by Tom Sharpe
Upstairs, the din in the kitchen had woken even the exhausted Chief Constable from a deep and welcome sleep. He sat up in bed to find Lady Vy in her dressing-gown, clutching his .38 Scott &Webley, marching towards the door with her black eyeshade pushed back menacingly on her forehead.
‘What the fuck’s going on?’ he asked hoarsely.
‘Another of your dumb tricks, no doubt,’ said his wife, and pushed open the door with her foot. Downstairs Mrs Thouless’ screams had redoubled and the crockery bouncing on the tiled floor suggested that someone was breaking up the entire kitchen.
It was this, far more than the housekeeper’s screams for help, that enraged Lady Vy. ‘Oh my pedestal plates,’ she yelled and hurled herself down the stairs.
Behind her, hideous in a diaphanous nightie hastily tucked into a black leather skirt, Auntie Bea lurched out of her room in the mistaken belief that her beloved Vy was being battered by the revolting Sir Arnold. ‘Let go of her,’ she shouted as she entered the bedroom, girding her loins with the skirt she had so hastily put on. ‘Let go, you vile creature. Haven’t you done enough harm already with your foul ways?’
Sir Arnold, who was crouched over the side of the bed in the process of locating his slippers, was unable to make any suitable reply before finding himself enveloped in black leather as she hurled herself at him. For half a minute they wrestled on the bed before Auntie Bea pinned him down and, realizing her error, was wondering what to do next. What she could see of Sir Arnold, one eye squinting malevolently over the edge of the black skirt while the other was possibly savouring the delights that lay below it, did not make her anxious to relinquish the hold she had on him. To lend weight to this already weighty advantage there was the knowledge that she would never again be in a position to make him taste some of his own medicine. With a hideous relish she leered down at him and then with a swift hand thrust his entire head under the skirt.
It was an unwise indulgence. Sir Arnold, weakened as he was by the incomprehensible horrors of the weekend, was still sufficiently strong to resist the ghastly prospect of going down on his wife’s lesbian lover, which was, he supposed, what she intended. In the folds of the black leather it was difficult to know, and the alternative – that she intended to smother him – was possibly even worse. The alternatives left the Chief Constable no choice. With all the desperate strength of a man embedded in a heavy woman’s crotch, Sir Arnold Gonders took an awful breath and thrust himself upwards. It was a hideous experience but for a moment he glimpsed daylight. His bald head broke through the waistband of the skirt, only to be plunged down into darkness as Auntie Bea, for the first time in her life experiencing the sort of pleasure a man, albeit a terrified and frantic one, could give, forced him back. For a few more minutes the mêlée went on as with each new surge by the panic-stricken Sir Arnold she felt the delights of dominance and Sir Arnold experienced the horrors.
When at last he subsided beneath her and it became obvious that he was beaten, she unwisely raised the skirt and smiled down at his flushed and sweating face. The Chief Constable, peering beyond her pudenda, saw that smile and, in one final assertion of his own diminished ego and just about everything else, jerked his head to one side and sank his teeth into her groin. That the teeth were not his own and that what he had hoped would be her groin wasn’t hardly mattered to the Chief Constable. With a fearful yell Auntie Bea lifted from the bed, seemed to hover on a cushion of pain and then crashed back towards Sir Arnold. This time there was no mistaking her intent. She was going to murder the swine.
It was precisely at this moment that Lady Vy returned with the smoking revolver. She had come back to tell Sir Arnold that the bloody fellow in the cellar had somehow managed to escape after first winding yards of insulating tape around the family pet’s head, and she was in no mood to find her husband quite evidently making very peculiar love to her Auntie Bea. More to the point her Auntie Bea, to judge from the look on her face, was finding the proceedings such a delicious agony of passion that her tongue was protruding from her mouth while she uttered grunts and cries of satisfaction. This sight was too much for Lady Vy following so closely on the discovery in the kitchen of Mrs Thouless lying full length on the floor by the cellar door with her dress strangely disarranged and moaning about some great beast. With a courage that came from years of conviction that she was morally superior to any servant and must of course demonstrate this in a crisis, particularly when she was armed with a loaded revolver, Lady Vy had stepped over Mrs Thouless and unhesitatingly fired into the cellar. This time Genscher had no doubt why it had been muzzled so horribly. While it hadn’t actually read about the fate of the Tsar and his family, it did recognize that the cellar made an ideal killing-ground and that, having failed to hang him when they had the chance, the master and now the mistress were bent on shooting him. As the bullet ricocheted round the walls, Genscher whimpered silently and took refuge in one of the wine racks.
