Wilt

Chapter 8

There was something horribly intractable about the mudbank on which the cabin cruiser had grounded. To add to their troubles the engine had gone wrong. Gaskell said it was a broken con rod.

‘Is that serious?’ asked Sally.

‘It just means we’ll have to be towed to a boatyard.’

‘By what?’

‘By a passing cruiser I guess,’ said Gaskell.

Sally looked over the side at the bullrushes.

‘Passing?’ she said. ‘We’ve been here all night and half the morning and nothing has passed so far and if it did we wouldn’t be able to see it for all these fucking bullrushes.’

‘I thought bullrushes did something for you.’

‘That was yesterday,’ snapped Sally. ‘Today they just mean we’re invisible to anyone more than fifty feet away. And now you’ve screwed the motor. I told you not to rev it like that.’

‘So how was I to know it would bust a con rod,’ said Gaskell. ‘I was just trying to get us off this mudbank. You just tell me how I’m supposed to do it without revving the goddam motor.’

‘You could get out and push.’

Gaskell peered over the side. ‘I could get out and drown,’ he said.

‘So the boat would be lighter,’ said Sally. ‘We’ve all got to make sacrifices and you said the tide would float us off.’

‘Well I was mistaken. That’s fresh water down there and means the tide doesn’t reach this far.’

‘Now he tells me. First we’re in Frogwater Beach…’

‘Reach,’ said Gaskell.

‘Frogwater wherever. Then we’re in Fen Broad. Now where are we for God’s sake?’

‘On a mudbank,’ said Gaskell.

In the cabin Eva bustled about. There wasn’t much space for bustling but what there was she put to good use. She made the bunks and put the bedding away in the lockers underneath and she plumped the cushions and emptied the ashtrays. She swept the floor and polished the table and wiped the windows and dusted the shelves and generally made everything as neat and tidy as it was possible to make it. And all the time her thoughts got untidier and more muddled so that by the time she was finished and every object insight was in its right place and the whole cabin properly arranged she was quite confused and in two minds about nearly everything.

The Pringsheims were ever so sophisticated and rich and intellectual and said clever things all the time but they were always quarrelling and getting at one another about something and to be honest they were quite impractical and didn’t know the first thing about hygiene. Gaskell went to the lavatory and didn’t wash his hands afterwards and goodness only knew when he had last had a shave. And look at the way they had walked out of the house in Rossiter Grove without clearing up after the party and the living-room all over cups and things. Eva had been quite shocked. She would never have left her house in that sort of mess. She had said as much to Sally but Sally had said how nonspontaneous could you get and anyway they were only renting the house for the summer and that it was typical of a male-oriented social system to expect a woman to enter a contractual relationship based upon female domestic servitude. Eva tried to follow her and was left feeling guilty because she couldn’t and because, it was evidently infra dig to be houseproud and she was.

And then there was what Henry had been doing with that doll. It was so unlike Henry to do anything like that and the more she thought about it the more unlike Henry it became. He must have been drunk but even so…without his clothes on? And where had he found the doll? She had asked Sally and had been horrified to learn that Gaskell was mad about plastic and just adored playing games with Judy and men were like that and so to the only meaningful relationships being between women because women didn’t need to prove their virility by any overt act of extrasexual violence did they? By which time Eva was lost in a maze of words she didn’t understand but which sounded important and they had had another session of Touch Therapy.

And that was another thing she was in two minds about. Touch Therapy. Sally had said she was still inhibited and being inhibited was a sign of emotional and sensational immaturity. Eva battled with her mixed feelings about the matter. On the one hand she didn’t want to be emotionally and sensationally immature and if the revulsion she felt lying naked in the arms of another woman was anything to go by and in Eva’s view the nastier a medicine tasted the more likely it was to do you good, then she was certainly improving her psycho-sexual behaviour pattern by leaps and bounds. On the other hand she wasn’t altogether convinced that Touch Therapy was quite nice. It was only by the application of considerable will-power that she overcame her objections to it and even so there was an undertow of doubt about the propriety of being touched quite so sensationally. It was all very puzzling and to cap it all she was on the Pill. Eva had objected very strongly and had pointed out that Henry and she had always wanted babies and she’d never had any but Sally had insisted.

