Wilt on High (18 page)

Flint picked up the phone and called the Drug Addiction Study Unit at the Ipford Hospital.

By lunchtime, Wilt was up and about. To be exact, he’d been up and about several times during the morning, in part to get another hot-water bottle from the freezer, but more often in a determined effort not to masturbate himself to death. It was all very well Eva supposing she’d benefit from the effects of whatever diabolical irritant she’d added to his homebrew, but to Wilt’s way of thinking, a wife who’d damned near poisoned her husband didn’t deserve what few sexual benefits he had to offer. Give her an inkling of satisfaction from this experiment and next time he’d land up in hospital with internal bleeding and a permanent erection. As it was, he had a hard time with his penis.

‘I’ll freeze the damn thing down,’ had been Wilt’s first thought and for a while it had worked, though painfully. But after a time he had drifted off to sleep and had woken an hour later with the awful impression that he’d taken it into his head to have an affair with a freshly caught Dover Sole. Wilt hurled himself off the thing and had then taken the bottle downstairs to put it back in the fridge before realizing that this wouldn’t be particularly hygienic. He was in the process of washing it when the front doorbell rang. Wilt dropped the bottle on the draining-board, retrieved it from the sink when it slithered off and finally tried wedging it between the upturned teapot and a casserole dish in the drying rack, before going to answer the call.

It was not the postman as he expected, but Mavis Mottram. ‘What are you doing at home?’ she asked.

Wilt sheltered behind the door and pulled his dressing-gown tightly round him. ‘Well, as a matter of fact …’ he began.

Mavis pushed past him and went through to the kitchen. ‘I just came round to see if Eva could organize the food side of things.’

‘What things?’ asked Wilt, looking at her with loathing. It was thanks to this woman that Eva had consulted Dr Kores. Mavis ignored the question. In her dual rôle as militant feminist and secretary of Mothers Against The Bomb, she evidently considered Wilt to be part of the male subspecies. ‘Is she going to be back soon?’ she went on.

Wilt smiled unpleasantly and shut the kitchen door behind him. If Mavis Mottram was going to treat him like a moron, he felt inclined to behave like one. ‘How do you know she’s not here?’ he asked, testing the blade of a rather blunt breadknife against his thumb.

‘The car’s not outside and I thought … well, you usually take it …’ She stopped.

Wilt put the breadknife on the magnetic holder next to the Sabatier ones. It looked out of place. ‘Phallic,’ he said. ‘Interesting.’

‘What is?’

‘Lawrentian,’ said Wilt, and retrieved the icing syringe from a plastic bucket where Eva had been soaking it in Dettol in an attempt to persuade herself she would be able to use the thing again.

‘Lawrentian?’ said Mavis, beginning to sound genuinely alarmed.

Wilt put the syringe on the counter and wiped his hands. Eva’s washing-up gloves caught his eye. ‘I agree,’ he said and began putting the gloves on.

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ asked Mavis, suddenly remembering Wilt and the inflated doll. She moved round the kitchen table towards the door and then thought better of it. Wilt in a dressing-gown and no pyjama trousers, and now wearing a pair of rubber gloves and holding a cake-icing syringe, was an extremely disturbing sight. ‘Anyway, if you’ll ask her to call me, I’ll explain about the food side of …’ Her voice trailed off.

Wilt was smiling again. He was also squirting a yellowish liquid into the air from the syringe. Images of some demented doctor in an early horror movie flickered in her mind. ‘You were saying something about her not being here,’ said Wilt and stepped back in front of the door. ‘Do go on.’

‘Go on about what?’ said Mavis with a distinct quaver.

‘About her not being here. I find your interest curious, don’t you?’

‘Curious?’ mumbled Mavis, desperately trying to find some thread of sanity in his inconsequential remarks. ‘What’s curious about it? She’s obviously out shopping and –’

‘Obviously?’ asked Wilt, and gazed vacantly past her out of the window and down the garden. ‘I wouldn’t have said anything was obvious.’

Mavis involuntarily followed his gaze and found the back garden almost as sinister as Wilt with washing-up
gloves and that bloody syringe. With a fresh effort, she forced herself to turn back and speak normally. ‘I’ll be off now,’ she said and moved forward.

Wilt’s fixed smile crumbled. ‘Oh, not so soon,’ he said. ‘Why not put the kettle on and have some coffee? After all, that’s what you’d do if Eva was here. You’d sit down and have a nice talk. And you and Eva had so much in common.’

