by Tom Sharpe
'Oh my God,' said Gudrun Schautz. 'So what do we do?'
'Do?' said Wilt. 'I don't see there is much we can do really. Except drink tea and make ourselves inconspicuous. It's all probably some ghastly mistake or other. I can't think what else it can be, can you?'
Gudrun Schautz could, and did, but to admit it to this idiot before she had the power to terrify him into doing what she wanted didn't seem a good idea. She headed for the kitchen and began to climb into the attic space. Wilt followed, sipping his tea. 'Of course I did try phoning the police,' he said, dropping his chin even more gormlessly.
Miss Schautz stopped in her tracks. 'The police? You phoned the police?'
'Couldn't actually,' said Wilt, 'some blighter had pulled the phone out of the wall. Can't think why. I mean with all that shooting going on...'
But Gudrun Schautz was no longer listening. She was clambering along the plank towards the luggage and Wilt could hear her rummaging among the suitcases. So long as the bitch didn't look in the water tank. To distract her attention Wilt poked his head through the door and switched off the light.
'Better not show a light,' he explained as she stumbled about in the pitch darkness cursing, 'don't want anyone to know we're up here. Best just to lie low until they go away.'
A stream of incomprehensible but evidently malevolent German greeted this suggestion, and after fruitlessly groping about for the bag for several more minutes Gudrun Schautz climbed down into the kitchen, breathing heavily.
Wilt decided to strike again. 'No need to be so upset, my dear. After all, this is England and nothing nasty can happen to you here.'
He placed a comforting arm round her shoulders. 'And anyway you've got me to look after you. Nothing to worry about.'
'Oh my God,' she said and suddenly began to shake with silent laughter. The thought that she had only this weak and stupid little coward to look after her was too much for the murderess. Nothing to worry about! The phrase suddenly took on a new and horribly inverted meaning and like a revelation she saw its truth, a truth she had been fighting against all her life. The only thing she had to worry about was nothing. Gudrun Schautz looked into oblivion, an infinity of nothingness and was filled with terror. With a desperate need to escape the vision she clung to Wilt and her raincoat hung open.
'I say...' Wilt began, realizing this new threat but Gudrun Schautz's mouth closed over his, her tongue flickering, while her hand dragged his fingers up to a breast. The creature who had brought only death into the world was now turning in her panic to the most ancient instinct of all.
Chapter 15
Gudrun Schautz was not the only person in Ipford to look oblivion in the face. The manager of Wilt's bank had spent an exceedingly disturbing afternoon with Inspector Flint who kept assuring him that it was of national importance that he shouldn't phone his wife to cancel their dinner engagement and refusing to allow him to communicate with his staff and several clients who had made appointments to see him. The manager had found these aspersions on his discretion insulting and Flint's presence positively lethal to his reputation for financial probity
'What the hell do you imagine the staff are thinking with three damned policemen closeted in my office all day?' he demanded, dropping the diplomatic language of banking for more earthy forms of address. He had been particularly put out by having to choose between urinating in a bucket procured from the caretaker or suffer the indignity of being accompanied by a policeman every time he went to the toilet.
'If a man can't pee in his own bank without having some bloody gendarme breathing down his neck all I can say is that things have come to a pretty pass.'
'Very aptly put, sir,' said Flint, 'but I'm only acting under orders and if the Anti-Terrorist Squad say a thing's in the national interest then it is.'
'I can't see how it's in the national interest to stop me relieving myself in private,' said the manager. 'I shall see that a complaint goes to the Home Office.'
'You do that small thing,' said Flint, who had his own reasons for feeling disgruntled. The intrusion of the Anti-Terrorist Squad into his patch had undermined his authority. The fact that Wilt was responsible only maddened him still further and he was just speculating on Wilt's capacity for disrupting his life when the phone rang.
'I'll take it if you don't mind,' he said and lifted the receiver.
'Mr Fildroyd of Central Investment on the line, sir, said the telephonist.