‘Eva baby,’ she had said, ‘with Gaskell one just never knows. Sometimes he goes for months without so much as a twitch and then, bam, he comes all over the place. He’s totally undiscriminating.’

‘But I thought you said you had this big thing between you,’ Eva said.

‘Oh, sure. In a blue moon. Scientists sublimate and G just lives for plastic. And we wouldn’t want you to go back to Henry with G’s genes in your ovum, now would we?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Eva horrified at the thought and had taken the pill after breakfast before going through to the tiny galley to wash up. It was all so different from Transcendental Meditation and Pottery.

On deck Sally and Gaskell were still wrangling.

‘What the hell are you giving brainless boobs?’ Gaskell asked.

‘TT, Body Contact. Tactile Liberation,’ said Sally. ‘She’s sensually deprived’

‘She’s mentally deprived too. I’ve met some dummies in my time but this one is the dimwittiest. Anyway, I meant those pills she takes at breakfast.’

Sally smiled. ‘Oh those,’ she said.

‘Yes those. You blowing what little mind she’s got or something?’ said Gaskell. ‘We’ve got enough troubles without Moby Dick taking a trip.’

‘Oral contraceptives, baby, just the plain old Pill.’

‘Oral contraceptives? What the hell for? I wouldn’t touch her with a sterilised stirring rod.’

‘Gaskell, honey, you’re so naïve. For authenticity, pure authenticity. It makes my relationship with her so much more real, don’t you think. Like wearing a rubber on a dildo.’

Gaskell gaped at her. ‘Jesus, you don’t mean you’ve…’

‘Not yet. Long John Silver is still in his bag but one of these days when she’s a little more emancipated…’ She smiled wistfully over the bullrushes. ‘Perhaps it doesn’t matter all that much us being stuck here. It gives us time, so much lovely time and you can look at your ducks…’

‘Waders,’ said Gaskell, ‘and we’re going to run up one hell of a bill at the Marina if we don’t get this boat back in time.’

‘Bill?’ said Sally. ‘You’re crazy. You don’t think we’re paying, for this hulk?’

‘But you hired her from the boatyard. I mean you’re not going to tell me you just took the boat,’ said Gaskell. ‘For Chrissake, that’s theft’

Sally laughed. ‘Honestly, G, you’re so moral. I mean, you’re inconsistent. You steal books from the library and chemicals from the lab but when it comes to boats you’re all up in the air.’

‘Books are different.’ said Gaskell hotly.

‘Yes,’ said Sally, ‘books you don’t go to jail for. That’s what’s different. So you want to think I stole the boat, you go on thinking that.’

Gaskell took out a handkerchief and wiped his glasses. ‘Are you telling me you didn’t?’ he asked finally.

‘I borrowed it.’

‘Borrowed it? Who from?’

‘Schei.’

‘Scheimacher?’

‘That’s right. He said we could have it whenever we wanted it so we’ve got it.’

‘Does he know we’ve got it?’

Sally sighed. ‘Look, he’s in India isn’t he, currying sperm? So what does it matter what he knows? By the time he gets back we’ll be in the Land of the Free.’

‘Shit.’ said Gaskell wearily, ‘one of these days you’re going to land us in it up to the eyeballs.’

‘Gaskell honey, sometimes you bore me with your worrying so.’

‘Let me tell you something. You worry me with your goddam attitude to other people’s property.’

‘Property is theft.’

‘Oh sure. You just get the cops to see it that way when they catch up with you. The fuzz don’t go a ball on stealing in this country.’

