students’ canteen to dig up some dirt on Mr Morris.
‘Not tests,’ said Wilt adamantly. ‘They’re deceptive.’
‘You think so?’ said Dr Pittman, consultant psychiatrist at the Fenland Hospital and professor of Criminal Psychology at the University. Being plagiocephalic didn’t help either.
‘I should have thought it was obvious.’ said Wilt. ‘You show me an ink-blot and I think it looks like my grandmother lying in a pool of blood, do you honestly think I’m going to be fool enough to say so? I’d be daft to do that. So I say a butterfly sitting on a geranium. And every time it’s the same. I think what it does look like and then say something completely different. Where does that get you?’
‘It is still possible to infer something from that,’ said Dr Pittman.
‘Well, you don’t need a bloody ink-blot to infer, do you?’ said Wilt. Dr Pittman made a note of Wilt’s interest in blood. ‘You can infer things from just looking at the shape of people’s heads.’
Dr Pittman polished his glasses grimly. Heads were not things he liked inferences to be drawn from. ‘Mr Wilt,’ he said, ‘I am here at your request to ascertain your sanity and in particular to give an opinion as to whether or not I consider you capable of murdering your wife and disposing of her body in a singularly revolting and callous fashion. I shall not allow anything you may say to influence my ultimate and objective findings.’
Wilt looked perplexed. ‘I must say you’re not giving yourself much room for manoeuvre. Since we’ve dispensed with mechanical aids like tests I should have thought what I had to say would be the only thing you could go on. Unless of course you’re going to read the bumps on my head. Isn’t that a bit old-fashioned?’
‘Mr Wilt,’ said Dr Pittman, ‘the fact that you clearly have a sadistic streak and take pleasure in drawing attention to other people’s physical infirmities in no way dispose me to conclude you are capable of murder…’
‘Very decent of you,’ said Wilt, ‘though frankly I’d have thought anyone was capable of murder given the right, or to be precise the wrong, circumstances.’
Dr Pittman stifled the impulse to say how right he was. Instead he smiled prognathously. ‘Would you say you are a rational man, Henry?’ he asked.
Wilt frowned. ‘Just stick to Mr Wilt if you don’t mind. This may not be a paid consultation but I prefer a little formality’
Dr Pittman’s smile vanished. ‘You haven’t answered my question.’
‘No, I wouldn’t say I was a rational man,’ said Wilt.
‘An irrational one perhaps?’
‘Neither the one wholly nor the other wholly. Just a man’
‘And a man is neither one thing nor the other?’
‘Dr Pittman, this is your province not mine but in my opinion man is capable of reasoning but not of acting within wholly rational limits. Man is an animal, a developed animal, though come to think of it all animals are developed if we are to believe Darwin. Let’s just say man is a domesticated animal with elements of wildness about him…’
‘And what sort of animal are you, Mr Wilt?’ said Dr Pittman. ‘A domesticated animal or a wild one?’
‘Here we go again. These splendidly simple dual categories that seem to obsess the modern mind. Either/Or Kierkegaard as that bitch Sally Pringsheim would say. No. I am not wholly domesticated. Ask my wife. She’ll express an opinion on the matter.’
‘In what respect are you undomesticated?’
‘I fart in bed, Dr Pittman. I like to fart in bed. It is the trumpet call of the
