by Tom Sharpe
Bea looked at her narrowly. ‘Oh he’s a cunning devil, there’s no doubt about that,’ she said. ‘I have to give him his cunning. But two can play that game and after all he wasn’t very subtle.’
‘Darling, you’re talking way above my head. What are you saying?’
‘Ask yourself this question,’ said Bea. ‘There was a young man in your bed, I don’t doubt that. But where is he now?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ said Lady Vy. ‘I went down to the cellar and he’d disappeared in the night.’
‘Exactly. Arnold got you to help tie him up in the cellar so that you were even more of an accomplice. Isn’t that the case?’
‘I suppose it must be,’ said Lady Vy. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’
‘And you say he was tied really tight? In two plastic bags?’
‘Well, actually he couldn’t get him into the garbage bags. He had to use the sheets off the bed. And lots of tape. You’ve no idea how much tape he tied round him.’
‘And yet the young man disappears. Doesn’t that strike you as peculiar?’
Lady Vy tried to stretch her tiny brain. It was reassuring to have Aunt Bea telling her things, but sometimes she couldn’t understand what she was saying. ‘The whole thing struck me as peculiar,’ she said. ‘I mean I’ve never found a young man in bed like that before. He was quite nice looking too if you didn’t look at the blood.’
Auntie Bea controlled her temper with difficulty. ‘No, dear, what I meant was . . . well, didn’t it seem very strange that he should have escaped so quickly after you had helped tie him so securely?’
‘Yes, I suppose it did,’ said Lady Vy. ‘And Arnold drugged him too to keep him quiet.’
‘Oh sure. Arnold said he drugged him. Arnold said he did this and he did that but the only thing you really know is that you helped tie him up and then when you went to look for him the next day he had escaped. What a miraculous thing to happen, wasn’t it? Or it would have been if Arnold hadn’t untied him himself and helped him on his way.’
‘But why should he have done that?’ asked Vy, still stumbling about in her attempt to plumb the mystery.
‘Because, dearest, because this was all an elaborate plan to make sure you didn’t leave him and wouldn’t make things awkward for dear Arnold at any time in the future.’
‘But why should I . . .’ Vy began before coming to her own conclusion. ‘Oh, Bea dear, do you really think . . . ?’
It was a thoroughly unnecessary question. Aunt Bea was thinking very hard indeed. She had already concocted a rational explanation for the succession of weird events that had taken place. They all pointed to the same conclusion: she must take Vy away from the malign influence of her husband. If there had been any doubt about the matter before the weekend, and there hadn’t been, she now felt sure she was saving Vy from a man who was prepared to use any sort of crime for his own vile ends. Being bitten in the groin by Sir Arnold had not exactly inclined Bea to see him in an even faintly sympathetic light and now she had the evidence she needed to break him. And she would be protecting darling Vy at the same time. She got up and took Lady Vy by the hand. ‘My darling, I want you to go upstairs and pack your things. Now you’re not to argue with me. I am going to take care of everything. Just do what I tell you.’
‘But, Bea darling, I can’t just leave –’
‘You’re not leaving, dear. You are merely coming down to London with me today. No argument. We’re going to see your father.’
And with this dubious reassurance – Sir Edward Gilmott-Gwyre was not someone she normally wanted to see – Lady Vy went up to the bedroom and began to pack. ‘I must leave Arnold a note just the same,’ she thought, and wrote a short one to the effect that she had had to go down to London to see Daddy because he hadn’t been well and she’d be back in a few days.
‘Now come along, Vy dear,’ Auntie Bea called. Lady Vy went downstairs obediently and left the note on the table by the front door. Aunt Bea saw it there, opened the envelope, read the note and put it quietly into her handbag. Sir Arnold could worry himself sick. And Vy wasn’t coming back, so there was no need to deceive him. On this nice moral note she went out to the Mercedes and presently they were on their way south. By the time the Chief Constable parked the Land Rover in the garage, they were halfway to London.