The fuzz weren’t going much of a ball on the well-nourished body of a woman apparently murdered and buried under thirty feet and twenty tons of rapidly setting concrete. Barney had supplied the well-nourished bit. ‘She had big breasts too,’ he explained, in the seventh version of what he had seen. ‘And this hand reaching up–’

‘Yes, well we know all about the hand,’ said Inspector Flint. ‘We’ve been into all that before but this is the first time you’ve mentioned breasts.’

‘It was the hand that got me,’ said Barney. ‘I mean you don’t think of breasts in a situation like that.’

The Inspector turned to the foreman. ‘Did you notice the deceased’s breasts?’ he enquired. But the foreman just shook his head. He was past speech.’

‘So we’ve got a well-nourished woman…What age would you say?’

Barney scratched his chin reflectively. ‘Not old,’ he said finally. ‘Definitely not old.’

‘In her twenties?’

‘Could have been.’

‘In her thirties?’

Barney shrugged. There was something be was trying to recall. Something that had seemed odd at the time.

‘But definitely not in her forties?’

‘No.’ said Barney. ‘Younger than that.’ He said it rather hesitantly.

‘You’re not being very specific,’ said Inspector Flint.

‘I can’t help it,’ said Barney plaintively. ‘You see a woman down a dirty great hole with concrete sloshing down on top of her you don’t ask her her age.’

‘Quite. I realise that but if you could just think. Was there anything peculiar about her…’

‘Peculiar? Well, there was this hand see…’

Inspector Flint sighed. ‘I mean anything out of the ordinary about her appearance. Her hair for instance. What colour was it?’

Barney got it. ‘I knew there was something,’ he said, triumphantly. ‘Her hair. It was crooked.’

‘Well, it would be, wouldn’t it. You don’t dump a woman down a thirty-foot pile shaft without mussing up her hair in the process.’

‘No, it wasn’t like that. It was on sideways and flattened. Like she’d been hit.’

‘She probably had been hit. If what you, say about the wooden cover being in place is true, she didn’t go down there of her own volition. But you still can’t give any precise indication of her age?’

‘Well,’ said Barney, ‘bits of her looked young and bits didn’t. That’s all I know.’

‘Which bits?’ asked the Inspector, hoping to hell Barney wasn’t going to start on that hand again.

‘Well, her legs didn’t look right for her teats if you see what I mean.’ Inspector Flint didn’t. ‘They were all thin and crumpled-up like.’

‘Which were? Her legs or her teats?’

‘Her legs, of course,’ said Barney. ‘I’ve told you she had these lovely great…’

‘We’re treating this as a case of murder,’ Inspector Flint told the Principal ten minutes later. The Principal sat behind his desk and thought despairingly about adverse publicity.

‘You’re quite convinced it couldn’t have been an accident?’

‘The evidence to date certainly doesn’t suggest accidental death,’ said the Inspector. ‘However, we’ll only be absolutely certain on that point when we manage to reach the body and I’m afraid that is going to take some time.’

‘Time?’ said the Principal. ‘Do you mean to say you can’t get her out this morning?’

Inspector Flint shook his head. ‘Out of the question, sir,’ he said. ‘We are considering two methods of reaching the body and they’ll both take several days. One is to drill down through the concrete and the other is to sink another shaft next to the original hole and try and get at her from the side.’

‘Good Lord,’ said the Principal, looking at his calendar, ‘but that means you’re going to be digging away out there for several days.’

‘I’m afraid it can’t be helped. Whoever put her down there make a good job of it. Still, we’ll try to be as unobtrusive as possible.’

Out of the window the Principal could see four police cars, a fire engine and a big blue van. ‘This is really most unfortunate,’ he murmured.

‘Murder always is,’ said the Inspector, and got to his feet. ‘It’s in the nature of the thing. In the meantime we are sealing off the site and we’d be grateful for your co-operation.’

‘Anything you require,’ said the Principal, with a sigh.

