Wilt in Nowhere (14 page)

The discovery of Wilt’s trousers covered with mud and what looked like dried blood, and
with several holes burnt in them, in the lane behind the late Meldrum Manor interested
the police at Oston.

‘Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. That bastard Battleby hired some swine to torch the
place,’ the Superintendent told the group of policemen assembled to find out what had
really happened on the night of the fire. ‘And what’s more we’ve got the sod’s name and
address from an envelope in the back pocket. Name of Mr H. Wilt. Address 45 Oakhurst
Avenue, Ipford. Does that ring a bell with any of you?’

A constable raised his hand. ‘That’s the name of the backpacker stayed at Mrs Rawley’s
B&B up Lentwood Way. You told me to check hotels. There aren’t too many about these parts
so I tried the bed and breakfasts too. He stayed at Mrs Crow’s the night before. Wouldn’t say
where he was heading. Claimed he didn’t know where he was and didn’t want to know.’

A sergeant spoke up. ‘My wife’s from Ipford,’ he said, ‘and we get the _Weekly Echo._
There was a story in last week’s about a man being found unconscious in the New Ipford
Estate with his head bashed in and no trousers. Covered in mud he was too.’

The Superintendent left the room and made a phone call.

‘Thank you. Spot on,’ he said when he returned. ‘He’s in the Ipford General with
concussion and suffering from amnesia. They’re waiting for him to come round. In the
mean time they’re sending a specimen of the mud on his shirt up for us to check if it’s the
same as in the lane back of the Manor.’

‘That’s strange. I went up that lane the very next day in broad daylight and there were no
trousers there then. I guarantee that,’ said a young constable. ‘The insurance bods did
the same. You can ask them.’

The Superintendent pursed his lips. What interested him was that the jeans had motor
oil and blood on them. He still hadn’t forgotten or forgiven Mrs Rottecombe’s insulting
attitude on the night of the fire. His ‘nose’ told him she was involved in the fire at
Meldrum Manor in some way. And where had the Shadow Minister for Social Enhancement got
to? The newspapers had taken their revenge with accusations that invited a suit for
libel but there had not been a squeak out of the MP. Odd, very odd. But most suspicious of
all the policeman ostensibly at the gate to guard Leyline Lodge but in fact to keep an
eye on the house had reported that the garage doors hadn’t been opened since Wilfred and
Pickles had dealt with the two intrepid newsmen. And Ruth Rottecombe had taken to
leaving her Volvo estate on the drive near the front door. Added to this the two bull
terriers roamed the grounds so that even the usual tradesmen left whatever Mrs
Rottecombe had ordered by phone outside the gate where she had to collect it. So she was
still there. It was the locked garage doors that held the Superintendent’s attention.
They suggested that there was something inside that needed to be kept hidden. The
Super’s intuition told him that it would be as well to have a discreet word with the Chief
Constable about the advisability of obtaining a search warrant. The Chief was known to
detest the Rottecombes and the case against Battleby had alienated him even further.
And since the destruction of their ancestral home and Bob Battleby’s arrest for
paedophilia there was nothing to fear from the rest of the influential Battlebys. That
evening the Superintendent spent an hour with the Chief Constable explaining his
suspicions and his dislike of Ruth Rottecombe, and found the Chief shared them.

‘This whole thing stinks,’ he said. ‘That bloody woman’s up to her ears in the rotten
business but at least we’ve got that bastard Battleby. And her husband’s in deep trouble
too, thank goodness. I’ve had enquiries from…well, on high. You might as well say from the
office of the Almighty himself, namely the Home Secretary. Take it from me the press
coverage isn’t doing the Central Office any good. They are as interested in knowing
where he’s got to as we are and I gained the impression they wouldn’t be unhappy if the
bastard was dead. Save sacking the blighter.’

By the time the Superintendent left he had been given permission to apply for a
search warrant and to take any reasonable measures he felt like.

One of those measures had been to have the Rottecombes’ phone tapped. All he’d learnt was
that the wretched Ruth Rottecombe had phoned her husband’s flat in London time and time
again, and had done the same with his club and the Party Central Office, but no one had seen
him.

By the time they found Geriatrics 3 Wilt hadn’t been in Geriatrics 5 Mavis Mottram had
had enough. So had Eva. They headed for the door only to be confronted by a formidable
Sister.

‘I’m sorry but you can’t see him yet. Dr Soltander is examining him,’ she said.

‘But I’m his wife,’ squawked Eva.

‘Very possibly. But’

Mavis intervened. ‘Show her your driving licence,’ she snapped. ‘That will prove who you
are.’ As Eva rummaged in her handbag Mavis turned on the Sister. ‘You can check the
address. I assume you know Mr Wilt’s.’

