodstained sheets and a pillow case wedged into a distant corner of the Old Boathouse cellar, and that he himself looked very much like one of the sacks of coal that had once occupied a space there.
Above his head and out in the garden the guests at the Gonders drinks party wandered about clutching glasses of a rather acid white wine that had been sold by Ernest Lamming to Sir Arnold as ‘a first-rate little Vouvray’ which had a certain accuracy about it though the Chief Constable now wished he hadn’t bought quite so much of the stuff. In particular he wasn’t feeling at all like drinking anything very much himself. He’d had three hours disrupted sleep and had woken with the feeling that he had not only drunk far too much but that he must have been hallucinating during the night. What appeared to have happened, namely that he had probably murdered some bastard who had been sleeping with Vy, couldn’t possibly have been the case. In fact all the events of the night had such a nightmarish quality about them that he would willingly have spent the entire day in solitude trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Instead he was forced to adopt a bonhomie he didn’t in the least feel. Anyway he wasn’t drinking that battery-acid Vouvray. He’d stick to vodka and tonic and hope it helped his head.
It was an indication of the remarkable social changes that had taken place in the eighties that the guests were such a very unmixed bunch. In earlier days there would have seemed something distinctly suspect about a Chief Constable who had quite so many friends in the property development and financial worlds and so very few among what had once been known as the gentry. This was particularly true in Twixt and Tween. The county had once been famous for the great industries and shipyards of Tween and the grouse moors and huge estates of the great landowners of Twixt. At the Gonders party there were none of the old ironmasters, and the only industries represented were service ones. None of the landowners would have mixed at all happily with the guests at the Old Boathouse. Then again there were no trade unionists. Sir Arnold Gonders had learnt the political catechism of Thatcherism very well indeed: only money mattered and preferably the newest money that talked about little else and cared for nothing. There were a great many people from the TV and showbiz world. ‘Communication is the real art of a Chief Constable,’ Sir Arnold had once pontificated. ‘We must keep the people on our side.’ It was a revealing comment suggesting that society was irremediably divided.
Certainly in the Twixt and Tween Constabulary area if people did not know which side Sir Arnold Gonders was on, a glance at the guest list would have given them some insight. Len Bload of Bload and Babshott, Public Relations and Financial Consultants to the County Council, was there with his wife, Mercia, the ex-model and masseuse who had risen to a directorship of B and B. Len Bload always addressed the Chief Constable as ‘My boy,’ and obviously looked on Sir Arnold as an active member of his team. ‘We’ve all got to look after one another is the way I look at it, my boy. We don’t who will? Tell me that,’ Len Bload had said more times than Lady Vy could bear to recall. She also disliked women who talked quite so openly about hand sex as Mercia Bload. Then there were the Sents. If she disliked the Bloads, she positively detested the Sents. Harry Sent was a dealer. ‘Don’t ask me in what. Everything. You name it, I got it. Some place I got to got it. You know my motto? “I’ll have it Sent.” Get it? I’ll have it. Sent. Great logo I got out of Lennie for free. You know why?’ Lady Vy certainly didn’t want to but noblesse was supposed to oblige. ‘Because one time I’m screwing Heaven I got to think of Mercia to get it up at all. Ain’t that so, Heaven?’ Mrs Sent smiled sourly and nodded. ‘I fuck better with that photo of Mercia in a bikini on the pillow, right?’ A shadow of something approaching pain crossed Olga Sent’s face. Lady Vy would have sympathized with her – the misery of being called ‘Heaven’ by a man as gross as Harry Sent would have broken a weaker woman – if she had not once heard Mrs Sent describe her as ‘that Gonders cow. So snobbish and no money with it. Drop dead is what I wish for her.’ Lady Vy had complained to Sir Arnold at the time about the remark but all he’d said was, ‘Got to keep in with the locals, you know.’ Which was a bit rich, considering old Sent claimed to have escaped from Poland to fight with the Free Polish Army. And someone had once accurately described Olga as looking like a concentration-camp guard who should have been hanged for Crimes against Humanity.
On the other hand there were a great many people in the county who had come only once to the Chief Constable’s parties, and had found reasons never to come to another. Sir Percival Knottland, the Lord Lieutenant, was one such absentee. He still hadn’t got over meeting at a Gonders party a man who had advised him to invest in a particular pizza chain ‘because there’s a lot more than cheese and anchovies involved, you know what I mean.’ The Lord Lieutenant thought he did and had complained to the Chief Constable, but Sir Arnold had assured him confidentially that the fellow was all right. ‘To be frank, he is one of our top grasses. Couldn’t do without him. Got to keep him sweet.’
‘But he advised me to invest in Pietissima Pizza Parlours,’ said the Lord Lieutenant. ‘Something about there being icing on the cake. Did I know what he meant? It sounded most suspicious to me. Shouldn’t you be investigating this pizza company very carefully?’
The Chief Constable had taken his arm confidentially. ‘Between ourselves, I have. Solid investment as far as I can tell. I put ten thousand in myself. Should double your money in six months.’
‘And you really don’t think these Pietissima Parlours are being used to distribute drugs?’ the Lord Lieutenant asked.
‘Good gracious, I hope not. Still, I can’t guarantee it. Everybody’s into that game nowadays. I’ll ask my drug lads, but I shouldn’t worry. Money is money, after all.’
The Lord Lieutenant had been so appalled that he had written to the Prime Minister only to get an extremely brusque letter back telling him in effect to stick to his role as Lord Lieutenant – a role which, it was implied, was entirely ceremonial and redundant – and leave the work of policing the community to the professionals like Sir Arnold Gonders who was doing such an excellent job etc. The Lord Lieutenant had taken the advice and had steered well clear of the Chief Constable ever since.
So had Judge Julius Foment, whose faith in the British police had been shattered by the discovery that he had been relying on the evidence of detectives in Twixt and
Tween to sentence perfectly innocent individuals to long terms of imprisonment for crimes the police knew perfectly well they could not possibly have committed. As a child refugee from Nazi persecution the Judge had been horrified by the change that had come over the British police. He had even thought of selling his own house on the far side of the reservoir when the Gonderses moved into the boathouse. He hadn’t, but he did not even reply to their invitations.
There were other people who stayed away. They were the genuine locals, the farmers and ordinary people in the villages round about who could be of no advantage to the Gonderses or their guests but belonged to an older and more indigenous tradition. Of these the most antipathetic to the human flotsam on the Gonderses’ lawn that Sunday were the Middens, Marjorie Midden at the Middenhall and her brother, Christopher, who farmed thirty miles away at Strutton.
*
From the first Sir Arnold had found himself up against Miss Midden. She lived in an old farmhouse behind the rambling Victorian house known as the Middenhall where she had lodgers. She had opposed him over the fencing of the common land known as Folly Moss on the grounds that it had provided free grazing for the villagers of Great Pockrington for a thousand years. Sir Arnold’s argument that there was only one family living at Pockrington now and that the man worked in the brickyards at Torthal and had no interest in grazing anything on Folly Moss was met by Miss Midden’s retort that there had once been two hundred families at Pockrington and the state of the world being what it was who was to say there might not be as many families there in the future.
‘Jimmy Hall may mean very little to the Chief Constable,’ she had said at a public meeting, ‘but he represents the rights of the common man to the common land. Rights have to be fought for and are not going to be set aside while I’m around.’
Sir Arnold had tried to argue that he only wanted to put barbed wire up to keep other people’s sheep out and that Jimmy Hall could use the land if he wanted to. It was no good. Miss Midden had answered that barbed wire too often defined the boundaries of liberty and set unwarranted limits on people’s free movement. The common land had remained unfenced.