Wilt in Nowhere (10 page)

Murphy talked to the Surveillance Centre.

‘Says they should have moved in by now. You reckon that place is important?’

‘Got its own air strip. Could be the ideal place for a lab to make the shit.’

But Murphy wasn’t listening. Auntie Joan had gone to the toilet.

Harold Rottecombe reached the boat-house to find the brilliant plan he had devised to
save having to cut across the fields to Slawford wasn’t going to work. It was clearly out
of the question. The river, swollen by the downpour that had driven Wilt to the whisky
bottle, swirled past the boat-house in full spate, carrying with it branches of trees,
empty plastic bottles, a whole bush that had been swept from the bank, someone’s suitcase
and, most alarmingly of all, a dead sheep. Harold Rottecombe eyed that sheep for a
moment–it passed too quickly for him to dwell on it for long–and instantly came to the
conclusion that he had no intention of sharing its fate. The little rowing boat in the
boat-house wouldn’t drift downstream; it would hurtle and be swamped. There was nothing for
it. He would have to walk to Slawford after all. And Slawford was ten miles downriver. It
was a long time, a very long time since Harold had walked ten miles. In fact it was quite a
long time since he had walked two. Still, there was nothing for it. He wasn’t going back to
the house to face the media mob. Ruth had got them into this mess and she could get them out
of it. He set off along the river bank. The ground was soggy from the torrential rain, his
shoes weren’t made for trudging through long wet grass and, when he rounded the bend in the
river, he found himself confronted by a barbed-wire fence that ran down to the water’s
edge. It stood in two feet of water where the river had overflowed. Harold looked at the
fence and despaired. Even without the rushing water he would not have attempted to climb
round it or over it. That way lay castration. But several hundred yards up the fence there
was a gate. He headed for it, found it locked and was forced to climb painfully over it.
After that he had to make several detours to find gaps or gates in hedges and the gaps were
always too narrow for a man of his size to squeeze through while the gates were invariably
locked. Then there was the barbed wire. Even the hedges that would have looked attractive on
a nice summer day turned out on closer inspection to be festooned with barbed wire. Harold
Rottecombe, Member of Parliament for a rural constituency and previously a spokesman
for farming interests, came to detest farmers. He’d always despised them as greedy,
ill-informed and generally uncouth creatures but never before had he realised the
malicious delight they obviously took in preventing innocent walkers from crossing
their land. And of course with so many detours to make to find gates or something he could
get through, and parts of fields that were flooded, the ten miles he’d dreaded looked like
becoming more like thirty.

In fact he never reached Slawford.

As he staggered wearily along he cursed his wife. The stupid bitch had been raving mad to
set the dogs on those two bloody reporters from the _News on Sunday_ instead of being
tactful. He was just considering what he would do to her and coming to the conclusion
that short of murder she had him by the short and curlies, when it began to rain again.
Harold Rottecombe hurried on and came to a stream which led into the river, and trudged up
it looking for a place to cross. Then his sodden left shoe came off. With a curse he sat down
on the bank and discovered his sock had a hole in it. Worse still his heel was blistered and
there was blood. He took the sock off to have a look and as he did so (he was thinking of
tetanus) his shoe rolled down the bank into the water. The stream was flowing fast now but
he no longer cared. Without that damned shoe he’d never get to Slawford. In a frantic
attempt to get his hands on it before it was swept away he slid down the bank, landed
painfully on a sharp stone and a moment later was flat on his face in the water and
struggling to get up. As the water carried him down his head hit a branch that hung down
over the stream and by the time he reached the river he was only partly conscious and in no
condition to deal with the torrent. For a moment his head emerged before being sucked
under by the current. Unnoticed, he passed below the stone bridge at Slawford and
continued on his way to the Severn and the Bristol Channel. Long before that he had lost
more than his political hopes. The late Shadow Minister for Social Enhancement swept on
his way towards the sea.

