by Tom Sharpe
Inspector Flint had heard enough. ‘Wilt,’ he snarled, ‘I don’t give a damn what you wanted to become. What I want to know is what has become of your wife.’
‘I was just coming to that,’ said Wilt. ‘What we’ve got to establish first is what I am.’
‘I know what you are, Wilt. A bloody word merchant, a verbal contortionist, a fucking logic-chopper, a linguistic Houdini, an encyclopaedia of unwanted information …’ Inspector Flint ran out of metaphors.
‘Brilliant, Inspector, brilliant. I couldn’t have put it better myself. A logic-chopper, but alas not a wife one. If we follow the same line of reasoning Eva in spite of all her beautiful thoughts and meditations has remained as unchanged as I. The ethereal eludes her. Nirvana slips ever from her grasp. Beauty and truth evade her. She pursues the absolute with a fly-swatter and pours Harpic down the drains of Hell itself …’
‘That’s the tenth time you have mentioned Harpic,’ said the Inspector, suddenly alive to a new dreadful possibility. ‘You didn’t …’
Wilt shook his head. ‘There you go again. So like poor Eva. The literal mind that seeks to seize the evanescent and clutches fancy by its non-existent throat. That’s Eva for you. She will never dance Swan Lake. No management would allow her to fill the stage with water or install a double bed and Eva would insist.’
Inspector Flint got up. ‘This is getting us nowhere fast.’
‘Precisely,’ said Wilt, ‘nowhere at all. We are what we are and nothing we can do will alter the fact. The mould that forms our natures remains unbroken. Call it heredity, call it chance …’
‘Call it a load of codswallop,’ said Flint, and left the room. He needed his sleep and he intended to get it.
In the passage he met Sergeant Yates.
‘There’s been an emergency call from a woman claiming to be Mrs Wilt,’ the Sergeant said.
‘Where from?’
‘She wouldn’t say where she was,’ said Yates. ‘She just said she didn’t know and that she had no clothes on …’
‘Oh one of those,’ said the Inspector. ‘A bloody nutter. What the hell are you wasting my time for? As if we didn’t have enough on our hands without that.’
‘I just thought you’d want to know. If she calls again we’ll try and get a fix on the number.’
‘As if I cared,’ said Flint, and hurried off in search of his lost sleep.
*
The Rev St John Froude spent an uneasy day. His investigation of the church had revealed nothing untoward, and there was no sign that an obscene ritual (a Black Mass had crossed his mind) had been performed there. As he walked back to the Vicarage he was glad to note that the sky over Eel Stretch was empty and that the contraceptives had disappeared. So had the ivy on his desk. He regarded the space where it had been with apprehension and helped himself to whisky. He could have sworn there had been a sprig of ivy there when he had left. By the time he had finished what remained in the bottle his hand was filled with weird fancies. The Vicarage was strangely noisy. There were odd creaks from the staircase and inexplicable sounds from the upper floor as if someone or something was moving stealthily about but when the Vicar went to investigate the noises ceased abruptly. He went upstairs and poked his head into several empty bedrooms. He came down again and stood in the hall listening. Then he returned to his study and tried to concentrate on his sermon, but the feeling that he was not alone persisted. The Rev St John Froude sat at his desk and considered the possibility of ghosts. Something very odd was going on. At one o’clock he went down the hall to the kitchen for lunch and discovered that a pint of milk had disappeared from the pantry and that the remains of an apple pie that Mrs Snape who did his cleaning twice weekly had brought him had also vanished. He made do with baked beans on toast and tottered upstairs for his afternoon nap. It was while he was there that he first heard the voices. Or rather one voice. It seemed to come from his study. The Rev St John Froude sat up in bed. If his ears weren’t betraying him and in view of the morning’s weird events he was inclined to believe that they were he could have sworn someone had been using his telephone. He got up and put on his shoes. Someone was crying. He went out on to the landing and listened. The sobbing had stopped. He went downstairs and looked in all the rooms on the ground floor but, apart from the fact that a dust cover had been removed from one of the armchairs in the unused sitting-room, there was no sign of anyone. He was just about to go upstairs again when the telephone rang. He went into the study and answered it.
