good supper of beef stew and dumplings and then getting into bed with an interesting book.'
'Bourgeois pig. All you think about is your own comfort.'
'It's not all I think about,' said Wilt, 'but you asked for a definition of happiness and that happens to be mine. If you want me to go on I will.'
Gudrun Schautz didn't but Wilt went on all the same. He spoke of picnics by the river on hot summer days and finding a book he wanted in a secondhand shop and Eva's delight when the garlic she had planted actually managed to show signs of growing and his delight at her delight and decorating the Christmas tree with the quads and waking in the morning with them all over the bed tearing open presents and dancing round the room with toys they had wanted and would probably have forgotten about in a week and...Simple family pleasures and surprises which this woman would never know but which were the bedrock of Wilt's existence. And as he retold them they took on a new significance for him and soothed present horrors with a balm of decency and Wilt felt himself to be what he truly was a good man in a quiet and unobtrusive way, married to a good woman in a noisy and ebullient way. If nobody else saw him like this he didn't care. It was what he was that mattered and what he was grew out of what he did, and for the life of him Wilt couldn't see that he had ever done anything wrong. If anything he had done a modicum of good.
That wasn't the way Gudrun Schautz viewed things. Hungry, cold and fearful, she heard Wilt tell of simple things with a growing sense of unreality. She had lived too long in a world of bestial actions taken to achieve the ideal society to be able to stand this catechism of domestic pleasures. And the only answers she could give him were to call him a fascist swine and secretly she knew she would be wasting her breath. In the end she stayed silent and Wilt was about to take pity on her and cut short a modified version of the family's holiday in France when the telephone rang.
'All right, Wilt,' said Flint, 'you can forget the travelogue. This is the crunch. Your missus is downstairs with the children and if the Schautz doesn't come down right now you're going to be responsible for a minor massacre.'
'I've heard that one before,' said Wilt. 'And for your information...'
'Oh no, you haven't. This time it's for real. And if you don't bring her down, by God, we will. Take a look out the window.' Wilt did. Men were climbing into the helicopter in the field.
'Right,' continued Flint, 'so they'll land on the roof and the first person they'll take out is you. Dead. The Schautz bitch we want alive. Now move.'
'I can't say I like your priorities,' said Wilt, but the Inspector had rung off. Wilt went through the kitchen and untied the bathroom door.
'You can come out now,' he said. 'Your friends downstairs seem to be winning. They want you to join them.'
There was no reply from the bathroom. Wilt tried the door and found it was locked.
'Now listen. You've got to come out. I'm serious. Messrs Baggish and Chinanda are downstairs with my wife and children and the police are prepared to meet their demands.'
Silence suggested that Gudrun Schautz wasn't. Wilt put his ear to the door and listened. Perhaps the wretched creature had escaped somehow or, worse still, committed suicide.
'Are you there?' he asked inanely. A faint whimper reassured him.
'Right. Now then, nobody is going to hurt you. There is absolutely no point in staying in there and...' A chair was jammed under the doorhandle on the other side.
'Shit,' said Wilt, and tried to calm himself. 'Please listen to reason. If you don't come out and join them all hell is going to be let loose and someone is going to get hurt. You've got to believe me.'
But Gudrun Schautz had listened to too much unreason already to believe anything. She gibbered faintly in German.
'Yes, well that's a great help,' said Wilt, suddenly conscious that his alternative had gone
