Wilt (17 page)

‘Then why the clothes, why blow the thing up and why leave it in such a position it was
bound to be spotted when the concrete was poured down? Why didn’t he cover it with earth if
he didn’t want it to be found? Why didn’t he just burn the bloody thing or leave it by the
roadside? It just doesn’t make sense unless you see it as a deliberate plan to draw our
attention away from the real crime.’ The Inspector paused. ‘Well now, the way I see it is
that something happened at that party we don’t know anything about. Perhaps Wilt found his
wife in bed with Dr Pringsheim. He killed them both. Mrs Pringsheim puts in an appearance
and he kills her too.’

‘How?’ said Mr Gosdyke. ‘You didn’t find that much blood.’

‘He strangled her. He strangled his own wife. He battered Pringsheim to death. Then he
hides the bodies somewhere, goes home and lays the doll trail. On Sunday he disposes of
the real bodies…’

‘Where?’

‘God alone knows, but I’m going to find out. All I know is that a man who can think up a
scheme like this one is bound to have thought of somewhere diabolical to put the real
victims. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he spent Sunday making illegal use of the
crematorium. Whatever he did can be sure he did it thoroughly.’

But Mr Gosdyke remained unconvinced. ‘I wish I knew how you could be so certain,’ he
said.

‘Mr Gosdyke,’ said the Inspector wearily. ‘you have spent two hours with your client. I
have spent the best part of the week and if I’ve learnt one thing from the experience it is
this, that sod in there knows what he is doing. Any normal man in his position would have
been worried and alarmed and down right frightened. Any innocent man faced with a missing
wife and the evidence we’ve got of murder would have had a nervous breakdown. Not Wilt. Oh
no, he sits in there as bold as you please and tells me how to conduct the investigation.
Now if anything convinces me that that bastard is as guilty as hell that does. He did it and
I know it. And what is more, I’m going to prove it.’

‘He seems a bit worried now,’ said Mr Gosdyke.

‘He’s got reason to be,’ said the Inspector, ‘because by Monday morning I’m going to
get the truth out of him even if it kills him and me both.’

‘Inspector,’ said Mr Gosdyke getting to his feet, ‘I must warn you that I have advised
my client not to say another word and if he appears in Court with a mark on him…’

‘Mr Gosdyke, you should know me better than that. I’m not a complete fool and if your
client has any marks on him on Monday morning they will not have been made by me or any of my
men. You have my assurance on that.’

Mr Gosdyke left the Police Station a puzzled man. He had to admit that Wilt’s story
hadn’t been a very convincing one. Mr Gosdyke’s experience of murderers was not
extensive but he had a shrewd suspicion that men who confessed openly that they had
entertained fantasies of murdering their wives ended by admitting that they had done so
in fact. Besides his attempt to get Wilt to agree that he’d put the doll down the hole as a
practical joke on his colleagues at the Tech had failed hopelessly. Wilt had refused to
lie and Mr Gosdyke was not used to clients who insisted on telling the truth.

Inspector Flint went back into the interview Room and looked at Wilt. Then he pulled up
a chair and sat down.

‘Henry,’ he said with an affability he didn’t feel, ‘you and I are going to have a
little chat.’

‘What, another one?’ said Wilt. ‘Mr Gosdyke has advised me to say nothing.’

‘He always does,’ said the Inspector sweetly, ‘to clients he knows are guilty. Now are
you going to talk?’

‘I can’t see why not. I’m not guilty and it helps to pass the time.’

It was Friday and as on every other day in the week the little church at Waterswick
was empty. And as on every other day of the week the Vicar, the Reverend St John Froude was
drunk. The two things went together, the lack of a congregation and the Vicar’s
insobriety. It was an old tradition dating back to the days of smuggling, when Brandy
for the Parson had been about the only reason the isolated hamlet had a vicar at all. And
like so many English traditions it died hard. The Church authorities saw to it that
Waterswick got idiosyncratic parsons whose awkward enthusiasms tended to make them
unsuitable for more respectable parishes and they, to console themselves for its
remoteness and lack of interest in things spiritual, got alcoholic. The Rev St John
Froude maintained tradition. He attended to his duties with the same Anglo-Catholic
Fundamentalist fervour that had made him so popular in Esher and turned an alcoholic
eye on the activities of his few parishioners who, now that brandy was not so much in
demand, contented themselves with the occasional boatload of illegal Indian
immigrants.

