The Midden by Tom Sharpe Page A

if he could lay his hands on that someone...some shit had unlocked the iron gates to

let some other shits in with the young bastard now in the cellar and, when they had left, had

locked the gates again. There was no other way they could have got in. The walls and the

steel-shuttered windows on the reservoir side of the house made any other route impossible. When

it came to self-protection, the Chief Constable did himself well.
    That was the first point and it was confirmed by the second, the pitiful state of the

Rottweiler. If Sir Arnold felt awful and he did the dog was in an even worse state. True, its

legs had recovered and it could walk well, at any rate hobble but in nearly every other respect

it had the look of an animal that had made the mistake of taking on a thoroughly ill-tempered

JCB. Its jaws were in a particularly nasty state and, when once or twice it tried to bark or make

some sort of audible protest, it merely achieved what looked like a yawn. No sound issued from

its massive throat, though when it hobbled, it wheezed. In more favourable circumstances Sir

Arnold would have got his wife to call the vet, but that was out of the question. Circumstances

were the least favourable he had ever known and he had no intention of allowing any damned vet to

come poking around the place. He had even less of allowing Lady Vy or that beastly Bea to go

anywhere. Genscher would have to suffer in silence. All the same, the dog provided further

evidence that Bea had helped the swine who had put that lout in his bed. The dog knew her and had

evidently come to like the cow. In his disgusted opinion it ought to have savaged her the first

time she set foot on the premises. Instead it had trusted her. Sir Arnold wasted no sympathy on

the animal. It had only itself to blame for its present condition. The damned woman must have

taken a crowbar to the brute.
    Following this line of reasoning, he wondered what she had taken to Lady Vy. Probably a

near-lethal dose of anti-depressants. Like twice her normal dose. And this on top of her usual

bottle of gin. Well, two could play that game, and he wasn't going to have anyone interfering

with his plans for the disposal of the bloke in the sheets.
    He was now left with the practical problem of getting the bloke out of the cellar and

depositing him somewhere else. Once that had been achieved successfully any attempt to blackmail

him would be a right give-away. That bloody Bea wouldn't be able to say a thing. The opportunity

would have passed. It was a nice thought.
    Sir Arnold applied his mind to the solution of this problem. First the place would have to be

somewhere near enough for him to be able to get there and back in an hour. Sometime between 2

a.m. and 3 would be ideal. And this time Auntie Bea would be the one to have something to make

her sleep. Say 80 mg of Valium in her tonic. That would undoubtedly do the trick. Or in the gin?

No, tonic was better. She would drink more of the tonic. He went through to the sitting-room and

got a bottle and made up the potion. And it wouldn't hurt if Vy got a dose too. He didn't want

her interfering in his plan or even knowing what it was. He knew his wife. She had an infinite

capacity for forgetting the unpleasant facts of her experience and for concentrating on only

those things that gave her pleasure. With the help of enough gin she could forget any sort of

crime. He wasn't going to worry about Vy.
    His thoughts, such as they were, reverted to the Middenhall. If only he could be absolutely

sure Miss Midden had gone away and the old farmhouse was unoccupied it would make the ideal spot

to dump the bastard. It was close enough to be convenient and at the same time far enough away to

remove all suspicion from the Old Boathouse. Best of all was the proximity of all those very

dubious Midden family eccentrics in the Hall itself. In a way it would be easier to dump the

fellow in