Wilt (10 page)

‘That’s the trouble. I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘No, I honestly don’t know,’ said Wilt.

‘She didn’t tell you where she was going?’

‘No. She just wasn’t there when I got home.’

‘She didn’t leave a note or anything like that?’

‘Yes,’ said Wilt, ‘as a matter of fact she did.’

‘Right, well let’s just go up to your house and have a look at that note.’

‘I’m afraid that’s not possible,’ said Wilt. ‘I got rid of it.’

‘You got rid of it?’ said the Inspector. ‘You got rid of it? How?’

Wilt looked pathetically across at the police stenographer. ‘To tell the truth I wiped
my bottom with it,’ he said.

Inspector Flint gazed at him demonically. ‘You did what?’

‘Well, there was no toilet paper in the lavatory so I…’ he stopped. The Inspector was
lighting yet another cigarette. His hands were shaking and he had a distant look in his
eyes that suggested he had just peered over some appalling abyss. ‘Mr Wilt,’ he said when he
had managed to compose himself, ‘I trust that I am a reasonably tolerant man, a patient
man and a humane man, but if you seriously expect me to believe one word of your
utterly preposterous story you must be insane. First you tell me you put a doll down
that hole. Then you admit that it was dressed in your wife’s clothes. Now you say that she
went away without telling you where she was going and finally to cap it all you have the
temerity to sit there and tell me that you wiped your arse with the one piece of solid
evidence that could substantiate your statement.’

‘But I did,’ said Wilt.

‘Balls,’ shouted the Inspector. ‘You and I both know where Mrs Wilt has gone and there’s
no use pretending we don’t. She’s down at the bottom of that fucking hole and you put her
there.’

‘Are you arresting me?’ Wilt asked as they walked in a tight group across the road to the
police car.

‘No,’ said Inspector Flint, ‘you’re just helping the police with their enquiries. It
will be on the news tonight.’

‘My dear Braintree, of course we’ll do all we can,’ said the Vice-Principal. ‘Wilt has
always been a loyal member of staff and there has obviously been some dreadful mistake.
I’m sure you needn’t worry. The whole thing will right itself before long.’

‘I hope you’re right,’ said Braintree, ‘but there are complicating factors. For one
thing there’s Eva…’

‘Eva? Mrs Wilt? You’re not suggesting…’

‘I’m not suggesting anything. All I’m saying is…well, she’s missing from home. She
walked out on Henry last Friday.

‘Mrs Wilt walked…well I hardly knew her, except by reputation of course. Wasn’t she the
woman who broke Mr Lockyer’s collar-bone during a part-time Evening Class in judo some
years back?’

‘That was Eva,’ said Braintree.

‘She hardly sounds the sort of woman who would allow Wilt to put her down…’

‘She isn’t,’ said Braintree hastily. ‘If anyone was liable to be murdered in the Wilt
household it was Henry. I think the police should be informed of that.’

They were interrupted by the Principal who came in with a copy of the evening paper.
‘You’ve seen this I suppose,’ he said, waving it distraughtly. ‘It’s absolutely
appalling.’ He put the paper down on the desk and indicated the headlines. MURDERED
WOMAN BURIED IN CONCRETE AT TECH. LECTURER HELPING POLICE.

‘Oh dear,’ said the Vice-Principal. ‘Oh dear. How very unfortunate. It couldn’t have
come at a worse moment’

‘It shouldn’t have come at all,’ snapped the Principal. ‘And that’s not all. I’ve already
had half a dozen phone calls from parents wanting to know if we make a habit of employing
murderers on the full-time staff. Who is this fellow Wilt anyway?’

‘He’s in Liberal Studies,’ said the Vice-Principal. ‘He’s been with us ten years.’

‘Liberal Studies. I might have guessed it. If they’re not poets mangoes they’re Maoists
or…I don’t know where the hell Morris gets them from. And now we’ve got a blasted murderer.
God knows what I’m going to tell the Education Committee tonight. They’ve called an
emergency meeting for eight.’

‘I must say I resent Wilt being called a murderer,’ said Braintree loyally. ‘There is
nothing to suggest that he has murdered anyone.’