‘Waterswick Vicarage,’ he mumbled.
‘This is Fenland Constabulary,’ said a man. ‘We’ve just had a call from your number purporting to come from a Mrs Wilt.’
‘Mrs Wilt?’ said the Rev St John Froude. ‘Mrs Wilt? I’m afraid there must be some mistake. I don’t know any Mrs Wilt.’
‘The call definitely came from your phone, sir.’
The Rev St John Froude considered the matter. ‘This is all very peculiar,’ he said, ‘I live alone.’
‘You are the Vicar?’
‘Of course I’m the Vicar. This is the Vicarage and I am the Vicar.’
‘I see, sir. And your name is?’
‘The Reverend St John Froude. F … R … O … U … D … E.’
‘Quite, sir, and you definitely don’t have a woman in the house.’
‘Of course I don’t have a woman in the house. I find the suggestion distinctly improper. I am a …’
‘I’m sorry, sir, but we just have to check these things out. We’ve had a call from Mrs Wilt, at least a woman claiming to be Mrs Wilt, and it came from your phone …’
‘Who is this Mrs Wilt? I’ve never heard of a Mrs Wilt.’
‘Well sir, Mrs Wilt … it’s a bit difficult really. She’s supposed to have been murdered.’
‘Murdered?’ said the Rev St John Froude. ‘Did you say “murdered”?’
‘Let’s just say she is missing from home in suspicious circumstances. We’re holding her husband for questioning.’
The Rev St John Froude shook his head. ‘How very unfortunate,’ he murmured.
‘Thank you for your help, sir,’ said the Sergeant. ‘Sorry to have disturbed you.’
The Rev St John Froude put the phone down thoughtfully. The notion that he was sharing the house with a disembodied and recently murdered woman was not one that he had wanted to put to his caller. His reputation for eccentricity was already sufficiently widespread without adding to it. On the other hand what he had seen on the boat in Eel Stretch bore, now that he came to think of it, all the hallmarks of murder. Perhaps in some extraordinary way he had been a witness to a tragedy that had already occurred, a sort of post-mortem déja vu if that was the right way of putting it. Certainly if the husband were being held for questioning the murder must have taken place before … In which case … The Rev St John Froude stumbled through a series of suppositions in which Time with a capital T, and appeals for help from beyond the grave figured largely. Perhaps it was his duty to inform the police of what he had seen. He was just hesitating and wondering what to do when he heard those sobs again and this time quite distinctly. They came from the next room. He got up, braced himself with another shot of whisky and went next door. Standing in the middle of the room was a large woman whose hair straggled down over her shoulders and whose face was ravaged. She was wearing what appeared to be a shroud. The Rev St John Froude stared at her with a growing sense of horror. Then he sank to his knees.
‘Let us pray,’ he muttered hoarsely.
The ghastly apparition slumped heavily forward clutching the shroud to its bosom. Together they kneeled in prayer.
*
‘Check it out? What the hell do you mean “check it out”?’ said Inspector Flint, who objected strongly to being woken in the middle of the afternoon when he had had no sleep for thirty-six hours and was trying to get some. ‘You wake me with some damned tomfoolery about a vicar called Sigmund Freud …’
‘St John Froude,’ said Yates.
&nb
sp; ‘I don’t care what he’s called. It’s still improbable. If the bloody man says she isn’t there, she isn’t there. What am I supposed to do about it?’
‘I just thought we ought to get a patrol car to check, that’s all.’
‘What makes you think …’
‘There was definitely a call from a woman claiming to be Mrs Wilt and it came from that number. She’s called twice now. We’ve got a tape of the second call. She gave details of herself and they sound authentic. Date of birth, address, Wilt’s occupation, even the right name of their dog and the fact that they have yellow curtains in the lounge.’
‘Well, any fool can tell that. All they’ve got to do is walk past the house.’
