Wilt (8 page)

When the Sunday papers came he got out of bed and went down to read them over his
All-Bran. Then he fed the dog and mooched about the house in his pyjamas, walked down to the
Ferry Path inn for lunch, slept in the afternoon and watched the box all evening. Then he
made the bed and got into it and spent a restless night wondering where Eva was, what she
was doing and why, since he had occupied so many fruitless hours speculating on ways of
getting rid of her homicidally, he should be in the least concerned now that she had gone
of her own accord.

‘I mean if I didn’t want this to happen why did I keep thinking up ways of killing her,’
he thought at two o’clock. ‘Sane people don’t go for walks with a Labrador and devise schemes
for murdering their wives when they can just as easily divorce them.’ There was probably
some foul psychological reason for it. Wilt could think of several himself, rather too
many in fact to be able to decide which was the most likely one. In any case a
psychological explanation demanded a degree of self-knowledge which Wilt, who wasn’t
at all sure he had a self to know, felt was denied him. Ten years of Plasterers Two and
Exposure to Barbarism had at least given him the insight to know that there was an answer
for every question and it didn’t much matter what answer you gave so long as you gave it
convincingly. In the fourteenth century they would have said the devil put such thoughts
into his head, now in a post Freduian world it had to be a complex or, to be really up to
date, a chemical imbalance. In a hundred years they would have come up with some
completely different explanation. With the comforting thought that the truths of one
age were the absurdities of another and that it didn’t much matter what you thought so
long as you did the right thing, and in his view he did, Wilt finally fell asleep.

At seven he was woken by the alarm clock and by half past eight had parked his car in the
parking lot behind the Tech. He walked past the building site where the workmen were
already at work. Then he went up to the Staff Room and looked out of the window. The square
of plywood was still in place covering the hole but the pile-boring machine had been
backed away. They had evidently finished with it.

At five to nine he collected twenty-five copies of Shane from the cupboard and took
them across to Motor Mechanics Three. Shane was the ideal soporific. It would keep the
brutes quiet while he sat and watched what happened down below. Room 593 in the
Engineering block gave him a grandstand view. Wilt filled in the register and handed out
copies of Shane and told the class to get on with it. He said it with a good deal more vigour
than was usual even for a Monday morning and the class settled down to consider the
plight of the homesteaders while Wilt stared out of the window, absorbed in a more
immediate drama.

A lorry with a revolving drum filled with liquid concrete had arrived on the site and
was backing slowly towards the plywood square. It stopped and there was an agonising wait
while the driver climbed down from the cab and lit a cigarette. Another man, evidently the
foreman, came out of a wooden hut and wandered across to the lorry and presently a little
group was gathered round the hole. Wilt got up from his desk and went over to the window. Why
the hell didn’t they get a move on? Finally the driver got back into his cab and two men
removed the plywood. The foreman signalled to the driver. The chute for the concrete was
swung into position. Another signal. The drums began to tilt. The concrete was coming.
Wilt watched as it began to pour down the chute and just at that moment the foreman looked
down the hole. So did one of the workmen. The next instant all hell had broken loose. There
were frantic signals and shouts from the foreman. Through the window Wilt watched the open
mouths and the gesticulations but still the concrete came. Wilt shut his eyes and
shuddered. They had found that fucking doll.

Outside on the building site the, air was chick with misunderstanding.

‘What’s that? I’m pouring as fast as I can.’ shouted the driver, misconstruing the
frenzied signals of the foreman. He pulled the lever still further and the concrete flood
increased. The next moment he was aware that he had made some sort of mistake. The foreman
was wrenching at the door of the cab and screaming blue murder.

‘Stop, for God’s sake stop,’ he shouted. ‘There’s a woman down that hole!’

‘A what?’ said the driver, and switched off the engine.

‘A fucking woman and look what you’ve been and fucking done. I told you to stop. I told
you to stop pouring and you went on. You’ve been and poured twenty tons of liquid concrete
on her.’

The driver climbed down from his cab and went round to the chute where the last trickles
of cement were still sliding hesitantly into the hole.

‘A woman?’ he said. ‘What? Down that hole? What’s she doing down there?’

The foreman stared at him demonically. ‘Doing?’ he bellowed, ‘what do you think she’s
doing? What would you be doing if you’d just had twenty tons of liquid concrete dumped on
top of you? Fucking drowning, that’s what.’

