Wilt in Nowhere (16 page)

Flint’s hopes that the two men from London would take him off the case had been dashed. In
the first place they weren’t from Scotland Yard or, if they were, the shortage of officers
in London was even more desperate than he’d supposed. The Metropolitan Police had to be
recruiting abroad, in this case in America. That was his first impression when they
entered his office with Hodge grinning in the background. The impression didn’t last. The
two Americans sat down unasked and stared at Flint for a moment. They evidently didn’t like
what they were seeing.

‘You Inspector Flint?’ the bigger of the two asked.

‘I am,’ said Flint. ‘And who may you be?’

They looked disparagingly round the office before answering. ‘American Embassy.
Undercover,’ they said in unison and flashed ID cards so briefly Flint couldn’t read
them.

‘We understand you’ve been interrogating a suspect called Wilt,’ the thinner man
said.

But Flint had been riled. He was damned if he was going to be questioned by two Americans
who wouldn’t identify themselves politely. Not with Hodge gloating in the
background.

‘You can understand what you like,’ he said grimly and glared at Hodge. ‘Ask him. He’s
the person who thinks he knows.’

‘He’s told us. The Superintendent has been very co-operative.’

It was on the tip of Flint’s tongue to say Hodge’s co-operation wasn’t worth a fly’s fart
but he restrained himself. If these arrogant bastards wanted to pin a drug-dealing
charge on Henry Wilt he was going to let them walk into the morass of misunderstanding
the moronic Hodge would provide. He had better things to do. Like find out why Wilt had
been assaulted and found half-naked in the New Estate.

He got up and walked past the two Americans. ‘If you want any information I’m sure the
Super will give it to you,’ he said as he opened the door. ‘He’s the drugs expert.’

He went out and down to the canteen and had a cup of tea overlooking the car park.
Presently Hodge and the two men came into view and climbed into a car with darkened
windows parked next to his own. Flint moved back to another table where he could see them
but remain out of sight himself. After five minutes the car was still there. The
Inspector gave them another ten. No movement. So they were waiting to see where he went.
The buggers could sit there all bloody day. He got up, went downstairs and out the front door
and walked to the bus station and caught a bus going to the hospital. He sat at the back in
a thoroughly belligerent mood.

‘Anyone would think this was Iraq,’ he muttered to himself and was assured by an
intense woman in the next seat that it wasn’t and was he all right?

‘Schizophrenia,’ he said and looked at her in a distinctly sinister manner. The woman
got off at the next stop and Flint felt better. He’d learnt something from Henry Wilt after
all: the gift of confusing people.

By the time he reached the hospital and the bus turned round he’d begun to devise his
new tactics. Hodge and those two arrogant Yanks would be bound to go up to 45 Oakhurst
Avenue and ask Eva or, if she wasn’t there, the quads, where Wilty was and as sure as eggs
were eggs she’d say, ‘At the hospital.’ Flint went into the empty bus shelter and took out
his mobile and dialled the number he knew so well.

Eva answered.

Flint put his handkerchief over the mouthpiece and assumed what he hoped was a
high-pitched la-di-da voice. ‘Is that Mrs Wilt?’ he asked.

Eva said it was.

‘I’m calling from the Methuen Mental Hospital. I’m sorry to have to tell you that your
husband Mr Henry Wilt has been transferred to the Serious Head Injuries Unit for an
exploratory operation and–’ He got no further. Eva gave an awful wail. Flint waited a
moment and then went on.

‘I’m afraid he’s in no condition to have any visitors for the next three days. We’ll keep
you informed of his progress. I repeat, he’s to have no visitors no matter who they are.
Please ensure he is not disturbed by anyone. We are particularly anxious no attempt is
made by the police to question him. He’s in no condition to be put under any pressure. Is
that clear?’

It was an unnecessary question. Eva was sobbing noisily and in the background the
quads were asking what the matter was. Flint cut the mobile off and went up to the
hospital with a smile on his face. If Hodge and those two American goons turned up at
Oakhurst Avenue they’d get a rough ride from Eva Wilt.

What Ruth Rottecombe was getting was a very rough ride indeed. Now that Harold’s
battered body had been found still being buffeted by the waves on the rocks of the North
Cornish coast near Morwenstow, and the local doctor’s original finding that the blow on
his head had been inflicted before he drowned had been confirmed by a forensic expert
helicoptered down from London, the police were taking a serious view of his death.