Sheriff Stallard and Baxter were on their way too. In the police car on the dirt road
that led to Lake Sassaquassee. Alerted by the guy at Lossville, who’d had trouble with the
stampeding bears, that Mr and Mrs Immelmann were having a quarrel that had to be heard to
be believed and if the police didn’t hurry and get there soon someone was going to die,
the Sheriff was puzzled. He couldn’t see how anyone who admitted he was at home ten miles
from the Immelmann place could know what was going on there. By the time he got within five
miles he knew exactly. Even with the car windows shut it was possible to hear Auntie Joan
yelling that she was fucked if she was going to be sodomised and that if Wally wanted to do
that dirty thing with someone he’d better find a gay who enjoyed it. The Sheriff didn’t
like it either and the man at Lossville said his wife couldn’t bear it. Listening to it,
that is. He was thinking of suing. He’d had enough trouble shooting all those bears
without a licence and they were protected animals and the fucking police…The Sheriff
turned the communications off. He was more interested in hearing about Dr Cohen and it
was coming through loud and clear. At four miles. Not that the Sheriff knew that. He’d never
been up to the Immelmann house before. On the other hand he’d never heard anyone shout
that loud even in the next room. The man at Lossville was right. This was a domestic dispute
to end all domestic disputes. And the business about the Watergate hearings tasting and
where her pussy was and had she been totalled when she’d had the hysterectomy was too
incredible to put into words. Leastways not so fucking loud the whole world could hear
it.

‘How far now?’ the Sheriff yelled above the din.

‘Got another two miles,’ Baxter told him.

The Sheriff looked at him as if he was a crazy. ‘What do you mean two miles? Stop the car.
They’ve got to be right here. Somewhere real close.’

Baxter stopped the car and the Sheriff opened the door to get out. He didn’t get far.
‘Shit!’ he screamed, slamming the door shut and putting his hands over his ears. ‘Get the hell
out of here.’

‘What did you say?’ Baxter yelled, trying to compete with Auntie Joan and the Book of
Genesis being written by a Jew of that name.

‘I said, let’s get the fuck out of here before we go deaf. And call up the Public
Nuisance Services. They’ve got to have someone who can deal with this. Tell them it’s a
Number One Emergency Noisewise.’

Baxter swung the car round on the wet dirt and the Sheriff clung to his seat-belt as they
slithered near the edge of a long drop. Then they were heading back to Wilma and Baxter was
trying to get contact. All he got was a guy at Lossville screaming that he was going out of
his mind and why didn’t someone do something like bomb the Immelmann fucking house.
Something sensible and would his wife please put that gun down because shooting him wasn’t
going to stop the goddam noise. His wife could be heard saying she was going to shoot
herself if those fucking filthy revelations didn’t stop.

‘Put out a Three AAA all bands!’ shouted the Sheriff as the car hurtled down the
road.

‘A Three AAA?’ Baxter yelled back. ‘An Atomic Attack Alert? Jesus, we can’t do that. We
could be starting a fucking World War.’

He tried Emergency Services again and couldn’t make himself heard. But by then the
domestic dispute was coming to an end. There was a brief moment’s respite while the tape
rewound and then it started again. Auntie Joan was screaming about sea slugs and Wally
leaving his toupee in the bathroom.

Sheriff Stallard couldn’t believe it. ‘But she’s said all that before. Every single
word. She’s got to be out of her mind.’

‘Could be they are on this new drug,’ said Baxter. ‘I mean, they got to be on some
God-awful substance to carry on like this.’

‘I wish to God I had some substance to be on!’ yelled the Sheriff and pondered the
possibility that he already was. It had to be something like that. He’d never
experienced a noise of this magnitude in all his career.

The same could be said for the Electronic Surveillance Team that had been sent to bug the
Bear Fort. They had just begun to climb the wire fence around the perimeter when the clock
and the tape timer struck six and simultaneously triggered the sound system and Wally
Immelmann’s most sophisticated deterrent. The latter was not intended for bears.
Wally’s enemy this time was burglarisers and he had used American know-how to excellent
effect. In fact he had done more. He had devised a means of adding utility to the merely
aesthetic and historical interest of his collection of military memorabilia. As the
first bugging expert dropped to the ground he set off the sensors and immediately four
antiaircraft searchlights swung round and focused on him. So did the guns in the Sherman
and the other armoured vehicles. The agents saw them coming and threw themselves flat as
the searchlights swung over them. The man on the far side of the fence didn’t. Blinded by the
lights and deafened by the sound of Auntie Joan’s yelling about not giving Wally any
foreplay he stumbled about helplessly and added his screams to the din. Behind the
searchlights the engines of the armoured vehicles and the Sherman roared into life and
then the whole place lit up and the searchlights went out. By the time he could see (he still
couldn’t hear) he was aware of the Sherman bearing down on him. Agent Nurdler wasn’t
waiting. With a terrible scream he headed for the wire and went up it with an agility that
was unnatural to him. He was over the top and running like mad through the trees when the
tank veered away from the fence and returned to its original position. The lights went out
and apart from Uncle Wally demanding at a thousand decibels to know when in thirty years
of marriage he’d ever tried to sodomise Auntie Joan peace reigned. The Immelmann
Intruder Deterrent had worked perfectly.

