by Tom Sharpe
He didn’t get much. Half an hour later his wife stormed into the room and woke him. She was in a filthy mood. ‘You disgust me,’ she told him. ‘Can’t you leave anyone alone?’
‘Leave anyone alone? I never went anywhere near the bitch. She was the one who attacked me.’
‘You really expect me to believe that? Bea has an aversion to men. She finds them repulsive.’
‘The feeling is mutual,’ said the Chief Constable. ‘And I don’t care what she finds repulsive, she’s got no right to go round attempting to murder people.’
‘You must have provoked her in some way. She’s a very lovely, peaceful person.’
Sir Arnold looked at her with bloodshot, unbelieving eyes. ‘Peaceful?’ he snarled. ‘Peaceful? That woman? You’ve got a bloody odd idea what peace is like. There I was hunting for my slippers – that’s all I was doing, trying to find my slippers under the bed – and without the slightest warning she hurled herself on me.’
‘I don’t believe it. But I haven’t come here to argue with you. Bea and I are leaving now. We’re going to Tween. You can come when you feel up to it.’
‘Like never,’ Sir Arnold thought, but he didn’t say it.
‘And while we’re on the subject, I suppose you know that young man has escaped from the cellar. He wrapped insulating tape round Genscher’s nose and got away.’
‘Really?’ said Sir Arnold, trying to think how he could use this new interpretation of events. ‘The bloke escaped after wrapping tape round Genscher’s nose? How very peculiar.’
‘He got through the hatch,’ said Lady Vy. ‘You can’t have tied him up very well. Thank goodness the whisky and the Valium didn’t kill him.’
‘How very remarkable,’ said Sir Arnold. ‘You don’t think the people who brought him could have realized they’d made a mistake and moved him to the place they’d intended?’
‘How the hell would I know what to think?’ Lady Vy answered and looked at her husband suspiciously. ‘And you look as if you hadn’t had much sleep, come to that. You should take a look at yourself. You’re not at all a picture of health.’
‘I don’t feel it,’ said the Chief Constable, ‘and you wouldn’t either if you’d been half suffocated by that beastly Bea. And for Heaven’s sake, don’t mention anything about the fellow in the cellar to her.’
‘You don’t think she doesn’t know already? Honestly, you are a fool. With all that noise going on? She hasn’t said anything because she’s too tactful. She just thought you’d been beating me up. Mrs Thouless saw the blood too.’
The Chief Constable sat wearily up in bed. This was the sort of news he least wanted. ‘Has she told you that?’ he stammered.
‘Not in so many words, but she asked what to do with the rug in your study with the blood on it. And of course you had to leave a bloodstained bedside lamp by the desk.’
‘Dear God,’ said the Chief Constable. ‘It’s a wonder she hasn’t sold the story to the Sun already.’
‘Since she didn’t see anything else she can’t be certain what has been going on.’
‘Not the only one round here,’ said the Chief Constable and slipped miserably back under the bedclothes. He felt like death.
*
So did Timothy Bright. After lying under the bed listening for sounds of movement in the house and not hearing any, he crawled slowly and awkwardly out and tried to get to his feet. He almost succeeded. He got halfway up before falling over and banging his head against the edge of the chair on which the Major had folded his clothes. The chair toppled over and Timothy Bright’s scalp wound began to bleed again, this time onto the Major’s tweed jacket and his natty little waistcoat. Timothy Bright lay there for a bit trying to think where he was or how he came to be naked and cold and hungry and why his mouth tasted like . . . He didn’t know what his mouth tasted like. He tried again to get up by clutching the bed, then slumped down on it and lay there. Thought was returning. To get warmer he pulled the duvet over him and felt slightly better. Only slightly. A terrible thirst drove him to try to stand up again. He succeeded and stood, wobbling a little, listening.