So were the Special Branch men sent down to assist the local police at Oston. They were
particularly interested in the connecting evidence that the blood of the man named
Wilt found on the New Estate in Ipford matched that on cloth found in the garage at Leyline
Lodge and on the jeans Ruth had dumped in the lane behind Meldrum Manor. Worst of all from
Ruth’s point of view was the fact that the number-plate of her Volvo estate had been
recorded by a motorway camera as she’d driven back from the New Estate at nearly 100
m.p.h. in an attempt to get home before dawn. The finding of Wilt’s knapsack in the attic
added to the evidence against her. For the first time she wished to hell Harold hadn’t been
Shadow Minister for Social Enhancement. That fact made the police investigation very
high priority indeed. Shadow Ministers who died in suspicious, very suspicious,
circumstances meant that the rules of interrogation could be stretched. And to avoid any
further intrusions by the media she had been moved from Oston to Rossdale.

At the same time the police methodically searched Leyline Lodge and took away a number
of canes and any heavier objects which could have been used to inflict the head wound on
Harold Rottecombe’s head before he had, as they imagined, been pushed unconscious into
the river. Urged on by the Party Central Committee officials they dismissed the
possibility that the Shadow Minister’s death had been accidental.

‘He drowned in the river and that’s for sure,’ the senior CID Inspector told the police
group dealing with the case. ‘Forensic checked the water in his lungs and it wasn’t sea
water. They’re absolutely definite about that. They can’t be certain of the date he died
but it was almost certainly a week to ten days ago. Probably more. That’s one thing we
know. Secondly, his Jag is still in the garage so he didn’t drive down to the coast and chuck
himself off the cliffs. That goes without saying. Another thing, his wife had driven the
car or moved it at any rate because her fingerprints were on the steering-wheel, weren’t
they?’

The Superintendent from Oston confirmed this. ‘They indicated she was the last
person to use the car,’ he said.

Then there was the blood on the floor of the Volvo estate where Wilt had bled. ‘Which
confirms what she was doing in Ipford. So we’ve got her on any number of charges, and more
importantly this bloke Wilt had the same type of head wound as her husband. So we go on
questioning her round the clock until she breaks. Oh, and one other thing, we’ve been
looking into her background and it stinks. False birth certificate, prostitute
specialising in S&M, she’s done the lot. As hard as they come.’

‘Hasn’t she asked to phone her lawyer?’ another detective asked.

The CID Chief Inspector smiled. ‘Phoned her husband’s lawyer and strangely enough he’s
not available. Says he’s on holiday. Well, that’s what he’s told me. Gone to France. Very
wise of him. She can have legal aid, of course. Some dimmy who’ll do her more harm than good
and she knows it so she’s refused.’

In the Interrogation Room Ruth the Ruthless was refusing to answer questions
too.

As Flint had hoped the arrival of Hodge and the two Americans at 45 Oakhurst Avenue was
not a success. They found Eva in tears.

‘I don’t know where he is,’ she sobbed. ‘He’s just disappeared. We came back from America
and found he’d gone but I don’t know where. There was no note or anything and his credit
cards were on the kitchen table, and his chequebook. He hadn’t taken any money out of the
bank so I don’t know what to think.’

‘Could be he’s had an accident. Have you tried the hospital?’

‘Of course I have. The first thing I did but they were no help.’

‘Has he shown any interest in any other women?’ one of the Americans asked, regarding
her critically.

Eva’s tears stopped immediately. She had had enough of Americans and particularly
plainclothes police ones who wore shades and drove up in cars with darkened windows.

‘No, he hasn’t,’ she snapped. ‘He’s always been a very good husband so you can go to hell,
asking questions like that.’

On this furious note she slammed the door in their faces. They went back to the car and
discovered they had a flat. From the upstairs window of their room the quads watched
gleefully. Josephine had let the tyre down.

At the hospital Inspector Flint was surprised to be met in the corridor by Dr Dedge.
The psychiatrist was looking desperately haggard and kept shaking his head in a
helpless sort of manner.

‘Thank God you’ve come,’ he said, and grasping Flint’s arm he dragged him into his
office, indicated a chair and slumped into one behind his desk. He opened a drawer and
took several blue pills.

‘Having a difficult time with our friend Wilt?’ Flint asked.

The doctor stared at him with bulging eyes. ‘Difficult?’ he gasped incredulously.
‘Difficult? That bastard in there had the gall to get me out of bed at 4 a.m. this morning
to tell me I was descended from the Pongid family’ He paused to get a glass of water and
another blue pill.

‘You mean to say you drove back here–’ Flint began but Dr Dedge seemed to be having a
choking fit.

‘Drove? I didn’t drive. I’m forced to sleep in here on that bloody couch in the corner in
case yet another lunatic chooses to hang himself or go berserk in the night. That’s how
short-staffed we are. And I’m a highly qualified psychiatrist specialising in serious
cases of paranoid psychotic disorder, not a damned night-watchman.’

