by Tom Sharpe
‘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.’
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 suppose 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 into lunch they had lost all appetite for food and most of them 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.’
‘Can’t you tie the rope around something else?’
‘Well I could,’ Barney conceded, ‘but I’m not going to. A leg is more likely to come off than her head and I’m not going to be underneath her when it goes.’
‘All right,’ said the Inspector. ‘I just hope you know what you’re doing, that’s all.’
‘I’ll tell you one thing. The sod who put her down here knew what he was doing and no mistake.’
But this fifth attempt failed, like the previous four, and Judy was lowered into the depths where she rested heavily on Barney’s foot.
‘Go and get that bloody crane,’ he shouted. ‘I can’t stand much more of this.’
‘Nor can I,’ muttered the Inspector, who still couldn’t make up his mind what it was he was supposed to be disinterring; a doll dressed up to look like Mrs Wilt or Mrs Wilt dressed up to look like something some demented sculptor forgot to finish. What few doubts he had had about Wilt’s sanity had been entirely dispelled by what he was presently witnessing. Any man who could go to the awful lengths Wilt had gone to render, and the word was entirely apposite whichever way you took it, either his wife or a plastic doll with a vagina, both inaccessible and horribly mutilated, must be insane.
Sergeant Yates put his thoughts into words. ‘You’re not going to tell me now that the bastard isn’t off his rocker,’ he said, as the crane was moved into position and the rope lowered and attached to Judy’s neck.
‘All right, now take her away,’ shouted Barney.
*
In the dining-room only Dr Board was enjoying his lunch. The eight members of the CNAA committee weren’t. Their eyes were glued to the scene below.
‘I suppose it could be said she was in statue pupillari,’ said Dr Board, helping himself to some more Lemon Meringue, ‘in which case we stand in loco parentis. Not a pleasant thought, gentlemen. Not that she was ever a very bright student. I once had her for an Evening Class in French literature. I don’t know what she got out of Les Fleurs du Mal but I do remember thinking that Baudelaire …’
‘Dr Board,’ said Dr Mayfield drunkenly, ‘for a so-called cultured man you are entirely without feeling.’
‘Something I share with the late Mrs Wilt, by the look of things,’ said Dr Board, glancing out of the window, ‘and while we are still on the subject, things seem to be coming to a head. They do indeed.’
Even Dr Cox, recently revived and coaxed into having some mutton, looked out of the window. As the crane slowly winched Judy into view the Course Board and the Committee rose and went to watch. It was an unedifying sight. Near the top of the shaft Judy’s left leg caught in a crevice while her outstretched arm em
bedded itself in the clay.
‘Hold it,’ shouted Barney indistinctly, but it was too late. Unnerved by the nature of his load or in the mistaken belief that he had been told to lift harder, the crane driver hoisted away. There was a ghastly cracking sound as the noose tightened and the next moment Judy’s concrete head, capped by Eva Wilt’s wig, looked as if it was about to fulfil Inspector Flint’s prediction that she would be decapitated. In the event he need not have worried. Judy was made of sterner stuff than might have been expected. As the head continued to rise and the body to remain firmly embedded in the shaft Judy’s neck rose to the occasion. It stretched.
‘Dear God,’ said Professor Baxendale frantically, ‘will it never end?’
Dr Board studied the phenomenon with increasing interest. ‘It doesn’t look like it,’ he said. ‘Mind you we do make a point of stretching our students, eh Mayfield?’
But Dr Mayfield made no response. As Judy took on the configuration of an ostrich that had absentmindedly buried its head in a pail of cement he knew that the Joint Honours degree was doomed.
‘I’ll say this for Mrs Wilt,’ said Dr Board, ‘she do hold on. No one could call her stiff-necked. Attenuated possibly. One begins to see what Modigliani was getting at.’
‘For God’s sake stop,’ yelled Dr Cox hysterically, ‘I think I’m going off my head.’
‘Which is more than can be said for Mrs Wilt,’ said Dr Board callously.