The Principal studied him for a moment and then looked back at the headlines. ‘Mr
Braintree, when someone is helping the police with their enquiries into a murder it may
not be proven that he is a murderer but the suggestion is there.’

‘This certainly isn’t going to help us get the new CNAA degree off the ground,’
intervened the Vice-Principal tactfully. ‘We’ve got a visit from the Inspection
Committee scheduled for Friday.’

‘From what the police tell me it isn’t going to help get the new Administration block
off the ground either,’ said the Principal. ‘They say it’s going to take at least three
days to bore down to the bottom of that pile and then they’ll have to drill through the
concrete to get the body out That means they’ll have to put a new pile down and we’re already
well behind schedule and our building budget has been halved. Why on earth couldn’t he have
chosen somewhere else to dispose of his damned wife’

‘I don’t think…’ Braintree began.

‘I don’t care what you think,’ said the Principal, ‘I’m merely telling you what the
police think.’

Braintree left them still wrangling and trying to figure out ways and means of
counteracting the adverse publicity the case had already brought the Tech. He went down
to the Liberal Studies office and found Mr Morris in a state of despair. He was trying
to arrange stand-in lecturers for all Wilt’s classes.

‘But he’ll probably be back in the morning,’ Braintree said.

‘Like hell he will.’ said Mr Morris. ‘When they take them in like that they keep them. Mark
my words. The police may make mistakes, I’m not saying they don’t, but when they act this
swiftly they’re on to a sure thing. Mind you. I always thought Wilt was a bit odd.’

‘Odd? I’ve just come from the VP’s office. You want to hear what the Principal’s got to
say about Liberal Studies staff.’

‘Christ.’ said Mr Morris, ‘don’t tell me.’

‘Anyway what’s so odd about Henry?’

‘Too meek and mild for my liking. Look at the way he accepted remaining a Lecturer
Grade Two all these years.’

‘That was hardly his fault.’

‘Of course it was his fault. All he had to do was threaten to resign and go somewhere
else and he’d have got promotion like a shot. That’s the only way to get on in this place.
Make your presence felt’

‘He seems to have done that now,’ said Braintree. ‘The Principal is already blaming him
for throwing the building programme off schedule and if we don’t get the joint Honours
degree past the CNAA, Henry’s going to be made the scapegoat. It’s too bad. Eva should have
had more sense than to walk out on him like that.’

Mr Morris took a more sombre view. ‘She’d have shown a damned sight more sense if she’d
walked out on him before the sod took it into his head to beat her to death and dump her down
that bloody shaft. Now who the hell can I get to take Gasfitters one tomorrow?’

At 34 Parkview Avenue Wilt sat in the kitchen with Clem while the detectives ransacked
the house. ‘You’re not going to find anything incriminating here,’ he told Inspector
Flint.

‘Never you mind what we’re going to find. We’re just having a look.’

He sent one detective upstairs to examine Mrs Wilt’s clothes or what remained of
them.

‘If she went away she’d have taken half her wardrobe,’ he said. ‘I know women. On the
other hand if she’s pushing up twenty tons of premix she wouldn’t need more than what she’s
got on.’

Eva’s wardrobe was found to be well stocked. Even Wilt had to admit that she hadn’t taken
much with her.

‘What was she wearing when you last saw her?’ the Inspector asked.

‘Lemon loungers.’ said Wilt.

‘Lemon what?’

‘Pyjamas,’ said Wilt, adding to the list of incriminating evidence against him. The
Inspector made a note of the fact in his pocketbook.

‘In bed, was she?’

‘No,’ said Wilt. ‘Round at the Pringsheims.’

The Pringsheims? And who might they be?’

‘The Americans I told you about who live in Rossiter Grove.’

‘You haven’t mentioned any Americans to me.’ said the Inspector.

‘I’m sorry. I thought I had. I’m getting muddled. She went away with them.’

‘Oh did she? And I suppose we’ll find they’re missing too?’

‘Almost certainly,’ said Wilt. ‘I mean if she was going away with them they must have
gone too and if she isn’t with them I can’t imagine where she has got to.’

