by Tom Sharpe
At the same time the police methodically searched Leyline Lodge and took away a number of canes and any heavier objects which could have been used to inflict the head wound on Harold Rottecombe’s head before he had, as they imagined, been pushed unconscious into the river. Urged on by the Party Central Committee officials they dismissed the possibility that the Shadow Minister’s death had been accidental.
‘He drowned in the river and that’s for sure,’ the senior CID Inspector told the police group dealing with the case. ‘Forensic checked the water in his lungs and it wasn’t sea water. They’re absolutely definite about that. They can’t be certain of the date he died but it was almost certainly a week to ten days ago. Probably more. That’s one thing we know. Secondly, his Jag is still in the garage so he didn’t drive down to the coast and chuck himself off the cliffs. That goes without saying. Another thing, his wife had driven the car or moved it at any rate because her fingerprints were on the steering-wheel, weren’t they?’
The Superintendent from Oston confirmed this. They indicated she was the last person to use the car,’ he said.
Then there was the blood on the floor of the Volvo estate where Wilt had bled. ‘Which confirms what she was doing in Ipford. So we’ve got her on any number of charges, and more importantly this bloke Wilt had the same type of head wound as her husband. So we go on questioning her round the clock until she breaks. Oh, and one other thing, we’ve been looking into her background and it stinks. False birth certificate, prostitute specialising in S & M, she’s done the lot. As hard as they come.’
‘Hasn’t she asked to phone her lawyer?’ another detective asked.
The CID Chief Inspector smiled. ‘Phoned her husband’s lawyer and strangely enough he’s not available. Says he’s on holiday. Well, that’s what he’s told me. Gone to France. Very wise of him. She can have legal aid, of course. Some dimmy who’ll do her more harm than good and she knows it so she’s refused.’
In the Interrogation Room Ruth the Ruthless was refusing to answer questions too.
33
As Flint had hoped the arrival of Hodge and the two Americans at 45 Oakhurst Avenue was not a success. They found Eva in tears.
‘I don’t know where he is,’ she sobbed. ‘He’s just disappeared. We came back from America and found he’d gone but I don’t know where. There was no note or anything and his credit cards were on the kitchen table, and his chequebook. He hadn’t taken any money out of the bank so I don’t know what to think.’
‘Could be he’s had an accident. Have you tried the hospital?’
‘Of course I have. The first thing I did but they were no help.’
‘Has he shown any interest in any other women?’ one of the Americans asked, regarding her critically.
Eva’s tears stopped immediately. She had had enough of Americans and particularly plainclothes police ones who wore shades and drove up in cars with darkened windows.
‘No, he hasn’t,’ she snapped. ‘He’s always been a very good husband so you can go to hell, asking questions like that.’
On this furious note she slammed the door in their faces. They went back to the car and discovered they had a flat. From the upstairs window of their room the quads watched gleefully. Josephine had let the tyre down.
At the hospital Inspector Flint was surprised to be met in the corridor by Dr Dedge. The psychiatrist was looking desperately haggard and kept shaking his head in a helpless sort of manner.
‘Thank God you’ve come,’ he said, and grasping Flint’s arm he dragged him into his office, indicated a chair and slumped into one behind his desk. He opened a drawer and took several blue pills.
‘Having a difficult time with our friend Wilt?’ Flint asked.
The doctor stared at him with bulging eyes. ‘Difficult?’ he gasped incredulously. ‘Difficult? That bastard in there had the gall to get me out of bed at 4 a.m. this morning to tell me I was descended from the Pongid family.’ He paused to get a glass of water and another blue pill.
‘You mean to say you drove back here—’ Flint began but Dr Dedge seemed to be having a choking fit.
‘Drove? I didn’t drive. I’m forced to sleep in here on that bloody couch in the corner in case yet another lunatic chooses to hang himself or go berserk in the night. That’s how short-staffed we are. And I’m a highly qualified psychiatrist specialising in serious cases of paranoid psychotic disorder, not a damned night-watchman.’
