‘It’s just that I can’t sleep, doctor. My wife keeps on going off and leaving me and I just can’t get used to sleeping on my own.’ A prescription for sleeping tablets. Then on the night. ‘I’ll make the Ovaltine tonight, dear. You’re looking tired. I’ll bring it up to you in bed.’ Gratitude followed by snares. Down to the car…fairly early would be best…around ten thirty…over to the Tech and down the hole. Perhaps inside a plastic bag…no, not a plastic bag. ‘I understand you bought a large plastic bag recently, sir. I wonder if you would mind showing it to us.’ No, better just to leave her down the hole they were going to fill with concrete next morning. And finally a bewildered Wilt. He would go round to the Pringsheims’. ‘Where’s Eva? Yes, you do. ‘No, we don’t.’ ‘Don’t lie to me. She’s always coming round here.’ ‘We’re not lying. We haven’t seen her.’ After that he would go to the police.
Motiveless, clueless and indiscoverable. And proof that he was a man who could act. Or wasn’t. What if he broke down under the strain and confessed? That would be some sort of vindication too. He would know what sort of man he was one way or another and at least he would have acted for once in his life. And fifteen years in prison would be almost identical to fifteen, more, twenty years at the Tech confronting louts who despised him and talking about Piggy and the Lord of the Flies. Besides he could always plead the book as a mitigating circumstance at his trial.
‘Me lud, members of the jury, I ask you to put yourself in the defendant’s place. For twelve years he has been confronted by the appalling prospect of reading this dreadful book to classes of bored and hostile youths. He has had to endure agonies of repetition, of nausea and disgust at Mr Golding’s revoltingly romantic view of human nature. Ah, but I hear you say that Mr Golding is not a romantic, that his view of human nature as expressed in his portrait of a group of young boys marooned on a desert island is the very opposite of romanticism and that the sentimentality of which I accuse him and to which my client’s appearance in this court attests is to be found not in The Lord of the Flies but in its predecessor, Coral Island. But, me lud, gentlemen of the jury, there is such a thing as inverted romanticism, the romanticism of disillusionment, of pessimism and of nihilism. Let us suppose for one moment that my client had spent twelve years reading not Mr Golding’s work but Coral Island to groups of apprentices,’ is it reasonable to imagine that he would have been driven to the desperate remedy of murdering his wife? No. A hundred times no. Mr Ballantyne’s book would have given him the inspiration, the self-discipline, the optimism and the belief in man’s ability to rescue himself from the most desperate situation by his own ingenuity…’
It might not be such a good idea to pursue that line of argument too far. The defendant Wilt had after all exercised a good deal of ingenuity in rescuing himself from a desperate situation…Still, it was a nice thought. Wilt finished his business in the lavatory and looked around for the toilet paper. There wasn’t any. The bloody roll had run out. He reached in his pocket and found Eva’s note and put it to good use. Then he flushed it down the U-bend, puffed some Harpic after it to express his opinion of it and her and went out to the kitchen and helped himself to another gin.
He spent the rest of the evening sitting in front of the TV with a piece of bread and cheese and a tin of peaches until it was time to try his first dummy run. He went out to the front door and looked up and down the street. It was almost dark now and there was no one in sight. Leaving the front door open he went upstairs and fetched the doll and put it in the back seat of the car. He had to push and squeeze a bit to get it in but finally the door shut. Wilt climbed in and backed the car out into Parkview Avenue and drove down to the roundabout. By the time he reached the car park at the back of the Tech it was half past ten exactly. He stopped and sat in the car looking around. Not a soul in sight and no lights on. There wouldn’t be. The Tech closed at nine.