The house was silent. Nothing moved. The sun shone in the window and outside he could see a patch of vegetable garden with some broad beans and a row of twigs for peas. Beyond it a wooden shed and a copse of tall trees and a drystone wall with more trees behind it. There was no sign of life, apart from a thrush breaking a snail’s shell on a concrete path. A cat appeared round the pea twigs and stopped, its eyes fixed on the thrush. Then it turned and slid round the broad beans and crept forward with the utmost stealth. For a moment Timothy Bright was almost transfixed by the drama, but the thrush flew off and the cat relaxed. Only then did he notice the blood on the pillow and the duvet. It was fresh blood. He was bleeding. Oh God, he had to do something about it.
The bathroom door was open and he went through to it and grabbed a towel and wiped his hair with it. There was a lot of blood on the towel and when he looked in the mirror over the washbasin he didn’t recognize himself. His face was covered with dried blood, his hair was matted with it and his chest was scratched and horribly bruised. In an instant the vision of that skinned pig returned and he lurched back. The Major’s bathroom was not a large one, was in fact merely a shower-room with a little shelf under the shaving-mirror on which he kept his bottle of Imperial Russian eau-de-Cologne (at least the bottle was genuine, he had pinched it from a rich friend, but he had long ago used up the contents and refilled it with 4711). Timothy lurched backwards into the shower curtain, a plastic one to which the Major had neatly sewn a rather pretty piece of Laura Ashley floral material, and as he tripped he clutched the shelf. The Imperial Russian Cologne bottle fell into the basin and broke. It was followed by the shaving-brush, the Major’s cut-throat razor which he used very carefully to trim his hair before dyeing it, his toothbrush and the scissors that were necessary for his moustache. But it was the cut-throat that threw Timothy Bright. It brought to mind a scene from a nightmare, the nightmare that had become central to his being, that of a man with black shiny hair in the back room of a bar who had sliced the end of his nose and talked about piggy-chops and what was going to happen to Timothy Bright if he didn’t do something terrible. It brought to mind that terrifying photograph of the pig. Somewhere still deeper within him it may even have rekindled the forgotten horror of Old Og’s ferret, Posy, with blood on its snout after killing the bought rabbit. In his panic reaction he fell back into the shower taking the curtain with him and sat with blood running down the curtain and the wall. There he sat crying, with tears and blood running down his face. He cried noiselessly. The house was silent again.
*
It remained so through the midday and into the afternoon. It was only then that Major MacPhee rose from his vomit and on all fours crawled out into the hall. The silence suited him too. It seemed to indicate that Miss Midden had gone down to the Middenhall and that he could use the upstairs bathroom and not go through his room past the body under the bed to clean himself up. Never, except by military convention, a very clean man, he felt the need to wash at least his face and neck before getting dressed . . . He had reached the bathroom and had turned the tap on before it dawned on him that his only clothes were in his bedroom and to get them he would have to go in there. He held the edge of the basin and sensibly didn’t look at his face in the mirror but bowed his head over the warm water and dipped his face into it very gently several times. The stitches above his eye stung. He washed his hands and somehow his neck with soap. He emptied the basin and dipped his face into the water again and very carefully used a flannel to clean it.
All this took time and had to be done slowly and deliberately. His physical state demanded it. He felt awful, more awful than he could ever remember feeling in his life, even after a particularly frightening experience with a sadistic sailor from Latvia in Rotterdam who had threatened to kill him with a knife and had cut him, very slowly, right across the chest. But it was his mental st
ate that was worse. He had to get rid of the body before Miss Midden found it and called the police. He had to clear up the mess in the dining-room. And she might come back at any moment. He took a clean towel from the cupboard and dried himself and took it downstairs with him, holding onto the banisters as he went. But when he came to the bedroom door his terror returned and it was only the thought of Miss Midden and the police that compelled him to open it and peer in.
