Wilt Read online

  Inspector Flint was no different. He was more obsessive but his tactics were just the same. And besides he had got hold of the wrong end of the stick with a vengeance and it amused Wilt to watch him trying to pin a crime on him he hadn’t committed. It made him feel almost important and certainly more of a man than he had done for a long, long time. He was innocent and there was no question about it. In a world where everything else was doubtful and uncertain and open to scepticism the fact of his innocence was sure. For the first time in his adult life Wilt knew himself to be absolutely right, and the knowledge gave him a strength he had never supposed he possessed. And besides there was no question in his mind that Eva would turn up eventually, safe and sound, and more than a little subdued when she realized what her impulsiveness had led to. Serve her right for giving him that disgusting doll. She’d regret that to the end of her days. Yes, if anybody was going to come off badly in this affair it was dear old Eva with her bossiness and her busyness. She’d have a job explaining it to Mavis Mottram and the neighbours. Wilt smiled to himself at the thought. And even the Tech would have to treat him differently in future and with a new respect. Wilt knew the liberal conscience too well not to suppose that he would appear anything less than a martyr when he went back. And a hero. They would bend over backwards to convince themselves that they hadn’t thought him as guilty as hell. He’d get promotion too, not for being a good teacher but because they would need to salve their fragile consciences. Talk about killing the fatted calf.

  14

  At the Tech there was no question of killing the fatted calf, at least not for Henry Wilt. The imminence of the CNAA visitation on Friday, coinciding as it apparently would with the resurrection of the late Mrs Wilt, was causing something approaching panic. The Course Board met in almost continuous session and memoranda circulated so furiously that it was impossible to read one before the next arrived.

  ‘Can’t we postpone the visit?’ Dr Cox asked. ‘I can’t have them in my office discussing bibliographies with bits of Mrs Wilt being dug out of the ground outside the window.’

  ‘I have asked the police to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible,’ said Dr Mayfield.

  ‘With conspicuous lack of success so far,’ said Dr Board. ‘They couldn’t be more in evidence. There are ten of them peering down that hole at this very moment.’

  The Vice-Principal struck a brighter note. ‘You’ll be glad to hear that we’ve managed to restore power to the canteen,’ he told the meeting, ‘so we should be able to lay on a good lunch.’

  ‘I just hope I feel up to eating,’ said Dr Cox. ‘The shocks of the last few days have done nothing to improve my appetite and when I think of poor Mrs Wilt …’

  ‘Try not to think of her,’ said the Vice-Principal, but Dr Cox shook his head.

  ‘You try not to think of her with a damned great boring machine grinding away outside your office window all day.’

  ‘Talking about shocks,’ said Dr Board, ‘I still can’t understand how the driver of that mechanical corkscrew managed to escape electrocution when they cut through the power cable.’

  ‘Considering the problems we are faced with, I hardly think that’s a relevant point just at present,’ said Dr Mayfield. ‘What we have got to stress to the members of the CNAA committee is that this degree is an integrated course with a fundamental substructure grounded thematically on a concomitance of cultural and sociological factors in no way unsuperficially disparate and with a solid quota of academic content to give students an intellectual and cerebral …’

  ‘Haemorrhage?’ suggested Dr Board.

  Dr Mayfield regarded him balefully. ‘I really do think this is no time for flippancy,’ he said angrily. ‘Either we are committed to the Joint Honours degree or we are not. Furthermore we have only until tomorrow to structure our tactical approach to the visitation committee. Now, which is it to be?’

  ‘Which is what to be?’ asked Dr Board. ‘What has our commitment or lack of it to do with structuring, for want of several far better words, our so-called tactical approach to a committee which, since it is coming all the way from London to us and not vice versa, is presumably approaching us?’