In the Staff Room the presence of so many uniformed men peering down a pile hole provoked mixed reactions. So did the dozen policemen scouring the building, site, stopping now, and then to put things carefully into envelopes, but it was the arrival of the dark blue caravan that finally clinched matters.

‘That’s a Mobile Murder Headquarters.’ Peter Fenwick explained. ‘Apparently some maniac has buried a woman at the bottom of one of the piles.’

The New Left, who had been clustered in a corner discussing the likely implications of so many paramilitary Fascist pigs, heaved a sigh of unmartyred regret but continued to express doubts.

‘No, seriously.’ said Fenwick. ‘I asked one of them what they were doing. I thought it was some sort of bomb scare.’

Dr Cox, Head of Science, confirmed it. His office looked directly on to the hole. ‘It’s too dreadful to contemplate,’ he murmured. ‘Every time I look up I think what she must have suffered.’

‘What do you suppose they are putting into those envelopes?’ asked Dr Mayfield.

‘Clues.’ said Dr Board, with evident satisfaction. ‘Hairs. Bits of skin and bloodstains. The usual trivial detritus of violent crime.’

Dr Cox hurried from the room and Dr Mayfield looked disgusted. ‘How revolting.’ he said. ‘Isn’t it possible that there has been some mistake? I mean why should anyone want to murder a woman here?’

Dr Board sipped his coffee and looked wistfully at him. ‘I can think of any number of reasons,’ he said happily. ‘There are at least a dozen women in my Evening Class whom I would cheerfully beat to death and drop down holes. Sylvia Swansbeck for one.’

‘Whoever did it must have known they were going to pour concrete down today,’ said Fenwick. ‘It looks like an inside job to me.’

‘One of our less community-conscious students perhaps,’ suggested Dr Board, ‘I don’t suppose they’ve had time to check if any of the staff are missing.’

‘You’ll probably find it had nothing to do with the Tech,’ said Dr Mayfield. ‘Some maniac…’

‘Come now, give credit where credit is due.’ interrupted Dr Board. ‘There was obviously an element of premeditation involved. Whoever the murderer was…is, he planned it pretty carefully. What puzzles me is why be didn’t shovel earth down on top of the wretched woman so that she couldn’t be seen. Probably intended to but was disturbed before he could get around to it. One of those little accidents of fate.’

In the corner of the Staff Room Wilt sat and drank his coffee, conscious that he was the only person not staring out of the window. What the hell was he to do? The sensible thing would be to go to the police and explain that he had been trying to get rid of an inflatable doll that someone had given him. But would they believe him? If that was all that had happened why had he dressed it up in a wig and clothes? And why had he left it inflated? Why hadn’t he just thrown the thing away? He was just rehearsing the pros and cons of the argument when the Head of Engineering came in and announced that the police intended boring another hole next to the first one instead of digging down through the concrete.

‘They’ll probably be able to see bits of her sticking out the side.’ he explained. ‘Apparently she had one arm up in the air and with all that concrete coming down on top of her there’s a chance that arm will have been pressed against the side of the hole. Much quicker that way.’

‘I must say I can’t see the need for haste.’ said Dr Board. ‘I should have thought she’d be pretty well preserved in all that concrete. Mummified I daresay.’

In his corner Wilt rather doubted it. With twenty tons of concrete on top of her even Judy who had been an extremely resilient doll was hardly likely to have withstood the pressure. She would have burst as sure as eggs were eggs in which case all the police would find was the empty plastic arm of a doll. They would hardly bother to dig a burst plastic doll out.

‘And another thing.’ continued the Head of Engineering, ‘if the arm is sticking out they’ll be able to take fingerprints straight away.’

Wilt smiled to himself. That was one thing they weren’t going to find on Judy, fingerprints. He finished his coffee more cheerfully and went off to a class of Senior Secretaries. He found them agog with news of the murder.