‘And the name of the dog. It’s called Clem. I’ve checked that and she’s right.’
‘She didn’t happen to say what she’d been doing for the past week did she?’
‘She said she’d been on a boat,’ said Yates. ‘Then she rang off.’
Inspector Flint sat up in bed. ‘A boat? What boat?’
‘She rang off. Oh and another thing, she said she takes a size ten shoe. She does.’
‘Oh shit,’ said Flint. ‘All right, I’ll come down.’ He got out of bed and began to dress.
*
In his cell Wilt stared at the ceiling. After so many hours of interrogation his mind still reverberated with questions. ‘How did you kill her? Where did you put her? What did you do with the weapon?’ Meaningless questions continually reiterated in the hope they would finally break him. But Wilt hadn’t broken. He had triumphed. For once in his life he knew himself to be invincibly right and everyone else totally wrong. Always before he had had doubts. Plasterers Two might after all have been right about there being too many wogs in the country. Perhaps hanging was a deterrent. Wilt didn’t think so but he couldn’t be absolutely certain. Only time would tell. But in the case of Regina versus Wilt re the murder of Mrs Wilt there could be no question of his guilt. He could be tried, found guilty and sentenced, it would make no difference. He was innocent of the charge and if he was sentenced to life imprisonment the very enormity of the injustice done to him would compound his knowledge of his own innocence. For the very first time in his life Wilt knew himself to be free. It was as though the original sin of being Henry Wilt, of 34 Parkview Avenue, Ipford, lecturer in Liberal Studies at the Fenland College of Arts and Technology, husband of Eva Wilt and father of none, had been lifted from him. All the encumbrances of possessions, habits, salary and status, all the social conformities, the niceties of estimation of himself and other people which he and Eva had acquired, all these had gone. Locked in his cell Wilt was free to be. And whatever happened he would never again succumb to the siren calls of self-effacement. After the flagrant contempt and fury of Inspector Flint, the abuse and the opprobrium heaped on him for a week, who needed approbation? They could stuff their opinions of him. Wilt would pursue his independent course and put to good use his evident gifts of inconsequence. Give him a life sentence and a progressive prison governor and Wilt would drive the man mad within a month by the sweet reasonableness of his refusal to obey the prison rules. Solitary confinement and a regime of bread and water, if such punishments still existed, would not deter him. Give him his freedom and he would apply his newfound talents at the Tech. He would sit happily on committees and reduce them to dissensions by his untiring adoption of whatever argument was most contrary to the consensus opinion. The race was not to the swift after all, it was to the indefatigably inconsequential and life was random, anarchic and chaotic. Rules were made to be broken and the man with the grasshopper mind was one jump ahead of all the others. Having established this new rule, Wilt turned on his side and tried to sleep but sleep wouldn’t come. He tried his other side with equal lack of success. Thoughts, questions, irrelevant answers and imaginary dialogues filled his mind. He tried counting sheep but found himself thinking of Eva. Dear Eva, damnable Eva, ebullient Eva and Eva irrepressibly enthusiastic. Like him she had sought the Absolute, the Eternal Truth which would save her the bother of ever having to think for herself again. She had sought it in Pottery, in Transcendental Meditation, in Judo, on trampolines and most incongruously of all in Oriental Dance. Finally she had tried to find it in sexual emancipation, Women’s Lib and the Sacrament of the Orgasm in which she could forever lose herself. Which, come to think of it, was what she appeared to have done. And taken the bloody Pringsheims with her. Well she would certainly have some explaining to do when and if she ever returned. Wilt smiled to himself at the thought of what she would say when she discovered what her latest infatuation with the Infinite had led to. He’d see to it that she had cause to regret it to her dying day.