Lady Vy turned the light on and came slowly down the steps holding the revolver in front of her. ‘Come out and face the music,’ she shouted. ‘I know you’re down here. Come out or I’ll fire.’
But the Rottweiler knew better than to move. It cringed at the very back of the stone wine rack and waited for death. Surprisingly it passed him by, and the next moment Lady Vy was hurrying up the steps again.
Now as she entered the bedroom she was too startled by what was taking place there to utter the message she had brought.
‘Bea darling, how could you?’ she asked piteously, and fanned her face with the muzzle of the revolver.
Auntie Bea turned an awful face towards her friend. ‘I haven’t finished yet,’ she snarled, misinterpreting the past tense. ‘But when I have –’
‘You mustn’t,’ screamed Lady Vy. ‘I won’t let you demean yourself in this horrible way. And with him of all people.’
‘What do you mean “with him”? I can’t think of anyone else I want to –’
‘I can’t bear it, Bea. Don’t say it. I won’t listen.’
Sir Arnold, taking advantage of this interchange, managed to get an intake of air and squawked, ‘Help, help me,’ rather feebly.
Auntie Bea bore down on him. ‘Die, you monster, die,’ she shouted, and dragged the skirt tightly over his mottled face.
Lady Vy sank onto the floor beside the bed. ‘Oh Bea darling, me darling, not him,’ she sobbed.
Auntie Bea tried to understand this bizarre request. She knew Vy to be a submissive woman but she had never been asked to kill a loving friend before. The request struck her as being positively perverse and decidedly tasteless.
This was more than could be said for the Chief Constable. Fighting off death by suffocation in the folds of black leather, he would willingly have swapped places with his wife or anyone else who felt inclined to die in such a dreadful fashion. And as for being tasteless that was not what he’d have called it either. If anything quite the reverse, but that was not of much concern to him at the moment. Staring into the black hell that was Auntie Bea’s idea of bas couture, he was appalled at the thought of his imminent obituary. It would read like something in one of the magazines God was always telling him not to borrow from the Porn Squad’s store of confiscated material. He couldn’t for the life of him imagine how the Sun and the News of the World editorial staff would find words sufficiently ambiguous to satisfy both the Press Complaints Commission and the salacious appetites of most of their readers. Not that he had more than a passing interest in his post-mortem reputation. He was dying a terrible death, if not at the hands at least at the legs of a woman he had particular reason to loathe. As he began to pass out he was vaguely aware of Vy’s voice.
‘But you swore to me you hated men, Bea,’ she screamed in a fit of hysterical jealousy. ‘You promised me you would never ever, ever, touch a man and now look what you’re doing.’
‘I’m trying to,’ Auntie Bea screamed back, grappling with the skirt, ‘but he isn’t dead yet.’
‘Isn’t dead
yet?’ repeated Lady Vy in a voice so vacuous that even the Chief Constable wasn’t sure he had heard right. What did the fucking woman think he was doing? Having a whale of a time?
Finally it dawned on Lady Vy that the situation was not as she supposed. ‘Oh God, no, no, you mustn’t, Bea darling,’ she bawled. ‘Don’t you see what this will do to us?’
‘I don’t care what it does to us,’ Auntie Bea shouted back, ‘all I care right now is what it does to him. You should see what the monster’s done to me.’
