Wilt w-1

by Tom Sharpe

  And slowly her self-disgust turned back to anger, and a cold hatred of the Pringsheims. She would get her own back on them. They would be sorry they had ever met her. She got up and opened the locker and took out the lifejackets and threw them over the side. Then she blew up the airbed, dropped it into the water and climbed over herself. She let herself down into the water and lay on the airbed. It rocked alarmingly but Eva was not afraid. She was getting her revenge on the Pringsheims and she no longer cared what happened to her. She paddled off through the little waves pushing the lifejackets in front of her. The wind was behind her and the airbed moved easily. In five minutes she had turned the corner of the reeds and was out of sight of the cruiser. Somewhere in the darkness ahead there was the open water where they had seen the dinghies and beyond it land.

  Presently she found herself being blown sideways into the reeds. The rain stopped and Eva lay panting on the airbed. It would be easier if she got rid of the lifejackets. She was far enough from the boat for them to be well hidden. She pushed them into the reeds and then hesitated. Perhaps she should keep one for herself. She disentangled a jacket from the bunch and managed to put it on. Then she lay face down on the airbed again and paddled forward down the widening channel.

  Sally leant against the cabin door and looked at Gaskell with loathing.

  ‘You stupid jerk.’ she said. ‘You had to open your big mouth. So what the hell are you going to do now?’

  ‘Divorce you for a start.’ said Gaskell.

  ‘I’ll alimony you for all the money you’ve got.’

  ‘Fat chance. You won’t get a red cent.’ Gaskell said and drank some more vodka.

  ‘I’ll see you dead first,’ said Sally.

  Gaskell grinned. ‘Me dead? Anyone’s going to die round here, it’s you. Booby baby is out for blood.’

  ‘She’ll cool off.’

  ‘You think so? Try opening that door if you’re so sure. Go on, unlock it,’

  Sally moved away from the door and sat down.

  ‘This time you’ve really bought yourself some trouble,’ said Gaskell. ‘You had to pick a goddam prizefighter.’

  ‘You go out and pacify her.’ said Sally.

  ‘No way. I’d as soon play blind man’s buff with a fucking rhinoceros.’ He lay on the bunk and smiled happily. ‘You know there’s something really ironical about all this. You had to go and liberate a Neanderthal. Women’s Lib for paleolithics. She Tarzan, you Jane. You’ve bought yourself a piece of zoo.’

  ‘Very funny,’ said Sally. ‘And what’s your role?’

  ‘Me Noah. Just be thankful she hasn’t got a gun.’ He pulled a pillow up under his head and went to sleep.

  Sally sat on staring at his back venomously. She was frightened. Eva’s reaction had been so violent that it had destroyed her confidence in herself. Gaskell was right. There had been something primeval in Eva Wilt’s behaviour. She shuddered at the thought of that dark shape moving towards her in the cockpit. Sally got up and went into the galley and found a long sharp knife. Then she went back into the cabin and checked the lock on the door and lay down on her bunk and tried to sleep. But sleep wouldn’t come. There were noises outside. Waves lapped against the side of the boat. The wind blew. God, what a mess it all was! Sally clutched her knife and thought about Gaskell and what he had said about divorce.

  Peter Braintree sat in the office of Mr Gosdyke, Solicitor, and discussed the problem. ‘He’s been in there since Monday and it’s Thursday now. Surely they’ve no right to keep him there so long without his seeing a solicitor.’

  If he doesn’t ask for one and if the police want to question him and he is prepared to answer their questions and refuses to demand his legal rights I don’t really see that there is anything I can do about it,’ said Mr Gosdyke.

  ‘But are you sure that that is the situation?’ asked Braintree.

  ‘As far as I can ascertain that is indeed the situation. Mr Wilt has not asked to see me. I spoke to the Inspector in charge, you heard me and it seems quite clear that Mr Wilt appears, for some extraordinary reason, to be prepared to help the police with their enquiries just as long as they feel his presence at the Police Station is necessary. Now if a man refuses to assert his own legal rights then he has only himself to blame for his predicament.’