*
On the floor of the sitting-room at the Vicarage Eva Wilt struggled with the growing conviction that her dying day was already over and done with. Certainly everyone she came into contact with seemed to think she was dead. The policeman she had spoken to on the phone had seemed disinclined to believe her assertion that she was alive and at least relatively well and had demanded proofs of her identity in the most disconcerting fashion. Eva had retreated stricken from the encounter with her confidence in her own continuing existence seriously undermined and it had only needed the reaction of the Rev St John Froude to her appearance in his house to complete her misery. His frantic appeals to the Almighty to rescue the soul of our dear departed, one Eva Wilt, deceased, from its present shape and unendurable form had affected Eva profoundly. She knelt on the carpet and sobbed while the Vicar stared at her over his glasses, shut his eyes, lifted up a shaky voice in prayer, opened his eyes, shuddered and generally behaved in a manner calculated to cause gloom and despondency in the putative corpse and when, in a last desperate attempt to get Eva Wilt, deceased, to take her proper place in the heavenly choir he cut short a prayer about ‘Man that is born of Woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery’ and struck up ‘Abide with me’ with many a semi-quaver, Eva abandoned all attempt at self-control and wailed ‘Fast falls the eventide’ most affectingly. By the time they had got to ‘I need thy presence every passing hour’ the Rev St John Froude was of an entirely contrary opinion. He staggered from the room and took sanctuary in his study. Behind him Eva Wilt, espousing her new role as deceased with all the enthusiasm she had formerly bestowed on trampolines, judo and pottery, demanded to know where death’s sting was and where, grave, thy victory. ‘As if I bloody knew,’ muttered the Vicar and reached for the whisky bottle only to find that it too was empty. He sat down and put his hands over his ears to shut out the dreadful noise. On the whole ‘Abide with me’ was the last hymn he should have chosen. He’d have been better off with ‘There is a green hill far away’. It was less open to misinterpretation.
When at last the hymn ended he sat relishing the silence and was about to investigate the possibility that there was another bottle in the larder when there was a knock on the door and Eva entered.
‘Oh Father I have sinned,’ she shrieked, doing her level best to wail and gnash her teeth at the same time. The Rev St John Froude gripped the arms of his chair and tried to swallow. It was not easy. Then overcoming the reasonable fear that delirium tremens had come all too suddenly he managed to speak. ‘Rise, my child,’ he gasped, as Eva writhed on the rug before him, ‘I will hear your confession.’
20
Inspector Flint switched the tape recorder off and looked at Wilt.
‘Well?’
‘Well what?’ said Wilt.
‘Is that her? Is that Mrs Wilt?’
Wilt nodded. ‘I’m afraid so.’
‘What do you mean you’re afraid so? The damned woman is alive. You should be fucking grateful. Instead of that you sit there saying you’re afraid so.’
Wilt sighed. ‘I was just thinking what an abyss there is between the person as we remember and imagine them and the reality of what they are. I was beginning to have fond memories of her and now …’
‘You ever been to Waterswick?’
Wilt shook his head. ‘Never.’
‘Know the Vicar there?’
‘Didn’t even know there was a vicar there.’
‘And you wouldn’t know how she got there?’
‘You heard her,’ said Wilt. ‘She said she’s been on a boat.’
‘And you wouldn’t know anyone with a boat, would you?’
‘People in my circle don’t have boats, Inspector. Maybe the Pringsheims have a boat.’
Inspector Flint considered the possibility and rejected it. They had checked the boatyards out and the Pringsheims didn’t have a boat and hadn’t hired one either.
On the other hand the possibility that he had been the victim of some gigantic hoax, a deliberate and involved scheme to make him look an idiot, was beginning to take shape in his mind. At the instigation of this infernal Wilt he had ordered the exhumation of an inflatable doll and had been photographed staring lividly at it at the very moment it changed sex. He had instituted a round-up of pork pies unprecedented in the history of the country. He wouldn’t be at all surprised if Sweetbreads instituted legal proceedings for the damage done to their previously unspotted reputation. And finally he had held an apparently innocent man for questioning for a week and would doubtless be held responsible for the delay and additional cost in building the new Administration block at the Tech. There were, in all probability, other appalling consequences to be considered, but that was enough to be going on with. And he had nobody to blame but himself. Or Wilt. He looked at Wilt venomously.