Flint was about to say he sympathised when the doctor went on.
‘And to cap it all that swine in there sleeps all day and seems to spend all night devising fiendish questions for me and ringing the panic button. You don’t know what he’s like.’
Flint said he did. ‘He’s the master of inconsequential answers. I’ve questioned him for hours on end and he always goes off at a tangent.’
Dr Dedge leant forward on to his desk. ‘I’m not asking him questions. The bastard’s asking me. At 4 a.m. he asked me if I realised I was 99.4 per cent a baboon because that’s what DNA analysis indicated. That’s what he meant by my ancestral family being members of the Pongid family.’
‘Actually he’s got it wrong. He didn’t mean baboon. He was talking about chimpanzees,’ said Flint in an effort to calm the man down.
It didn’t work. Dr Dedge looked wildly at him. ‘A chimpanzee? Are you mad too? Do I look like a baboon or a chimpanzee and I’ve never had a DNA analysis and what’s with my ancestors being Pongids? My father was a Dedge and my mother’s family name is Fawcett and always has been since 1605. We’ve done a genealogical tree on both sides of the family and there’s no one called Pongid on it.’
Inspector Flint tried another tack. ‘He’s been reading the papers. There’s been all this stuff about Pongids being older than Hominids and Homo sapiens. The latest theory is—’
‘Fuck the latest theory!’ shouted the psychiatrist. ‘I want some sleep. Can’t you take that maniac off to the police station and give him the third degree there?’
‘No,’ said Flint firmly. ‘He’s a sick man and—’
‘You can say that again and I’m going to join him if he stays here much longer. Anyway, we’ve done scans and all the tests needed and they none of them indicate any actual damage to his brain – if that’s what’s inside his blasted head.’
Flint sighed and went out into the corridor and entered the Isolation Room to find Wilt sitting up in bed smiling to himself. He’d rather enjoyed what he’d heard the doctor shouting next door. The Inspector stood at the end of the bed and stared at Wilt for a moment. Whatever he’d done to drive Dr Dedge virtually out of his mind it was clear to Flint that Wilt had all or most of his senses about him. He decided his tactics. He’d had a long conversation on the phone with the Superintendent in Oston and knew where Wilt had been. Two could play a game of bluff.
‘All right, Henry,’ he said and took out a pair of handcuffs. ‘This time you’ve gone too far. Faking the murder of your missis by dumping an inflatable doll dressed in her clothes down a pile hole when you knew perfectly well she was alive and on a stolen boat with those Californians was one thing, but arson and the murder of a Shadow Minister is another. So you can wipe that smile off your face.’
Wilt’s smile vanished.
Flint locked the door and sat down very close to the bed.
‘Murder? Murder of a Shadow Minister?’ said Wilt, now genuinely startled.
‘You heard me. Murder and arson in a village called Meldrum Slocum.’
‘Meldrum Slocum? I’ve never even heard of the place.’
‘Then you tell me how your jeans were found in a lane behind the Manor House there which some bastard torched. Your jeans, Henry, with burn marks and ash on them and you’ve never heard of the place. Don’t give me that bullshit.’
‘But I swear to God—’
‘You can swear all you like but the evidence is there. First, the jeans with mud on them found in a lane behind the burnt-out house. And the mud matches that in the la
ne. Third, you were definitely in the garage belonging to the murdered Shadow Minister. They’ve done a DNA test on that blood and it fits yours exactly. They also found your knapsack inside the house of the other suspect. These are the facts. Undeniable facts. And just to cheer you up let me tell you Scotland Yard are involved. This is not something you can talk your way out of this time like you’ve done before.’
Flint let this awful information sink into Wilt’s bewildered mind. He tried to remember how all this had happened but only disjointed scenes came back to him.
‘Think, Henry, think. This isn’t some prank. I’m telling you the gospel truth.’
Wilt looked at him and knew that Inspector Flint was deadly serious.