‘Had?’ said Mavis and wished to God she’d kept her mouth shut. Wilt’s awful smile was back again. ‘Well, if you’d like a cup yourself, I suppose I’ve got time.’ She crossed to the electric kettle and took it to the sink. The hot-water bottle was lying on the bottom. Mavis lifted it out and experienced another ghastly frisson. The hot-water bottle wasn’t simply not hot, it was icy cold. And behind her Wilt had begun to grunt alarmingly. For a moment Mavis hesitated before swinging round. This time there was no mistaking the threat she was facing. It was staring at her from between the folds of Wilt’s dressing-gown. With a squeal, she hurled herself at the back door, dragged it open, shot out and with a clatter of dustbin lids, was through the gate and heading for the car.

Behind her Wilt dropped the syringe back into the bucket and tried to get his hands out of the washing-up gloves by pulling on the fingers. It wasn’t the best method and it was some time before he’d rid himself of the wretched things and had grabbed the second bottle from the freezer. ‘Bugger the woman,’ he muttered as he clutched
the bottle to his penis and tried to think of what to do next. If she went to the police … No, she wasn’t likely to do that but all the same, it would be as well to take precautions. Regardless of hygiene, he flung the bottle from the sink into the freezer and hobbled upstairs. ‘At least we’ve seen the last of Mavis M,’ he thought as he got back into bed. That was some consolation for the reputation he was already doubtless acquiring. As usual, he was entirely wrong.

Twenty minutes later, Eva, who had been intercepted by Mavis on her way home, drove up to the house.

‘Henry,’ she shouted as soon as she was inside the front door. ‘You come straight down here and explain what you were doing with Mavis.’

‘Sod off,’ said Wilt.

‘What did you say?’

‘Nothing. I was just groaning.’

‘No, you weren’t. I distinctly heard you say something,’ said Eva on her way upstairs.

Wilt got out of bed and girded his loins with the water bottle. ‘Now you just listen to me,’ he said before Eva could get a word in, ‘I’ve had all I can stand from everybody, you, Mavis-moron-Mottram, that poisoner Kores, the quads and the bloody thugs who’ve been following me. In fact the whole fucking modern world with its emphasis on me being nice and docile and passive and everyone else doing their own thing and to hell with the
consequences. (
A
) I am not a thing, and (
B
) I’m not going to be done any more. Not by you, or Mavis, or, for that matter, the damned quads. And I don’t give a tuppenny stuff what received opinions you suck up like some dehydrated sponge from the hacks who write articles on progressive education and sex for geriatrics and health through fucking hemlock –’

‘Hemlock’s a poison. No one …’ Eva began, trying to divert his fury.

‘And so’s the ideological codswallop you fill your head with,’ shouted Wilt. ‘Permissive cyanide, page three nudes for the so-called intelligentsia or video nasties for the unemployed, all fucking placebos for them that can’t think or feel. And if you don’t know what a placebo is, try looking it up in a dictionary.’

He paused for breath and Eva grabbed her opportunity. ‘You know very well what I think about video nasties,’ she said, ‘I wouldn’t dream of letting the girls see anything like that.’

‘Right,’ yelled Wilt, ‘so how about letting me and Mr bleeding Gamer off the hook. Has it ever occurred to you that you’ve got genuine non-video actual nasties, pre-pubescent horrors, in those four daughters? Oh no, not them. They’re special, they’re unique, they’re flipping geniuses. We mustn’t do anything to retard their intellectual development, like teaching them some manners or how to behave in a civilized fashion. Oh no, we’re your modern model parents holding the ring while those four ignoble little savages turn themselves into
computer-addicted technocrats with about as much sense as Ilse Koch on a bad day.’

‘Who’s Ilse Koch?’ asked Eva.

‘Just a mass murderess in a concentration camp,’ said Wilt, ‘and don’t get the idea I’m on a right-wing, flog ‘em and hang ‘em reactionary high because I’m not, and those idiots don’t think either. I’m just mister stick-in-the-middle who doesn’t know which way to jump. But my God I do think! Or try to. Now leave me in peace and discomfort and go and tell your mate Mavis that the next time she doesn’t want to see an involuntary erection, not to advise you to go anywhere near Castrator Kores.’

Eva went downstairs feeling strangely invigorated. It was a long time since she’d heard Henry state his feelings so strongly and, while she didn’t understand everything he’d said, and she certainly didn’t think he’d been fair about the quads, it was somehow reassuring to have him assert his authority in the house. It made her feel better about having been to that awful Dr Kores with all her silly talk about … what was it? … ‘the sexual superiority of the female in the mammalian world’. Eva didn’t want to be superior in everything and anyway, she wasn’t just a mammal. She was a human being. That wasn’t the same thing at all.