The driver scratched his head. ‘Well I didn’t know she was down there. How was I to know?
You should have told me.’

‘Told you?’ shrieked the foreman. ‘I told you. I told you to stop. You weren’t
listening.’

‘I thought you wanted me to pour faster. I couldn’t hear what you were saying.’

‘Well, every other bugger could,’ yelled the foreman. Certainly Wilt in Room 593
could. He stared wild-eyed out of the window as the panic spread. Beside him Motor
Mechanics Three had lost all interest in Shane. They clustered at the window and
watched.

‘Are you quite sure?’ asked the driver.

‘Sure? Course I’m sure,’ yelled the foreman. ‘Ask Barney.’

The other workman, evidently Barney, nodded. ‘She was down there all right. I’ll vouch
for that. All crumpled up she was. She had one hand up in the air and her legs was…’

‘Jesus,’ said the driver, visibly shaken. ‘What the hell are we going to do now?’

It was a question that had been bothering Wilt. Call the Police, presumably. The
foreman confirmed his opinion. ‘Get the cops. Get an ambulance. Get the Fire Brigade and
get a pump. For God’s sake get a pump.’

‘Pump’s no good,’ said the driver, ‘you’ll never pump that concrete out of there, not in
a month of Sundays. Anyway it wouldn’t do any good. She’ll be dead by now. Crushed to death.
Wouldn’t drown with twenty tons on her. Why didn’t she say something?’

‘Would it have made any difference if she had?’ asked the foreman hoarsely. ‘You’d have
still gone on pouring.’

‘Well, how did she get down there in the first place?’ said the driver, to change the
subject.

‘How the fuck would I know. She must have fallen…’

‘And pulled that plywood sheet over her, I suppose,’ said Barney, who clearly had a
practical turn of mind. ‘She was bloody murdered.’

‘We all know that,’ squawked the foreman. ‘By Chris here. I told him to stop pouring. You
heard me. Everyone for half a mile must have heard me but not Chris. Oh, no, he has to go
on–’

‘She was murdered before she was put down the hole,’ said Barney. ‘That wooden cover
wouldn’t have been there if she had fallen down herself.’

The foreman wiped his face with a handkerchief and looked at the square of plywood.
‘There is that to it,’ he muttered. ‘No one can say we didn’t take proper safety
precautions. You’re right. She must have been murdered. Oh, my God!’

‘Sex crime, like as not,’ said Barney. ‘Raped and strangled her. That or someone’s
missus. You mark my words. She was all crumpled up and that hand…I’ll never forget that
hand, not if I live to be a hundred.’

The foreman stared at him lividly. He seemed incapable of expressing, his feelings.
So was Wilt. He went back to his desk and sat with his head in his hands while the class gaped
out of the window and tried to catch what was being said. Presently sirens sounded in the
distance and grew louder. A police car arrived, four fire engines hurtled into the car
park and an ambulance followed. As more and more uniformed men gathered around what had
once been a hole in the ground it became apparent that getting the doll down there had been
a damned sight easier than getting it out.

‘That concrete starts setting in twenty minutes.’ the driver explained when a pump was
suggested for the umpteenth time. An Inspector of Police and the Fire Chief stared down at
the hole.

‘Are you sure you saw a woman’s body down there?’ the Inspector asked. ‘You’re positive
about it?’

‘Positive?’ squeaked the foreman. ‘Course I’m positive. You don’t think…Tell them,
Barney. He saw her too.’

Barney told the Inspector even more graphically than before. ‘She had this hair see
and her hand was reaching up like it was asking for help and there were these fingers…I tell
you it was horrible. It didn’t look natural.’

‘No, well, it wouldn’t,’ said the Inspector sympathetically. ‘And you say there was a
board on top of the hole when you arrived this morning.’

The foreman gesticulated silently and Barney showed them the board. ‘I was standing
on it at one time,’ he said. ‘It was here all right so help me God.’

‘The thing is, how are we to get her out?’ said the Fire Chief. It was a point that was put
to the manager of the construction company when he finally arrived on the scene. ‘God
alone, knows,’ he said. ‘There’s no easy way of getting that concrete out now. We’d have to
use drills to get down thirty feet’

At the end of the hour they were no nearer a solution to the problem. As the Motor
Mechanics dragged themselves away from this fascinating situation to go to Technical
Drawing, Wilt collected the unread copies of Shane and walked across to the Staff Room in a
state of shock. The only consolation he could think of was that it would take them at least
two or three days to dig down and discover that what had all the appearances of being the
body of a murdered woman was in fact an inflatable doll. Or had been once. Wilt rather
doubted if it would be inflated now. There had been something horribly intractable about
that liquid concrete.