‘Of course we do. We wouldn’t know who he was if we didn’t.’

‘In that case why didn’t you phone Mrs Wilt and let her know he was here?’

The Sister gave up and went back into the ward. ‘His wife and another dreadful woman
are demanding to see him,’ she told the doctor.

Dr Soltander sighed. His was a hard life and he had enough terminally ill old people to
attend to without having any interruptions from wives and dreadful women. ‘Tell them to
give me another twenty minutes,’ he said. ‘I may be in a better position to make a
prognosis by then.’

But the Sister wasn’t tackling Mavis Mottram again. ‘You’d better tell them yourself.
They won’t listen to me.’

‘Very well,’ muttered the doctor with a dangerous degree of patience and went out
into the corridor. He could see at once what the Sister had meant by ‘two dreadful
women’. Eva was white-faced and sobbing and demanding to see her Henry. Dr Soltander
tried to point out that Wilt was unconscious and in no condition to see anyone and aroused
the fury of Mavis Mottram.

‘It’s her legal right to visit her husband. You can’t stop her.’

The doctor’s expression hardened. ‘And who may you be?’

‘Mrs Wilt’s friend and I’ll repeat that Mrs Wilt has every right to visit her
husband.’

Dr Soltander’s eyes narrowed. ‘Not while I’m doing my rounds,’ he snapped. ‘She can visit
him when I’ve finished.’

‘And when will that be? In four hours?’

‘I’m not here to be cross-examined by you or anyone else. Now kindly take your friend
into the Waiting Room while I make sure my absence from the ward hasn’t resulted in any
premature deaths.’

‘Presence more likely,’ Mavis snapped back and took out her little notebook. ‘What’s
your name? It isn’t Shipman by any chance?’

The remark failed to have the effect she had expected. Two effects to be precise.
Eva’s awful wail startled a number of patients several wards down the corridor and even
some on the floor above. At the same time Dr Soltander leant forward with a sinister smile
until his face was almost touching Mavis Mottram’s.

‘Don’t tempt me, my dear,’ he whispered. ‘One day I look forward to having you as a
patient.’

And before Mavis could recover from the shock of being nose to nose with such a
sinister man he had turned and stalked back into the ward.

‘Now if you’ll just wait in the Visitors’ Room I’ll call you just as soon as Dr Soltander
is through,’ the Sister told them and ushered the two women down the corridor. By the time
she returned to the ward the doctor had abandoned Wilt and was taking his fury out on
Inspector Flint by explaining that his presence was hindering what little treatment he
could give the sick and dying, and that in any case Wilt was not in any condition to be
questioned.

‘How the devil am I supposed to do the job of three doctors minimum with blasted
coppers littering the ward? You can bloody well go and wait with those two diabolical
women. Sister, show him out.’

‘And my job is to take a statement from this bloke when he comes round,’ Flint
retorted.

‘Yes, well the Sister here will let you know when he does.’

All the same the Inspector wasn’t sharing the so-called Visitors’ Room with Eva and
Mavis Mottram. ‘You can phone me at the police station when he’s awake,’ he told the Sister
and went down to the car park. For ten minutes he sat there thinking. Wilt had been found
without trousers? And old Mrs Verney had seen him being hoisted out of a car by a woman.
And kicked by some drunken louts. It was all very strange.

At Leyline Lodge Ruth Rottecombe was no longer ruthless. She was frantic. The police
had arrived early that morning with a search warrant and had insisted she open the garage
doors to allow a number of white-coated and gloved forensic experts to make a detailed
examination of the place. Still in her dressing gown Ruth had watched them from the kitchen
as they moved Harold’s Jaguar and then paid particular attention to the patch of oil
underneath. Ruth retreated to the bedroom and tried to think. She decided to place the
blame on Harold. After all the car was his and he’d obviously done a runner which she
could now see was to her advantage. With him out of the way she was still in the clear.
After all there was no evidence against her.

She was wrong. In the garage the police had found all the evidence they needed, oil mixed
with dried blood, strands of hair and best of all a fragment of blue cloth which matched the
colour of the jeans they had found in the lane. There was also mud. They placed all these
items in plastic bags and took their findings back to the police station.

‘Now we’re getting somewhere,’ said the Superintendent. ‘If this stuff proves to be
what it looks like we’ve got the bitch. Get forensic on to it pronto. And get a match of the
cloth with the jeans we found in the lane. If they’re the same she’s up shit creek without a
canoe let alone a paddle. In the mean time see she doesn’t leave the house. I want a watch
kept on her all the time. And while you’re about it bring me the file.’

