may well be dealing with a split personality. I'll play the tapes again and perhaps you'll see what I mean.'
'Must you? Oh well...'
But the sergeant had switched the recorder on and once again the cluttered drawing-room echoed to guttural snarls and whimpers of Wilt's communiques. In a dark corner Inspector Flint who had been on the point of dozing off suddenly sprang to his feet.
'I knew it,' he shouted triumphantly, 'I knew it. I just knew it had to be and by God it is!'
'Had to be what?' asked the Superintendent.
'Henry Fucking Wilt who was behind this foul-up. And there's the proof on those tapes.'
'Are you sure, Inspector?
'I'm more than that. I'm positive. I'd know that little sod's voice if he imitated an Eskimo in labour.'
I don't think we have to go that far,' said the psychological adviser. 'Are you telling us you know the man we've just heard?'
'Know him?' said Flint. 'Of course I know the bastard. I ought to after what he did for me. And now he's having you lot on.'
'I must say I find it hard to believe,' said the Superintendent. 'A more inoffensive little man you couldn't wish to meet.'
'I could,' said Flint with feeling.
'But he had to be drugged up to the eyeballs before we could get him to go back in,' said the Major.
'Drugged? What with?' said the psychologist.
'No idea. Some concoction our medic brews up for blighters with a streak of yellow. Works wonders with the bomb-disposal chappies.'
Well it wouldn't appear to have worked quite so well in this case,' said the psychologist nervously, 'but it certainly accounts for the remarkable readings we've been getting. We could well have a case of chemically induced schizophrenia on our hands.'
'I wouldn't bother too much about the 'chemically induced' if I were you,' said Flint. 'Wilt's a nutter anyway. I'll give a hundred to one he set this thing up from the start.'
'You can't seriously be suggesting that Mr Wilt deliberately went out of his way to put his own children in the hands of a bunch of international terrorists,' said the Superintendent. 'When I discussed the matter with him he seemed genuinely astonished and disturbed.'
'What Wilt seems and what Wilt is are two entirely separate things. I can tell you this much though. Any man who can dress an inflatable doll up in his wife's clothes and ditch the thing at the bottom of a pile hole under thirty tons of quick-set concrete isn't '
'Excuse me, sir,' interrupted the sergeant, 'message just come through from the station that Mrs Wilt has flown the coop.'
The four men looked at him in despair 'She's what?' said the Superintendent. 'Escaped from custody, sir. Nobody seems to know where she is.'
'It fits,' said Flint, 'it fits and no mistake.'
'Fits? What fits for Chrissake?' asked the Superintendent, who was beginning to feel distinctly peculiar himself.
'The pattern, sir. Next thing we'll hear is that she was last seen on a motor cruiser going down the river, only she won't be.'
The Superintendent stared at him dementedly. 'And you call that a pattern? Oh, my God.'
'Well, it's the sort of thing Wilt would come up with, believe me. That little bugger can think up more ways of taking a perfectly sane and sensible situation and turning it into a raving nightmare than any villain I've ever met.'
