being held for questioning the murder must have taken place before…In which case…The Rev St John Froude stumbled through a series of suppositions in which Time with a capital T, and appeals for help from beyond the grave figured largely. Perhaps it was his duty to inform the police of what he had seen. He was just hesitating and wondering what to do when he heard those sobs again and this time quite distinctly. They came from the next room. He got up, braced himself with another shot of whisky and went next door. Standing in the middle of the room was a large woman whose hair straggled down over her shoulders and whose face was ravaged. She was wearing what appeared to be a shroud. The Rev St John Froude stared at her with a growing sense of horror. Then he sank to his knees.
‘Let us pray,’ he muttered hoarsely.
The ghastly apparition slumped heavily forward clutching the shroud to its bosom. Together they kneeled in prayer.
‘Check it out? What the hell do you mean “check it out”?’ said Inspector Flint who objected strongly to being woken in the middle of the afternoon when he had had no sleep for thirty-six hours and was trying to get some. ‘You wake me with some damned tomfoolery about a Vicar called Sigmund Freud…’
‘St John Froude,’ said Yates.
‘I don’t care what he’s called. It’s still improbable. If the bloody man says she isn’t there, she isn’t there. What am I supposed to do about it?’
‘I just thought we ought to get a patrol car to check, that’s all.’
‘What makes you think…’
‘There was definitely a call from a woman claiming to be Mrs Wilt and it came from that number. She’s called twice now. We’ve got a tape of the second call. She gave details of herself and they sound authentic. Date of birth, address, Wilt’s occupation, even the right name of their dog and the fact that they have yellow curtains in the lounge.’
‘Well, any fool can tell that. All they’ve got to do is walk past the house,’
‘And the name of the dog. It’s called Clem. I’ve checked that and she’s right.’
‘She didn’t happen to say what she’d been doing for the past week did she?’
‘She said she’d been on a boat,’ said Yates. ‘Then she rang off.’
Inspector Flint sat up in bed. ‘A boat? What boat?’
‘She rang off. Oh and another thing, she said she takes a size ten shoe. She does.’
‘Oh shit.’ said Flint, ‘All right, I’ll come down.’ He got out of bed and began to dress.
In his cell Wilt stared at the ceiling. After so many hours of interrogation his mind still reverberated with questions. ‘How did you kill her? Where did you put her? What did you with the weapon?’ Meaningless questions continually reiterated in the hope they would finally break him. But Wilt hadn’t broken. He had triumphed. For once in his life he knew himself to be invincibly right and everyone else totally wrong. Always before he had had doubts. Plasterers Two might after all, have been right about there being too many wogs in the country. Perhaps hanging was a deterrent. Wilt didn’t think so but he couldn’t be absolutely certain. Only time would tell. But in the case of Regina versus Wilt re the murder of Mrs Wilt there could be no question of his guilt. He could be tried, found guilty and sentenced, it would make no difference. He was innocent of the charge and if he was sentenced to life imprisonment the very enormity of the injustice done to him would compound his knowledge of his own innocence. For the very first time in his life Wilt knew himself to be free. It was as though the original sin of being Henry Wilt, of 34 Parkview Avenue, Ipford, lecturer in Liberal Studies at the Fenland College of Arts and Technology, husband of Eva Wilt and father of none, had been lifted from him. All the encumbrances of possessions, habits, salary and status, all the social conformities, the niceties of estimation of himself and other people which he and Eva had acquired,