‘Do you think it was a sex killing?’ a small blonde girl in the front raw asked as Wilt handed out copies of This Island Now. He had always found the chapter on the Vicissitudes of Adolescence appealed to Senior Secs. It dealt with sex and violence and was twelve years out of date but then so were the Senior Secretaries. Today there was no need for the book.

‘I don’t think it was any sort of killing.’ said Wilt taking his place behind the desk.’

‘Oh but it was. They saw a woman’s body down there,’ the small blonde insisted.

‘They thought they saw something down there that looked like a body,’ said Wilt. ‘That doesn’t mean it was one. People’s imaginations play tricks with them.’

‘The police don’t think so.’ said a large girl whose father was something in the City. ‘They must be certain to go to all that trouble. We had a murder on our golf course and all they found were bits of body cut up and put in the water hazard on the fifteenth. They’d been there six months. Someone sliced a ball on the dogleg twelfth and it went into the pond. They fished out a foot first. It was all puffy and green…’ A pale girl from Wilstanton fainted in the third row. By the time Wilt had revived her and taken her to the Sick Room, the class had got on to Crippen, Haigh and Christie. Wilt returned to find them discussing acid baths…and all they found were her false teeth and gallstones.’

‘You seem to know a lot about murder,’ Wilt said to the large girl.

‘Daddy plays bridge with the Chief Constable,’ she explained. ‘He comes to dinner and tells super stories. He says they ought to bring back hanging.’

‘I’m sure he does,’ said Wilt grimly. It was typical of Senior Secs that they knew Chief Constables who wanted to bring back hanging. It was all mummy and daddy and horses with Senior Secretaries.

‘Anyway, hanging doesn’t hurt,’ said the large girl. ‘Sir Frank says a good hangman can have a man out of the condemned cell and on to the trap with a noose around his neck and pull the lever in twenty seconds.’

‘Why confine the privilege to men?’ asked ‘Wilt bitterly. The class looked at him with reproachful eyes, ‘The last woman they hanged was Ruth Ellis,’ said the blonde in the front row.

‘Anyway with women it’s different,’ said the large girl.

‘Why?’ said Wilt inadvisedly.

‘Well it’s slower.’

‘Slower?’

‘They had to tie Mrs Thomson to a chair,’ volunteered the blonde. ‘She behaved disgracefully.’

‘I must say I find your judgements peculiar,’ said Wilt. ‘A woman murdering her husband is doubtless disgraceful. The fact that she puts up a fight when they come to execute her doesn’t strike me as disgraceful at all. I find that…’

‘It’s not just that,’ interrupted the large girl, who wasn’t to be diverted.

‘What isn’t?’ said Wilt.

‘It’s being slower with women. They have to make them wear waterproof pants.’

Wilt gaped at her in disgust. ‘Waterproof what?’ he asked without thinking.

‘Waterproof pants,’ said the large girl.

‘Dear God,’ said Wilt.

‘You see, when they get to the bottom of the rope their insides drop out,’ continued the large girl, administering the coup de grâce. Wilt stared at her wildly and stumbled from the room.

‘What’s the matter with him?’ said the girl. ‘Anyone would think I had said something beastly.’

In the corridor Wilt leant against the wall and felt sick. Those fucking girls were worse than Gasfitters. At least Gasfitters didn’t go in for such disgusting anatomical details and besides Senior Secs all came from so-called respectable families. By the time he felt strong enough to face them again the hour had ended. Wilt went back into the classroom sheepishly and collected the books.

‘Name of Wilt mean anything to you? Henry Wilt?’ asked the Inspector.

‘Wilt?’ said the Vice-Principal, who had been left to cope with the police while the Principal spent his time more profitably trying to offset the, adverse publicity caused by the whole appalling business. ‘Well, yes it does. He’s one of our Liberal Studies lecturers. Why? Is there…’

‘If you don’t mind, sir, I’d just like a word with him. In private’

‘But Wilt’s a most inoffensive man,’ said the Vice-Principal. ‘I’m sure he couldn’t help you at all.’

