unisex is about right. It’s impossible to tell what sex anyone is in here.’
It was not a remark that endeared him to three women nearby who had been under the illusion that they were still relatively attractive and sexy. Flint didn’t care. He tried to interest himself more vicariously in a scandal involving a well-known rugby player who had gone to a massage parlour in Swansea only to find his wife working there and had tackled the owner or, as the latter had put it from the witness box, ‘had gone apeshit’, when he saw Wilt looking at him.
Flint put the paper down and smiled. ‘Hello, Henry. Feeling any better?’
From the pillow Wilt studied that smile and found it difficult to interpret. It wasn’t the sort of smile to give him any confidence. Inspector Flint’s false teeth were too loose for that and besides, he had seen Flint smile maliciously in the past too often to find the sight at all reassuring. He didn’t feel any better.
‘Better than what?’ he asked.
Flint’s smile disappeared and with it most of his sympathy. He began to doubt whether Wilt’s brain had been affected at all by being mugged. ‘Well, better than you did before.’
‘Before what?’ said Wilt, fighting for time to find out what was going on. It was obvious he was in hospital and that he had bandages round his head but that was about all that was obvious.
Flint’s hesitation before replying did nothing to give him any confidence in his own innocence. ‘Before this thing happened,’ he said finally.
Wilt tried to think. He had no idea what had happened. ‘I can’t say I do,’ he replied. It seemed a reasonable answer to a question he didn’t understand.
That wasn’t the way Inspector Flint saw it. He was already beginning to lose the thread of the conversation and as always with Wilt he was being led into a swamp of misunderstanding. The sod never did say anything that was at all clear-cut. ‘When you say you can’t say you do, just exactly what do you mean?’ he enquired and tried to smile again. That didn’t help.
Wilt’s caution went into overdrive. ‘Just that,’ he said.
‘And ‘just that’ means?’
‘What I said. Just that,’ Wilt said.
Again Flint’s smile vanished. He leant forward. ‘Listen, Henry, all I want to know is–’
He got no further. Wilt had decided on new avoiding tactics. ‘Who’s Henry?’ he asked abruptly.
A new look of doubt came on Flint’s face and his lean forward ground to a halt. ‘Who’s Henry? You want to know who Henry is?’
‘Yes. I don’t know of any Henrys. Except kings and princes of course and I wouldn’t know any of them, would I? Never met one and I’m not likely to. Have you ever met a king or a prince?’
For a second the look on the Inspector’s face had changed from doubt to certainty. Now it swung back again. With Wilt nothing was certain and even that was doubtful in these circumstances. Wilt was uncertainty personified. ‘No. I haven’t met a king or a prince and I don’t want to. All I want to know–’
‘That’s the second time you’ve said that,’ said Wilt. ‘And what I want to know is who I am.’
At that moment Eva shoved her way into the room. She had waited long enough and she wasn’t spending another two hours in that revoltingly dirty waiting room. She was going to her husband’s side.
‘Oh, darling, are you in terrible pain, my pet?’
