‘Now, we’ll just go over that again,’ said the Inspector. ‘You say that what those men saw down that hole was in actual fact an inflatable plastic doll with a vagina.’
‘The vagina is incidental,’ said Wilt, calling forth reserves of inconsequence.
‘That’s as maybe,’ said the Inspector. ‘Most dolls don’t have them but…all right, we’ll let that pass. The point I’m trying to get at is that you’re quite positive there isn’t a real live human being down there.’
‘Positive,’ said Wilt, ‘and if there were it is doubtful if it would still be alive now.’
The Inspector studied him unpleasantly. ‘I don’t need you to point that out to me,’ he said. ‘If there was the faintest possibility of whatever it is down there being alive I wouldn’t be sitting here, would I?’
‘No.’ said Wilt.
‘Right. So now we come to the next point. How is it that what those men saw, they say a woman and you say a doll…that this thing was wearing clothes, had hair and even more remarkably had its head bashed in and one hand stretched up in the air?’
‘That was the way it fell,’ said Wilt. ‘I suppose the arm, got caught up on the side and lifted up’
‘And its head was bashed in?’
Well, I did drop a lump of mud on it.’ Wilt admitted, ‘that would account for that.’
‘You dropped a lump of mud on its head?’
‘That’s what I said,’ Wilt agreed.
‘I know that’s what you said. What I want to know is why you felt obliged to drop a lump of mud on the head of as inflatable doll that had, as far as I can gather, never done you any harm.’
Wilt hesitated. That damned doll had done, him a great deal of harm one way and another but this didn’t seem an opportune moment to go into that. ‘I don’t know really,’ he said finally, ‘I just thought it might help.’
‘Help what?’
‘Help…I don’t know. I just did it, that’s all. I was drunk at the time.’
‘All right, we’ll come back to that in a minute. There’s still one question you haven’t answered. If it was a doll, why was it wearing clothes?’
Wilt looked desperately round the caravan and met the eyes of the police stenographer. There was a look in them that didn’t inspire confidence. Talk about lack of suspension of disbelief.
‘You’re not going to believe this,’ Wilt said. The Inspector looked at him and lit a cigarette.
‘Well?’
‘As a matter of fact I had dressed it up,’ Wilt said, squirming with embarrassment’
‘You had dressed it up?’
‘Yes,’ said Wilt.
‘And may one enquire what purpose you had in mind when you dressed it up?’
‘I don’t know exactly.’
The Inspector sighed significantly. ‘Right. We go back to the beginning. We have a doll with a vagina which you dress up and bring down here in the dead of night and deposit at the bottom of a thirty-foot hole and drop lumps of mud on its head. Is that what you’re saying?’
‘Yes,’ said Wilt.
‘You wouldn’t prefer to save everyone concerned a lot of time and bother by admitting here and now that what is at present resting, hopefully at peace, under twenty tons of concrete at the bottom of that pile is the body of a murdered woman?’