The audiovisual equipment in the Starfighter Mansion was working perfectly too.
Every detail of the activities in the house was being monitored in the Surveillance
Truck in the drive-in and while the bathroom sequence starring Auntie Joan on the can was
all too revealing, the other people seemed to be behaving according to schedule, the
schedule already firmly established in the minds of the DEA agents. Wally Immelmann was
in his den chewing a cigar and alternately pacing up and down the room and helping
himself to Scotch. Every now and then he picked up the phone to call his lawyer and then
thought better of it and put it down again. He was obviously extremely worried about
something.

‘You think he smells us?’ Murphy asked Palowski. ‘Some guys got sixth sense. They can feel
they’re under surveillance. Remember that Panamanian down in Florida who was into
voodoo. He was uncanny.’

‘Man marries a broad like Mrs Immelmann doesn’t have sixth sense. No way. Got no sense at
all.’

‘They say behind every rich man there’s a great woman,’ said Murphy.

‘Great? Great doesn’t get near it. This time it’s gigantic.’

They switched to the quads who were busy filling their exercise books with details of
Auntie Joan and Uncle Wally’s sexual habits for their project on American culture for
their English teacher.

‘How do you spell ’sodomise’?’ asked Emmeline.

‘Sodom and eye ess ee,’ Samantha told her.

‘Uncle Wally’s really sexist. Talking about her thing like that is horrible.’

‘Uncle Wally is a wally and he is horrible. They’re both out-of-this-world awful.
All that stuff he told us about the War and burning the Japanese with that flame thing. What
did he call it?’

‘A turkey roast on the hoof,’ said Josephine.

‘It sounds absolutely horrible. I’m never going to touch turkey again. I’ll always
associate them with little Japanese.’

‘Not all Japanese are little,’ Penelope pointed out. ‘Some of those wrestlers are
fearfully fat.’

‘Like Auntie Joan,’ said Samantha. ‘She’s disgusting.’

In the surveillance truck across the road Palowski and Murphy nodded agreement.

The next remark was of a different and more intriguing sort.

‘I don’t know why we’re writing all this down now. The incriminating evidence is all
there on the tape.’

‘Miss Sprockett would have a fit if we played that to the class. She’s as butch as can be.
I’d like to hear her opinion of Uncle Wally.’

‘It’s just a pity we haven’t got it on video,’ said Emmeline. ‘Uncle Wally trying to
find Auntie Joan’s ‘thing’ and giving it to her up the bum. We could make our fortunes.’

‘We could have made our fortunes if you’d done what I wanted instead of putting the
backup tape on the sound system,’ Josephine said. ‘I wonder what it sounds like. It’s long
past six. Uncle Wally’s going to go absolutely bananas. He’d have paid a terrific
amount of money for that tape. An absolute fortune. I mean if people find out–’

‘If?’ said Emmeline. ‘I’d say he’ll kill us when he finds out.’

But Samantha shook her head. ‘He won’t,’ she said smugly. ‘I’ve hidden the original tape
where he’ll never find it.’

‘Where?’ the others demanded but Samantha wasn’t telling.

‘Just somewhere he’s never going to find it. I’m not telling you anything else. Emmy
might go and tell him.’

‘I wouldn’t. You know I wouldn’t,’ said the aggrieved Emmeline.

‘You said that when we put that stuff on the Revd Vascoe’s computer and then you–’

‘It wasn’t me. It was Penny said I was the one who put it there.’

