Wilt in Nowhere (17 page)

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 county 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.

In her cell in yet another police station in yet another town Ruth Rottecombe felt
the same way about her marriage to the late Shadow Minister for Social Enhancement. She
should have known he was just the sort of idiot to get himself murdered at a time when she
needed his support and influence most desperately. After all, that was what she had
married him for, and she had cultivated that drunken swine Battleby to ensure that
Harold’s seat in Parliament remained absolutely secure. She tried frantically to make
sense out of the chaotic series of events that had led up to his disappearance, but the
noises coming from a drunk who alternated whining pleas to be let out of the cell next to
hers with vomiting, and on the other side what sounded like a foul-mouthed psychotic on
some extremely powerful hallucinogenic drug, made anything approaching rational
thought impossible. So was getting any sleep. Every half-hour the cell door was opened,
the light turned on and a sinister female detective asked her insistently if she was
all right.

‘No, I’m fucking not,’ she had squawked at her time and time again. ‘Haven’t you got
anything better to do than turn the light on and come in and ask that damn-fool
question?’

Each time the detective had said she was just making sure she hadn’t committed suicide
and she had finally left the light on all the time. After three such sleepless nights Ruth
Rottecombe was almost prepared to confess she had murdered Harold. Instead she refused
to answer any more questions.

‘I did not, repeat not, murder Harold. I didn’t harm him in any way at all. I have no idea
who did, either. And that’s my last word.’

‘All right, we’ll talk about something we know you did do,’ the senior detective said.
‘We have proof that you drove to Ipford New Estate with a man in the back of your Volvo
estate and dumped him there. We also have proof that he had been in your garage and had been
bleeding. You know all that so–’

‘I’ve told you I won’t answer any more questions!’ Ruth shouted hoarsely.

‘I’m not asking any. I’m telling you what is undeniable evidence.’

‘Oh, God, why can’t you stop? I know all that and it is deniable.’

‘Right, but what you don’t know is that we have a witness who saw you drag the man out of
the back of your car and dump him in the road. A very reliable witness indeed.’ He paused
to let this sink into Ruth Rottecombe’s weary mind before going on. ‘What we now need to
know is why if, as you’ve said repeatedly, you don’t have any idea what he had done to land
up lying unconscious and bleeding in your garage–you drove him down to that New
Estate.’

Ruth began to cry. This time she wasn’t faking the tears. ‘Harold found him there when he
came back from London. At least he said he had. He was out of his mind and tried to pin the
blame on me. He was shouting and raving and said I’d picked the man up to have sex with him.
I thought he was going to kill me.’

‘Go on. Give us the rest.’

‘He made me go out to the garage and look at the bloody man. I’d never seen him in my life.
I swear I hadn’t.’

‘What happened then?’

‘The telephone rang and it was some bloody newspaper said they wanted to interview
Harold about bringing young men to the house, you know, rent-boys.’

For another hour they went on with the questions and got nowhere. In the end they left
her sobbing in the Interrogation Room with her head on the table, and went into
another office.

‘Could be true except for one thing,’ said the senior Scotland Yard man. ‘That bit of
cloth from this fellow Wilt’s jeans found in the garage and the fact that they discovered
those jeans in the lane behind the Manor House two days after the fire and they hadn’t been
there when they searched the area the first time. Second, he wasn’t wearing any when he was
picked up in Ipford. On top of that all his gear, the boots, socks and knapsack, were in the
attic of the Rottecombe house.’

‘You think she planted the jeans there?’

‘I’m damned sure someone did.’

‘Christ, what a case. And London’s demanding a quick arrest,’ said the
Superintendent.

They were interrupted by a Woman Sergeant. ‘She’s passed out or is pretending to
have,’ she told them. ‘We’ve put her back in the cell.’

The CID man picked up the phone and called Ipford. When he put it down again he shook his
head. ‘They’ve moved the bloke Wilt to a mental hospital for what they call ‘assessment’,
whatever that means. I suppose to see if he’s a psychopath.’ He paused and considered the
possibilities. There didn’t seem to be many rational ones.

One of the other detectives took up the theme. ‘Whoever set this little lot up had to
be damned abnormal. And this bloke Wilt has been in some weird trouble before. Could be he
was paid to torch the house.’

The senior CID man gave the matter some thought. ‘I suppose it’s just possible but this
Inspector Flint doesn’t think so. Reckons the man Wilt’s too bloody incompetent. Wouldn’t
know how to set fire to a pile of newspapers soaked in petrol, he’s that impractical. In
any case, if he’d come to set fire to the house he wouldn’t have left such an obvious trail
staying at bed and breakfasts and giving his real name. No, there has to be someone else.
What beats me is that he and that damned Shadow Minister had head wounds. The Shadow
Minister’s dead and this other fellow might well have been if they hadn’t found him in the
road when they did. No, I reckon this Rottecombe cow knows more than she’s letting on. I
don’t care if she has passed out. I’m going to break her. She knows more than she’s telling.
In any case her background stinks. False birth certificate, high-class prostitute who
dupes an MP into marrying her, and on top of that she goes in for sado-masochism with that
drunken paedophile swine, Battleby. And of course he’s tried to shift the blame on to her.
Says she deliberately encouraged him to become an alcoholic so she could control him.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t an element of truth there.’