Now as he finished a breakfast of eggnog and Irish coffee and considered the
iniquities of his more egregious colleagues as related in the previous Sunday’s
paper he was startled see something wobbling above the reeds on Eel Stretch. It looked like
balloons, white sausage-shaped balloons that rose briefly and then disappeared. The Rev St
John Froude shuddered, shut his eyes, opened them again and thought about the virtues of
abstinence. If he was right and he didn’t know whether he wanted to be or not, the morning
was being profaned by a cluster of contraceptives, inflated contraceptives wobbling
erratically where by the nature of things no contraceptive had ever wobbled before.
At least he hoped it was cluster. He was so used to seeing things in twos when they were in
fact ones that he couldn’t be sure if what looked like a cluster of inflated
contraceptives wasn’t just one or better still none at all.

He reeled off to his study to get his binoculars and stepped out onto the terrace to
focus them. By that time the manifestation had disappeared. The Rev St John Froude shook
his head mournfully. Things and in particular his liver had reached a pretty pickle for
him to have hallucinations so early in the morning. He went back into the house and
tried to concentrate his attention on a case involving an Archdeacon in Ongar who had
undergone a sex-change operation before eloping with his verger. There was matter
there for a sermon if only he could think of a suitable text.

At the bottom of the garden Eva Wilt watched his retreat and wondered what to do. She
had no intention of going up to the house and introducing herself in her present
condition. She needed clothes, or at least some sort of covering. She looked around for
something temporary and finally decided on some ivy climbing up the graveyard fence.
With one eye on the Vicarage she emerged from the willow tree and scampered across to the
fence and through the gate into the churchyard. There she ripped some ivy off the trunk of a
tree and, carrying it in front of her rather awkwardly, made her way surreptitiously up
the overgrown path towards the church. For the most part her progress was masked from the
house by the trees but once or twice she had to crouch low and scamper from tombstone to
tombstone in full view of the Vicarage. By the time she reached the church porch she was
panting and her sense of impropriety had been increased tenfold. If the prospect of
presenting herself at the house in the nude offended her on grounds of social decorum,
going into a church in the raw was positively sacrilegious. She stood in the porch and
tried frantically to steel herself to go in. There were bound to be surplices for the
choir in the vestry and dressed in a surplice she could go up to the house. Or could she? Eva
wasn’t sure about the significance of surplices and the Vicar might be angry. Oh dear it
was all so awkward. In the end she opened the church door and went inside. It was cold and
damp and empty. Clutching the ivy to her she crossed to the vestry door and tried it. It was
locked. Eva stood shivering and tried to think. Finally she went outside and stood in the
sunshine trying to get warm.

In the Staff room at the Tech, Dr Board was holding court. ‘All things considered I think
we came out of the whole business rather creditably,’ he said. ‘The Principal has always
said he wanted to put the college on the map and with the help of friend Wilt it must be said
he has succeeded. The newspaper coverage has been positively prodigious. I shouldn’t
be surprised if our student intake jumped astonishingly.’

‘The committee didn’t approve our facilities,’ said Mr Morris, ’so you can hardly
claim their visit was an unqualified success.’

‘Personally I think they got their money’s worth,’ said Dr Board. ‘It’s not every day
you get the chance to see an exhumation and an execution at the same time. The one
usually precedes the other and certainly the experience of seeing what to all
intents and purposes was a woman turn in a matter of seconds into a man, an
instantaneous sex change, was to use a modern idiom, a mind-blowing one.’

‘Talking of poor Mayfield,’ said the Head of Geography, ‘I understand he’s still at
the Mental Hospital.’

‘Committed?’ asked Dr Board hopefully.