‘I don’t know what happened to me and that’s the gospel truth too. I remember not wanting to go to America to stay with Eva’s Aunt Joan and her husband Wally Immelmann. So I told her I had a class to prepare for next term and got some books Wally Immelmann would hate out of the library and of course she made a fuss and said I couldn’t take them.’
‘What sort of books?’
‘Oh, books about Castro’s wonderful Cuba and the Marxist Theory of Revolution. The sort of stuff he detests. I can’t say I like it myself but he’d have had an apoplectic fit if I’d turned up in Wilma with the books I said I was going to take. There were others but I can’t remember them all.’
‘And your missis swallowed that story?’
‘Hook, line and sinker,’ said Wilt. ‘Anyway, it was plausible. We’ve still got lunatics who think Lenin was a saint and Stalin was fundamentally a kindly chap at heart. Some people never learn, do they?’
Flint kept his thoughts on the matter to himself. ‘All right, I’ll accept what you’ve told me so far. What I want to know is what you did next. And don’t give me any hogwash about having amnesia. The doctors say your brain hasn’t been damaged. At least not any more than it was before you got into this scrape.’
‘I can tell you what I did up to a certain point but after that until I woke up in that Terminal Ward I haven’t a clue. The last thing I remember was being in a wood soaked to the skin and stumbling forward over a root or something and falling. From then on, nothing. I can’t help you any further.’
‘OK, let’s go back a bit. Where had you come from?’ said the Inspector.
‘That’s the point. I don’t know. I was on a walking tour.’
‘From where to where?’
‘I didn’t know. In fact I didn’t want to know. I just wanted to go nowhere. You see what I mean?’
Flint shook his head. ‘Not one bloody word,’ he said. ‘You didn’t want to know. You just wanted to go. And that makes sense? Not to me it doesn’t. A lot of gibberish is what it sounds like to me. Deliberate gibberish. Like lies. You had to know where you wanted to go.’
Wilt sighed. He’d known Inspector Flint on and off for a good number of years and he should have predicted the Inspector wouldn’t understand that he didn’t want to know where he was going. He tried to explain again.
‘I wanted to get away from Ipford, the Tech, the routine of going to work, if you can call it work, and clear my mind of all that junk by finding England without any preconceptions.’
Flint tried to grasp what Wilt was saying and failed as usual. ‘So how come you ended up in Meldrum Slocum?’ he said in a desperate attempt to get some sanity into the conversation. ‘You must have come from somewhere.’
‘I told you. From a wood. And anyhow I was pissed.’
‘And I’m pissed off with having the mickey taken out of me,’ snarled Flint and went back to Dr Dedge’s office and banged on the door only to be told to fuck off.
‘All I want to know is if that bloody man is well enough to go home. Just tell me that.’
‘Listen!’ shouted the psychiatrist. ‘I don’t give a damn whether he is well or not. Get him out of here. He’ll be the death of me. Is that good enough for you?’
‘Would you say he ought to be in a mental hospital?’ asked Flint.
‘I can’t think of a better place for the swine!’ yelled Dr Dedge.
‘In that case I’ll need you to certify him.’
He was answered by a moan. ‘I can’t do that. He’s not certifiably insane,’ the psychiatrist said and opened the door. He was in his underpants. He hesitated for a moment and came to a decision. ‘I tell you what I will do. I’ll recommend him for assessment and leave the doctors at the Methuen to make the decision.’
And on this note he crossed to his desk and filled in a form and handed it to the Inspector. ‘That will get him off my back at any rate.’
Flint went back to Wilt. ‘You heard what he said. You don’t have to stay here any longer.’
‘What did he mean by assessment?’
‘Don’t ask me. I’m not a psychiatrist,’ said the Inspector.
‘Nor is he, come to that,’ said Wilt but he got out of bed and began looking for his clothes. There weren’t any. ‘I’m not going anywhere dressed like this,’ he said, indicating the long nightdress he’d been given in the Geriatric Ward.
Flint went back to Dr Dedge whose temper hadn’t improved. ‘In the clothes he came in, of course,’ he snarled through the door.
‘But they were taken away as evidence that he’d been assaulted.’