And so the questioning went on and got nowhere.

At the Methuen Mental Hospital the female psychiatrist assigned to assessing Wilt’s
psychological state was having as much difficulty. Wilt had passed all the standard
visual and symbolic tests with such surprising ease that the psychiatrist could have
sworn he’d spent considerable time practising doing them. His verbal skills were even
more disconcerting. Only his attitude to sex remained suspicious. It appeared that he
found copulation boring and exhausting, not to say ludicrous and fairly repulsive.
His admiration for the procreative habits of earthworms and amoebas who simply
reproduced by dividing themselves, voluntarily in the case of amoebas and, as far as
Wilt knew, involuntarily by earthworms when they were cut in half by a spade, seemed to
indicate a severely depressed libido. Since the lady shrink was completely ignorant
on the subject of amoebas and earthworms but keen on what little sex her looks attracted,
this information came as a nasty revelation to her.

‘Are you saying you would rather bisect yourself than sleep with your wife?’ she asked,
hoping to draw the inference that Wilt had a tendency towards a split personality.

‘Of course not,’ Wilt replied indignantly. ‘Mind you, when you meet my wife you’ll
understand why I might be.’

‘Your wife does not attract you physically?’

‘I did not say that and in any case, I can’t see what that has to do with you.’

‘I am merely trying to help you,’ said the psychiatrist.

Wilt looked at her sceptically. ‘Really? I thought I had been brought here for
assessment, not for prurient inquiries into my sex life.’

‘Your sexual attitude forms part of the assessment process. We want to get a rounded
picture of your mental condition.’

‘My mental condition has not been affected by being mugged, left unconscious and
beaten over the head. I am not a criminal and by this time I should have thought you’d have
recognised that I have all my wits about me. Having realised that, I suggest you mind your
own business about my married life. And if you think I am some sort of pervert, let me tell
you that my wife and I have produced four daughters or, to put it absolutely correctly,
my wife Eva had quadruplets fourteen years ago. I hope that satisfies you that I am a
normal heterosexual and a father to boot. Now if you want to make me do some more
absurdly simple mental tests, I will happily oblige. What I don’t intend to do is
discuss my marital sex life any further. You can do that with Eva. I think I can hear her
voice now. How clever of her to come to my side at such an opportune moment. Now, if you’ll
excuse me, I think I’ll get police protection.’

Leaving the shrink open-mouthed and gaping through her spectacles he hurried from the
room and moved down the passage away from the sound of Eva demanding to see her darling
Henry. In the background the quads could be heard telling someone who didn’t like what he
was confronted with that he wasn’t seeing double. ‘We aren’t twins, we’re quadruplets,’
they sang in unison.

Wilt hurried on, trying to find a door that wasn’t locked and failing. At that moment
Inspector Flint emerged from his refuge in the Visitors’ Toilet, Eva barged out of the
Waiting Room and the psychiatrist left her office and peered shortsightedly to see what
on earth was happening and collided with Eva. In the mêlée that followed, the
psychiatrist, who had been bowled over and was helped to her feet by the Inspector,
revised her opinion of Wilt.

If the formidable woman who had knocked her down was Mrs Wilt–and the presence of the four
almost identical teenage girls seemed to indicate that she must be–she could fully
understand his lack of interest in marital sex. And his need for police protection. She
groped around for her glasses, perched them on her nose and retreated to her office. Eva
and Inspector Flint followed; Eva to apologise and Flint more reluctantly to find out
how Wilt’s assessment had gone.

The psychiatrist looked at Eva doubtfully and decided not to object to her presence.
‘You want to know my opinion of the patient?’ she asked.

The Inspector nodded. In Eva’s company the less said the soonest mended seemed
entirely appropriate.

‘He seems to be perfectly normal. I did all the routine tests we apply in these cases
and I should say he has no symptoms of abnormality. There is absolutely no reason why
he should not return home.’

She closed the file and stood up.

‘I told you so. There’s nothing wrong with him. You heard her,’ Eva said sharply to Flint.
‘You’ve got no right to hold him any longer. I’m going to take him home.’

‘I really think we should continue this conversation in private,’ said the
Inspector.

‘Don’t mind me. I just happen to work here and this is my office,’ said the
psychiatrist, obviously anxious to get this formidably dangerous woman who knocked
people over out of the place. ‘You can go and continue your discussion in the Visitors’
Room.’

Flint followed Eva out into the passage and into the Waiting Room.

