by Tom Sharpe
Buffalo Midden had already worked out why. The Middenhall was the perfect place. Isolated, cut off from the world and equipped with military huts and shelters, it had all the necessary requirements for a terrorist base. Alone on the roof of the awful house he lay in the shadow of a towering chimney and took the most precise aim on that privy and the murderous swine inside it. With all his old expertise he gently eased the trigger back. It was a hair trigger, one he had adjusted to his own specifications, and he knew it well. So, a fraction of a second later, did the two policemen in that corrugated-iron privy. Of course they didn’t know precisely what was happening but they had a pretty good idea what was going to happen if they stayed there. They were going to die. The bullet had hardly slammed through the door of the privy and out through the back before they were out of there and running like hell for cover.
Buffalo Midden fired again. And again. And again. He was enjoying himself. The policemen weren’t. Pinned down behind a concrete pig-pen which, fortunately for the pig, was unoccupied, they listened to the bullets ricocheting round the interior of the sty and radioed frantically for help. One of them had been hit in the shoulder and the other had had a bullet through his leg. At eighty-five, Buffalo Midden’s eyesight was no longer 20/20 but it was sufficiently acute to hit a pig-pen at a hundred and fifty yards and the old Lee Enfield he had always maintained was all he needed to bring down a charging bull elephant so that it slumped at his feet fired a sufficiently powerful .303 bullet to make life behind the pig-pen a decidedly unpleasant affair.
On the far side of the lake the sound of that rifle raised some degree of apprehension. It was not equipped with a silencer. Buffalo liked to boast that when he fired the beast he fired at wouldn’t hear anything again this side of the end of eternity and that the shot would so startle the herd of whatever he was killing that his next target would be moving like the clappers, which was much the most sporting way of shooting things. As the firing died away (Buffalo was moving to a position that would give him a better chance of hitting the swine cowering behind the pig-pen) the Dean and his peculiar congregation turned and looked at the Middenhall.
So did Detective Constable Markin. He was a firearms expert himself and he knew a heavy-calibre rifle when he heard one. For a moment he imagined that that moron Rascombe had thrown the whole weight of the Armed Quick Response Team against the house where it wasn’t needed. It was needed on his side of the lake where the Black Mass was taking place. He was just wondering what to do when the firing resumed. This time it was accompanied by screams.
Buffalo had found his mark once again and this time he was satisfied. He had heard that sort of scream before many times and it portended death, a terrible and agonizing death. He stood up exultantly and hurried from the roof. There was a Union Flag in his room and he intended to run it up the flagpole Black Midden had erected to celebrate the Coronation of George V.
26
Looking back on the events of that Sunday, Miss Midden was wont to say that the Armed Quick Response Team, or whatever those buffoons were called, had arrived in the nick of time. It is not clear what nick of time, or possibly which nick of time, she was referring to, just as it wasn’t clear to anyone taking part in whatever it was that was taking place around them whatever it was they were taking part in. Not even Detective Constable Markin, who had witnessed just about everything (he couldn’t see what was happening or had happened round the other side of the ghastly house but he had a shrewd idea – that fucking hearse was going to come in handy after all) that seemed to have occurred since first light began, but even he, when it came to the inquests, and there were several, couldn’t under oath, or cross-examination of the most persistent and thoroughly unpleasant kind, actually put his hand on his heart and swear to present a faintly lucid account of what he had seen. He had to admit that he had lain under a pile of leaves with a video camera and a mobile (they called it a walkie-talkie in court and the videos he had made were shown over and over and over again) and he was a trained and intelligent and observant police officer but it still didn’t add up to a row of sane beans or perhaps he ought to say a sane row of beans. Anyway it hadn’t, didn’t and never would make any sense to him. All he knew was that an old bloke in the altogether had come out for a swim and . . . How the hell was he to know the thing under that hat and in that frock was a woman? (Fortunately Phoebe Turnbird was not in court at that particular moment. She was otherwise engaged. Literally though briefly.) And if small, fat, waddling clergymen went around wearing cloaks and weird flat shovel-hats, and he hadn’t known what they were called at the time, carrying whacking great leather-bound bibles and bloody great brass crosses and got into boats and were rowed across lakes to a whole lot of children whom he had been officially informed by a superior officer were about to be buggered and abused, which was why he was there in the first place, how the hell was he to know they were genuine clergymen and the Dean of Porterhouse College, Cambridge, an ancient and important educational establishment etc? Asked if he needed trauma relief counselling or had had any, he said he didn’t. The only relief he needed was to get the hell out of the Twixt and Tween Constabulary into another job where he wouldn’t be required to try to assess situations he didn’t and still couldn’t make head or tail of even if that particular situation had had a head or a tail. The detective’s was a garbled account but an accurate one, and it was infinitely more perceptive than that of Inspector Rascombe who had precipitated the whole appalling disaster and was responsible for its outcome.