There was something horribly intractable about the mudbank on which the cabin cruiser
had grounded. To add to their troubles the engine had gone wrong. Gaskell said it was a
broken con rod.

‘Is that serious?’ asked Sally.

‘It just means we’ll have to be towed to a boatyard.’

‘By what?’

‘By a passing cruiser I guess,’ said Gaskell.

Sally looked over the side at the bullrushes.

‘Passing?’ she said. ‘We’ve been here all night and half the morning and nothing has
passed so far and if it did we wouldn’t be able to see it for all these fucking
bullrushes.’

‘I thought bullrushes did something for you.’

‘That was yesterday,’ snapped Sally. ‘Today they just mean we’re invisible to anyone
more than fifty feet away. And now you’ve screwed the motor. I told you not to rev it like
that.’

‘So how was I to know it would bust a con rod,’ said Gaskell. ‘I was just trying to get us
off this mudbank. You just tell me how I’m supposed to do it without revving the goddam
motor.’

‘You could get out and push.’

Gaskell peered over the side. ‘I could get out and drown,’ he said.

‘So the boat would be lighter,’ said Sally. ‘We’ve all got to make sacrifices and you
said the tide would float us off.’

‘Well I was mistaken. That’s fresh water down there and means the tide doesn’t reach this
far.’

‘Now he tells me. First we’re in Frogwater Beach…’

‘Reach,’ said Gaskell.

‘Frogwater wherever. Then we’re in Fen Broad. Now where are we for God’s sake?’

‘On a mudbank,’ said Gaskell.

In the cabin Eva bustled about. There wasn’t much space for bustling but what there was
she put to good use. She made the bunks and put the bedding away in the lockers underneath
and she plumped the cushions and emptied the ashtrays. She swept the floor and polished the
table and wiped the windows and dusted the shelves and generally made everything as
neat and tidy as it was possible to make it. And all the time her thoughts got untidier
and more muddled so that by the time she was finished and every object insight was in its
right place and the whole cabin properly arranged she was quite confused and in two minds
about nearly everything.

The Pringsheims were ever so sophisticated and rich and intellectual and said
clever things all the time but they were always quarrelling and getting at one another
about something and to be honest they were quite impractical and didn’t know the first
thing about hygiene. Gaskell went to the lavatory and didn’t wash his hands afterwards and
goodness only knew when he had last had a shave. And look at the way they had walked out of
the house in Rossiter Grove without clearing up after the party and the living-room all
over cups and things. Eva had been quite shocked. She would never have left her house in that
sort of mess. She had said as much to Sally but Sally had said how nonspontaneous could
you get and anyway they were only renting the house for the summer and that it was typical
of a male-oriented social system to expect a woman to enter a contractual
relationship based upon female domestic servitude. Eva tried to follow her and was
left feeling guilty because she couldn’t and because, it was evidently infra dig to be
houseproud and she was.

And then there was what Henry had been doing with that doll. It was so unlike Henry to
do anything like that and the more she thought about it the more unlike Henry it became. He
must have been drunk but even so…without his clothes on? And where had he found the doll? She
had asked Sally and had been horrified to learn that Gaskell was mad about plastic and just
adored playing games with Judy and men were like that and so to the only meaningful
relationships being between women because women didn’t need to prove their virility by
any overt act of extrasexual violence did they? By which time Eva was lost in a maze of
words she didn’t understand but which sounded important and they had had another
session of Touch Therapy.

And that was another thing she was in two minds about. Touch Therapy. Sally had said she
was still inhibited and being inhibited was a sign of emotional and sensational
immaturity. Eva battled with her mixed feelings about the matter. On the one hand she
didn’t want to be emotionally and sensationally immature and if the revulsion she
felt lying naked in the arms of another woman was anything to go by and in Eva’s view the
nastier a medicine tasted the more likely it was to do you good, then she was certainly
improving her psycho-sexual behaviour pattern by leaps and bounds. On the other hand
she wasn’t altogether convinced that Touch Therapy was quite nice. It was only by the
application of considerable will-power that she overcame her objections to it and
even so there was an undertow of doubt about the propriety of being touched quite so
sensationally. It was all very puzzling and to cap it all she was on the Pill. Eva had
objected very strongly and had pointed out that Henry and she had always wanted babies
and she’d never had any but Sally had insisted.