17
That evening Miss Midden and the Major moved Timothy Bright, wearing only a towel, up to the old nursery. The term ‘nursery’ was a euphemism. The bars in the window were substantial and the door thick because one of Miss Midden’s ancestors in the late eighteenth century, one Elias Midden, acting on the same extravagant impulse that had prompted Black Midden to build his domiciliary mausoleum, had bought a small bear from some gipsies at Twixt Fair. Elias, who had just won the wrestling match and been proclaimed Champion of the Fells, had drunk a great deal of beer to celebrate and had supposed that the bear was fully grown and also that it would be fun to match his strength against the beast of an evening. In fact the gipsies had been anxious to get rid of that bear. They had bought it from some sailors on the quay at Tween and the sailors had brought the bear back from a voyage to Canada where one of them had shot its mother. In short, the bear was a very young one and it grew into a very big one. Having paid a great deal of money for the animal Elias Midden was anxious to provide it with the best accommodation and to have it close to hand for evening bouts.
His wife did not share his enthusiasm. She disliked sharing the farmhouse with a young and growing bear, even if it was kept muzzled. She had threatened to leave Elias and his bear and take the children with her unless he kept it safely locked up. Reluctant to give the animal up, and conscious that he would be laughed at by every farmer between Stagstead and . . . well just about everywhere if he drove his wife out of the house on account of the bear – people would say coarse things about his relationship with it – Elias Midden had built a very strong room in which to keep it. It was just as well. As the weeks and months passed the bear grew. It grew to the point where even Elias, a proud man with a magnificent physique, had to admit defeat. That bear was not for wrestling. It was extremely strong and extremely nasty. And it became huge, so huge and so nasty that feeding it became a hazardous procedure. In building the bear room on the assumption that it was fully grown and amiable he had not made a hatch in the door through which to pass it its food and since the heavy door opened into the room rather than out of it (Mrs Midden had sensibly suggested that precaution – she had a horror of the bear bursting out of that room in the middle of the night and doing dreadful things to her and the children) Elias risked his life every time he opened it. The final straw, and the term was literal, came when he lost three fingers of his right hand between the door and the door jamb trying to push some litter through. ‘It’s all your fault,’ he had bellowed at his wife. ‘If you hadn’t complained about the smell.’
Mrs Midden had retorted that he’d been fool enough to waste a great deal of money and had bought a pup or whatever young grizzlies were called into the bargain and she knew now how the family had got its name and she wasn’t sharing her house with a bear that couldn’t go outside to do its business and the smell was appalling and not the sort of thing a decent woman with a reputation for keeping a clean home to consider could put up with and he’d got to do something or else . . .
Elias Midden had said he intended to do something about the bloody bear. In fact he did nothing. He wasn’t opening that door again for all the tea in China. The bear could lump it. The bear did. It had been living on a restricted diet before, but now it starved. Its last snack had been those three fingers. Day after day and night after night it battered that door and scratched at it. It tried the walls too and it bent the bars on the window. In the end it died and Elias put it about that he had killed it in a fair fight, losing his fingers in the encounter. He buried the emaciated corpse and double dug several barrowloads of bear’s excreta into the kitchen garden, where it did more good than it had done in the hous
e. Then, because his wife still refused to enter the bear’s den, he scrubbed it out and repainted the walls. He didn’t touch the door. It remained scratched and bitten and battered so that he could show visitors just how fierce the bear he had killed had been.
It was left to later and more refined Middens to alter the name of the room to ‘the old nursery’. With its bent bars and battered door the name had a nicely macabre touch to it and the young Middens who slept in it suffered terrifying nightmares which in more enlightened times would have required the attentions of psychotherapists, trauma relief specialists and stress counsellors. It was there in that bear room that Black Midden had first dreamt of a ferocious life in Africa where there were no bears. Now it was where Timothy Bright was confined.
‘You can stay in there until you tell us who you are and how you came to break into my house,’ Miss Midden told him after he’d eaten. ‘If you don’t want to stay, you have only to say the word and I shall call the police.’
Timothy Bright said he definitely didn’t want the police but could he have his clothes please.