‘Depressed. And suffering from exhaustion.’

‘Hardly surprising. Anyone who can use language…abuse language like that is asking
for trouble. Structure as a verb, for example.’

‘He had set great score by the joint Honours degree and the fact that it has been turned
down…’

‘Quite right too,’ said Dr Board. ‘The educative value of stuffing second-rate
students with fifth-rate ideas on subjects as diverse as Medieval Poetry and Urban
Studies escapes me. Far better that they should spend their time watching the police dig
up the supposed body of a woman coated in concrete, stretch her neck, rip all her clothes
off her, hang her and finally blow her up until she explodes. Now that is what I call a
truly educational experience. It combines archaeology with criminology, zoology
with physics, anatomy with economic theory, while maintaining the students’ undivided
attention all the time. If we must have joint Honours degrees let them be of that
vitality. Practical too. I’m thinking of sending away for one of those dolls.’

‘It still leaves unresolved the question of Mrs Wilt’s disappearance,’ said Mr
Morris.

‘Ah, dear Eva,’ said Dr Board wistfully. ‘Having seen so much of what I imagined to be
her I shall, if I ever have the pleasure of meeting her again treat her with the utmost
courtesy. An amazingly versatile woman and interestingly proportioned. I think I
shall christen my doll Eva.’

‘But the police still seem to think she is dead.’

‘A woman like that can never die.’ said Dr Board. ‘She may explode but her memory
lingers on indelibly.’

In his study the Rev St John Froude shared Dr Board’s opinion. The memory of the large and
apparently naked lady he had glimpsed emerging from the willow tree at the bottom of his
garden like some disgustingly oversized nymph and scuttling through the churchyard was
not something he was ever likely to forget. Coming so shortly after the apparition of
the inflated contraceptives it lent weight to the suspicion that he had been overdoing
things on the alcohol side. Abandoning the sermon he had been preparing on the apostate
Archdeacon of Ongar–he had had ‘By their fruits ye shall know them’ in mind as a text–he got
up and peered out of the window in the direction of the church and was wondering if he
shouldn’t go down and see if there wasn’t a large fat naked lady there when his attention
was drawn to the reeds across the water. They were there again, those infernal things. This
time there could be no doubt about it. He grabbed his binoculars and stared furiously
through them. He could see them much more clearly than the first time and much more
ominously. The sun was high in the sky and a mist rose over Eel Stretch so that the
contraceptives had a luminescent sheen about them, an insubstantiality that was
almost spiritual in its implications. Worse still, there appeared to be something
written on them. The message was clear if incomprehensible. It read PEESOP. The Rev St
John Froude lowered his binoculars and reached for the whisky bottle and considered the
significance of PEESOP etched ectoplasmically against the sky. By the time he had
finished his third hurried glass and had decided that spiritualism might after all have
something to be said for it though why you almost always found yourself in touch with a Red
Indian who was acting by proxy for an aunt which might account for the misspelling of
Peasoup while removing some of the less attractive ingredients from the stuff, the wind
had changed the letters round. This time when he looked the message read EELPOPS. The Vicar
shuddered. What eel was popping and how?

‘The sins of the spirit,’ he said reproachfully to his fourth glass of whisky before
consulting the oracle once more. POSHELLS was followed by HEPOLP to be succeeded by
SHHLPSPO which was even worse. The Rev St John Froude thrust his binoculars and the bottle
of whisky aside and went down on his knees to pray for deliverance or at least for some
guidance in interpreting the message. But every time he got up to see if his wish had
been granted the combination of letters was as meaningless as ever or downright
threatening. What, for instance, did HELLSPO signify? Or SLOSHHEEL? Finally,
determined to discover for himself the true nature of the occurrence, he put on his
cassock and wove off down the garden path to the boathouse.

‘They shall rue the day,’ he muttered as he climbed into the rowing boat and took the
oars. The Rev St John Froude held firm views on contraception. It was one of the tenets of
his Anglo-Catholicism.

