had bust the door down in a fit of jealousy. Much better. Then he had drowned them. And then Sally had come upstairs and he had had to kill her too. That explained the blood. There had been a struggle. He hadn’t meant to kill her but she had fallen in the bath. So far so good. But where had he put them? It had to be something good. Flint wasn’t going to believe anything like the river. Somewhere that made sense of the doll down the hole. Flint had it firmly fixed in his head that the doll had been a diversionary tactic. That meant that time entered into their disposal.
Wilt got up and asked to go to the toilet. As usual the constable came with him and stood outside the door.
‘Do you have to?’ said Wilt. ‘I’m not going to hang myself with the chain.’
‘To see you don’t beat your meat,’ said the constable coarsely.
Wilt sat down. Beat your meat. What a hell of an expression. It called to mind Meat One. Meat One? It was a moment of inspiration. Wilt got up and flushed the toilet. Meat One would keep them busy for a long time. He went back to the pale green room where the light buzzed. Flint was waiting for him.
‘You going to talk now?’ he asked.
Wilt shook his head. They would have to drag it out of him if his confession was to be at all convincing. He would have to hesitate, start to say something, stop, start again, appeal to Flint to stop torturing him, plead and start again. This trout needed tickling. Oh well, it would help to keep him awake.
‘Are you going to start again at the beginning?’ he asked
Inspector Flint smiled horribly. ‘Right at the beginning.’
‘All right,’ said Wilt. ‘have it your own way, just don’t keep asking me if I gave the dog Chappie or Bonzo. I can’t stand all that talk about dog food.’
Inspector Flint rose to the bait. ‘Why not?’
‘It gets on my nerves,’ said Wilt, with a shudder.
The Inspector leant forward. ‘Dog food gets on your nerves?’ he said.
Wilt hesitated pathetically. ‘Don’t go on about it,’ he said. ‘Please don’t go on.’
‘Now then, which was it, Bonzo or Chappie?’ said the Inspector, scenting blood.
Wilt put his head in his hands. ‘I won’t say anything. I won’t. Why must you keep asking me about food? Leave me alone.’ His voice rose hysterically and with it Inspector Flint’s hopes. He knew when he had touched the nerve. He was on to a good thing.
Chapter 18
‘Dear God,’ said Sergeant Yates, ‘but we had pork pies for lunch yesterday. It’s too awful.’
Inspector Flint rinsed his mouth out with black coffee and spat into the washbasin. He had vomited twice and felt like vomiting again.
‘I knew it would be something like that.’ he said with a shudder. ‘I just knew it. A man who could pull that doll-trick had to have something really filthy up his sleeve.’
‘But they may all have been eaten by now,’ said the Sergeant. Flint looked at him balefully.
‘Why the hell do you think he laid that phoney trail?’ he asked. ‘To give them plenty of time to be consumed. His expression “consumed”, not mine. You know what the shelf life of a pork pie is?’
Yates shook his head.
‘Five days. Five days. So they went out on Tuesday which leaves us one day to find them or what remains of them. I want every pork pie in East Anglia picked up. I want every fucking sausage and steak and kidney pie that went out of Sweetbreads Meat Factory this week found