  ‘Vice-Principal,’ said Dr Mayfield, ‘I really must protest. Dr Board’s attitude at this late stage in the game is quite incomprehensible. If Dr Board …’

  ‘Could even begin to understand one tenth of the jargon Dr Mayfield seems to suppose is English he might be in a better position to express his opinion,’ interrupted Dr Board. ‘As it is, “incomprehensible” applies to Dr Mayfield’s syntax, not to my attitude. I have always maintained …’

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said the Vice-Principal, ‘I think it would be best if we avoided inter-departmental wrangles at this point in time and got down to business.’

  There was a silence broken finally by Dr Cox. ‘Do you think the police could be persuaded to erect a screen round that hole?’ he asked.

  ‘I shall certainly suggest that to them,’ said Dr Mayfield. They passed on to the matter of entertainment.

  ‘I have arranged for there to be plenty of drinks before lunch,’ said the Vice-Principal, ‘and in any case lunch will be judiciously delayed to allow them to get into the right mood so the afternoon sessions should be cut short and proceed, hopefully, more smoothly.’

  ‘Just so long as the Catering Department doesn’t serve Toad in the Hole,’ said Dr Board.

  The meeting broke up acrimoniously.

  *

  So did Mr Morris’s encounter with the Crime Reporter of the Sunday Post.

  ‘Of course I didn’t tell the police that I employed homicidal maniacs as a matter of policy,’ he shouted at the reporter. ‘And in any case what I said was, as I understood it, to be treated in the strictest confidence.’

  ‘But you did say you thought Wilt was insane and that quite a number of Liberal Studies lecturers were off their heads?’

  Mr Morris looked at the man with loathing. ‘To put the record straight, what I said was that some of them were …’

  ‘Off their rockers?’ suggested the reporter.

  ‘No, not off their rockers,’ shouted Mr Morris. ‘Merely, well, shall we say, slightly unbalanced.’

  ‘That’s not what the police say you said. They say quote …’

  ‘I don’t care what the police say I said. I know what I said and what I didn’t and if you’re implying …’

  ‘I’m not implying anything. You made a statement that half your staff are nuts and I’m trying to verify it.’

  ‘Verify it?’ snarled Mr Morris. ‘You put words into my mouth I never said and you call that verifying it?’

  ‘Did you say it or not? That’s all I’m asking. I mean if you express an opinion about your staff …’

  ‘Mr MacArthur, what I think about my staff is my own affair. It has absolutely nothing to do with you or the rag you represent.’

  ‘Three million people will be interested to read your opinion on Sunday morning,’ said Mr MacArthur, ‘and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this Wilt character didn’t sue you if he ever gets out of the copshop.’

  ‘Sue me? What the hell could he sue me for?’

  ‘Calling him a homicidal maniac for a start. Banner headlines

  HEAD OF LIBERAL STUDIES CALLS LECTURER HOMICIDAL MANIAC

  should be good for fifty thousand. I’d be surprised if he got less.’

  Mr Morris contemplated destitution. ‘Even your paper would never print that,’ he muttered. ‘I mean Wilt would sue you too.’

  ‘Oh we’re used to libel actions. They’re run-of-the-mill for us. We pay for them out of petty cash. Now if you’d be a bit more cooperative …’ He left the suggestion in mid-air for Mr Morris to digest.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ he asked miserably.

  ‘Got any juicy drug scene stories for us?’ asked Mr MacArthur. ‘You know the sort of thing.

  LOVE ORGIES IN LECTURES.

  That always gets the public. Teenyboppers havi
ng it off and all that. Give us a good one and we’ll let you off the hook about Wilt.’

  ‘Get out of my office!’ yelled Mr Morris.

  Mr MacArthur got up. ‘You’re going to regret this,’ he said and went downstairs to the students’ canteen to dig up some dirt on Mr Morris.

  *

  ‘Not tests,’ said Wilt adamantly. ‘They’re deceptive.’

  ‘You think so?’ said Dr Pittman, consultant psychiatrist at the Fenland Hospital and professor of Criminal Psychology at the University. Being plagiocephalic didn’t help either.