He sat back and studied his notes from the previous meeting. A bloke named Wilt, Henry
Wilt of 45 Oakhurst Avenue, Ipford, found dumped in the street, apparently mugged and now
unconscious in hospital there. And the backpacker who’d stayed at the B&Bs had used
the same name. All it required was a DNA check on his blood and that found on the floor of the
Rottecombes’ garage and the case was beginning to build up. The Superintendent gloated
at the prospect before him. If he could get the evidence to prove that Ruth the Ruthless was
truly involved, however indirectly, in setting the Manor on fire he would earn the
gratitude of the Chief Constable who loathed the bitch. And if the Shadow Minister for
Social Enhancement was forced to resign or better still was involved himself, his own
future looked very bright. He’d be certain of promotion. The Home Secretary would be
delighted. The Shadow Minister would certainly lose his seat in the next election and
his own future would be assured. The Superintendent stared out the window of his shabby
office, then picked up the phone and called Ipford Police Station.

In Wilma Auntie Joan wasn’t in any mood to gloat. Wally was still in the Coronary Care
Unit and she had been assured he would soon recover which was good news. The bad news was
that she was met by two men with Yankee accents who insisted she take a look at the pool
behind the house.

‘Who are you?’ she demanded and was shown their IDs which told her they were Federal
Drug Enforcement Agents. Auntie Joan wanted to know why they were at the Starfighter
Mansion.

‘Come on round the back and you’ll see why.’

Auntie Joan went reluctantly and was horrified to find the pool empty except for a
dead sniffer dog lying on the bottom. Two other men dressed in protective clothing and
wearing gas masks were collecting bits of what had once been a gelatine capsule. Not that
it was recognisable as such any more.

‘Like to tell us just what was hidden down there?’ the man named Palowski asked.

Auntie Joan looked wildly at him. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Like the dog drinks the water and the next moment it dies but fast?’

‘What’s that got to do with me? My husband’s in Intensive Care and you’re asking me…Oh,
God!’ She turned and headed for the house. She needed a stiff drink and three, at least
three, Prozacs and some sleeping pills for good measure. And then the phone rang. She let it.
It rang again. And again. Auntie Joanie drank half a tumbler of brandy and took four
sleeping tablets. The phone rang another time. She managed to get to it and slurred, ‘Fuck
off,’ and sat down on the floor and passed out.

At Immelmann Enterprises the deputy CEO wished to hell he had taken the day off. His
morning had been made hellish. He’d had calls from all over the country from enraged
recipients of the quads’ emails.

‘He called you what?’ he asked the first caller, one of IE’s biggest customers. ‘There’s
got to have been a mistake. Why would he call you that? He’s sick in hospital with a
quadruple bypass.’

‘And when he comes out he’s going to find out just how sick he is. He’ll need more than a
quadruple bypass by the time I’ve finished with the cunt-sucker. He wants another
million-dollar order from us he ain’t going to get it. He gets no more business out of me
and what’s more I’m taking him to court for defamation. A penis-gobbler, am I? Well, you
tell him…’

It was a most appalling call. The fifteen others that came in during the rest of the
morning weren’t any better. Cancellation orders poured in accompanied by physical
threats. So did obscene hate emails.

The deputy CEO told the secretary to leave the phone off the hook. ‘And while you’re about
it you’d better be looking for another job. I sure as shit am. Immelmann’s gone crazy.
He’s lost every customer we ever had,’ he shouted as he dashed out to his car.

In the Sheriff’s office Harry Stallard refused to believe Baxter’s report. ‘A new
sniffer dog died after licking the water in the swimming-pool? Why in the name of God
should they empty the pool? The dog probably fell in and drowned.’

But Baxter was adamant. ‘There was something dissolved down the bottom and they wanted
to see what it was.’

‘Sure. One drowned hound dog.’

‘All I know is they had special wet suits and masks. And there was this special
container to put it in to fly it up to the Chemical Warfare Research Center in
Washington for analysis,’ Baxter told him. ‘They reckon it could be linked to Al Qaeda
it’s that toxic.’

‘In Wilma? In Wilma? That’s out-of-this-world crazy. Who the hell’s going to use a
highly toxic substance in a one-horse town like Wilma?’

Baxter pondered the question. ‘Could be that Saddam Hussein bastard. Got to test it
someplace, I guess,’ he said finally.

‘So why choose Wilma; he’s got all those Kurds he gassed? You tell me that.’

‘Or that other guy Ossam been…The one who did the Twin Towers.’