*
At the head of the column of Armed Quick Response Teams (AQRTs) hurtling towards the Middenhall that morning, Inspector Rascombe was not exactly himself. Sleepless nights in the Communications Centre, and the sounds of rifle fire ahead of him, and the urgency of his mission to save the little kiddies from having their throats cut on an altar by the queen of the night in drag, or whatever it was in the frock, had awakened in the Inspector’s mind a new vision of himself. He saw himself not as a mere police inspector of the Serious Crime Squad but (and this may have had something to do with a book he had been reading by Alan Clark about the war in Russia, called Barbarossa) as Standartenführer Sigismund Rascombe of the Waffen SS Sturmgruppe AQRT acting under orders from the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht to storm the Middenhall or die in the attempt. It was a most unfortunate delusion to possess or be possessed by. Inspector Rascombe did not lack the fanatical fervour of a Standartenführer – if anything he had about as much of it as would have made him a thoroughly obedient SS mass murderer in Russia, though at the lowest possible level of command. None at all would have been better. He’d have made a bad cook or baggage-handler. He lacked any degree of intelligence or capacity for organizing anything other than a major catastrophe.
He not only didn’t have the faintest clue what he was leading his men into, he hardly knew where the Middenhall was. He had never seen it, it was no more than a mark on the Ordnance Survey map in his borrowed British Telecom van (here he muddled up Standartenführers with General Montgomery who worked from a sort of caravan) and his Surveillance Units hadn’t bothered to try to describe it to him. It was in any case beyond description. (Even Sir John Betjeman hadn’t attempted that awesome task and had retired to his hotel room in Stagstead for two days to recover after only looking at it for ten minutes from the bottom of the drive.) When finally the Inspector did see the great building it was not what he had expected.
The Armed Quick Response Team leaping from their vehicles with rifles weren’t what Buffalo Midden had expected either. He had just managed to get his Union Jack to the top of the flagpole when they arrived, and he drew the worst possible conclusion. He thought he had fought off the attack of the Muslim–Zionist–Black–IRA terrorists, but he had been over-optimistic. The sods had come back in force. Buffalo hastily withdrew from the rooftop and hurried to his room to collect his shotgun, a revolver and a fresh supply of cartridges for the Lee Enfield. Then, to distract the bastards below and mislead them as to hi
s eventual firing position, he put a bullet through the front tyre of each of the vehicles, holed the radiator of the lead one and retreated to the second floor where he could command the back and front of the Middenhall by scurrying to the turrets so conveniently equipped with arrow slits on the four corners of the building. Nobody in his, her or its right mind, not even Black Midden at his most megalomanic, had ever supposed those slits had any military purpose. They were mere ornamentation on the hideous building. Buffalo Midden knew better. From his warped point of view they were perfect for picking off the enemy. As the Armed Quick Response marksmen ran for cover he shot three of them, each in a different part of the garden and the anatomy, and then turned his attention on the relief party that was trying to reach the remaining and groaning Surveillance man still alive behind the pig-pen. By the time he had finished there were three wounded policemen behind that pen and he had pinned another eight down behind the rockery. It was time to change tactics.