  ‘I should have thought it was obvious,’ said Wilt. ‘You show me an ink-blot and I think it looks like my grandmother lying in a pool of blood, do you honestly think I’m going to be fool enough to say so? I’d be daft to do that. So I say a butterfly sitting on a geranium. And every time it’s the same. I think what it does look like and then say something completely different. Where does that get you?’

  ‘It is still possible to infer something from that,’ said Dr Pittman.

  ‘Well, you don’t need a bloody ink-blot to infer, do you?’ said Wilt. Dr Pittman made a note of Wilt’s interest in blood. ‘You can infer things from just looking at the shape of people’s heads.’

  Dr Pittman polished his glasses grimly. Heads were not things he liked inferences to be drawn from. ‘Mr Wilt,’ he said, ‘I am here at your request to ascertain your sanity and in particular to give an opinion as to whether or not I consider you capable of murdering your wife and disposing of her body in a singularly revolting and callous fashion. I shall not allow anything you may say to influence my ultimate and objective findings.’

  Wilt looked perplexed. ‘I must say you’re not giving yourself much room for manoeuvre. Since we’ve dispensed with mechanical aids like tests I should have thought what I had to say would be the only thing you could go on. Unless of course you’re going to read the bumps on my head. Isn’t that a bit old-fashioned?’

  ‘Mr Wilt,’ said Dr Pittman, ‘the fact that you clearly have a sadistic streak and take pleasure in drawing attention to other people’s physical infirmities in no way disposes me to conclude you are capable of murder …’

  ‘Very decent of you,’ said Wilt, ‘though frankly I’d have thought anyone was capable of murder given the right, or to be precise the wrong, circumstances.’

  Dr Pittman stifled the impulse to say how right he was. Instead he smiled prognathously. ‘Would you say you were a rational man, Henry?’ he asked.

  Wilt frowned. ‘Just stick to Mr Wilt if you don’t mind. This may not be a paid consultation but I prefer a little formality.’

  Dr Pittman’s smile vanished. ‘You haven’t answered my question.’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t say I was a rational man,’ said Wilt.

  ‘An irrational one perhaps?’

  ‘Neither the one wholly nor the other wholly. Just a man.’

  ‘And a man is neither one thing nor the other?’

  ‘Dr Pittman, this is your province not mine but in my opinion man is capable of reasoning but not of acting within wholly rational limits. Man is an animal, a developed animal though come to think of it all animals are developed if we are to believe Darwin. Let’s just say man is a domesticated animal with elements of wildness about him …’

  ‘And what sort of animal are you, Mr Wilt?’ said Dr Pittman. ‘A domesticated animal or a wild one?’

  ‘Here we go again. These splendidly simple dual categories that seem to obsess the modern mind. Either/ Or Kierkegaard, as that bitch Sally Pringsheim would say. No, I am not wholly domesticated. Ask my wife. She’ll express an opinion on the matter.’

  ‘In what respect are you undomesticated?’

  ‘I fart in bed, Dr Pittman. I like to fart in bed. It is the trumpet call of the anthropoid ape in me asserting its territorial imperative in the only way possible.’

  ‘In the only way possible?’

  ‘You haven’t met Eva,’ said Wilt. ‘When you do you’ll see that assertion is her forte not mine.’

  ‘You feel dominated by Mrs Wilt?’

  ‘I am dominated by Mrs Wilt.’

  ‘She bullies you? She assumes the dominant role?’

  ‘Eva is, Dr Pittman. She doesn’t have to assume anything. She just is.’

  ‘Is what?’

  ‘Now there’s the rub,’ said Wilt. ‘What’s today? You lose track of time in this place.’

  ‘Thursday.’

  ‘Well, today being Thursday, Eva is Bernard Leach.’

  ‘Bernard Leach?’

  ‘The potter, Dr Pittman, the famous potter,’ said Wilt. ‘Now tomorrow she’ll be Margot Fonteyn and on Saturday we play bridge with the Mottrams so she’ll be Omar Sharif. On Sunday she’s Elizabeth Taylor or Edna O’Brien depending on what the Colour Supplements have in store for me and in the afternoon we go for a drive and she’s Eva Wilt. It’s about the only time in the week I meet her and that’s because I’m driving and she’s got nothing to do but sit still and nag the pants off me.’