‘Well, so you did. You were the one thought of it. And anyway I didn’t tell Mummy. She
knows you because you’re always the one who fouls things up.’

‘I don’t care about that,’ said Samantha. ‘And I’m still not telling and no one is going
to make me. So there.’

The discussion moved on to the coming visit to the Florida Keys. Uncle Wally had said
he wanted to take them shark fishing in his boat and Auntie Joan and Eva wanted to fly to
Miami to do some shopping.

But downstairs Wally Immelmann’s plans were being altered by the second.

‘You telling me someone’s tried to burglarise the Bear Fort?’ he shouted down the phone
at Sheriff Stallard who had got back to Wilma and had partially recovered his hearing
and had called to find out how to get in touch with Mr Immelmann.

‘I don’t know about burglarising,’ the Sheriff shouted back. ‘All I know is there’s a
guy over Lossville says he’s going to sue for nuisance and contravention of the
Obscenity Regulations. Had difficulty hearing him myself.’

‘Must be the fucking bears have set the system off. That guy is always complaining. And
what’s he mean about Obscenity Regulations? It’s only a prolonged Frankie Sinatra. He
sings ‘My Way’.’

‘If you say so, Mr Immelmann, I guess I got to believe you,’ said the Sheriff. ‘Though
frankly–’

‘I lie. The tape I got on is Abba. The Abba group. Real soothing stuff from way
back.’

For a moment Sheriff Stallard hesitated. He didn’t want to cross Wally Immelmann but
if that was Abba and real soothing his name wasn’t Harry Stallard.

‘Anyway, I’m just calling to ask you to cut the stuff off. You got a remote control or
something?’

‘A remote control? Are you crazy? There’s no remote control can cover twenty-five
miles with forest and mountains in between. You think I can bounce it off a satellite.’

‘I guess I thought you might have some way of shutting it off,’ said the Sheriff.

‘Not from here I haven’t. Got myself a generator so the power can’t be cut off. Anyhow,
what’s it to you?’

Sheriff Stallard decided the time had come to break the news. ‘I mean, what you and Mrs
Immelmann are discussing over that sound system you’ve built up there isn’t something
you’d want to hear. The guy in Lossville says–’

‘Fuck the little shit,’ said Wally. ‘I told you he is always complaining.’ He paused.
The Sheriff’s last statement had hit him. ‘What do you mean, what me and Mrs Immelmann are
discussing?’

Sheriff Stallard gritted his teeth. This was going to be the hard bit. ‘I don’t really
like to say, sir,’ he muttered. ‘It’s kind of intimate.’

‘Intimate?’ Wally yelled. ‘Are you fucking drunk or mad or something? Me and Mrs
Immelmann?’

The Sheriff had had enough. He was getting real mad now. ‘And Dr Cohen!’ he shouted
back. There was a gasp and silence on the line. ‘You still there, Mr Immelmann?’

Mr Immelmann was still there. Just. He just wasn’t hearing right. He couldn’t be.

‘What was that last you said?’ he asked finally and in a weak voice.

‘I said you and Mrs Immelmann are discussing intimate personal details about…well, I
guess you know what you were talking about.’

‘Like what?’ Wally demanded.

‘Well, like Dr Cohen and–’

‘Shit!’ yelled Wally. ‘You telling me the bastard over in Lossville…oh, my God!’

‘He called in to say it was all over the district up there, and we thought you might want
to know.’

‘I might want to know? I might want…What else did he say?’

‘Could you cut it off is what he really wanted because the noise is driving his wife
crazy. And what you and Mrs Immelmann are shouting about, like your sex life and what she
didn’t want you to do to her, isn’t helping.’

Wally could well imagine it. The knowledge was driving him crazy too, trying to work
out how what he and Joanie had said in the bedroom was coming out of the sound system at a
thousand decibels plus. It wasn’t possible.

‘The thing is, there has to be some way to shut it down,’ the Sheriff insisted. ‘We got
the National Guard team moving in. Maybe…Mr Immelmann, are you all right?’

Something in the Starfighter Mansion had crashed on to something else, like a
table.

‘Mr Immelmann, Mr Immelmann, oh shit!’ shouted the Sheriff. ‘Baxter, get an
ambulance over there fast. Sounds like Wally’s had a heart attack.’