‘Bin Laden,’ said the Sheriff. ‘Sure. So he chooses Wally Immelmann’s swimming-pool
and takes out a hound dog? And that makes sense?’

‘Shit, I don’t know. Nothing makes sense. Hooking the toilets and all up to that tanker
back of the old drive-in was crazy.’

Sheriff Stallard pushed his hat back and wiped the sweat from his face. ‘I don’t believe
what I’m hearing. This isn’t happening. Not in Wilma it’s not. It can’t be. Wally
Immelmann’s in with goddam terrorists. And that ain’t possible, no way, Billy, no way.
I mean it’s way out impossible.’

Baxter shrugged. ‘That mega-decibel sound system was impossible too. You heard it.
You know.’

The Sheriff did know. He was never going to forget it. He sat thinking. Or trying to.
In the end he succeeded and the impossible became slightly more possible and his own
position less insecure. People did go loco. ‘Get me Maybelle,’ he said. ‘Bring her in.
She’s the one who’ll know.’

One person who definitely didn’t know was Eva. She had finally been allowed out of the
Visitors’ Room only to be told that the patient Wilt was still unconscious but she could
go and see him provided Mavis Mottram didn’t accompany her. Having been in Eva Wilt’s
maudlin company for three hours Mavis had no intention of spending any more time or
sympathy on her. She slunk out of the hospital a broken woman, cursing the day she’d met
anyone so stupid and mawkishly sentimental. Eva’s feelings about Mavis had changed too.
She was all bluff and bravado and a bully to boot and had no staying power.

Through the door of the ward Eva had glimpsed Inspector Flint sitting by the bed,
apparently reading a newspaper. In fact he wasn’t reading it at all; he was using it as
a shield to hide what was being done to a man who, if appearances were anything to go by,
had recently been trepanned or had had an exceedingly nasty accident with some sort of
circular saw. Whatever it was Flint didn’t want to see it. He had never been a
particularly squeamish man and his experience of mutilated corpses had hardened him
to inanimate horrors, but he was less able to cope with those involving modern surgery and
in particular found pulsing brains in adult males (babies were different) decidedly
unnerving.

‘Can’t you put a screen round the bed while you’re doing whatever you are doing to that
poor bloke?’ he’d asked only to be told he could leave the ward if he was so wimpish and
anyway it wasn’t a bloke but a woman and this was a unisex ward.

‘You could have fooled me,’ Flint retorted. ‘Though come to think of it, I daresay
unisex is about right. It’s impossible to tell what sex anyone is in here.’

It was not a remark that endeared him to three women nearby who had been under the
illusion that they were still relatively attractive and sexy. Flint didn’t care. He tried
to interest himself more vicariously in a scandal involving a well-known rugby
player who had gone to a massage parlour in Swansea only to find his wife working there
and had tackled the owner or, as the latter had put it from the witness box, ‘had gone
apeshit’, when he saw Wilt looking at him.

Flint put the paper down and smiled. ‘Hello, Henry. Feeling any better?’

From the pillow Wilt studied that smile and found it difficult to interpret. It wasn’t
the sort of smile to give him any confidence. Inspector Flint’s false teeth were too loose
for that and besides, he had seen Flint smile maliciously in the past too often to find
the sight at all reassuring. He didn’t feel any better.

‘Better than what?’ he asked.

Flint’s smile disappeared and with it most of his sympathy. He began to doubt whether
Wilt’s brain had been affected at all by being mugged. ‘Well, better than you did
before.’

‘Before what?’ said Wilt, fighting for time to find out what was going on. It was
obvious he was in hospital and that he had bandages round his head but that was about all
that was obvious.

Flint’s hesitation before replying did nothing to give him any confidence in his own
innocence. ‘Before this thing happened,’ he said finally.

Wilt tried to think. He had no idea what had happened. ‘I can’t say I do,’ he replied. It
seemed a reasonable answer to a question he didn’t understand.

That wasn’t the way Inspector Flint saw it. He was already beginning to lose the thread
of the conversation and as always with Wilt he was being led into a swamp of
misunderstanding. The sod never did say anything that was at all clear-cut. ‘When you
say you can’t say you do, just exactly what do you mean?’ he enquired and tried to smile
again. That didn’t help.

Wilt’s caution went into overdrive. ‘Just that,’ he said.

‘And ‘just that’ means?’

‘What I said. Just that,’ Wilt said.

Again Flint’s smile vanished. He leant forward. ‘Listen, Henry, all I want to know
is–’

He got no further. Wilt had decided on new avoiding tactics. ‘Who’s Henry?’ he asked
abruptly.

A new look of doubt came on Flint’s face and his lean forward ground to a halt. ‘Who’s
Henry? You want to know who Henry is?’