He hurried down the curved staircase to the ground floor to deal with any terrorist trying to infiltrate the kitchen. There was no need. The cook and the entire domestic staff had already taken shelter in the cellar and the other guests, with the exception of Consuelo, were milling about in the corridors and hall asking each other what was happening. Buffalo Midden added to the confusion by shouting that they were being attacked by IRA terrorists and must fight to the death. Mrs Devizes already had died, though whether she had been fighting or merely peering shortsightedly out of the window when she was shot by a police marksman was a matter of some debate at the inquest. The police marksman was not there to give evidence. His moment of satisfaction had been short-lived. Buffalo, firing from behind the library sofa, took him out through the open window and then scuttled through to the breakfast-room to put paid to another dark-overalled figure who was sneaking round to the back door. Mr Joseph Midden, the retired gynaecologist, had been killed trying to enquire from a wounded policeman what he was doing lying on the drive. His wife’s attempts to save him from falling out of the window had been in all likelihood misinterpreted.
As bodies began to accumulate, Inspector Rascombe’s military fantasies evaporated. So had most of the Armed Quick Response Team. Those who had survived Buffalo’s murderous fire had taken refuge in various secluded parts of the garden waiting to get the bastards in that fucking house, and the Inspector was cowering behind the leading vehicle unable to coordinate the next phase of Operation Kiddlywink because his walkie-talkie was lying out in the open and he had sufficient sense not to try to reach it. It was Constable Markin, on the far side of the lake, who made the call for help. ‘There’s a bloody massacre going on here,’ he yelled into his mobile. ‘Blokes are dropping like flies. For fuck-sake do something.’
It was a mistake to have shouted. The Dean had just decided it would be prudent to get the Mission children and Miss Turnbird away to a place of greater safety – he didn’t give a damn what happened to that foul woman in the cat suit, if that’s what she was – when Phoebe heard Detective Constable Markin’s plea for assistance and drew her own conclusions about men in camouflage jackets lying under piles of leaves. They were as wrong as his conclusions about her sex (actually gender was, for once, a better word for Phoebe Turnbird’s state of nature – sex she hadn’t) but, in the circumstances, understandable. Being the brave woman she was, and one who had never in a lifetime of hunting allowed the horse she was riding to refuse a fence or a drystone wall with a ditch on the other side (one or two had tried and had learnt better), Phoebe Turnbird brought all her unrequited passion for men to bear on Detective Constable Markin. Sexual frustration lent weight to her fury.
It was an unequal battle. A policeman under a pile of leaves who is suffering from a perfectly natural bout of homophobia is not at his best when attacked by powerful women descended from a line of Turnbirds that could prove its ancestry back to Saxon times. A Turnbird had fought at the Battle of Hastings with Harold, and that same ancestral spirit inspired Phoebe now. She would die to get her man. In fact it was Detective Constable Markin who damn near died. It is not pleasant to be kicked in the head by a fifteen-stone woman of thirty-five who talks to mirrors and writes poetry before going out to make life hell for foxes and other vermin. That the thing under the pile of leaves was vermin Phoebe Turnbird had not the slightest doubt and, if anything was needed to prove how verminous it was, its supine lack of resistance provided that proof. That it kept moaning about not being buggered please I don’t want Aids didn’t exactly increase her respect or liking for the creature. To stifle this flow of filth Phoebe Turnbird knelt on the constable and ground his blackened face into the soggy earth. Around them the kiddies shouted encouragement, and one of the older ones was taken into the bushes by Consuelo McKoy to be shown something he hadn’t seen before.