  ‘But are you absolutely certain that Henry has refused to see you? I mean the police could be lying to you.’ Mr Gosdyke shook his head. ‘I have known Inspector Flint for many years,’ he said, ‘and he is not the sort of man to deny a suspect his rights. No, I’m sorry. Mr Braintree. I would like to be of more assistance but frankly, in the circumstances, I can do nothing. Mr Wilt’s predilection for the company of police officers is quite incomprehensible to me, but it disqualifies me from interfering.’

  ‘You don’t think they’re giving him third degree or anything of that sort?’

  ‘My dear fellow, third degree? You’ve been watching too many old movies on the TV. The police don’t use strong-arm methods in this country.’

  ‘They’ve been pretty brutal with some of our students who have been on demos,’ Braintree pointed out.

  ‘Ah, but students are quite another matter and demonstrating students get what they deserve. Political provocation is one thing but domestic murders of the sort your friend Mr Wilt seems to have indulged in come into a different category altogether. I can honestly say that in all my years in the legal profession I have yet to come across a case in which the police did not treat a domestic murderer with great care and not a little sympathy. After all, they are nearly all married men themselves, and in any case Mr Wilt has a degree and that always helps. If you are a professional man, and in spite of what some people may say lecturers in Technical Colleges are members of a profession if only marginally, then you can rest assured that the police will do nothing in the least untoward. Mr Wilt is perfectly safe.’

  And Wilt felt safe. He sat in the Interview Room and contemplated Inspector Flint with interest.

  ‘Motivation? Now there’s an interesting question,’ he said. ‘If you had asked me why I married Eva in the first place I’d have same trouble trying to explain, myself. I was young at the time and…’

  ‘Wilt,’ said the Inspector, ‘I didn’t ask you why you married your wife. I asked you why you decided to murder her.’

  ‘I didn’t decide to murder her.’ said Wilt.

  ‘It was a spontaneous action? A momentary impulse you couldn’t resist? An act of madness you now regret?’

  ‘It was none of those things. In the first place it was not an act. It was mere fantasy.’

  ‘But you do admit that the thought crossed your mind?’

  ‘Inspector,’ said Wilt, ‘if I acted upon every impulse that crossed my mind I would have been convicted of child rape, buggery, burglary, assault with intent to commit grievous bodily harm and mass murder long ago.’

  ‘All those impulses crossed your mind?’

  ‘At some time or other, yes,’ said Wilt.

  ‘You’ve got a bloody odd mind.’

  ‘Which is something I share with the vast majority of mankind. I daresay that even you in your odd contemplative moments have…’

  ‘Wilt,’ said the Inspector, ‘I don’t have odd contemplative moments. Not until I met you anyhow. Now then, you admit you thought of killing your wife…’

  ‘I said the notion had crossed my mind, particularly when I have to take the dog for a walk. It is a game I play with myself. No more than that.’

  ‘A game? You take the dog for a walk and think of ways and means of killing Mrs Wilt? I don’t call that a game. I call it premeditation.’

  ‘Not badly put,’ said Wilt with a smile, ‘the meditation bit. Eva curls up in the lotus position on the living-room rug and thinks beautiful thoughts. I take the bloody dog for a walk and think dreadful ones while Clem defecates on the grass verge in Grenville Gardens. And in each case the end result is just the same. Eva gets up and cooks supper and washes up and I come home and w
atch the box or read and go to bed. Nothing has altered one way or another.’

  ‘It has now,’ said the Inspector. ‘Your wife has disappeared off the face of the earth together with a brilliant young scientist and his wife, and you are sitting here waiting to be charged with their murder.’

  ‘Which I don’t happen to have committed,’ said Wilt. ‘Ah well, these things happen. The moving finger writes and having writ…’

  ‘Fuck the moving finger. Where are they? Where did you put them? You’re going to tell me.’

  Wilt sighed. ‘I wish I could,’ he said, ‘I really do. Now you’ve got that plastic doll…’

  ‘No we haven’t. Not by a long chalk. We’re still going down through solid rock. We won’t get whatever is down there until tomorrow at the earliest.’

  ‘Something to look forward to,’ said Wilt. ‘Then I suppose you’ll let me go.’