Flint was about to say he sympathised when the doctor went on.

‘And to cap it all that swine in there sleeps all day and seems to spend all night
devising fiendish questions for me and ringing the panic button. You don’t know what he’s
like.’

Flint said he did. ‘He’s the master of inconsequential answers. I’ve questioned him
for hours on end and he always goes off at a tangent.’

Dr Dedge leant forward on to his desk. ‘I’m not asking him questions. The bastard’s
asking me. At 4 a.m. he asked me if I realised I was 99.4 per cent a baboon because that’s
what DNA analysis indicated. That’s what he meant by my ancestral family being members
of the Pongid family.’

‘Actually he’s got it wrong. He didn’t mean baboon. He was talking about chimpanzees,’
said Flint in an effort to calm the man down.

It didn’t work. Dr Dedge looked wildly at him. ‘A chimpanzee? Are you mad too? Do I look
like a baboon or a chimpanzee and I’ve never had a DNA analysis and what’s with my
ancestors being Pongids? My father was a Dedge and my mother’s family name is Fawcett and
always has been since 1605. We’ve done a genealogical tree on both sides of the family and
there’s no one called Pongid on it.’

Inspector Flint tried another tack. ‘He’s been reading the papers. There’s been all
this stuff about Pongids being older than Hominids and _Homo sapiens._ The latest theory
is–’

‘Fuck the latest theory!’ shouted the psychiatrist. ‘I want some sleep. Can’t you take
that maniac off to the police station and give him the third degree there?’

‘No,’ said Flint firmly. ‘He’s a sick man and–’

‘You can say that again and I’m going to join him if he stays here much longer. Anyway,
we’ve done scans and all the tests needed and they none of them indicate any actual
damage to his brain–if that’s what’s inside his blasted head.’

Flint sighed and went out into the corridor and entered the Isolation Room to find
Wilt sitting up in bed smiling to himself. He’d rather enjoyed what he’d heard the doctor
shouting next door. The Inspector stood at the end of the bed and stared at Wilt for a
moment. Whatever he’d done to drive Dr Dedge virtually out of his mind it was clear to
Flint that Wilt had all or most of his senses about him. He decided his tactics. He’d had a
long conversation on the phone with the Superintendent in Oston and knew where Wilt had
been. Two could play a game of bluff.

‘All right, Henry,’ he said and took out a pair of handcuffs. ‘This time you’ve gone too
far. Faking the murder of your missis by dumping an inflatable doll dressed in her
clothes down a pile hole when you knew perfectly well she was alive and on a stolen boat with
those Californians was one thing, but arson and the murder of a Shadow Minister is
another. So you can wipe that smile off your face.’

Wilt’s smile vanished.

Flint locked the door and sat down very close to the bed.

‘Murder? Murder of a Shadow Minister?’ said Wilt, now genuinely startled.

‘You heard me. Murder and arson in a village called Meldrum Slocum.’

‘Meldrum Slocum? I’ve never even heard of the place.’

‘Then you tell me how your jeans were found in a lane behind the Manor House there which
some bastard torched. Your jeans, Henry, with burn marks and ash on them and you’ve never
heard of the place. Don’t give me that bullshit.’

‘But I swear to God’

‘You can swear all you like but the evidence is there. First, the jeans with mud on them
found in a lane behind the burnt-out house. And the mud matches that in the lane. Third, you
were definitely in the garage belonging to the murdered Shadow Minister. They’ve done a
DNA test on that blood and it fits yours exactly. They also found your knapsack inside the
house of the other suspect. These are the facts. Undeniable facts. And just to cheer you
up let me tell you Scotland Yard are involved. This is not something you can talk your way
out of this time like you’ve done before.’

Flint let this awful information sink into Wilt’s bewildered mind. He tried to
remember how all this had happened but only disjointed scenes came back to him.

‘Think, Henry, think. This isn’t some prank. I’m telling you the gospel truth.’

Wilt looked at him and knew that Inspector Flint was deadly serious.

‘I don’t know what happened to me and that’s the gospel truth too. I remember not
wanting to go to America to stay with Eva’s Aunt Joan and her husband Wally Immelmann. So
I told her I had a class to prepare for next term and got some books Wally Immelmann would
hate out of the library and of course she made a fuss and said I couldn’t take them.’

‘What sort of books?’

‘Oh, books about Castro’s wonderful Cuba and the Marxist Theory of Revolution. The
sort of stuff he detests. I can’t say I like it myself but he’d have had an apoplectic fit
if I’d turned up in Wilma with the books I said I was going to take. There were others but I
can’t remember them all.’