‘Well?’ Eva said as the Inspector shut the door. ‘I want to know what’s been going on,
bringing Henry to an awful place like this.’

‘Mrs Wilt, if you’ll just sit down, I’ll do my best to explain,’ he said.

Eva sat down. ‘You’d better,’ she snapped.

Flint tried to think how to put the situation to her as reasonably as possible. He
didn’t want her to go berserk. ‘I had Mr Wilt brought here for simple assessment to get him
out of the hospital before two Americans from the US Embassy arrived to question him
about something that happened in the States. Something to do with drugs. I don’t know what
it was and I don’t want to know. More importantly he’s suspected of being somehow
involved in the murder of a Shadow Minister, a man called Rottecombe, and…Yes, I know he
couldn’t murder–’ he began but Eva was on her feet.

‘Are you mad?’ she yelled. ‘My Henry wouldn’t hurt a fly. He’s gentle and kind and he
doesn’t know anyone in Government.’

Inspector Flint tried to calm her down. ‘I know that, Mrs Wilt, believe me I do, but
Scotland Yard have evidence he was in the district when the Shadow Minister disappeared
and they want to question him.’

For once in her life Eva resorted to logic. ‘And how many thousands of other people
were around wherever it was?’

‘Herefordshire,’ said the Inspector involuntarily.

Eva’s eyes bulged in her head and her face turned purple. ‘Herefordshire?
Herefordshire? You’re crazy. He doesn’t know anyone in Herefordshire. He’s never been
there. We always go to the Lake District for our summer holidays.’

Flint raised the palms of his hands in submission. Wilt’s inconsequential answers
were evidently infectious. ‘I’m sure you do,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t doubt it for a
moment. All I’m saying–’

‘Is that Henry is wanted by Scotland Yard for the murder of a Shadow Minister. And
you call that all?’

‘I didn’t say he was wanted by Scotland Yard for murder. They just want him to help them
with their inquiries.’

‘And we all know what that means, don’t we just.’

The Inspector struggled to get some sense into the tirade. And as ever with the Wilts
he failed.

In the central concourse of the mental hospital Wilt, who had spent half an hour
searching for a way out, had failed too. All the doors were locked and, dressed as he was, he
had been accosted by four genuinely insane patients two of whom protested they weren’t
depressives and didn’t intend to have electric shock therapy again. Another two sidled
up to him clearly under the influence of some very strong anti-psychotic medication
and giggled rather alarmingly.

Wilt hurried on, unnerved by these encounters and by the atmosphere, and cursing the
peculiar way he was dressed. Through a window he could see an area of lawn with patients
wandering about or sitting on benches in the sun and beyond them a high wire fence. If he
could only find his way out there he’d feel a lot better. But before he could make his way
into the open air, Eva shot out of the Waiting Room and hurried towards him.

‘We’re going home, Henry. Now come along. I’m not listening to any more nonsense from
that dreadful Inspector,’ she ordered. For once Wilt was in no mood to argue. He’d had
quite enough of the dim distracted figures around him and the oppressive atmosphere of
the mental hospital. He followed her through the main door and towards their car which was
parked outside on the gravel, but before they reached it a series of screams echoed through
the building.

‘What on earth is going on?’ Eva demanded of a small and evidently demented man who
was scurrying past, panic-stricken.

‘There’s a girl in there with breasts that move from one side to the other like the
clappers!’ he yelled as he ran past.

Eva knew who that girl was. With a silent curse she turned and pushed her way into the
hospital through the crush of patients trying to escape the awful sight of scurrying
bosoms. Emmeline’s rat Freddy, encouraged by the effect it was having and at the same
time alarmed by the shrieks, was up to its old tricks with a vigour it had never shown
before. The sight of a third pubescent breast apparently changing from right to left and
back again at a rate of knots was too much even for heavily sedated mental patients. They
had been faintly aware that they were not at all well but this was altogether too much.
Hallucinations couldn’t come any worse than this.

By the time Eva reached Emmeline the rat was hidden in her jeans. As mad hysteria broke
out in the concourse and spread through the entire hospital and even into the Secure
Area, Eva, dragging Emmeline and the other three girls, who were enjoying the chaos
Freddy’s imitation of a rampaging breast had caused, forced her way through the deluded
mass struggling in the doorway and, thanks to her size and strength, out into the open air.
By the time they reached the car Wilt was already inside it and cowering in the back
seat.

‘Get in and cover your father,’ Eva ordered. ‘We mustn’t let him be seen by the guard on
the gate.’

The next moment Wilt was on the floor and the four girls were kneeling on top of him. As
Eva started the car and drove down the drive she glanced in the rear-view mirror and
glimpsed a dishevelled Inspector Flint hurtle out of the door of the hospital, trip and
land face down on the gravel. Eva put her foot on the accelerator and five minutes later
they were through the gates and heading for Oakhurst Avenue.