Wilt w-1

by Tom Sharpe

  ‘Which is what to be?’ asked Dr Board. ‘What has our commitment or lack of it to do with structuring, for want of several far better words, our so-called tactical approach to a committee which, since it is coming all the way from London to us and not vice versa, is presumably approaching us?’

  ‘Vice-Principal,’ said Dr Mayfield, I really must protest. Dr Board’s attitude at this late stage in the game is quite incomprehensible. If Dr Board…’

  ‘Could even begin to understand one tenth of the jargon Dr Mayfield seems to suppose is English he might be in a better position to express his opinion,’ interrupted Dr Board. ‘As it is “incomprehensible” applies to Dr Mayfield’s syntax, not to my attitude. I have always maintained…’

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said the Vice-Principal. ‘I think it would be best if we avoided inter-departmental wrangles at this point in time and got down to business.’

  There was a silence broken finally by Dr Cox. ‘Do you think the police could he persuaded to erect a screen round that hole?’ he asked.

  ‘I shall certainly suggest that to them,’ said Dr Mayfield. They passed on to the matter of entertainment.

  ‘I have arranged for there to be plenty of drinks before lunch,’ said the Vice-Principal, ‘and in any case lunch will be judiciously delayed to allow them to get into the right mood so the afternoon sessions should be cut short and proceed, hopefully, more smoothly.’

  ‘Just so long as the Catering Department doesn’t serve Toad in the Hole,’ said Dr Board.

  The meeting broke up acrimoniously.

  So did Mr Morris’s encounter with the Crime Reporter of the Sunday Post.

  ‘Of course I didn’t tell the police that I employed homicidal maniacs as a matter of policy,’ he shouted at the reporter. ‘And in any case what I said was, as I understood it, to be treated in the strictest confidence.’

  ‘But you did say you thought Wilt was insane and that quite a number of Liberal Studies lecturers were off their heads?’

  Mr Morris looked at the man with loathing. ‘To put the record straight, what I said was that some of them were…’

  ‘Off their rockers?’ suggested the reporter.

  ‘No, not off, their rockers,’ shouted Mr Morris. ‘Merely, well, shall we say, slightly unbalanced.’

  ‘That’s not what the police say you said. They say quote…’

  ‘I don’t care what the police say I said. I know what I said and what I didn’t and if you’re implying…’

  ‘I’m not implying anything. You made a statement that half your staff are nuts and I’m trying to verify it.’

  ‘Verify it?’ snarled Mr Morris. ‘You put words into my mouth I never said and you call that verifying it?’

  ‘Did you say it or not? That’s all I’m asking. I mean if you express an opinion about your staff…’

  ‘Mr MacArthur, what I think about my staff is my own affair. It has absolutely nothing to do with you or the rag you represent’

  ‘Three million people will be interested to read your opinion on Sunday morning,’ said Mr MacArthur, ‘and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this Wilt character didn’t sue you if he ever gets out of the copshop.’

  ‘Sue me? What the hell could he sue me for?’

  ‘Calling him a homicidal maniac for a start. Banner headlines HEAD OF LIBERAL STUDIES CALLS LECTURER HOMICIDAL MANIAC should be good for fifty thousand. I’d be surprised if he got less.’

  Mr Morris contemplated destitution. ‘Even your paper would never print that,’ he muttered. ‘I mean Wilt would sue you too.’

  ‘Oh we’re used to libel actions. They’re run-of-the-mill for us. We pay for them out of petty cash. Now if you’d be a bit more cooperative…’ He left the suggestion in mid-air for Mr Morris to digest.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ he asked miserably.

  ‘Got any juicy drug scene stories for us?’ asked Mr MacArthur. ‘You know the sort of thing. LOVE ORGIES IN LECTURES. That always gets the public. Teenyboppers having it off and all that. Give us a good one and we’ll let you off the hook about Wilt.’

  ‘Get out of my office!’ yelled Mr Morris.

  Mr MacArthur got up. ‘You’re going to regret this.’ he said and went downstairs to the students’ canteen to dig up some dirt on Mr Morris.

  ‘Not tests,’ said Wilt adamantly. ‘They’re deceptive.’

  ‘You think so?’ said Dr Pittman, consultant psychiatrist at the Fenland Hospital and professor of Criminal Psychology at the University. Being plagiocephalic didn’t help either.