By the following evening, it would have been difficult to say what Inspector Hodge was. Since Wilt hadn’t emerged from the house, the Inspector had spent the best part of two days tracing Eva’s progress to and from the school and round Ipford in the bugged Escort.

‘It’s good practice,’ he told Sergeant Runk, as they followed her in a van Hodge had converted to a listening-post.

‘For what?’ asked the Sergeant, pinning a mark on the town map to indicate that Eva had now parked behind Sainsbury’s. She’d already been to Tesco’s and Fine Fare. ‘So we learn where to get the best discount on washing powder?’

‘For when he decides to move.’

‘When,’ said Runk. ‘So far he hasn’t been out of the house all day.’

‘He’s sent her out to check she hasn’t got a tail on her,’ said Hodge. ‘In the meantime, he’s lying low.’

‘Which you said was just the thing he wasn’t doing,’ said Runk. ‘I said he was and you said …’

‘I know what I said. But that was when he knew he was being followed. It’s different now.’

‘I’ll say,’ said Runk. ‘So the sod sends us on a tour of
shopping centres and we haven’t got a clue what’s going on.’

They had that night. Runk, who had insisted on having the afternoon off for some shut-eye if he was to work at night, retrieved the tape from under the seat and replaced it with a new one. It was one o’clock in the morning. Half an hour later, Hodge, whose childhood had been spent in a house where sex was never mentioned, was listening to the quads discussing Wilt’s condition with a frankness that appalled him. If anything was needed to convince him that Mr and Mrs Wilt were died-in-the-wool criminals, it was Emmeline’s repeated demand to know why Daddy had been up in the night putting cake icing on his penis. Eva’s explanation didn’t help either. ‘He wasn’t feeling very well, dear. He’d had too much beer and he couldn’t sleep, so he went down to the kitchen to see if he could ice cake and …’

‘I wouldn’t like the sort of cake he was icing,’ interrupted Samantha. ‘And anyway, it was face-cream.’

‘I know, dear, but he was practising and he spilt it.’

‘Up his cock?’ demanded Penelope, which gave Eva the opportunity to tell her never to use that word. ‘It’s not nice,’ she said, ‘it’s not nice to say things like that and you’re not going to tell anyone at school.’

‘It wasn’t very nice of Daddy to use the icing syringe to pump face-cream up his penis,’ said Emmeline.

By the time the discussion was over, and Eva had dropped the quads off at the school, Hodge was ashen. Sergeant Runk wasn’t feeling very well either.

‘I don’t believe it, I don’t believe a bloody word of it,’ muttered the Inspector.

‘I wish to God I didn’t,’ said Runk. ‘I’ve heard some revolting things in my time but that lot takes the cake.’

‘Don’t mention that word,’ Hodge said. ‘I still don’t believe it. No man in his right mind would do a thing like that. They’re having us on.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I knew a bloke once who used to butter his wick with strawberry jam and have his missus –’

‘Shut up,’ shouted Hodge, ‘if there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s filth and I’ve had my fill of that for one night.’

‘So’s Wilt, by the sound of it,’ said Runk, ‘walking about with his prick in a jug of ice cubes like that. Can’t have been just face-cream or icing-sugar he had in that syringe.’

‘Dear God,’ said Hodge. ‘You’re not suggesting he was fixing himself with a cake-icing syringe, are you? He’d be bloody dead by now, and anyhow the fucking thing would leak.’

‘Not if he mixed the junk with cold cream. That’d explain it, wouldn’t it?’

‘It might do,’ Hodge admitted. ‘I suppose if people can sniff the filthy muck, there’s no knowing what they can do with it. Not that it helps us much what he does.’

‘Of course it does,’ said the Sergeant, who had suddenly seen a way of ending the tedium of sitting through the night in the van. ‘It means he’s got the stuff in the house.’

‘Or up his pipe,’ said Hodge.

‘Wherever. Anyway, there’s bound to be enough around to haul him in and give him a good going over.’

But the Inspector had his sights set on more ambitious targets. ‘A fat lot of good that’s going to do us,’ he said, ‘even if he did crack, and if you’d read what he did to old Flint you’d know better –’

‘But this’d be different,’ Runk interrupted. ‘First off, he’d be cold turkey. Don’t have to question him. Leave him in a cell for three days without a fix and he’d be bleating like a fucking baa-lamb.’