The invitation was too much for the distraught Lady Vy. ‘Show me, oh show me, darling,’ she said, and hurled herself onto what the Chief Constable had come to regard as his deathbed. As she scrabbled at Auntie Bea’s curious skirt his face emerged, almost as black as the garment itself. Sir Arnold gulped relatively fresh air and stared through bloodshot, bulging eyes up into the face of his moronic wife. For the first time in twenty-two years it had some appeal for him. And what she was doing had even more. Lady Vy was dragging the skirt off Bea’s legs. For a moment it seemed she was about to join him in the filthy thing but Aunt Bea’s attention had switched. She was less interested in killing her assailant than in finding out if she was likely to bleed to death from his bite. She fell back onto the bed and the Chief Constable and Lady Vy were just seeing what he had done, when there was a sound from the bedroom doorway.
‘I’ve come to give my notice,’ Mrs Thouless announced in a loud voice. ‘I’m not staying in a house where there are such strange goings-on. I mean, begging your pardon, ma’am, for interrupting but that thing downstairs has come out of the cellar again and it isn’t a fit sight for a decent woman to see first thing in the morning.’
With an insouciance that came from years of dealing with embarrassing moments and awkward servants, Lady Vy flounced off the bed and advanced on the poor housekeeper. ‘How dare you come in here without knocking?’ she demanded.
To the Chief Constable, peering over Aunt Bea’s knee with all the enthusiasm of a man temporarily reprieved from death and one who no longer cared with any real intensity what his public reputation might be, Mrs Thouless’ intervention was a Godsend. On the other hand, if Lady Vy came all high and mighty, the damned housekeeper might walk out of the house straightaway. It was not a prospect to be borne. ‘Dear Mrs Thouless,’ he called out, ‘you mustn’t leave us.’
From the doorway the housekeeper became aware of the very dubious nature of her employers’ marital arrangements. She stared short-sightedly at Sir Arnold’s head and then at Auntie Bea and finally up at Lady Vy. ‘Ooh mum,’ she said, all trace of a Scotch accent entirely gone. ‘Ooh mum I don’t know what . . .’
Lady Vy forestalled her. ‘Now pull yourself together, Mrs T.,’ she said. ‘I know it’s been a trying morning and you’ve had a long weekend but there is no need to over-dramatize. Just go downstairs and make us all a nice pot of tea.’
‘Yes, mum, if you say so, mum,’ said Mrs Thouless with her jaw sagging, and went off down the landing utterly bemused.
Lady Vy turned her attention back to more urgent matters and picked up the revolver again. ‘I must say,’ she said with a renewed air of social confidence, ‘it’s come to a pretty pass when the staff march into bedrooms without knocking. I can’t think what the country’s coming to.’
On the bed Auntie Bea responded to the call of her upbringing. ‘My dear,’ she said, ‘I have exactly the same trouble at Washam. It’s almost impossible to get anyone to stay and they demand quite exorbitant wages and two nights off a week.’ And with a final obscene flick of her skirt she signalled to the Chief Constable that he could go now.
Sir Arnold scrambled off the bed and hurried through to the bathroom and was presently busy with a toothbrush and some cold water. There was no hot. There had been no time to have the tank repaired. He was staring into the bathroom mirror and wondering what message God had intended to have put him through such an awful ordeal, when it dawned on him that Mrs Thouless had said something important. What was it? ‘. . . that thing has come out of the cellar again . . .’ What thing? And why wasn’t whatever it was a fit sight for a decent woman to see? For the first time that morning the Chief Constable suddenly saw things in a longer perspective of time than the previous five minutes. Someone had been down into the cellar and found the young bastard gone. Of course. That explained everything, and in particular Auntie Bloody Bea’s murderous assault on him. She had found her accomplice had disappeared and had come upstairs to kill him in revenge. Or something. The Chief Constable’s late night and fearful weekend had taken their toll of his capacity for rational thought. All he could be certain of was that he was in an isolated house with three women, one of whom he detested, another he despised, and a third who was presently making a pot of tea in the kitchen. Of the three only Mrs Thouless held even the faintest of charms for him and they were entirely of a practical order. He was about to hurry from the bathroom and get down to the relative safety of the kitchen when he remembered the shot. And Vy had taken the bloody gun downstairs with her. What the hell had she been firing at? Without thinking clearly Sir Arnold stumbled out of the bathroom to find his wife swabbing Auntie Bea’s groin with eau-de-Cologne and discussing the advisability of a tetanus shot.