‘When we find them,’ Miss Midden said, and locked the door. Then she went downstairs and sat in the fading evening light wondering which of the arrogant and idiotic Middens down at the Hall was responsible for this crime. In other circumstances she would have suspected the Major, but he’d been with her and his state of terror on finding the young man had been genuine. On the other hand he would be able to tell her, if anyone could, which of the inmates at the hell-hole had sado-masochistic tendencies. Not that she wanted to talk to the silly little man. She was still furious with him and her contempt at his cowardice was immense. All the same, she had to ask him. She found him looking at his soiled bed. There was a nasty smell in the room too. ‘Dogshit,’ said Miss Midden. ‘That’s what that is.’ But no one down at the hell-hole had a dog.
‘It has to be someone who knew I was away,’ she told the Major, ‘and the only people who knew for certain are down there.’
‘Do you want me to go down and find out what I can?’ he asked, but Miss Midden shook her head. ‘One look at you and whoever did this would sleep easy. You’re the perfect suspect with your black eye and stitches.’
‘But I can prove I got them in Glasgow in that pub.’
‘Which pub?’
The Major tried to remember. He had been in so many pubs and had been so very drunk. ‘There you are. You don’t even know,’ said Miss Midden. ‘And what did you call yourself at the hospital? I bet you didn’t call yourself MacPhee because you are no more a Scot than I am.’
‘Jones,’ the Major admitted.
‘And that overworked doctor didn’t like you in the least. So she isn’t going to be at all helpful. And that’s not all. We don’t know when that young man got into the house and we don’t know when whatever happened to him did happen. You could have been trying to establish some sort of alibi. Only a madman would get himself beaten up in a pub. Or a frightened and guilty person. You go down to the Hall and the police will get an anonymous call from a certain person down there who knows the man is in this house and may think he’s dead. And what about your record?’
‘Record?’ said the Major beginning to tremble.
‘Don’t tell me you haven’t been inside. With your nasty tendencies? Oh yes, you’ve been had up before now. Probably for peering through a hole in a public lavatory. Or worse. You don’t fool me. The police would be only too happy to lay their hands on you. Well, you needn’t worry. They’re not going to if I have anything to do with it.’
‘What are we going to do then?’ he asked.
‘What we aren’t going to do is show ourselves. We are not here. We are going to sit tight and see who comes up to check on that young man and find out if he is still alive. That’s what we are going to do. They came through the dining-room window. The next time they come I’ll be waiting for them. And now I’m going to put the car out of sight in the barn. This could be fun.’
It wasn’t Major MacPhee’s idea of fun.
In London the man who had called himself Mr Brian Smith was looking distinctly peaky. He wasn’t enjoying himself at all. ‘The little shit has done a a flyer,’ he told someone on the phone. ‘With the fucking piggy-bank too. Yeah, I know how many megabytes it was. But . . . No, I never dreamt. I wouldn’t have thought he had the fucking guts. He should have been on the boat and he wasn’t . . . Yeah, I know it’s not a fun matter. I’m the first to know that, aren’t I? Of course he could have had an accident or gone over by a different route. I only had one bloke at Santander to check him out and he wasn’t on any ferry. If he doesn’t do the rest of the job on time we’ll know. Yes, yes . . . yes . . . of course.’
He put the phone down gently and cursed Timothy Bright loud and long and with a ferocity that justified all that young man’s fears.
*
Sir Arnold Gonders was on the phone too, in a public phone box talking to the sod who ran The Holy Temple of Divine Being and The Pearly Gates of Paradise. He could see the lights on in the room above the painted-over window of the sex shop and had already walked past it twice in a raincoat and with a flat cap pulled down over his face. He was also wearing gloves. On the second occasion he had stopped briefly to stuff a brown envelope through the letterbox. Now he was using a voice distorter. The Chief Constable was taking every precaution and no chances.
‘I am interested in young people,’ he said in tones that he hoped were mincingly authentic. ‘Know what I mean?’ The proprietor said he thought he did. ‘Male or female, sir?’ he enquired.
