was wrong with him?
‘How would I know? I just get these hot flushes. I had a prostate operation on Tuesday,’ he said.
‘And a very successful one too. You’ve done nothing but grumble since you came here. You’re just a grotty old man. I’ll be glad to see the back of you.’
The nurse intervened. ‘But he’s eighty-one, Sister,’ she said.
‘And a very healthy eighty-one he is too,’ the Sister replied and swept off to deal with the patient who had dragged his catheter out for the fifth time. It was perfectly obvious what ‘gender’ he was now. To avoid witnessing the reinsertion of the catheter, and a fresh bout of convulsions by the old man in the next bed, Flint turned to look at Wilt and found an eye staring at him. Wilt had recovered consciousness and, if the eye was anything to go by, didn’t like what he was seeing. Flint wasn’t enjoying it much either. He stared back and wondered what to do. But the eye closed abruptly. Flint turned to the nurse to ask her if an open eye was an indication that the patient had recovered consciousness but the nurse was having difficulty putting the old man’s dentures back into his mouth again. When she had succeeded Flint asked again.
‘Couldn’t say, not really,’ she said. ‘I’ve known some of them die with their eyes wide open. Of course they glaze over a bit blue later on. That way you know they’ve gone.’
‘Charming,’ said the Inspector and turned back but Wilt’s eyes were firmly shut. The sight of the Inspector sitting beside the bed had so startled him he had almost forgotten his dreadful headache and how awful he felt. Whatever had happened to him–and he had no idea where he’d been or what he’d done the vaguely familiar figure sitting and staring at him was not a reassuring one. Not that he recognised Flint. And presently he fell into a coma again and Flint sent for Sergeant Yates.
‘I’m off home for a bit of lunch and a kip,’ he told him. ‘Let me know the moment he comes round and on no account let that idiot Hodge know he’s here. He’ll have Wilt charged for drug dealing before the poor bugger’s conscious.’
He went down the seemingly endless corridors and drove home.
Chapter 24
On the other side of the Atlantic Eva and the quads sat in the airport waiting for their plane. It had been delayed first by a bomb threat and then, when it had been thoroughly searched, by a mechanical fault. Eva was no longer impatient or even angry with the quads or Auntie Joan. She was glad to be going home to her Henry but intensely worried about his whereabouts and what had happened to him. The girls played and squabbled around her. She blamed herself for having accepted the invitation to Wilma but at least she was going home and in a way she was glad her mission to get the Immelmanns to change their wills in the girls’ favour had failed so catastrophically. The prospect of a fortune would have been bad for the quads.
From an office overlooking the check-in DEA officials studied the little group and wondered what to do.
‘We stop them here, we’re not going to find anything. If there ever was anything to find. Reckon Palowski was right. This Mrs Wilt is a decoy. The guys in London can check her out. No point in pulling her in here.’
What Ruth Rottecombe was doing was preparing a prospect that would be very bad. For Wilt, at any rate. When she was woken from her sleep after her long drive back from Ipford by a phone call from the Superintendent at Oston Police Station to say he was coming up to interview her, she realised she hadn’t got rid of Wilt’s trousers and rucksack as she had intended. They were still in the back of the Volvo. If the police found them…Ruth