‘And your missis swallowed that story?’

‘Hook, line and sinker,’ said Wilt. ‘Anyway, it was plausible. We’ve still got lunatics
who think Lenin was a saint and Stalin was fundamentally a kindly chap at heart. Some
people never learn, do they?’

Flint kept his thoughts on the matter to himself. ‘All right, I’ll accept what you’ve
told me so far. What I want to know is what you did next. And don’t give me any hogwash about
having amnesia. The doctors say your brain hasn’t been damaged. At least not any more than
it was before you got into this scrape.’

‘I can tell you what I did up to a certain point but after that until I woke up in that
Terminal Ward I haven’t a clue. The last thing I remember was being in a wood soaked to
the skin and stumbling forward over a root or something and falling. From then on, nothing.
I can’t help you any further.’

‘OK, let’s go back a bit. Where had you come from?’ said the Inspector.

‘That’s the point. I don’t know. I was on a walking tour.’

‘From where to where?’

‘I didn’t know. In fact I didn’t want to know. I just wanted to go nowhere. You see what I
mean?’

Flint shook his head. ‘Not one bloody word,’ he said. ‘You didn’t want to know. You just
wanted to go. And that makes sense? Not to me it doesn’t. A lot of gibberish is what it
sounds like to me. Deliberate gibberish. Like lies. You had to know where you wanted to
go.’

Wilt sighed. He’d known Inspector Flint on and off for a good number of years and he
should have predicted the Inspector wouldn’t understand that he didn’t want to know where
he was going. He tried to explain again.

‘I wanted to get away from Ipford, the Tech, the routine of going to work, if you can
call it work, and clear my mind of all that junk by finding England without any
preconceptions.’

Flint tried to grasp what Wilt was saying and failed as usual. ‘So how come you ended up
in Meldrum Slocum?’ he said in a desperate attempt to get some sanity into the
conversation. ‘You must have come from somewhere.’

‘I told you. From a wood. And anyhow I was pissed.’

‘And I’m pissed off with having the mickey taken out of me,’ snarled Flint and went back
to Dr Dedge’s office and banged on the door only to be told to fuck off.

‘All I want to know is if that bloody man is well enough to go home. Just tell me that.’

‘Listen!’ shouted the psychiatrist. ‘I don’t give a damn whether he is well or not. Get
him out of here. He’ll be the death of me. Is that good enough for you?’

‘Would you say he ought to be in a mental hospital?’ asked Flint.

‘I can’t think of a better place for the swine!’ yelled Dr Dedge.

‘In that case I’ll need you to certify him.’

He was answered by a moan. ‘I can’t do that. He’s not certifiably insane,’ the
psychiatrist said and opened the door. He was in his underpants. He hesitated for a
moment and came to a decision. ‘I tell you what I will do. I’ll recommend him for
assessment and leave the doctors at the Methuen to make the decision.’

And on this note he crossed to his desk and filled in a form and handed it to the
Inspector. ‘That will get him off my back at any rate.’

Flint went back to Wilt. ‘You heard what he said. You don’t have to stay here any
longer.’

‘What did he mean by assessment?’

‘Don’t ask me. I’m not a psychiatrist,’ said the Inspector.

‘Nor is he, come to that,’ said Wilt but he got out of bed and began looking for his
clothes. There weren’t any. ‘I’m not going anywhere dressed like this,’ he said,
indicating the long nightdress he’d been given in the Geriatric Ward.

Flint went back to Dr Dedge whose temper hadn’t improved. ‘In the clothes he came in, of
course,’ he snarled through the door.

‘But they were taken away as evidence that he’d been assaulted.’

‘Try the Morgue. There’s bound to be a corpse down there with clothes his size. Now leave me
alone to get some sleep.’

The Inspector went down the corridor, asked directions to the Morgue and, having
finally found it and explained his reason for coming, was called a grave robber and told
to get the hell out. In a fury he went back and snitched a white coat from a male nurse’s
dressing room when its owner was in the lavatory. Ten minutes later Wilt, dressed in the
white coat which was far too short to cover his hospital gown, was in the bus with Flint, on
his way to the Methuen Mental Hospital protesting vehemently that he didn’t need
‘assessing’.

‘All they’ll do is ask you a few simple questions and let you go,’ Flint told him.
‘Anyway, it’s a damned sight better than being sectioned.’

‘And what precisely does that mean?’ Wilt asked.

‘Being declared insane and held against your will.’

Wilt said nothing. He’d changed his mind about being assessed.