my client not to say another word and if he appears in Court with a mark on him…’
‘Mr Gosdyke, you should know me better than that. I’m not a complete fool and if your client has any marks on him on Monday morning they will not have been made by me or any of my men. You have my assurance on that.’
Mr Gosdyke left the Police Station a puzzled man. He had to admit that Wilt’s story hadn’t been a very convincing one. Mr Gosdyke’s experience of murderers was not extensive but he had a shrewd suspicion that men who confessed openly that they had entertained fantasies of murdering their wives ended by admitting that they had done so in fact. Besides his attempt to get Wilt to agree that he’d put the doll down the hole as a practical joke on his colleagues at the Tech had failed hopelessly. Wilt had refused to lie and Mr Gosdyke was not used to clients who insisted on telling the truth.
Inspector Flint went back into the interview Room and looked at Wilt. Then he pulled up a chair and sat down.
‘Henry,’ he said with an affability he didn’t feel, ‘you and I are going to have a little chat.’
‘What, another one?’ said Wilt. ‘Mr Gosdyke has advised me to say nothing.’
‘He always does,’ said the Inspector sweetly, ‘to clients he knows are guilty. Now are you going to talk?’
‘I can’t see why not. I’m not guilty and it helps to pass the time.’
Chapter 17
It was Friday and as on every other day in the week the little church at Waterswick was empty. And as on every other day of the week the Vicar, the Reverend St John Froude was drunk. The two things went together, the lack of a congregation and the Vicar’s insobriety. It was an old tradition dating back to the days of smuggling, when Brandy for the Parson had been about the only reason the isolated hamlet had a vicar at all. And like so many English traditions it died hard. The Church authorities saw to it that Waterswick got idiosyncratic parsons whose awkward enthusiasms tended to make them unsuitable for more respectable parishes and they, to console themselves for its remoteness and lack of interest in things spiritual, got alcoholic. The Rev St John Froude maintained tradition. He attended to his duties with the same Anglo-Catholic Fundamentalist fervour that had made him so popular in Esher and turned an alcoholic eye on the activities of his few parishioners who, now that brandy was not so much in demand, contented themselves with the occasional boatload of illegal Indian immigrants.
Now as he finished a breakfast of eggnog and Irish coffee and considered the iniquities of his more egregious colleagues as related in the previous Sunday’s paper he was startled see something wobbling above the reeds on Eel Stretch. It looked like balloons, white sausage-shaped balloons that rose briefly and then disappeared. The Rev St John Froude shuddered, shut his eyes, opened them again and thought about the virtues of abstinence. If he was right and he didn’t know whether he wanted to be or not, the morning was being profaned by a cluster of contraceptives, inflated contraceptives wobbling erratically where by the nature of things no contraceptive had ever wobbled before. At least he hoped it was cluster. He was so used to seeing things in twos when they were in fact ones that he couldn’t be sure if what looked like a cluster of inflated contraceptives wasn’t just one or better still none at all.
He reeled off to his study to get his binoculars and stepped out onto the terrace to focus them. By that time the manifestation had disappeared. The Rev St John Froude shook