  ‘Like hell I will. I’ll have you up for remand on Monday.’

  ‘Without any evidence of murder? Without a body? You can’t do that.’

  Inspector Flint smiled. ‘Wilt,’ he said, ‘I’ve got news for you. We don’t need a body. We can hold you on suspicion, we can bring you up for trial and we can find you guilty without a body. You may be clever but you don’t know your law.’

  ‘Well I must say you fellows have an easy job of it. You mean you can go out in the street and pick up some perfectly innocent passer-by and lug him in here and charge him with murder without any evidence at all?’

  ‘Evidence? We’ve got evidence all right. We’ve got a blood spattered bathroom with a busted-down door. We’ve got an empty house in a filthy mess and we’ve got some bloody thing or other down that pile hole and you think we haven’t got evidence. You’ve got it wrong.’

  ‘Makes two of us,’ said Wilt.

  ‘And I’ll tell you another thing, Wilt. ‘The trouble with bastards like you is that you’re too clever by half. You overdo things and you give yourselves away. Now if I’d been in your shoes, I’d have done two things. Know what they are?’

  ‘No,’ said Wilt, ‘I don’t.’

  ‘I’d have washed that bathroom down, number one, and number two I’d have stayed away from that hole. I wouldn’t have tried to lay a false trail with notes and making sure the caretaker saw you and turning up at Mr Braintree’s house at midnight covered in mud. I’d have sat tight and said nothing.’

  ‘But I didn’t know about those bloodstains in the bathroom and if it hadn’t been for that filthy doll I wouldn’t have dumped the thing down the hole. I’d have gone to bed. Instead of which I got pissed and acted like an idiot.’

  ‘Let me tell you something else. Wilt.’ said the Inspector. ‘You are an idiot, a fucking cunning idiot but an idiot all the same. You need your head read.’

  ‘It would make a change from this lot,’ said Wilt.

  ‘What would?’

  ‘Having my head read instead of sitting here and being insulted.’

  Inspector Flint studied him thoughtfully. ‘You mean that?’ asked.

  ‘Mean what?’

  ‘About having your head read? Would you be prepared to undergo an examination by a qualified psychiatrist?’

  ‘Why not?’ said Wilt. ‘Anything to help pass the time.’

  ‘Quite voluntarily, you understand. Nobody is forcing you to, but if you want…’

  ‘Listen, Inspector, if seeing a psychiatrist will help to convince you that I have not murdered my wife I’ll be only too happy to. You can put me on a lie detector. You can pump me full of truth drugs. You can…’

  ‘There’s no need for any of that other stuff,’ said Flint, and stood up. ‘A good shrink will do very nicely. And if you think you can get away with guilty but insane, forget it. These blokes know when you’re malingering madness.’ He went to the door and paused. Then he came back and leant across the table.

  ‘Tell me, Wilt,’ he said. ‘Tell me just one thing. How come you sit there so coolly? Your wife is missing, we have evidence of murder, we have a replica of her, if you are to be believed, under thirty feet of concrete and you don’t turn a hair. How do you do it?’

  ‘Inspector,’ said Wilt. ‘If you had taught Gasfitters for ten years and been asked as many damnfool questions in that time as I have, you’d know. Besides you haven’t met Eva. When you do you’ll see why I’m not worried. Eva is perfectly capable of taking care of herself. She may not be bright but she’s got a built-in survival kit.’

  ‘Jesus, Wilt, with you around for twelve years she must have had something.’

  ‘Oh she has. You’ll like Eva when you meet her. You’ll get along like a house on fire. You’ve both got literal minds and an obsession with trivia. You can take a wormcast and turn it into Mount Everest.’

  ‘Wormcast? Wilt, you sicken me,’ said the Inspector, and left the room.