Flint looked at the bank manager. 'Some bloke called Fildroyd. Know anyone of that name?'
'Fildroyd? Of course I do.'
'Is he to be trusted?'
'Good Lord, man, Fildroyd to be trusted? He's in charge of the entire bank's investment policy.'
'Stocks and shares, eh?' asked Flint who had once had a little flutter in Australian bauxite and wasn't likely to forget the experience. 'In that case I wouldn't trust him further than I could throw him.'
He relayed this opinion in only slightly less offensive terms to the girl on the switchboard. A distant rumble suggested that Mr Fildroyd was on the line.
'Mr Fildroyd wants to know who's speaking,' said the girl.
'Well you just tell Mr Fildroyd that it's Inspector Flint of the Fenland Constabulary and if he knows what's good for him he'll keep his trap shut.'
He put the phone down and turned to the manager who was looking distinctly seedy. 'What's the matter with you?' Flint asked.
'Matter? Nothing, nothing at all. Only that you've just led the entire Central Investment Division to suppose I'm suspected of some serious crime.'
'Landing me with Mr Henry Wilt is a serious crime,' said Flint bitterly, 'and if you want my opinion this whole thing's a put-up job on Wilt's part to get himself another slice of publicity.'
'As I understood it Mr Wilt was the innocent victim of '
'Innocent victim my foot. The day that sod's innocent I'll stop being a copper and take holy fucking orders.
'Charming way of expressing yourself, I must say,' said the bank manager.
But Flint was too engrossed in a private line of speculation to note the sarcasm. He was recalling those hideous days and nights during which he and Wilt had been engaged in a dialogue on the subject of Mrs Wilt's disappearance. There were still dark hours before dawn when Flint would wake sweating at the memory of Wilt's extraordinary behaviour and swearing that one day he would catch the little sod out in a serious crime. And today had seemed the ideal opportunity, or would have done if the Anti-Terrorist Squad hadn't intervened. Well, at least they were having to cope with the situation but if Flint had had his way he would have discounted all that talk about German au pairs as so much hogwash and remanded Wilt in custody on a charge of being in possession of stolen money, never mind where he said he had got it from.
But when at five he left the bank and returned to the police station it was to discover that Wilt's account seemed yet again to correspond, however implausibly, with the facts.
'A siege?' he said to the desk sergeant. 'A siege at Willington Road? At Wilt's house?'
'Proof of the pudding's in there, sir,' said the sergeant indicating an office. Flint crossed to the window and glanced in.
Like some monolith to maternity Eva Wilt sat motionless on a chair staring into space, her mind evidently absent and with her children in the house in Willington Road. Flint turned away and for the umpteenth time wondered what it was about this woman and her apparently insignificant husband that had brought them together and by some strange fusion of incompatibility had turned them into a catalyst for disaster. It was a recurring enigma, this marriage between a woman whom Wilt had once described as a centrifugal force and a man whose imagination fostered bestial fantasies involving murder, rape, and those bizarre dreams that had come to light during the hours of his interrogation. Since Flint's own marriage was as conventionally happy as he could wish, the Wilts' was less a marriage in his eyes than some rather sinister symbiotic arrangement of almost vegetable origin, like mistletoe growing on an oak tree. The
re was certainly a vegetable-looking quality about Mrs Wilt sitting there in silence in the office and Inspector Flint shook his head sadly.
'Poor woman's in shock,' he said, and hurried away to discover for himself what was actually happening at Willington Road.
But as usual his diagnosis was wrong. Eva was not in a state of shock. She had long since realized that it was pointless telling the policewomen who were sitting with her that she wanted to go home, and now her mind was calmly and rather menacingly working on practical things. Out there in the gathering darkness her children were at the mercy of murderers and Henry was probably dead. Nothing was going to stop her from joining the quads and saving them. Beyond that goal she had not looked, but a brooding violence seeped through her.