  ‘I should have thought it was obvious.’ said Wilt. ‘You show me an ink-blot and I think it looks like my grandmother lying in a pool of blood, do you honestly think I’m going to be fool enough to say so? I’d be daft to do that. So I say a butterfly sitting on a geranium. And every time it’s the same. I think what it does look like and then say something completely different. Where does that get you?’

  ‘It is still possible to infer something from that,’ said Dr Pittman.

  ‘Well, you don’t need a bloody ink-blot to infer, do you?’ said Wilt. Dr Pittman made a note of Wilt’s interest in blood. ‘You can infer things from just looking at the shape of people’s heads.’

  Dr Pittman polished his glasses grimly. Heads were not things he liked inferences to be drawn from. ‘Mr Wilt,’ he said, ‘I am here at your request to ascertain your sanity and in particular to give an opinion as to whether or not I consider you capable of murdering your wife and disposing of her body in a singularly revolting and callous fashion. I shall not allow anything you may say to influence my ultimate and objective findings.’

  Wilt looked perplexed. ‘I must say you’re not giving yourself much room for manoeuvre. Since we’ve dispensed with mechanical aids like tests I should have thought what I had to say would be the only thing you could go on. Unless of course you’re going to read the bumps on my head. Isn’t that a bit old-fashioned?’

  ‘Mr Wilt,’ said Dr Pittman, ‘the fact that you clearly have a sadistic streak and take pleasure in drawing attention to other people’s physical infirmities in no way dispose me to conclude you are capable of murder…’

  ‘Very decent of you,’ said Wilt, ‘though frankly I’d have thought anyone was capable of murder given the right, or to be precise the wrong, circumstances.’

  Dr Pittman stifled the impulse to say how right he was. Instead he smiled prognathously. ‘Would you say you are a rational man, Henry?’ he asked.

  Wilt frowned. ‘Just stick to Mr Wilt if you don’t mind. This may not be a paid consultation but I prefer a little formality’

  Dr Pittman’s smile vanished. ‘You haven’t answered my question.’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t say I was a rational man,’ said Wilt.

  ‘An irrational one perhaps?’

  ‘Neither the one wholly nor the other wholly. Just a man’

  ‘And a man is neither one thing nor the other?’

  ‘Dr Pittman, this is your province not mine but in my opinion man is capable of reasoning but not of acting within wholly rational limits. Man is an animal, a developed animal, though come to think of it all animals are developed if we are to believe Darwin. Let’s just say man is a domesticated animal with elements of wildness about him…’

  ‘And what sort of animal are you, Mr Wilt?’ said Dr Pittman. ‘A domesticated animal or a wild one?’

  ‘Here we go again. These splendidly simple dual categories that seem to obsess the modern mind. Either/Or Kierkegaard as that bitch Sally Pringsheim would say. No. I am not wholly domesticated. Ask my wife. She’ll express an opinion on the matter.’

  ‘In what respect are you undomesticated?’

  ‘I fart in bed, Dr Pittman. I like to fart in bed. It is the trumpet call of the anthropoid ape in me asserting its territorial imperative in the only way possible.’

  ‘In the only way possible?’

  ‘You haven’t met Eva,’ said Wilt. ‘When you do you’ll see that assertion is her f
orte not mine.’

  ‘You feel dominated by Mrs Wilt?’

  ‘I am dominated by Mrs Wilt.’

  ‘She bullies you? She assumes the dominant role?’

  ‘Eva is, Dr Pittman. She doesn’t have to assume anything. She just is.’

  ‘Is what?’

  ‘Now there’s the rub.’ said Wilt, ‘What’s today? You lose track of time in this place.’

  ‘Thursday.’

  ‘Well, today being Thursday, Eva is Bernard Leach.’

  ‘Bernard Leach?’

  ‘The potter, Dr Pittman, the famous potter,’ said Wilt. ‘Now tomorrow she’ll be Margot Fonteyn and on Saturday we play bridge with the Mottrams so she’ll be Omar Sharif. On Sunday she’s Elisabeth Taylor or Edna O’Brien depending on what the Colour Supplements have in store for me and in the afternoon we go for a drive and she’s Eva Wilt. It’s about the only time in the week I meet her and that’s because I’m driving and she’s got nothing to do but sit still and nag the pants off me.’

