looking into her background and it stinks. False birth certificate, prostitute specialising in S&M, she’s done the lot. As hard as they come.’
‘Hasn’t she asked to phone her lawyer?’ another detective asked.
The CID Chief Inspector smiled. ‘Phoned her husband’s lawyer and strangely enough he’s not available. Says he’s on holiday. Well, that’s what he’s told me. Gone to France. Very wise of him. She can have legal aid, of course. Some dimmy who’ll do her more harm than good and she knows it so she’s refused.’
In the Interrogation Room Ruth the Ruthless was refusing to answer questions too.
Chapter 33
As Flint had hoped the arrival of Hodge and the two Americans at 45 Oakhurst Avenue was not a success. They found Eva in tears.
‘I don’t know where he is,’ she sobbed. ‘He’s just disappeared. We came back from America and found he’d gone but I don’t know where. There was no note or anything and his credit cards were on the kitchen table, and his chequebook. He hadn’t taken any money out of the bank so I don’t know what to think.’
‘Could be he’s had an accident. Have you tried the hospital?’
‘Of course I have. The first thing I did but they were no help.’
‘Has he shown any interest in any other women?’ one of the Americans asked, regarding her critically.
Eva’s tears stopped immediately. She had had enough of Americans and particularly plainclothes police ones who wore shades and drove up in cars with darkened windows.
‘No, he hasn’t,’ she snapped. ‘He’s always been a very good husband so you can go to hell, asking questions like that.’
On this furious note she slammed the door in their faces. They went back to the car and discovered they had a flat. From the upstairs window of their room the quads watched gleefully. Josephine had let the tyre down.
At the hospital Inspector Flint was surprised to be met in the corridor by Dr Dedge. The psychiatrist was looking desperately haggard and kept shaking his head in a helpless sort of manner.
‘Thank God you’ve come,’ he said, and grasping Flint’s arm he dragged him into his office, indicated a chair and slumped into one behind his desk. He opened a drawer and took several blue pills.
‘Having a difficult time with our friend Wilt?’ Flint asked.
The doctor stared at him with bulging eyes. ‘Difficult?’ he gasped incredulously. ‘Difficult? That bastard in there had the gall to get me out of bed at 4 a.m. this morning to tell me I was descended from the Pongid family’ He paused to get a glass of water and another blue pill.
‘You mean to say you drove back here–’ Flint began but Dr Dedge seemed to be having a choking fit.
‘Drove? I didn’t drive. I’m forced to sleep in here on that bloody couch in the corner in case yet another lunatic chooses to hang himself or go berserk in the night. That’s how short-staffed we are. And I’m a highly qualified psychiatrist specialising in serious cases of paranoid psychotic disorder, not a damned night-watchman.’
Flint was about to say he sympathised when the doctor went on.
‘And to cap it all that swine in there sleeps all day and seems to spend all night devising fiendish questions for me and ringing the panic button. You don’t know what he’s