‘I can,’ said the Inspector looking with distasteful interest at a stain on a sheet
one of the detectives had found in the dirty linen basket. By the time they left the house
the incriminating evidence consisted of the sheet, an old dressing-gown cord that had
found its way mysteriously into the attic, a chopper that Wilt had once used to open a
tin of red lead, and a hypodermic syringe which Eva had got from the vet for watering
cacti very precisely during her Indoor Plant phase. There was also a bottle of tablets
with no label on it.

‘How the hell would I know what they are?’ Wilt asked when confronted with the bottle.
‘Probably aspirins. And anyway it’s full’

‘Put it with the other exhibits,’ said the Inspector. Wilt looked at the box.

‘For God’s sake, what do you think I did with her? Poisoned her, strangled her, hacked her
to bits with a chopper and injected her with Biofood?’

‘What’s Biofood?’ asked Inspector Flint with sudden interest.

‘It’s stuff you feed plants with,’ said Wilt. ‘The bottle’s on the windowsill.’

The Inspector added the bottle of Biofood to the box. ‘We know what you did with her, Mr
Wilt,’ he said. ‘It’s how that interests us now.’

They went out to the police car and drove round to the Pringsheims’ house in Rossiter
Grove. ‘You just sit in the car with the constable here while I go and see if they’re in,’
said Inspector Flint and went to the front door. Wilt sat and watched while he rang the bell.
He rang again. He hammered on the doorknocker and finally he walked round through the gate
marked Tradesman’s Entrance to the kitchen door. A minute later he was back and fumbling
with the car radio.

‘You’ve hit the nail on the head all right, Wilt,’ he snapped. ‘They’ve gone away. The place
is a bloody shambles. Looks like they’ve had an orgy. Take him out.’

The two detectives bundled Wilt, no longer Mr Wilt but plain Wilt and conscious of the
fact, out of the car while the Inspector called Fenland Constabulary and spoke with
sinister urgency about warrants and sending something that sounded like the D brigade
up. Wilt stood in the driveway of 12 Rossiter Grove and wondered what the hell was
happening to him. The order of things on which he had come to depend was disintegrating
around him.

‘We’re going in the back way,’ said the Inspector. This doesn’t look good.’

They went down the path to the kitchen door and round to the back garden. Wilt could see
what the Inspector had meant by a shambles. The garden didn’t look at all good. Paper
plates lay about the lawn or, blown by the wind, had wheeled across the garden into
honeysuckle or climbing rose while paper cups, some squashed and some still filled with
Pringsheim punch and rainwater, littered the ground. But it was the beefburgers that gave
the place its air of macabre filth. They were all over the lawn, stained wilt coleslaw so that
Wilt was put in mind of Clem.

‘The dog returns to his vomit,’ said Inspector Flint evidently reading his mind. They
crossed the terrace to the lounge windows and peered through. If the garden was bad the
interior was awful.

‘Smash a pane in the kitchen window and let us in,’ said the Inspector to the taller of
the two detectives. A moment later the lounge window slid back and they went inside.

‘No need for forcible entry,’ said the detective. ‘The back door was unlocked and so was
this window. They must have cleared out in a hell of a hurry.’

The Inspector looked round the room and wrinkled his nose. The smell of stale pot, sour
punch and candle smoke still hung heavily in the house.

‘If they went away,’ he said ominously and glanced at Wilt.

‘They must have gone away,’ said Wilt who felt called upon to make some comment on the
scene, ‘no one would live in all this mess for a whole weekend without…’

‘Live? You did say “live” didn’t you?’ said Flint stepping on a piece of burnt
beefburger.

‘What I meant…’

‘Never mind what you meant, Wilt.’ Let’s see what’s happened here.’