He was interrupted by another awful crack as Judy’s body finally gave up the struggle with the shaft. With a shower of clay it careered upwards to resume a closer relationship with the head and hung naked, pink and, now that the clothes and the concrete had been removed, remarkably lifelike at the end of the rope some twenty feet above the ground.
‘I must say,’ said Dr Board, studying the vulva with relish, ‘I’ve never had much sympathy with necrophilia before but I do begin to see its attractions now. Of course it’s only of historical interest but in Elizabethan times it was one of the perks of an executioner …’
‘Board,’ screamed Dr Mayfield, ‘I’ve known some fucking swine in my time …’
Dr Board helped himself to some more coffee. ‘I believe the slang term for it is liking your meat cold.’
*
Underneath the crane Inspector Flint wiped the mud from his face and peered up at the awful object swinging above him. He could see now that it was only a doll. He could also see why Wilt had wanted to bury the beastly thing.
‘Get it down. For God’s sake get it down,’ he bawled, as the press photographers circled round him. But the crane driver had lost his nerve. He shut his eyes, pulled the wrong lever and Judy began a further ascent.
‘Stop it, stop it, that’s fucking evidence,’ screamed the Inspector, but it was already too late. As the rope wound through the final pulley Judy followed. The concrete cap disintegrated, her head slid between the rollers and her body began to swell. Her legs were the first to be affected.
*
‘I’ve often wondered what elephantiasis looked like,’ said Dr Board. ‘Shelley had a phobia about it, I believe.’
Dr Cox certainly had. He was gibbering in a corner and the Vice-Principal was urging him to pull himself together.
‘An apt expression,’ observed Dr Board, above the gasps of horror as Judy, now clearly twelve months pregnant, continued her transformation. ‘Early Minoan, wouldn’t you say, Mayfield?’
But Dr Mayfield was past speech. He was staring dementedly at a rapidly expanding vagina some fourteen inches long and eight wide. There was a pop and the thing became a penis, an enormous penis that swelled and swelled. He was going mad. He knew he was.
‘Now that,’ said Dr Board, ‘takes some beating. I’ve heard about sex-change operations for men but …’
‘Beating?’ screamed Dr Mayfield. ‘Beating? You can stand there so cold-bloodedly and talk about …’
There was a loud bang. Judy had come to the end of her tether. So had Dr Mayfield. The penis was the first thing to go. Dr Mayfield the second. As Judy deflated he hurled himself at Dr Board only to sink to the ground gibbering.
Dr Board ignored his colleague. ‘Who would have thought the old bag had so much wind in her?’ he murmured, and finished his coffee. As Dr Mayfield was led out by the Vice-Principal, Dr Board turned to Professor Baxendale.
‘I must apologize for Mayfield,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid this Joint Honours degree has been too much for him and to tell the truth I have always found him to be fundamentally unsound. A case of dementia post Cox I daresay.’
*
Inspector Flint drove back to the Police Station in a state bordering on lunacy.
‘We’ve been made to look idiots,’ he snarled at Sergeant Yates. ‘You saw them laughing. You heard the bastards.’ He was particularly incensed by the press photographers who had asked him to pose with the limp remnants of the plastic doll. ‘We’ve been held up to public ridicule. Well, my God, somebody’s going to pay.’
He hurled himself out of the car and lunged down the passage to the Interview Room. ‘Right, Wilt,’ he shouted, ‘you’ve had your little joke and a bloody nasty one it was too. So now we’re going to forget the niceties and get to the bottom of this business.’
Wilt studied the torn piece of plastic. ‘Looks better like that if you ask me,’ he said. ‘More natural if you know what I mean.’
‘You’ll look bloody natural if you don’t answer my questions,’ yelled the Inspector. ‘Where is she?’
‘Where is who?’ said Wilt.
‘Mrs Fucking Wilt. Where did you put her?’
‘I’ve told you. I didn’t put her anywhere.’
‘And I’m telling you you did. Now either you’re going to tell me where she is or I’m going to beat it out of you.’