‘Eva baby,’ she had said, ‘with Gaskell one just never knows. Sometimes he goes for
months without so much as a twitch and then, bam, he comes all over the place. He’s totally
undiscriminating.’

‘But I thought you said you had this big thing between you,’ Eva said.

‘Oh, sure. In a blue moon. Scientists sublimate and G just lives for plastic. And we
wouldn’t want you to go back to Henry with G’s genes in your ovum, now would we?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Eva horrified at the thought and had taken the pill after
breakfast before going through to the tiny galley to wash up. It was all so different
from Transcendental Meditation and Pottery.

On deck Sally and Gaskell were still wrangling.

‘What the hell are you giving brainless boobs?’ Gaskell asked.

‘TT, Body Contact. Tactile Liberation,’ said Sally. ‘She’s sensually deprived’

‘She’s mentally deprived too. I’ve met some dummies in my time but this one is the
dimwittiest. Anyway, I meant those pills she takes at breakfast.’

Sally smiled. ‘Oh those,’ she said.

‘Yes those. You blowing what little mind she’s got or something?’ said Gaskell. ‘We’ve
got enough troubles without Moby Dick taking a trip.’

‘Oral contraceptives, baby, just the plain old Pill.’

‘Oral contraceptives? What the hell for? I wouldn’t touch her with a sterilised
stirring rod.’

‘Gaskell, honey, you’re so naïve. For authenticity, pure authenticity. It makes my
relationship with her so much more real, don’t you think. Like wearing a rubber on a
dildo.’

Gaskell gaped at her. ‘Jesus, you don’t mean you’ve…’

‘Not yet. Long John Silver is still in his bag but one of these days when she’s a little
more emancipated…’ She smiled wistfully over the bullrushes. ‘Perhaps it doesn’t
matter all that much us being stuck here. It gives us time, so much lovely time and you can
look at your ducks…’

‘Waders,’ said Gaskell, ‘and we’re going to run up one hell of a bill at the Marina if we
don’t get this boat back in time.’

‘Bill?’ said Sally. ‘You’re crazy. You don’t think we’re paying, for this hulk?’

‘But you hired her from the boatyard. I mean you’re not going to tell me you just took the
boat,’ said Gaskell. ‘For Chrissake, that’s theft’

Sally laughed. ‘Honestly, G, you’re so moral. I mean, you’re inconsistent. You steal
books from the library and chemicals from the lab but when it comes to boats you’re all up in
the air.’

‘Books are different.’ said Gaskell hotly.

‘Yes,’ said Sally, ‘books you don’t go to jail for. That’s what’s different. So you want
to think I stole the boat, you go on thinking that.’

Gaskell took out a handkerchief and wiped his glasses. ‘Are you telling me you didn’t?’
he asked finally.

‘I borrowed it.’

‘Borrowed it? Who from?’

‘Schei.’

‘Scheimacher?’

‘That’s right. He said we could have it whenever we wanted it so we’ve got it.’

‘Does he know we’ve got it?’

Sally sighed. ‘Look, he’s in India isn’t he, currying sperm? So what does it matter
what he knows? By the time he gets back we’ll be in the Land of the Free.’

‘Shit.’ said Gaskell wearily, ‘one of these days you’re going to land us in it up to the
eyeballs.’

‘Gaskell honey, sometimes you bore me with your worrying so.’

‘Let me tell you something. You worry me with your goddam attitude to other people’s
property.’

‘Property is theft.’

‘Oh sure. You just get the cops to see it that way when they catch up with you. The fuzz
don’t go a ball on stealing in this country.’

The fuzz weren’t going much of a ball on the well-nourished body of a woman
apparently murdered and buried under thirty feet and twenty tons of rapidly setting
concrete. Barney had supplied the well-nourished bit. ‘She had big breasts too,’ he
explained, in the seventh version of what he had seen. ‘And this hand reaching up–’

‘Yes, well we know all about the hand,’ said Inspector Flint. ‘We’ve been into all that
before but this is the first time you’ve mentioned breasts.’

‘It was the hand that got me,’ said Barney. ‘I mean you don’t think of breasts in a
situation like that.’