'Perhaps you would like some friend to come and sit with you,' one of the policewomen suggested. 'Or we could come with you to a friend's house.'
But Eva shook her head. She didn't want sympathy. She had her own reserves of strength to cope with her misery. In the end a social worker arrived from the welfare hostel.
'We've got a nice warm room for you,' she said with an extruded cheerfulness that had served in the past to irritate a number of battered wives, 'and you needn't worry about nighties and toothbrushes and things like that. Everything you want will be provided for you.'
'It won't,' thought Eva but she thanked the policewomen and followed the social worker out to her car and sat docilely beside her as they drove away. And all the time the woman chattered on, asking questions about the quads and how old they were and saying how difficult it must be bringing up four girls at the same time as if the continually repeated assumption that nothing extraordinary had happened would somehow recreate the happy, humdrum world Eva had seen disintegrate round her that afternoon. Eva hardly heard her. The trite words were so grotesquely at odds with the instincts moving within her that they merely added anger to her terrible resolve. No silly woman who didn't have children could know what it meant to have them threatened and she wasn't going to be lulled into a passive acceptance of the situation.
At the corner of Dill Road and Persimmon Street she caught sight of a billboard outside a newsagent's shop. TERRORIST SIEGE LATEST.
'I want a newspaper,' said Eva abruptly and the woman pulled to the kerb.
'It won't tell you anything you don't know already,' she said.
'I know that. I just want to see what they're saying,' said Eva and opened the door of the car. But the woman stopped her.
'You just sit here and I'll get one for you. Would you like a magazine too?'
'Just the paper.'
And with the sad thought that even in terrible tragedies some people found solace by seeing their names in print the social worker crossed the pavement to the shop and went in. Three minutes later she came out and had opened the car door before she realized that the seat beside her was empty, Eva Wilt had disappeared into the night.
By the time Inspector Flint had made his way past the road blocks in Farrington Avenue and with the help of an SGS man had clambered across several gardens to the Communications Centre he had begun to have doubts about his theory that the whole business was yet another hoax on Wilt's part. If it was it had gone too far this time. The armoured car in the road and the spotlights that had been set up round Number 9 indicated how seriously the Anti-Terrorist Squad and Special Ground Services were taking the siege. In the conservatory at the back of Mrs de Frackas' house men were assembling strange looking equipment.
'Parabolic listening devices. PLDs for short,' explained a technician. 'Once we've installed them we'll be able to hear a cockroach fart in any room in the house.'
'Really? I had no idea cockroaches farted,' said Flint. 'One lives and learns.'
'We'll learn what those bastards are saying and just where they are.'
Flint went through the conservatory into the drawing-room and found the Superintendent and the Major listening to the adviser on International Terrorist Ideology who was discussing the tapes.
'If you want my opinion,' said Professor Maerlis gratuitously, 'I would have to say that the People's Alternative Army represents a sub-fraction or splinter group of the original cadre known as the People's Army Group. I think I would go so far.'
Flint took a seat in a corner and was pleased to note that the Superintendent and Major seemed to share his bewilderment.
'Are you saying that they're actually part of the same group?' asked the Superintendent
'Specifically, no,' said the Professor, 'I can only surmise from the inherent contradictions expressed in their communiqués that there is a strong difference of opinion as to the tactical approach while at the same time the two groups share the same underlying ideological assumptions. Owing, however, to the molecular structure of terrorist organizations the actual identification of a member of one group by another member of another group or sub-faction of the same group remains extremely problematical.'
The whole fucking situation is extremely problematical, come to that,' said the Superintendent. 'So far we've had two communiqués from what sounds like a partially castrated German, one from an asthmatic Irishman, demands from a Mexican for a jumbo jet and six million quid, a counter-demand from the Kraut for seven millions, not to mention a stream of abuse from an Arab and everyone accusing everyone else of being a CIA agent working for Israel and who's fighting for whose freedom.'