They went into the kitchen where the same chaos reigned and then into another room.
Everywhere it was the same. Dead cigarette ends doused in cups of coffee or ground out on
the carpet. Pieces of broken record behind the sofa marked the end of Beethoven’s Fifth.
Cushions lay crumpled against the wall. Burnt-out candles hung limply post-coital from
bottles. To add a final touch to the squalor someone had drawn a portrait of Princess Anne
on the wall with a red felt pen. She was surrounded by helmeted policemen and
underneath was written. THE FUZZ AROUND OUR ANNY THE ROYAL. FAMLYS FANNY THE PRICK IS
DEAD LONG LIVE THE CUNT. Sentiments that were doubtless perfectly acceptable is Women’s
Lib circles but were hardly calculated to establish the Pringsheims very highly in
Inspector Flint’s regard.

‘You’ve got some nice friends, Wilt.’ he said.

‘No friends of mine,’ said Wilt, with feeling. ‘The sods can’t even spell.’

They went upstairs and looked in the big bedroom. The bed was unmade, clothes, mostly
underclothes, were all over the floor or hung out of drawers and an unstoppered bottle of
Joy lay on its side on the dressing-table. The room stank of perfume.

‘Jesus wept,’ said the Inspector, eyeing a pair of jockstraps belligerently. ‘All
that’s missing is some blood.’

They found it in the bathroom. Dr Scheimacher’s cut hand had rained bloodstains in the
bath and splattered the tiles with dark blotches. The bathroom door with its broken frame
was hanging from the bottom hinge and there were spots of blood on the paintwork.

‘I knew it,’ said the Inspector, studying their message and that written in lipstick
on the mirror above the washbasin. Wilt looked at it too. It seemed unduly personal.

WHERE WILT FAGGED AND EVA RAN WHO WAS THEN THE MALE CHAUVINIST PIG?

‘Charming,’ said Inspector Flint. He turned to look at Wilt whose face was now the colour
of the tiles. ‘I don’t suppose you’d know anything about that. Not your handiwork?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Wilt.

‘Nor this?’ said the Inspector, pointing to the bloodstains in the bath. Wilt shook his
head. ‘And I suppose this has nothing to do with you either?’ He indicated a diaphragm
that had been nailed to the wall above the lavatory seat. WHERE THE B SUCKS THERE SUCK I
UNDERNEATH A DUTCH CAP NICE AND DRY. Wilt stared at the thing in utter disgust.

‘I don’t know what to say,’ he muttered. ‘It’s all so awful.’

‘You can say that again,’ the Inspector agreed, and turned to more practical matters.
‘Well, she didn’t die in here.’

‘How can you tell?’ asked the younger of the two detectives.

‘Not enough blood.’ The Inspector looked round uncertainly. ‘On the other hand one
hard bash…’ They followed the bloodstains down the passage to the room where Wilt had been
dollknotted.

‘For God’s sake don’t touch anything,’ said the Inspector, easing the door open with his
sleeve, ‘the fingerprint boys are going to have a field day here.’ He looked inside at the
toys.

‘I suppose you butchered the children too,’ he said grimly.

‘Children?’ said Wilt, ‘I didn’t know they had any.’

Well if you didn’t,’ said the Inspector, who was a family man, ‘the poor little buggers
have got something to be thankful for. Not much by the look of things but something.’

Wilt poked his head round the door and looked at the Teddy Bear and the rocking horse.
‘Those are Gaskell’s,’ he said, ‘he likes to play with them.’

‘I thought you said you didn’t know they had any children?’

‘They haven’t. Gaskell is Dr Pringsheim. He’s a biochemist and a case of arrested
development according to his wife.’ The Inspector studied him thoughtfully. The
question of arrest had become one that needed careful consideration.

‘I don’t suppose you’re prepared to make a full confession now?’ he asked without much
hope.

‘No I am not,’ said Wilt.

‘I didn’t think you would be, Wilt,’ said the Inspector. ‘All right, take him down to the
Station. I’ll be along later.’

The detectives took Wilt by the arms. It was the last straw.

‘Leave me alone,’ he yelled. ‘You’ve got no right to do this. You’ve got–’

‘Wilt,’ shouted Inspector Flint, ‘I’m going to give you one last chance. If you don’t go
quietly I’m going to charge you here and now with the murder of your wife’

Wilt went quietly. There was nothing else to do.