‘Or rabies,’ said Lady Vy, looking villainously at her husband.
Sir Arnold gave up all thought of questioning her. Instead he went down to the kitchen to see for himself what had been going on there. He found Mrs Thouless, quite recovered and restored to her own domestic role, unwinding the demoralized Rottweiler’s insulated muzzle. Sir Arnold sipped his cup of tea and cursed the dog, his wife, his wife’s murderous lover, and most of all the swine who had deposited a drugged lout in his bed.
14
After a while Sir Arnold concentrated his thoughts on some method of getting his revenge. He could confront that bloody lesbian bitch upstairs and demand to know what the hell she had hoped to achieve by having the lout brought to the Old Boathouse. It didn’t make sense. On the other hand she had just tried to murder him and had very nearly succeeded. Would have succeeded if Vy hadn’t, for once, come in at the right moment. So fucking Bea had to be mad. Mad, insane, out of her tiny, way off her trolley and a homocidal maniac. (The Chief Constable hadn’t got the word wrong: ‘homocidal’ was exact.) And in addition she had an accomplice. He had no doubt about that either. She couldn’t possibly have left the Old Boathouse and driven somewhere to find the young lout and drug him, and then driven back and carried him upstairs on her own. That was out of the question. She had been drinking with Vy all evening. He’d asked Vy that and she’d told him the truth. He was sure of that. His wife had been just as astonished to find the bastard in bed with her as he’d been himself. So there was someone out there – and here the Chief Constable’s mind, never far from paranoia, turned lurid with fury. And fear. A conspiracy had been hatched to destroy him. Hatched? Hatched wasn’t strong enough, and besides it was too reminiscent of eggs and hens and things that were natural. There was absolutely nothing natural about drugging some young bastard to the eyeballs before stripping him naked and shoving him into a respectable Chief Constable’s marital bed. It was an act of diabolical unnaturalness, of pure evil and malice aforethought. Hatched it wasn’t. This vile act had been plotted, premeditated and planned to destroy his reputation. If this little lot had got out he’d have been ruined. If it got out now he’d still be ruined. In fact now that he came to think of it, he was in a far worse position than before because he had beaten the young bastard over the head and had kept him tied up in the cellar for twenty-four hours. He might even have killed the sod. For all he knew the bastard was dead and at this very moment under that narrow bed at the Midden rigor mortis might have set in.
A cold sweat broke out on the Chief Constable’s face and he went through to his study to try to think. Sitting there at his desk feeling like death he searched his mind for a motive. Blackmail was the first and most obvious. But why, in God’s name, should the beast
ly Bea want to blackmail him? There was no need. The woman had enough money of her own, or so he had always understood from Vy. Mind you, Vy had the brain of a mentally challenged peahen but she was good at smelling incomes. One of her upper-class virtues. No, Auntie Bea’s motive had to be something else. Pure hatred for him? She had that all right. In spades. Not that the Chief Constable cared. A great many people hated him. He was used to being hated. He rather liked it, in fact. It gave him a sense of power and authority. In his mind hatred went with respect and fear. To be feared and respected gave him a sense of worth. It assured him that he meant something.
On the other hand, he was damned if he could see what anything else meant. There had to be some other more sinister motive. No one would go to all this trouble simply to ruin him. No, Auntie Bea was merely a willing accomplice, a subordinate who could open gates and keep Genscher quiet. In all likelihood she had been blackmailed, or at least persuaded, into acting as the insider. She wouldn’t have needed much persuading either. Yes, that was much more like it. There was somebody out there – here the Chief Constable’s horizons expanded to include every villain in Twixt and Tween – who had deliberately set out to destroy him. Or, and this seemed a more rational explanation, to hold him to ransom by threatening to expose him. That was much more likely. Well, that was going to take some doing now. Unless, of course, that young bloke was dead, in which case the fat would really be in the fire. Again the cold sweat broke out on his pallid face. The Chief Constable gave up trying to think. He was too exhausted. Making sure that Vy and Bea were now in the kitchen having breakfast, he went upstairs and climbed into bed. He needed sleep.