‘Try the Morgue. There’s bound to be a corpse down there with clothes his size. Now leave me alone to get some sleep.’
The Inspector went down the corridor, asked directions to the Morgue and, having finally found it and explained his reason for coming, was called a grave robber and told to get the hell out. In a fury he went back and snitched a white coat from a male nurse’s dressing room when its owner was in the lavatory. Ten minutes later Wilt, dressed in the white coat which was far too short to cover his hospital gown, was in the bus with Flint, on his way to the Methuen Mental Hospital protesting vehemently that he didn’t need ‘assessing’.
‘All they’ll do is ask you a few simple questions and let you go,’ Flint told him. ‘Anyway, it’s a damned sight better than being sectioned.’
‘And what precisely does that mean?’ Wilt asked.
‘Being declared insane and held against your will.’
Wilt said nothing. He’d changed his mind about being assessed.
34
In Wilma the Drug Enforcement Agents had given up their surveillance of the Starfighter Mansion. An autopsy of the sniffer dog and the analysis of the remains of the capsule on the bottom of the pool had indicated nothing in the least suspicious. The dog had died of natural causes almost certainly brought on by a lifetime’s diet of drugs to give him the nose for heroin, crack cocaine, ecstasy, opium, LSD, marijuana and anything else that came on the market. In short the dog was a raving drug addict and recently it had been forced to inhale tobacco smoke, the latest banned substance, to such an extent that shortly before its death it had eaten two cigarette butts in a desperate effort to assuage this new addiction. All in all it had been a thoroughly sick dog.
The same could not be said for the water in the pool. It had recently been emptied and refilled and there were no traces of illegal substances in the one hundred thousand gallons of fresh water.
‘You should have hooked the pool outlet up to the analyser tank back of the old drive-in,’ Murphy told the men who had been checking what came out of the toilets and bathrooms in the Starfighter.
‘You think we can get a hundred thousand gallons from a pool into this thing? You’ve got to be crazy. You should have taken a sample right at the start.’
‘Oh sure, first thing you do is test for illegal substances in swimming-pools. That’s genius. Like dope carriers always dump the stuff there. What they do then? Wait till the water evaporates? Jesus, we’ve got some real geniuses round here.’
They reported back to the office in Atlanta.
‘We’ve been given the run-around. Either Sol was sucker bait and someone else was running the stuff or those Poles were selling foot powder. What�
�s Washington say?’
‘Says you’ve screwed up.’
‘That fucker Campito was a fucking decoy,’ said Palowski as they left the office. ‘Had to be. Just let me get my hands on the bastard I’ll castrate the swine.’
‘Too late,’ said Murphy. ‘They’ve found his body in the Everglades – or the bits of it the alligators left.’
As the DEA team pulled out of Wilma, Wally Immelmann lay in the Coronary Unit staring bleakly at the ceiling and cursing the day he’d ever got married to that fat bitch Joanie or allowed her to bring her goddam niece over with those terrible girls. They had ruined his marriage and his reputation with that damned recording and he wouldn’t be able to show his face in Wilma again. Not that he cared too much about his marriage – at times he was grateful to the little bitches for wrecking it. Infinitely more infuriating were the business consequences of their obscene emails. Immelmann Enterprises had lost virtually every customer he had cultivated over the past fifteen years and several of them were threatening him with lawsuits. He had tried to contact his lawyers only to be told that they no longer wished to represent a man who was mad enough to send messages calling them ‘cocksuckers’ and ‘motherfuckers’, not to mention announcing to the world in the crudest terms and at one thousand decibels that he made a habit of sodomising his wife. Even Congressman Herb Reich had been a recipient of one of the more abusive emails. To cap it all Maybelle’s statement to Sheriff Stallard hadn’t helped either. The news that the most prominent businessman in Wilma regularly had sex with black employees had spread all over the country and almost certainly was known right across the State. In short, he was a ruined man. He’d have to leave town and change his name and hole up somewhere he wasn’t known. And it was all that fucking Joanie’s fault. He should never have married the bitch.