‘Yes. I don’t know of any Henrys. Except kings and princes of course and I wouldn’t know
any of them, would I? Never met one and I’m not likely to. Have you ever met a king or a
prince?’

For a second the look on the Inspector’s face had changed from doubt to certainty. Now
it swung back again. With Wilt nothing was certain and even that was doubtful in these
circumstances. Wilt was uncertainty personified. ‘No. I haven’t met a king or a prince
and I don’t want to. All I want to know–’

‘That’s the second time you’ve said that,’ said Wilt. ‘And what I want to know is who I
am.’

At that moment Eva shoved her way into the room. She had waited long enough and she
wasn’t spending another two hours in that revoltingly dirty waiting room. She was going
to her husband’s side.

‘Oh, darling, are you in terrible pain, my pet?’

Wilt opened his eyes with a silent curse. ‘What’s it got to do with you? And who are you
calling “darling”?’

‘But…oh, God! I’m your Eva, your wife.’

‘Wife? What do you mean? I haven’t got a wife,’ Wilt moaned. ‘I’m a…I’m a…I don’t know what
I am.’

In the background Inspector Flint agreed wholeheartedly. He didn’t know what Wilt was
either. Never had and never would. About the nearest he’d ever got to it was that Wilt was
the most devious bastard he’d come across in all the years he’d been in the police force.
With Eva, now weeping copiously, you knew precisely where you stood. Or lay. At the
bottom of the pile. To that extent Wilt had told the truth. Family first with those ghastly
quads; Eva second, along with her material possessions–or, as Wilt’s solicitor had once
put it, ‘like living with a dishwasher cum vacuum cleaner that thinks it thinks’–and
finally whatever latest fad or so-called philosophical twaddle she had heard about.
Even Greenpeace had found her militancy too much. The Keeper of the Seal Culling Station
at Worthcombe Bay had, in giving evidence in court against her from his wheelchair, said
that if she represented Greenpeace, he shuddered to think what Greenwar would be like. In
fact the man’s language had been so filthy that only his injuries prevented the
magistrate from holding him in contempt. And finally at the very bottom of the pile was
Mr Henry Wilt, lawfully wedded husband of Mrs Eva Wilt, poor bugger. No wonder he
deliberately refused to recognise her.

He was distracted from these considerations by one last desperate appeal from Eva to
her Henry to acknowledge her as his devoted wife and mother of his lovely daughters,
and Wilt’s refusal to do anything so utterly insane, as well as his complaint that he was
sick and didn’t want to be harassed by strange women he’d never seen before. The effect of
this statement was that the weeping Eva was helped from the ward. Her sobs could be heard
from the corridor as she went in search of a doctor.

Inspector Flint seized the opportunity to go back to the bedside and bend over Wilt.
‘You’re a cunning bugger, Henry,’ he whispered. ‘Cunning as hell but you don’t fool me. I
saw the nasty little glint in your eye when your missis took off. I’ve known you too long to
be fooled by your tricks. You just remember that.’

For a moment he thought Wilt was about to smile but the gormless expression returned
and Wilt closed his eyes. Flint gave up. He wasn’t going to get anything useful out of him
in these awful circumstances. And the circumstances were getting more awful by the
minute. The woman with the pulsating skull was having some sort of fit and one of the
shaven multi-sexes was protesting to a nurse that he, she or it had already been given a
forty-five-minutes oil enema and definitely didn’t need another. The whole thing was a
bloody nightmare.

In Wilma Sheriff Stallard shared Inspector Flint’s horror though for very different
reasons. It wasn’t so much that Maybelle was refusing to give him information about what
had been going on at the Starfighter Mansion. She was giving far too much and he’d have
preferred not to hear it.

‘They asked you what?’ he gasped when she told him the quads had asked her how many times a
week Wally Immelmann fucked her and how many other gays there were in Wilma. ‘The filthy
bitches. And they used the words ‘fucked’ and ‘asswise’?’

Maybelle nodded. ‘Yessir, they sure did.’

‘What in God’s name did they ask that for? It’s crazy. It’s not possible.’

‘Said they were doing a project on exploitation of coloured folk in the South for the
school they go to back in Britain and they had to fill in a questionnaire,’ Maybelle
said.

‘And what did you tell them, for Chrissake?’

‘I’d rather not say, Sheriff. Nothing more than the truth.’

The Sheriff shuddered. If the truth was anything like what he’d heard at a thousand
decibels up near the lake, Wally Immelmann would have to get the hell out of Wilma but
fast. Either that or be lucky to die in the Coronary Unit.