‘Both,’ said Sir Arnold.
‘And young?’
Sir Arnold hesitated. ‘Yes, young,’ he said finally. ‘Like tied up, know what I mean?’
The proprietor knew perfectly well what was meant.
‘Pictures. Mags. And I need discretion. If you go down to your shop you’ll find an envelope with my money in it. I want you to send the material in a box to me at the address I have supplied. Two hundred should cover the cost, shouldn’t it?’
‘I’m sure it will, sir.’
‘So I’ve added another hundred for discretion. Right?’
‘Right, sir. Very kind.’
‘And there’ll be an additional order if I like what I see. Name’s MacPhee.’ Again he hesitated before going on in a far more sinister tone of voice. ‘And don’t think of not sending me the stuff and keeping the cash. I got some connections.’
‘Connections, sir?’
‘Like with Freddie Monce, like The Torch. I wouldn’t want to have to call them.’
The sod wouldn’t want him to call them either. Having a firebombed sex shop wouldn’t do him any good at all. The Chief Constable put the phone down and hurried away. The first part of his plan had begun. He went home and changed. It was time to begin his other investigation. It was ten o’clock when he left the house again in his own Jag and drove down the coast to Urnmouth. Maxie at the Hydro knew what was going on with just about everyone. He wanted a chat with Maxie.
18
The Urnmouth Hydro is an imposing building. Built in the age of mid-Victorian splendour along impeccably classical lines, it stands in its own elegant grounds like a Grecian temple. Its white columns are made of cast iron from the Gundron cannon foundry while its walls are of brown ironstone. But it is inside that the classical ambience is most appropriate to its present use. The original owner had insisted the interior should reflect Roman taste as authentically as the exterior was to be a mirror of something in Athens. The architect and decorator had followed these instructions as exactly as his knowledge of Roman history and custom allowed. One elderly cleric, already stunned by the Darwinian controversy of the time, had been so overwhelmed by the scenes of debauchery depicted on the walls of the atrium that he had died of apoplexy in the arms of the butler. These murals even now struck all visitors forcibly. It was even claimed that several gentlemen had been known to experience ejaculatio praecox before they had rid themselves of their
overcoats. And it was due to these friezes that, after a considerable period of neglect, the house had been turned into what was called a hydro by Maxie Schryburg, an entrepreneur from Miami.
Sir Arnold Gonders had taken an interest in Maxie Schryburg’s enterprise from the beginning. The Hydro would, he felt sure, attract the sort of people the Chief Constable wanted to know all about. Besides Maxie himself was of interest to Sir Arnold. Maxie had always claimed he was ‘outta da Big Apple’ but the Chief Constable had information that he had in fact been a minor operator in Florida and had found it wise to move away on account of some Cuban competition there. Certainly Urnmouth was the last place anyone would look for a restaurateur of his recondite type. The cold wind blowing in off the sea made the little town an inhospitable place for strangers. The Hydro offered its only entertainment apart from a straggle of pubs in the high street but membership, while open to all who could pay, was in fact restricted to those who could pay a great deal either in cash or in kind. Sir Arnold, who always used the nom de guerre of Mr Will Cope, belonged to the latter sort, but at the same time extracted a great deal of information from Maxie in return for his patronage.
Now, having entered by the private door at the back which led along a covered way to Maxie’s bungalow, he climbed the stairs to his usual private dining-room in the happy knowledge that with Vy and the foul Bea away, presumably in Harrogate, he could afford to relax and combine pleasure with investigation. He accepted the menu from the obsequious Maxie in his role of maître.
‘May I suggest that for the hors d’oeuvres you have Number Three?’ he said. ‘Very fresh and tender.’
‘Really? Interesting. Ample proportions, eh?’
‘I think you’ll find them adequate, sir. Very, ’ow you say, “well hung”.’
‘Sounds all right to me,’ said Sir Arnold. ‘And for the main course? What’s on tonight? Anything special?’
‘The mixed grill will be ready about ten. Before that we are a bit short, I’m afraid. Times ain’t what they used to be.’