‘Possibly not but all the same…’

‘You’re not suggesting for one moment that Henry Wilt had anything to do with…’ the Vice-Principal stopped and studied the expression on the Inspector’s face. It was ominously neutral.

‘I’d rather not go into details,’ said Inspector Flint, ‘and it’s best if we don’t jump to conclusions.’

The Vice-Principal picked up the phone. ‘Do you want him to come across to that…er…caravan?’ he asked.

Inspector Flint shook his head. ‘We like to be as inconspicuous as possible. If I could just have the use of an empty office.’

‘There’s an office next door. You can use that.’

Wilt was in the canteen having lunch with Peter Braintree when the Vice-Principal’s secretary came down with a message.

‘Can’t it wait?’ asked Wilt.

‘He said it was most urgent.’

‘It’s probably your Senior Lectureship come through at last,’ said Braintree brightly. Wilt swallowed the rest of his Scotch egg and got up.

‘I doubt that, ‘he said and went wanly out of the canteen and up the stairs. He had a horrid suspicion that promotion was the last thing the Vice-Principal wanted to see him about.

‘Now, sir.’ said the Inspector when they were seated in the office, ‘my name is Flint, Inspector Flint, CID, and you’re Mr Wilt? Mr Henry Wilt?’

‘Yes,’ said Wilt.

Now, Mr Wilt, as you may have gathered we are investigating the suspected murder of a woman whose body is believed to have been deposited at the bottom of one of the foundation holes for the new building. I daresay you know about it.’ Wilt nodded. ‘And naturally we are interested in anything that might be of assistance. I wonder if you would mind having a look at these notes.’

He handed Wilt a piece of paper. It was headed ‘Notes on Violence and the Break-Up of Family Life, and underneath were a number of sub-headings.

1. Increasing use of violence in public life to attain political ends. A) Bombings. B) Hijacking. C) Kidnapping. D) Assassination.

2. Ineffectuality of Police Methods in combating Violence. A) Negative approach. Police able only to react to crime after it has taken place. B) Use of violence by police themselves. C) Low level of intelligence of average policeman. D) Increasing use of sophisticated methods such as diversionary tactics by criminals.

3. Influence of media. TV brings crime techniques into the home.

There was more. Much more. Wilt looked down the list with a sense of doom.

‘You recognise the handwriting?’ asked the Inspector.

‘I do,’ said Wilt, adopting rather prematurely the elliptical language of the witness box.

‘You admit that you wrote those notes?’ The Inspector reached out a hand and took the notes back.

‘Yes.’

‘They express your opinion of police methods?’

Wilt pulled himself together. ‘They were jottings I was making for a lecture to Sandwich-Course Trainee Firemen,’ he explained. ‘They were simply rough ideas. They need amplifying of course…’

‘But you don’t deny you wrote them?’

‘Of course I don’t. I’ve just said I did, haven’t I?’

The Inspector nodded and picked up a book. ‘And this is yours too?’

Wilt looked at Bleak House. ‘It says so, doesn’t it?’

Inspector Flint opened the cover. ‘So it does,’ he said with a show of astonishment, ’so it does’

Wilt stared at him. There was no point in maintaining the pretence any longer. The best thing to do was to get it over quickly. They had found that bloody book in the basket of the bicycle and the notes must have fallen out of his pocket on the building site.

‘Look, Inspector,’ he said, ‘I can explain everything. It’s really quite simple. I did go into that building site…’

The Inspector stood up. ‘Mr Wilt, if you’re prepared to make a statement I think I should warn you…’

Wilt went down to the Murder Headquarters and made a statement in the presence of a police stenographer. His progress to the blue caravan and his failure to come out again were noted with interest by members of the staff teaching in the Science block, by students in the canteen and by twenty-five fellow lecturers gaping through the windows of the Staff Room.