reality. My secret dream was to become a ruthless man of action, decisive, unhindered by moral doubts or considerations of conscience, a Hamlet transformed into Henry the Fifth without the patriotic fervour that inclines one to think that he would not have approved of the Common Market, a Caesar…’
Inspector Flint had heard enough. ‘Wilt,’ he snarled, ‘I don’t give a damn what you wanted to become. What I want to know is what has become of your wife.’
‘I was just coming to that,’ said Wilt. ‘What we’ve got to establish first is what I am.’
‘I know what you are, Wilt. A bloody word merchant, a verbal contortionist, a fucking logic-chopper, a linguistic Houdini, an encyclopedia of unwanted information…’ Inspector Flint ran out of metaphors.
‘Brilliant, Inspector, brilliant. I couldn’t have put it better myself. A logic-chopper, but alas not a wife one. If we follow the same line of reasoning Eva in spite of all her beautiful thoughts and meditations has remained as unchanged as I. The ethereal eludes her. Nirvana slips ever from her grasp. Beauty and truth evade her. She pursues the absolute with a flyswatter and pours Harpic down the drains of Hell itself…’
‘That’s the tenth time you have mentioned Harpic,’ said the Inspector, suddenly alive to a new dreadful possibility. ‘You didn’t…’
Wilt shook his head. ‘There you go again. So like poor Eva. The literal mind that seeks to seize the evanescent and clutches fancy by its non-existent throat. That’s Eva for you. She will never dance Swan Lake. No management would allow her to fill the stage with water or install a double bed and Eva would insist.’
Inspector Flint got up. ‘This is getting us nowhere fast.’
‘Precisely,’ said Wilt, ‘nowhere at all. We are what we are and nothing we can do will alter the fact. The mould that forms our natures remains unbroken. Call it heredity, call it chance…’
‘Call it a load of codswallop.’ said Flint and left the room. He needed his sleep and he intended to get it.
In the passage he met Sergeant Yates.
‘There’s been an emergency call from a woman claiming to be Mrs Wilt,’ the Sergeant said.
‘Where from?’
‘She wouldn’t say where she was,’ said Yates. ‘She just said she didn’t know and that site had no clothes on…’
‘Oh one of those,’ said the Inspector. ‘A bloody nutter. What the hell are you wasting my time for? As if we didn’t have, enough on our hands without that.’
‘I just thought you’d want to know. If she calls again we’ll try and get a fix on the number.’
‘As if I cared,’ said Flint and hurried off in search of his lost sleep.
The Rev St John Froude spent an uneasy day. His investigation of the church had revealed nothing untoward and there was no sign that an obscene ritual (a Black Mass had crossed his mind) had been performed there. As he walked back to the Vicarage he was glad to note that the sky over Eel Stretch was empty and that the contraceptives had disappeared. So had the ivy on his desk. He regarded the space where it had been with apprehension and helped himself to whisky. He could have sworn there had been a sprig of ivy there when he had left. By the time he had finished what remained in the bottle his mind was filled with weird fancies. The Vicarage was strangely noisy. There were odd creaks from the staircase and inexplicable sounds from the upper floor as if someone or something was moving stealthily about but when the Vicar went to investigate the noises ceased abruptly. He