What he saw held him rigid. His clothes were on the floor beside the overturned chair and there was blood on them. There was more blood on the duvet and the pillow was bright with the stuff. The Major whimpered and looked frantically round the room. Finally he crept in and made his way to the chest of drawers for a shirt, all the time keeping his eye on the door of his little bathroom. The man was evidently in there. Somehow he got the shirt on and had opened his wardrobe for a clean pair of trousers and a jacket when he heard a noise in the bathroom. It was a strange and horrible sound, a sobbing moan and a groan. The Major grabbed the clothes he needed, took a pair of shoes from the rack, and hurried into the dining-room to finish dressing. The situation was almost worse now than it had been when he thought the young man was dead. He might just have got rid of a dead body, taken it out and hidden it somewhere before deciding what next to do. With a live man that was impossible. To take his thoughts off the subject for a moment he went out to the kitchen in his socks, fetched some water and a rag from the sink, cleared up the vomit on the floor, and put the empty decanter back into the sideboard. He could always fill it with whisky again. Miss Midden seldom drank the stuff and perhaps she wouldn’t miss it for the time being. He had just finished and was back in the kitchen when he heard footsteps in the yard.
Miss Midden had returned.
15
Miss Midden had woken from her snooze under the clear blue sky and had got to her feet with a refreshed determination. She wasn’t going to go on living like this. She wasn’t going to have her weekends spoilt by a wretched sponger like MacPhee, for that’s what he was, no more than a sponger on her hospitality and good nature. She had had enough of him. But her feelings went deeper than that. She had had enough of looking after the Middenhall and the spongers down there, for that was really what they were too, arrogant, self-centred, spoilt spongers who had always had servants to do things for them and who, if she hadn’t been the sort of person she was, would have driven her into the role of a servant too. MacPhee (she was no longer prepared to use his phoney rank – he was MacPhee and that was probably a false name too) had had his uses with them. He made up a foursome at bridge, he listened to their repeated stories about Africa and the good life they had enjoyed there and he was happy to sympathize with their views about the way things had deteriorated everywhere. Miss Midden wasn’t. ‘The good old days’ – their good old days – had been other people’s bad old days with long hours and miserable wages and the brutal assumption that the lower classes, black or white, were there to be despised and set apart. And they grumbled. Oh God, how those people grumbled. They grumbled about everything, particularly the National Health Service to which they had contributed not one penny during their spoilt, distant lives. Old Mr Lionel Midden had been furious when he had to wait to have a hip replacement and had come back from the Tween General Hospital complaining about the bad food and the fact that the nurses had refused to call him ‘Sir’. And all he had ever been was a so-called recruiting officer for some mining company in Zambia, which he still insisted on calling Northern Rhodesia. Mrs Consuelo McKoy, who had lived for thirty-five years in California until her husband died and she found he had left her nothing at all in his will and had in fact spent his last few years gambling his fortune away, deliberately, she said, to spite her, was always saying how much better things were done in the United States. ‘People are so hospitable and friendly there. Over here there is no friendliness at all.’ Miss Midden particularly resented that ‘over here’. It suggested that Mrs McKoy was an American herself, whereas she had been born in London where her father had had a grocer’s shop in Hendon. She had married Corporal McKoy of the US Airforce during the War and had lorded it over the family on the occasional trip to Europe. Miss Midden could remember her driving up to the Midden in an absurdly large Lincoln Continental Bob McKoy had borrowed from a business associate (he had gone into electrical engineering at the end of the war) in London. Now she demanded to be driven in the old Humber staff car when she wanted to do a little shopping in Stagstead and insisted on sitting in the back while Miss Midden drove.
It was the same with all of them. Almost all. Mrs Laura Midden Rayter, who as long ago as 1956 had insisted on keeping her maiden name when she married, was different. She helped with the washing-up and vacuumed her own room and generally made herself useful about the place. Arthur Midden, who had been a dentist in Hastings and who suffered bouts of depression when he did bizarre charcoal drawings of gaping mouths as a form of therapy, actually paid for his room and board.
‘I don’t like to inflict myself on you, my dear,’ he said when he first came to the Middenhall, ‘but it’s peaceful up here and I need company since Annie died. You don’t make many friends in dentistry and Hastings has deteriorated with so many young people injecting themselves there. I never liked giving injections and the sight of hypodermics still unsettles me.’ No, they weren’t all spongers or complainers, but most of them were. Besides, Miss Midden had never liked the Middenhall even as a child. It was dauntingly ugly and she had shared her father’s distaste for it. She had only agreed to take over to allow him to go into a retirement home. The house and its inmates had broken him. Miss Midden had given him a few years in which to sit and read in his own room in Scarborough and nurse his ailments. Even so she resented the treatment he had suffered at the hands of the so-called family.