  ‘I begin to see the pattern.’ said Dr Pittman. ‘Mrs Wilt was…is given to role-playing. This made for an unstable relationship in which you couldn’t establish a distinctive and assertive role as a husband’

  ‘Dr Pittman,’ said Wilt, ‘a gyroscope may, indeed must, spin but in doing so it achieves a stability that is virtually unequalled. Now if you understand the principle of the gyroscope you may begin to understand that our marriage does not lack stability. It may be damned uncomfortable coming home to a centrifugal force but it bloody well isn’t unstable.’

  ‘But just now you told me that Mrs Wilt did not assume a dominant role. Now you tell me she is a forceful character.’

  ‘Eva is not forceful. She is a force. There’s a difference. And as for character, she has so many and they’re so varied it’s difficult to keep up with them all. Let’s just say she throws herself into whoever she is with an urgency and compulsiveness that is not always appropriate. You remember that series of Garbo pictures they showed on TV some years back? Well, Eva was La Dame Aux Camélias for three days after that and she made dying of TB look like St Vitus’ dance. Talk about galloping consumption’

  ‘I begin to get the picture,’ said Dr Pittman making a note that Wilt was a pathological liar with sado-masochistic tendencies.

  ‘I’m glad somebody does,’ said Wilt. ‘Inspector Flint thinks I murdered her and the Pringsheims in some sort of bloodlust and disposed of their bodies in some extraordinary fashion. He mentioned acid. I mean it’s crazy. Where on earth does one get nitric acid in the quantities necessary to dissolve three dead bodies, and one of them overweight at that? I mean it doesn’t bear thinking about.’

  ‘It certainly doesn’t,’ said Dr Pittman.

  ‘In any case do I look like a murderer?’ continued Wilt cheerfully. ‘Of course I don’t. Now if he’d said Eva had slaughtered the brutes, and in my opinion someone should’ve done years ago, I’d have taken him seriously. God help the poor sods who happen to be around when Eva takes it into her head she’s Lizzie Borden.’

  Dr Pittman studied him predaciously.

  ‘Are you suggesting that Dr and Mrs Pringsheim were murdered by your wife?’ be asked. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘No,’ said Wilt, ‘I am not. All I’m saying is that when Eva does things she does them wholeheartedly. When she cleans the house she cleans it. Let me tell you about the Harpic. She’s got this thing about germs…’

  ‘Mr Wilt,’ said Dr Pittman hastily. ‘I am not interested in what Mrs Wilt does with the Harpic. I have come here to understand you. Now then, do you make a habit of copulating with a plastic doll? Is this a regular occurrence?’

  ‘Regular?’ said Wilt. ‘Do you mean a normal occurrence or a recurring one? Now your notion of what constitutes a normal occurrence may differ from mine…’

  ‘I mean, do you do it often?’ interrupted Dr Pittman.

  ‘Do it?’ said Wilt. ‘I don’t do it at all.’

  ‘But I understood you to have placed particular emphasis on the fact that this doll had a vagina?’

  ‘Emphasis? I didn’t have to emphasize the fact. The beastly thing was plainly visible.’

  ‘You find vaginas beastly?’ said Dr Pittman stalking his prey into the more familiar territory of sexual aberration.

  ‘Taken out of context, yes,’ said Wilt sidestepping, ‘and with plastic ones you can leave them in context and I still find them nauseating.’

  By the time Dr Pittman had finished the interview he was uncertain what to think. He got up wearily and made for the door.

  ‘You’ve forgotten your hat, doctor,’ said Wilt holding it out to him. ‘Pardon my asking but do you have them specially made for you?’

  ‘Well?’ said Inspector Flint when Dr Pittman came into his office. ‘What’s the verdict?’

  ‘Verdict? That man should be put away for life.’

  ‘You mean he’s a homicidal maniac?’

  ‘I mean, that no matter how he killed her Mrs Wilt must have been thankful to go. Twelve years married to that man…Good God, it doesn’t bear thinking about.’

  ‘Well, that doesn’t get us much forrader,’ said the Inspector, when the psychiatrist had left having expressed the opinion that while Wilt had the mind of an intellectual jackrabbit he couldn’t in all honesty say that he was criminally insane. ‘We’ll just have to see what turns up tomorrow.’