The Inspector turned to the foreman. ‘Did you notice the deceased’s breasts?’ he
enquired. But the foreman just shook his head. He was past speech.’

‘So we’ve got a well-nourished woman…What age would you say?’

Barney scratched his chin reflectively. ‘Not old,’ he said finally. ‘Definitely not
old.’

‘In her twenties?’

‘Could have been.’

‘In her thirties?’

Barney shrugged. There was something be was trying to recall. Something that had seemed
odd at the time.

‘But definitely not in her forties?’

‘No.’ said Barney. ‘Younger than that.’ He said it rather hesitantly.

‘You’re not being very specific,’ said Inspector Flint.

‘I can’t help it,’ said Barney plaintively. ‘You see a woman down a dirty great hole
with concrete sloshing down on top of her you don’t ask her her age.’

‘Quite. I realise that but if you could just think. Was there anything peculiar about
her…’

‘Peculiar? Well, there was this hand see…’

Inspector Flint sighed. ‘I mean anything out of the ordinary about her appearance.
Her hair for instance. What colour was it?’

Barney got it. ‘I knew there was something,’ he said, triumphantly. ‘Her hair. It was
crooked.’

‘Well, it would be, wouldn’t it. You don’t dump a woman down a thirty-foot pile shaft
without mussing up her hair in the process.’

‘No, it wasn’t like that. It was on sideways and flattened. Like she’d been hit.’

‘She probably had been hit. If what you, say about the wooden cover being in place is
true, she didn’t go down there of her own volition. But you still can’t give any precise
indication of her age?’

‘Well,’ said Barney, ‘bits of her looked young and bits didn’t. That’s all I know.’

‘Which bits?’ asked the Inspector, hoping to hell Barney wasn’t going to start on that
hand again.

‘Well, her legs didn’t look right for her teats if you see what I mean.’ Inspector Flint
didn’t. ‘They were all thin and crumpled-up like.’

‘Which were? Her legs or her teats?’

‘Her legs, of course,’ said Barney. ‘I’ve told you she had these lovely great…’

‘We’re treating this as a case of murder,’ Inspector Flint told the Principal ten
minutes later. The Principal sat behind his desk and thought despairingly about
adverse publicity.

‘You’re quite convinced it couldn’t have been an accident?’

‘The evidence to date certainly doesn’t suggest accidental death,’ said the
Inspector. ‘However, we’ll only be absolutely certain on that point when we manage to
reach the body and I’m afraid that is going to take some time.’

‘Time?’ said the Principal. ‘Do you mean to say you can’t get her out this morning?’

Inspector Flint shook his head. ‘Out of the question, sir,’ he said. ‘We are
considering two methods of reaching the body and they’ll both take several days. One is
to drill down through the concrete and the other is to sink another shaft next to the
original hole and try and get at her from the side.’

‘Good Lord,’ said the Principal, looking at his calendar, ‘but that means you’re going
to be digging away out there for several days.’

‘I’m afraid it can’t be helped. Whoever put her down there make a good job of it. Still,
we’ll try to be as unobtrusive as possible.’

Out of the window the Principal could see four police cars, a fire engine and a big
blue van. ‘This is really most unfortunate,’ he murmured.

‘Murder always is,’ said the Inspector, and got to his feet. ‘It’s in the nature of the
thing. In the meantime we are sealing off the site and we’d be grateful for your
co-operation.’

‘Anything you require,’ said the Principal, with a sigh.

In the Staff Room the presence of so many uniformed men peering down a pile hole
provoked mixed reactions. So did the dozen policemen scouring the building, site,
stopping now, and then to put things carefully into envelopes, but it was the arrival of
the dark blue caravan that finally clinched matters.

‘That’s a Mobile Murder Headquarters.’ Peter Fenwick explained. ‘Apparently some
maniac has buried a woman at the bottom of one of the piles.’

The New Left, who had been clustered in a corner discussing the likely implications
of so many paramilitary Fascist pigs, heaved a sigh of unmartyred regret but continued
to express doubts.

‘No, seriously.’ said Fenwick. ‘I asked one of them what they were doing. I thought it
was some sort of bomb scare.’

Dr Cox, Head of Science, confirmed it. His office looked directly on to the hole. ‘It’s
too dreadful to contemplate,’ he murmured. ‘Every time I look up I think what she must
have suffered.’

‘What do you suppose they are putting into those envelopes?’ asked Dr Mayfield.