Now, stepping out across the rough grass and avoiding the wet places where the sedge grass grew, she knew the time had come to get out herself. She would see her cousin, Lennox, who had taken over as the family solicitor from his father, Uncle Leonard, and tell him she was no longer prepared to take responsibility for the place. He would have to find someone else. She would keep the farmhouse, possibly letting out to summer visitors to earn some money, but she wouldn’t live there. She would go away and find work of some sort. She had a small amount of money put away, not enough to live on but enough to allow her time to make a different life for herself. With this sense of resolution, the decision made, she walked into the yard and steeled herself to give MacPhee his marching orders. But as she entered the kitchen and saw him she knew that something far worse than a hangover afflicted him. He stood staring at her with terrified eyes and he was trembling all over. For a moment she thought he might be dying. She had never seen such palpable terror in anyone before. The man had ceased to exist as a man or even an animal. He had become something amorphous, almost liquefied by fear. For a few seconds his state kept her silent. Then she said, ‘What in God’s name is the matter?’
MacPhee held on to the kitchen table and opened his mouth. His lips quivered, his mouth moved jerkily, he gibbered.
Miss Midden pulled a chair out and pushed him down onto it. ‘I said what’s the matter,’ she said harshly. ‘Answer me.’
The Major raised anguished eyes to her. ‘It’s in my room,’ he gasped.
‘What’s in your room?’ She was almost certain now that he had delirium tremens. ‘Tell me what’s in your room?’
‘A man. He’s been murdered. There’s blood everywhere. On my bed, on the duvet, on my clothes.’
‘Nonsense,’ Miss Midden snapped. ‘You’ve been having delusions, drinking all that whisky.’
The Major shook his head – or it shook uncontrollably. It was impossible to tell which. ‘It’s true, it’s true. He was under my bed and his face was covered with blood. He was naked.’
‘Bollocks. You’ve just poisoned yourself with alcohol. A naked man with blood all over his face under your bed? Poppycock.’
‘I
swear it’s true. He was there.’
‘But he’s not there now? Of course he isn’t. Because he never was.’
‘I swear –’
But Miss Midden had had enough of his terror. ‘Get up,’ she ordered. ‘Get up and show me.’
‘No, I can’t.’
‘Get up, get off that chair. You’re going to show me this man.’
The Major tried to rise and flopped back. Miss Midden seized him by the collar of his jacket and dragged him to his feet. But he just shook and whimpered.
‘You sicken me,’ she said and let go. He slumped down into the chair. ‘All right, I’ll go myself.’
She moved across the kitchen but the Major spoke. ‘For God’s sake be careful. I’m telling you the truth. He’s in the bathroom. He could be dangerous.’
Miss Midden looked back at him with utter contempt and went out into the passage. She entered the dining-room and crossed to the door of the Major’s bedroom and opened it. Then she stopped. Blood. There was blood on the bed, a lot of blood. And on the clothes by the fallen chair. Miss Midden felt her own fear and her own horror. But not for long. She stepped back across the dining-room and went into the little office where she kept her twelve-bore. Whatever had happened in the bedroom and whoever was in the bathroom, and for all she knew there was more than one person there, was going to have to face a loaded shotgun. She put two cartridges into the breech and closed the gun. Then she went back. As she entered the dining-room she saw the open window. Alert now to the reality of the break-in, she noticed the mud on the floor under the window. She crossed to the bedroom door and looked round carefully before stepping in, holding the shotgun pointed at the bathroom door. Two yards away she stopped. ‘All right,’ she said in a loud and surprisingly steady voice. ‘Come out of there. Come out. I’m standing here with a twelve-bore so open that door and come out slowly.’
Nothing happened. Miss Midden hesitated and listened intently. She heard nothing. She moved back towards the dining-room and then hurried through to the kitchen. ‘You come with me now,’ she told MacPhee, and this time he stood up. Some of her courage had communicated itself to him and besides the sight of the shotgun was persuasive. He came across the room and she ushered him through into the bedroom.