  ‘I begin to see the pattern,’ said Dr Pittman. ‘Mrs Wilt was … is given to role-playing. This made for an unstable relationship in which you couldn’t establish a distinctive and assertive role as a husband …’

  ‘Dr Pittman,’ said Wilt, ‘a gyroscope may, indeed must, spin but in doing so it achieves a stability that is virtually unequalled. Now if you understand the principle of the gyroscope you may begin to understand that our marriage does not lack stability. It may be damned uncomfortable coming home to a centrifugal force but it bloody well isn’t unstable.’

  ‘But just now you told me that Mrs Wilt did not assume a dominant role. Now you tell me she is a forceful character.’

  ‘Eva is not forceful. She is a force. There’s a difference. And as for character, she has so many and they’re so varied it’s difficult to keep up with them all. Let’s just say she throws herself into whoever she is with an urgency and compulsiveness that is not always appropriate. You remember that series of Garbo pictures they showed on TV some years back? Well, Eva was La Dame Aux Camélias for three days after that and she made dying of TB look like St Vitus’ dance. Talk about galloping consumption.’

  ‘I begin to get the picture,’ said Dr Pittman, making a note that Wilt was a pathological liar with sadomasochistic tendencies.

  ‘I’m glad somebody does,’ said Wilt. ‘Inspector Flint thinks I murdered her and the Pringsheims in some sort of bloodlust and disposed of their bodies in some extraordinary fashion. He mentioned acid. I mean it’s crazy. Where on earth does one get nitric acid in the quantities necessary to dissolve three dead bodies, and one of them overweight at that? I mean it doesn’t bear thinking about.’

  ‘It certainly doesn’t,’ said Dr Pittman.

  ‘In any case do I look like a murderer?’ continued Wilt cheerfully. ‘Of course I don’t. Now if he’d said Eva had slaughtered the brutes, and in my opinion someone should have done years ago, I’d have taken him seriously. God help the poor sods who happen to be around when Eva takes it into her head she’s Lizzie Borden.’

  Dr Pittman studied him predaciously.

  ‘Are you suggesting that Dr and Mrs Pringsheim were murdered by your wife?’ he asked. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘No,’ said Wilt, ‘I am not. All I’m saying is that when Eva does things she does them wholeheartedly. When she cleans the house she cleans it. Let me tell you about the Harpic. She’s got this thing about germs …’

  ‘Mr Wilt,’ said Dr Pittman hastily, ‘I am not interested in what Mrs Wilt does with the Harpic. I have come here to understand you. Now then, do you make a habit of copulating with a plastic doll? Is this a regular occurrence?’

  ‘Regular?’ said Wilt. ‘Do you mean a normal occurrence or a recurring one? Now your notion of what constitutes a normal occurrence may differ from mine …’

  ‘I mean, do you do it often?’ interrupted Dr Pittman.

  ‘Do it?’ said Wilt. ‘I don’t do it at all.’<
br />
  ‘But I understood you to have placed particular emphasis on the fact that this doll had a vagina?’

  ‘Emphasis? I didn’t have to emphasize the fact. The beastly thing was plainly visible.’

  ‘You find vaginas beastly?’ said Dr Pittman, stalking his prey into the more familiar territory of sexual aberration.

  ‘Taken out of context, yes,’ said Wilt, sidestepping, ‘and with plastic ones you can leave them in context and I still find them nauseating.’

  By the time Dr Pittman had finished the interview he was uncertain what to think. He got up wearily and made for the door.

  ‘You’ve forgotten your hat, doctor,’ said Wilt, holding it out to him. ‘Pardon my asking but do you have them specially made for you?’

  *

  ‘Well?’ said Inspector Flint when Dr Pittman came into his office. ‘What’s the verdict?’

  ‘Verdict? That man should be put away for life.’