Wilt opened his eyes with a silent curse. ‘What’s it got to do with you? And who are you calling “darling”?’
‘But…oh, God! I’m your Eva, your wife.’
‘Wife? What do you mean? I haven’t got a wife,’ Wilt moaned. ‘I’m a…I’m a…I don’t know what I am.’
In the background Inspector Flint agreed wholeheartedly. He didn’t know what Wilt was either. Never had and never would. About the nearest he’d ever got to it was that Wilt was the most devious bastard he’d come across in all the years he’d been in the police force. With Eva, now weeping copiously, you knew precisely where you stood. Or lay. At the bottom of the pile. To that extent Wilt had told the truth. Family first with those ghastly quads; Eva second, along with her material possessions–or, as Wilt’s solicitor had once put it, ‘like living with a dishwasher cum vacuum cleaner that thinks it thinks’–and finally whatever latest fad or so-called philosophical twaddle she had heard about. Even Greenpeace had found her militancy too much. The Keeper of the Seal Culling Station at Worthcombe Bay had, in giving evidence in court against her from his wheelchair, said that if she represented Greenpeace, he shuddered to think what Greenwar would be like. In fact the man’s language had been so filthy that only his injuries prevented the magistrate from holding him in contempt. And finally at the very bottom of the pile was Mr Henry Wilt, lawfully wedded husband of Mrs Eva Wilt, poor bugger. No wonder he deliberately refused to recognise her.
He was distracted from these considerations by one last desperate appeal from Eva to her Henry to acknowledge her as his devoted wife and mother of his lovely daughters, and Wilt’s refusal to do anything so utterly insane, as well as his complaint that he was sick and didn’t want to be harassed by strange women he’d never seen before. The effect of this statement was that the weeping Eva was helped from the ward. Her sobs could be heard from the corridor as she went in search of a doctor.
Inspector Flint seized the opportunity to go back to the bedside and bend over Wilt. ‘You’re a cunning bugger, Henry,’ he whispered. ‘Cunning as hell but you don’t fool me. I saw the nasty little glint in your eye when your missis took off. I’ve known you too long to be fooled by your tricks. You just remember that.’
For a moment he thought Wilt was about to smile but the gormless expression returned and Wilt closed his eyes. Flint gave up. He wasn’t going to get anything useful out of him in these awful circumstances. And the circumstances were getting more awful by the minute. The woman with the pulsating skull was having some sort of fit and one of the shaven multi-sexes was protesting to a nurse that he, she or it had already been given a forty-five-minutes oil enema and definitely didn’t need another. The whole thing was a bloody nightmare.
In Wilma Sheriff Stallard shared Inspector Flint’s horror though for very different reasons. It wasn’t so much that Maybelle was refusing to give him information about what had been going on at the Starfighter Mansion. She was giving far too much and he’d have preferred not to hear it.
‘They asked you what?’ he gasped when she told him the quads had asked her how many times a week Wally Immelmann fucked her and how many other gays there were in Wilma. ‘The filthy bitches. And they used the words ‘fucked’ and ‘asswise’?’
Maybelle nodded. ‘Yessir, they sure did.’
‘What in God’s name did they ask that for? It’s crazy. It’s not possible.’
‘Said they were doing a project on exploitation of coloured folk in the South for the school they go to back in Britain and they had to fill in a questionnaire,’ Maybelle said.