‘You can beat me up if you like,’ said Wilt, ‘but it won’t do you any good.’
‘Oh yes it will,’ said the Inspector, and took off his coat.
‘I demand to see a solicitor,’ said Wilt hastily.
Inspector Flint put his jacket on again. ‘I’ve been waiting to hear you say that. Henry Wilt, I hereby charge you with …’
16
In the reeds Eva greeted the dawn of another day by blowing up the airbed for the tenth time. It had either sprung a leak or developed a fault in the valve. Whichever it was it had made her progress exceedingly slow and had finally forced her to take refuge in the reeds away from the channel. Here, wedged between the stems, she had spent a muddy night getting off the airbed to blow it up and getting back on to try and wash off the sludge and weeds that had adhered to her when she got off. In the process she had lost the bottom half of her lemon loungers and had torn the top half so that by dawn she resembled less the obsessive housewife of 34 Parkview Avenue than a finalist in the heavyweight division of the Ladies Mud-wrestling Championship. In addition she was exceedingly cold and was glad when the sun came up bringing with it the promise of a hot summer day. All she had to do now was to find her way to land or open water and get someone to … At this point Eva became aware that her appearance was likely to cause some embarrassment. The lemon loungers had been sufficiently outré to make her avoid walking down the street when she had had them on; with them largely off she certainly didn’t want to be seen in public. On the other hand she couldn’t stay in the reeds all day. She plunged on, dragging the airbed behind her, half swimming but for the most part trudging through mud and water. At last she came out of the reeds into open water and found herself looking across a stretch to a house, a garden that sloped down to the water’s edge, and a church. It seemed a long way across but there was no boat in sight. She would have to swim across and just hope that the woman who lived there was sympathetic and better still large enough to lend her some clothes until she got home. It was at this point that Eva discovered that she had left her handbag somewhere in the reeds. She remembered having it during the night but it must have fallen off the airbed when she was blowing it up. Well she coul
dn’t go back and look for it now. She would just have to go on without it and ring Henry up and tell him to come out in the car and get her. He could bring some clothes too. Yes, that was it. Eva Wilt climbed on to the airbed and began to paddle across. Halfway over the airbed went down for the eleventh time. Eva abandoned it and struggled on in the lifejacket. But that too impeded her progress and she finally decided to take it off. She trod water and tried to undo it and after a struggle managed to get it off. In the process the rest of the lemon loungers disintegrated so that by the time she reached the bank Eva Wilt was exhausted and quite naked. She crawled into the cover of a willow tree and lay panting on the ground. When she had recovered she stood up and looked around. She was at the bottom of the garden and the house was a hundred yards away up the hill. It was a very large house by Eva’s standards, and not the sort she would feel at home in at the best of times. For one thing it appeared to have a courtyard with stables at the back and to Eva, whose knowledge of large country houses was confined to what she had seen on TV, there was the suggestion of servants, gentility and a social formality that would make her arrival in the nude rather heavy going. On the other hand the whole place looked decidedly run down. The garden was overgrown and unkempt; ornamental bushes which might once have been trimmed to look like birds and animals had reverted to strange and vaguely monstrous shapes; rusted hoops leant half-hidden in the grass of an untended croquet lawn; a tennis net sagged between posts and an abandoned greenhouse boasted a few panes of lichened glass. Finally there was a dilapidated boathouse and a rowing boat. All in all the domain had a sinister and imposing air to it which wasn’t helped by the presence of a small church hidden among trees to the left and a neglected graveyard beyond an old iron fence. Eva peered out from the weeping willow and was about to leave its cover when the French windows opened and a man came out on to the terrace with a pair of binoculars and peered through them in the direction of Eel Stretch. He was wearing a black cassock and a dog collar. Eva went back behind the tree and considered the awkwardness of her situation and lack of attire. It was all extremely embarrassing. Nothing on earth would make her go up to the house, the Vicarage, with nothing on. Parkview Avenue hadn’t prepared her for situations of this sort.