  Chapter 15

  What turned up on Friday was seen not only by Inspector Flint, Sergeant Yates, twelve other policemen, Barney and half a dozen construction workers, but several hundred Tech students standing on the steps of the Science block, most of the staff and by all eight members of the CNAA visitation committee who had a particularly good view from the windows of the mock hotel lounge used by the Catering Department to train waiters and to entertain distinguished guests. Dr Mayfield did his best to distract their attention.

  ‘We have structured the foundation course to maximize student interest,’ he told Professor Baxendale, who headed the committee, but the professor was not to be diverted. His interest was maximized by what was being unstructured from the foundations of the new Admin block.

  ‘How absolutely appalling.’ he muttered as Judy protruded from the hole. Contrary to Wilt’s hopes and expectations she had not burst. The liquid concrete had sealed her in too well for that and if in life she had resembled in many particulars a real live woman, in death she had all the attributes of a real dead one. As the corpse of a murdered woman she was entirely convincing. Her wig was matted and secured to her head at an awful angle by the concrete. Her clothes clung to her and cement to them while her legs had evidently been contorted to the point of mutilation and her outstretched arm had, as Barney had foretold, a desperate appeal about it that was most affecting. It also made it exceedingly difficult to extricate her from the hole. The legs didn’t help, added to which the concrete had given her a substance and stature approximate to that of Eva Wilt.

  ‘I suppose that’s what they mean by rigor mortice.’ said Dr Board, as Dr Mayfield desperately tried to steer the conversation back to the joint Honours degree.

  ‘Dear Lord,’ muttered Professor Baxendale. Judy had eluded the efforts of Barney and his men and had slumped back down the hole. ‘To think what she must have suffered. Did you see that damned hand?’

  Dr Mayfield had. He shuddered. Behind him Dr Board sniggered. ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will,’ he said gaily. ‘At least Wilt has saved himself the cost of a gravestone. All they’ll have to do is prop her up with Here Stands Eva Wilt, Born So and So, Murdered last Saturday carved across her chest. In life monumental, in death a monument.’

  ‘I must say, Board,’ said Dr Mayfield, ‘I find your sense of humour singularly ill-timed.’

  ‘Well they’ll never be able to cremate her, that’s for certain,’ continued Dr Board. ‘And the undertaker who can fit that little lot into a coffin will be nothing short of a genius. I s
uppose they could always take a sledgehammer to her.’

  In the corner Dr Cox fainted.

  ‘I think I’ll have another whisky if you don’t mind,’ said Professor Baxendale weakly. Dr Mayfield poured him a double. When he turned back to the window Judy was protruding once more from the hole. ‘The thing about embalming,’ said Dr Board, ‘is that it costs so much. Now I’m not saying that thing out there is a perfect likeness of Eva Wilt as I remember her…’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, do you have to go on about it?’ snarled Dr Mayfield, but Dr Board was not to be stopped. ‘Quite apart from the legs there seems to be something odd about the breasts. I know Mrs Wilt’s were large but they do seem to have inflated. Probably due to the gases. They putrefy, you know, which would account for it.’

  By the time the committee went onto lunch they had lost all appetite for food and most of then were drunk.

  Inspector Flint was less fortunate. He didn’t like being present at exhumations at the best of times and particularly when the corpse on whose behalf he was acting showed such a marked inclination to go back where she came from. Besides he was in two minds whether it was a corpse or not. It looked like a corpse and it certainly behaved like a corpse, albeit a very heavy one, but there was something about the knees that suggested that all was not anatomically as it should have been with whatever it was they had dug up. There was a double jointedness and a certain lack of substance where the legs stuck forwards at right angles that seemed to indicate that Mrs Wilt had lost not only her life but both kneecaps as well. It was this mangled quality that made Barney’s job so difficult and exceedingly distasteful. After the body had dropped down the hole for the fourth time Barney went down himself to assist from below.

  ‘If you sods drop her,’ he shouted from the depths, ‘you’ll have two dead bodies down here so hang on to that rope whatever happens. I’m going to tie it round her neck.’

  Inspector Flint peered down the shaft. ‘You’ll do no such thing,’ he shouted, ‘we don’t want her decapitated. We need her all in one piece.’

  ‘She is all in one bloody piece,’ came Barney’s muffled reply, ‘that’s one thing you don’t have to worry about.’