In the cabin cruiser Gaskell slept soundly. Around him Sally made her preparations.
She undressed and changed into the plastic bikini. She took a silk square from her bag and
put it on the table and she fetched a jug from the kitchen and leaning over the side filled
it with water. Finally she went into the toilet and made her face up in the mirror. When
she emerged she was wearing false eyelashes, her lips were heavily red and pancake
make-up obscured her pale complexion. She was carrying a bathing-cap. She crossed the
door of the galley and put an arm up and stuck her hip out.

‘Gaskell baby,’ she called.

Gaskell opened his eyes and looked at her. ‘What the bell gives?’

‘Like it, baby?’

Gaskell put on his glasses. In spite of himself he did like it. ‘You think you’re going
to, wheedle round me, you’re wrong…’

Sally smiled. ‘Conserve the verbiage. You turn me on, bio-degradable baby.’ She moved
forward and sat on the bunk beside him.

‘What are you trying to do?’

‘Make it up, babykink. You deserve a cure.’ She fondled him gently. ‘Like the old days.
Remember?’

Gaskell remembered and felt weak. Sally leant forward and pressed him down on to the
bunk.

‘Surrogate Sally,’ she said and unbuttoned his shirt.

Gaskell squirmed. ‘If you think…’

‘Don’t think, kink,’ said Sally and undid his jeans. ‘Only erect.’

‘Oh God,’ said Gaskell. The perfume, the plastic, the mask of a face and her hands were
awakening ancient fantasies. He lay supine on the bunk staring at her while Sally
undressed him. Even when she rolled him over on his face and pulled his hands behind his back
he made no resistance.

‘Bondage baby,’ she said softly and reached for the silk square.

‘No, Sally, no,’ he said weakly. Sally smiled grimly and tied his hands together,
winding the silk between his wrists carefully before tightening it. When she had
finished Gaskell whimpered. ‘You’re hurting me.’

Sally rolled him over. ‘You love it,’ she said and kissed him. She sat back and stroked him
gently. ‘Harder, baby, real hard. Lift me lover sky high.’

‘Oh Sally.’

‘That’s my baby and now the waterproof.’

‘There’s no need. I like it better without.’

‘But I do, G. I need it to prove you loved me till death did us part.’ She bent over and
rolled it down.

Gaskell stared up at her. Something was wrong.

‘And now the cap.’ She reached over and picked up the bathing-cap.

‘The cap?’ said Gaskell. ‘Why the cap? I don’t want that thing on.’

‘Oh but you do, sweetheart It makes you look girlwise.’ She fitted the cap over his head.
‘Now into Sallia inter alia.’ She undid the bikini and lowered herself on to him.
Gaskell moaned and stared up at her. She was lovely. It was a long time since she had been so
good. But he was still frightened. There was a look in her eyes he hadn’t seen before.
‘Untie me,’ he pleaded, ‘you’re hurting my arm.’

But Sally merely smiled and gyrated. ‘When you’ve come and gone, G baby. When you’ve
been.’ She moved her hips. ‘Come, bum, come quick.’

Gaskell shuddered.

‘Finished?’

He nodded. ‘Finished,’ he sighed.

‘For good, baby, for good,’ said Sally. ‘That was it. You’re past the last.’

‘Past the last?’

‘You’ve come and gone, G, come and gone. It’s Styxside for you now.

‘Stickside?’

‘S for Sally, T for Terminal, Y for You and X for Fast. All that’s left is this.’ She
reached over and picked up the jug of muddy water. Gaskell turned his head and looked at
it.

‘What’s that for?’

‘For you, baby. Mudders milk.’ She moved up his body and sat on his chest. ‘Open your
mouth.’

Gaskell Pringsheim stared up at her frantically. He began to writhe ‘You’re mad. You’re
crazy.’

‘Now just lie quietly and it won’t hurt. It will soon be over, lover. Natural death by
drowning. In bed. You’re making’ history.’

‘You bitch, you murderous bitch.’

‘Cerberuswise,’ said Sally, and poured the water into his mouth. She put the jug down
and pulled the cap down over his face.