  Wilt got up and walked up and down. He was tired of sitting down. On the other hand he was well satisfied with his performance. He had surpassed himself and he took pride in the fact that he was reacting so well to what most people would consider an appalling predicament. But to Wilt it was something else, a challenge, the first real challenge he had had to meet for a long time. Gasfitters and Plasterers had challenged him once but he had learnt to cope with them. You jollied them along. Let them talk, ask questions, divert them, get them going, accept their red herrings and hand out a few of your own, but above all you had to refuse to accept their preconceptions. Whenever they asserted something with absolute conviction as a self-evident truth like all wogs began at Calais, all you had to do was agree and then point out that half the great men in English history had been foreigners like Marconi or Lord Beaverbrook and that even Churchill’s mother had been a Yank or talk about the Welsh being the original Englishmen and the Vikings and the Danes and from that lead them off through Indian doctors to the National Health Service and birth control and any other topic under the sun that would keep them quiet and puzzled and desperately trying to think of some ultimate argument that would prove you wrong.

  Inspector Flint was no different. He was more obsessive but his tactics were just the same. And besides he had got hold of the wrong end of the stick with a vengeance and it amused Wilt to watch him trying to pin a crime on him he hadn’t committed. It made him feel almost important and certainly more of a man than he had done for a long, long time. He was innocent and there was no question about it. In a world where everything else was doubtful and uncertain and open to scepticism the fact of his innocence was sure. For the first time in his adult life Wilt knew himself to be absolutely right, and the knowledge gave him a strength he had never supposed he possessed. And besides there was no question in his mind that Eva would turn up eventually, safe and sound, and more than a little subdued when she realized what her impulsiveness had led to. Serve her right for giving him that disgusting doll. She’d regret that to the end of her days. Yes, if anybody was going to come off badly in this affair it was dear old Eva with her bossiness and her busyness. She’d have a job explaining it to Mavis Mottram and the neighbours. Wilt smiled to himself at the thought. And even the Tech would have to treat him differently in future and with a new respect. Wilt knew the liberal conscience too well not to suppose that he would appear anything less that martyr when he went back. And a hero. They would bend over backwards to convince themselves that they hadn’t thought him as guilty as hell. He’d get promotion too, not for being a teacher but because they would need to salve their fragile consciences. Talk about killing the fatted calf.

  Chapter 14

  At the Tech there was no question of killing the fatted calf, at least not for Henry Wilt. The imminence of the CNAA visitation on Friday, coinciding as it apparently would with the resurrection of the late Mrs Wilt, was causing something approaching panic. The Course Board met in almost continuous session and memoranda circulated so furiously that it was impossible to read one before the next arrived.

  ‘Can’t we postpone the visit?’ Dr Cox asked. ‘I ca
n’t have them in my office discussing bibliographies with bits of Mrs Wilt being dug out of the ground outside the window.’

  ‘I have asked the police to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible,’ said Dr Mayfield.

  ‘With conspicuous lack of success so far,’ said Dr Board.’

  ‘They couldn’t be more in evidence. There are ten of them peering down that hole at this very moment.’

  The Vice-Principal struck a brighter note. ‘You’ll be glad to hear that we’ve managed to restore power to the canteen,’ he told the meeting, ’so we should be able to lay on a good lunch.’

  ‘I just hope I feel up to eating.’ said Dr Cox. ‘The shocks of the last few days have done nothing to improve my appetite and when I think of poor Mrs Wilt…’

  ‘Try not to think of her,’ said the Vice-Principal, but Dr Cox shook his head.

  ‘You try not to think of her with a damned great boring machine grinding away outside your office window all day.’

  ‘Talking about shocks,’ said Dr Board, ‘I still can’t understand how the driver of that mechanical corkscrew managed to escape electrocution when they cut through the power cable.’

  ‘Considering the problems we are faced with, I hardly think that’s a relevant point just at present,’ said Dr Mayfield. ‘What we have got to stress to the members of the CNAA committee is that this degree is an integrated course with a fundamental substructure grounded thematically on a concomitance of cultural and sociological factors in no way unsuperficially disparate and with a solid quota of academic content to give students an intellectual and cerebral..

  ‘Haemorrhage?’ suggested Dr Board.

  Dr Mayfield regarded him balefully. ‘I really do think this is no time for flippancy,’ he said angrily. ‘Either we are committed to the Joint Honours degree or we are not. Furthermore we have only until tomorrow to structure our tactical approach to the visitation committee. Now, which is it to be?’