questions. I mean I've taken the trouble to come up here and undo the door and you won't come out and you keep on about who they are and where I was and all that as if I knew. As a matter of fact I was having a nap in the bedroom and...'
'A nap? What is a nap?'
'A nap? Oh, a nap. Well it's a sort of after-lunch snooze. Sleep, you know. Anyway when all the hullabaloo started, the shooting and so on, and I heard you shout 'Get the children,' and I thought how jolly kind of you that was...'
'Kind of me? You thought that kind of me?' asked Miss Schautz with a distinctly strangulated disbelief.
'I mean putting the children first instead of your own safety. Most people wouldn't have thought of saving the children, would they?'
A gurgling noise from the bathroom indicated that Gudrun Schautz hadn't thought of this interpretation of her orders and was having to make readjustments in her attitude to Wilt's intelligence.
'No, that is so,' she said finally.
'Well naturally after that I couldn't leave you locked up here, could I?' continued Wilt, realizing that talking like some idiotic chinless wonder had its advantages. 'Noblesse oblige and all that, what!'
'Noblesse oblige?'
'You know, one good turn deserves another and whatnot,' said Wilt. 'So as soon as the coast was clear I sort of came out from under the bed and hopped up here.'
'What coast?' demanded Miss Schautz suspiciously.
'When the blighters up here decided to go downstairs,' said Wilt. 'Seemed the safest place to be. Anyway, why don't you come out and have a chair. It must be jolly uncomfortable in there.'
Miss Schautz considered this proposition and the fact that Wilt sounded like a congenital idiot and took the risk.
'I haven't any clothes on,' she said opening the door an inch.
'Gosh,' said Wilt, 'I'm awfully sorry. Hadn't thought of that. I'll go and get you something.'
He went into the bedroom and rummaged in a cupboard and having found what felt like a raincoat in the darkness took it back.
'Here's a coat,' he said handing it through the doorway 'Don't like to turn the bedroom light on in case those blokes downstairs see it and start pooping off again with their guns. Mind you I've locked the door and barricaded it so they'd have a job getting in.'
In the bathroom Miss Schautz put on the raincoat and cautiously came out to find Wilt pouring boiling water from the electric kettle into a teapot.
'Thought you'd like a nice cup of tea,' he said. 'Know I would.'
Behind him Gudrun Schautz tried to comprehend what had happened. From the moment she had been locked in the bathroom she had been convinced that the flat was occupied by policemen. Now it seemed whoever had been there had gone and this weak and stupid Englishman was making tea as if nothing was wrong. Wilt's admission that he had spent the afternoon cowering under the bed in the room below had been convincingly ignominious and had helped to confirm the impression she had gathered from his previous nocturnal exchanges with Frau Wilt that he was no sort of threat. On the other hand she had to find out how much he knew.
'These men with guns,' she said, 'what sort of men are they?'
'Well I wasn't really in a very good position to see them,' said Wilt, 'being under the bed and so on. Some of them were wearing boots and some weren't, if you see what I mean.'
Gudrun Schautz didn't. 'Boots?'