'Beats me how they can begin to talk about freedom when they're holding innocent children and an old lady hostage and threatening to kill them,' said the Major.
'There I must disagree with you,' said the Professor. 'In terms of Neo-Hegelian post-Marxist political philosophy the freedom of the individual can only reside within the parameters of a collectively free society. The People's Army Groups regard themselves as in the forefront of total freedom and equality and as such are not bound to observe the moral norms which restrict the actions of lackeys of imperialist, fascist and neo-colonialist oppression.'
'Listen, old boy,' said the Major angrily removing his Afro wig, 'just whose side are you on anyway?'
'I am merely stating the theory. If you want a more precise analysis...' began the Professor nervously, only to be interrupted by the Head of the Psychological Warfare team who had been working on the voiceprints.
'From our analysis of the stress factors revealed in these tape recordings we are of the opinion that the group holding Fräulein Schautz are emotionally more disturbed than the two other terrorists,' he announced, 'and frankly I think we should concentrate on reducing their anxiety level.'
'Are you saying the Schautz woman is likely to be shot?' asked the Superintendent.
The psychologist nodded. 'It's rather baffling actually. We've hit something rather odd with that lot, a variation from the normal pattern of speech reactions and I must admit I think she's the one who's most likely to get it in the neck.'
'No skin off my nose if she does,' said the Major, 'she's had it coming to her.'
'There'll be skin off everyone's nose if that happens,' said the Superintendent. 'My instructions are to keep this thing cool and if they start killing their hostages all hell will be let loose.'
'Yes,' said the Professor, 'a very interesting dialectical situation. You must understand that the theory of terrorism as a progressive force in world history demands the exacerbation of class warfare and the polarizing of political opinion. Now in terms of simple effectiveness we must say that the advantage lies with People's Army Group Four and not with the People's Alternative Army.'
'Say that again,' said the Major.
The Professor obliged. 'Put quite simply it is politically better to kill these children than eliminate Fräulein Schautz.'
'That may be your opinion,' said the Major, his fingers twitching on the butt of his revolver, 'but if you know what's good for you you won't express it round here again.'
'I was talking only in terms of political polarization,' said the Professor nervously. 'Only a very small minority will be perturbed
if Fräulein Schautz dies but the effect of liquidating four small children, and coterminously conceived female siblings at that, would be considerable.'
'Thank you. Professor,' said the Superintendent hastily. And before the Major could decipher this sinister pronouncement he had ushered the adviser on Terrorist Ideologies out of the room.
'It's blasted eggheads like him who've ruined this country,' said the Major. 'To hear him talk you'd think there were two sides to every damned question.'
'Which is exactly the opposite of what we're getting on the voiceprints,' said the psychologist. 'Our analysis seems to indicate that there's only one spokesman for the People's Alternative Army.'
'One man? said the Superintendent incredulously. 'Didn't sound like one man to me. More like half-a-dozen insane ventriloquists.'
'Precisely. Which is why we think you should try to lower the anxiety level of that group. We may well be dealing with a split personality. I'll play the tapes again and perhaps you'll see what I mean.'
'Must you? Oh well...'
But the sergeant had switched the recorder on and once again the cluttered drawing-room echoed to guttural snarls and whimpers of Wilt's communiqués. In a dark corner Inspector Flint who had been on the point of dozing off suddenly sprang to his feet.
'I knew it,' he shouted triumphantly, 'I knew it. I just knew it had to be and by God it is!'
'Had to be what?' asked the Superintendent.
'Henry Fucking Wilt who was behind this foul-up. And there's the proof on those tapes.'
'Are you sure, Inspector?
'I'm more than that. I'm positive. I'd know that little sod's voice if he imitated an Eskimo in labour.'
I don't think we have to go that far,' said the psychological adviser. 'Are you telling us you know the man we've just heard?'
'Know him?' said Flint. 'Of course I know the bastard. I ought to after what he did for me. And now he's having you lot on.'