‘The screw?’ said Sally. ‘But you said it was the con rod.’

‘So I was wrong,’ said Gaskell. She cranks over.’

‘It, G, it. It cranks over.’

‘OK. It cranks over so it can’t be a con rod. It could be something that got tangled with
the propshaft.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like weeds.’

‘Why don’t you go down and have a look yourself?’

‘With these glasses?’ said Gaskell. ‘I wouldn’t be able to see anything.’

‘You know I can’t swim,’ said Sally. ‘I have this leg.’

‘I can swim,’ said Eva.

‘We’ll tie a rope round you. That way you won’t drown,’ said Gaskell, ‘all you’ve got to do
is go under and feel if there’s anything down there.’

‘We know what’s down there,’ said Sally. ‘Mud is.’

‘Round the propshaft,’ said Gaskell. ‘Then if there is you can take it off.’

Eva went into the cabin and put on the bikini.

‘Honestly, Gaskell, sometimes I think you’re doing this on purpose. First it’s the con
rod and now it’s the screw.’

‘Well, we’ve got to try everything. We can’t just sit here,’ said Gaskell, ‘I’m supposed
to be back in the lab tomorrow.’

‘You should have thought of that before,’ said Sally. ‘Now all we need is a goddam
Albatross.’

‘If you ask me we’ve got one,’ said Gaskell, as Eva came out of the cabin and put on a
bathing cap.

‘Now where’s the rope?’ she asked. Gaskell looked in a locker and found some. He tied it
round her waist and Eva clambered over the side into the water.

‘It’s ever so cold,’ she giggled.

‘That’s because of the Gulf Stream,’ said Gaskell, ‘it doesn’t come this far round.’

Eva swam out and put her feet down.

‘It’s terribly shallow and full of mud.’

She waded round hanging on to the rope and groped under the stern of the cruiser.

‘I can’t feel anything,’ she called.

‘It will be further under,’ said Gaskell, peering down at her. Eva put her head under
the water and felt the rudder.

‘That’s the rudder,’ said Gaskell.

‘Of course it is,’ said Eva, ‘I know that, silly. I’m not stupid.’

She disappeared under the boat. This time she found the propeller but there was nothing
wrapped round it.

‘It’s just muddy, that’s all,’ she said, when she resurfaced. ‘There’s mud all along the
bottom.’

‘Well there would be wouldn’t there,’ said Gaskell. Eva waded round to the side. ‘We just
happen to be stuck on a mudbank.’

Eva went down again but the propshaft was clear too. I told you so,’ said Sally, as they
hauled Eva back on board. ‘You just made her do it so you could see her in her plastic kini
all covered with mud. Come, Botticelli baby, let Sally wash you off.’

‘Oh Jesus,’ said Gaskell. ‘Penis arising from the waves.’ He went back to the engine and
looked at it uncertainly. Perhaps there was a blockage in the fuel line. It didn’t seem
very likely but he had to try something. They couldn’t stay stuck on the mudbank
forever.

On the foredeck Sally was sponging Eva down.

‘Now the bottom half, darling,’ she said untying the string.

‘Oh, Sally. No, Sally.’

‘Labia babia.’

‘Oh, Sally, you are awful.’

Gaskell struggled with the adjustable wrench. All this Touch Therapy was getting to him.
And the plastic.

At the County Hall the Principal was doing his best to pacify the members of the
Education Committee who were demanding a full Enquiry into the recruitment policy of
the Liberal Studies Department.

‘Let me explain,’ he said patiently, looking round at the Committee, which was a nice
balance of business interests and social commitment. ‘The 1944 Education Act laid down
that all apprentices should be released from their places of employment to attend Day
Release Classes at Technical Colleges…’

‘We know all that,’ said a building contractor, ‘and we all know it’s a bloody waste of
time and public money. This country would be a sight better of if they were left to get on
with their jobs.’

‘The courses they attend,’ continued the Principal before anyone with a social
conscience could intervene, ‘are craft-oriented with the exception of one hour, one
obligatory hour of Liberal Studies. Now the difficulty with Liberal Studies is that
no one knows what it means.’