But it was on the drive down to the Middenhall under the avenue of chestnut trees that new and more fearful developments were taking place. The Child Abuse Trauma Specialists were arriving in surprising numbers. They came from all over Britain and had been attending a conference in Tween devoted to ‘The Sphincter: Its Diagnostic Role in Parental Rape Inspections’. There were witchcraft experts from Scotland, sodomy specialists from South Wales, oral-sex-in-infancy counsellors, mutual masturbation advisers for adolescents, a number of clitoris stimulation experts, four vasectomists (female), and finally fifteen whores who had come to tell the conference what men really wanted. If they were anything to go by, what men wanted was anything, but anything, with two legs, a short skirt and a mouthful of rotten teeth. And one that whined about being socially deprived. ‘Disadvantaged’ was the word of the conference. Sphincters were disadvantaged, sodomists were disadvantaged – there had been a prolonged debate on the subject of which were the more disadvantaged and on the whole the sodomists got the greater support largely because, in the experience of the delegates, sodomists didn’t pose any threat to women under the age of sixty-five. Consuelo McKoy could have told them differently.
What she was getting under a dense thicket on the edge of the estate was not what she had expected or was enjoying. The kiddy from the Isle of Dogs might not have been able to distinguish with absolute assurance between a vagina and a sphincter, though that was to be doubted, but he knew which he preferred in Consuelo’s case. Her screams, muted by distance and by her inability to open her mouth too wide if she were to avoid scalping herself, went unheard.
In any case even if they had heard those screams the Child Abuse experts would have ignored them. Granny Abuse came under another department. They milled about looking for the children they had come to counsel and their faces were alive with desperate care. Or, to be precise, dead with desperate care. They were concerned. They had come to deal with misery and helplessness and to dole out their own misery and helplessness in even greater measure. A miasma of mixed emotions and bitter hatred of anything faintly fond or normal seemed to hang over them. Cruelty and sadism were their specialities and they were infected with them. Suffused with guilt about massacres and droughts in faraway places, they appeased their worthless consciences by doing worthless things. And blamed society for everything. Or God. Or men and parents who loved and disciplined their children to be polite and civil and to work at school. Above all they blamed sex but never ceased to slobber on their own proclivities.
Now, dragged by duty from one another’s beds in the most expensive conference hotel in Tween, few of them had had time to wash. Not that they would have washed if there’d been all the time in the world. They liked their own smells. They reminded them of their calling, those smells of stinking fish did, and they revelled in their rejection of the hygienic. The coven from Aberdeen was particularly noisome, and some of the oral sex counsellors still had pubic hair on their chins. As their cars piled up behind one another down the drive and blocked the lodge gates the women debated what to do. They held a conference, and one or two of the more determined ones actually looked around for some children to counsel and expend their care and
concern on.
There were none to be seen. With a prescience that did him credit, the Dean and the undergraduates had driven them past Miss Turnbird far into the wood and had forced them to hide by the boundary wall out of harm’s way. Only some of the prostitutes did anything useful, one of them giving a peculiar form of last rite to a dying marksman. He’d never been shot before and he’d never been into fellatio. But the whore didn’t know that. She was following her calling. So were the creatures under the chestnut trees. They had brought the atmosphere of a failed hospice to the Middenhall. They couldn’t have brought it to a better place.
27
To Miss Midden the sound of gunfire from the Middenhall was not altogether surprising. That old fool Buffalo had frequently boasted he was going to teach those youngsters from the slums about spooring and killing things like rhinos on the hoof at a thousand yards and generally being manly. Doubtless that’s what he was doing. She turned over and went back to sleep. She had got home from London late, well after midnight, and she wanted to lie in. Whatever old Buffalo was doing wasn’t any of her business.
On the other hand the roar of SS Standartenführer Sigismund Rascombe’s Storm Group’s vans as they pelted past the farm did seem to suggest that something bloody odd was going on. Miss Midden put on a dressing-gown and went downstairs to the kitchen to find the Major looking fearfully out of the back window at the Union Jack which could be seen fluttering from the flagpole above the rim of trees. ‘Buffalo,’ said Miss Midden, and put the kettle on. ‘Bound to be that old idiot being a geriatric boy scout. Thinks he’s Baden-Powell, I daresay.’