out of this time like you’ve done before.’
Flint let this awful information sink into Wilt’s bewildered mind. He tried to remember how all this had happened but only disjointed scenes came back to him.
‘Think, Henry, think. This isn’t some prank. I’m telling you the gospel truth.’
Wilt looked at him and knew that Inspector Flint was deadly serious.
‘I don’t know what happened to me and that’s the gospel truth too. I remember not wanting to go to America to stay with Eva’s Aunt Joan and her husband Wally Immelmann. So I told her I had a class to prepare for next term and got some books Wally Immelmann would hate out of the library and of course she made a fuss and said I couldn’t take them.’
‘What sort of books?’
‘Oh, books about Castro’s wonderful Cuba and the Marxist Theory of Revolution. The sort of stuff he detests. I can’t say I like it myself but he’d have had an apoplectic fit if I’d turned up in Wilma with the books I said I was going to take. There were others but I can’t remember them all.’
‘And your missis swallowed that story?’
‘Hook, line and sinker,’ said Wilt. ‘Anyway, it was plausible. We’ve still got lunatics who think Lenin was a saint and Stalin was fundamentally a kindly chap at heart. Some people never learn, do they?’
Flint kept his thoughts on the matter to himself. ‘All right, I’ll accept what you’ve told me so far. What I want to know is what you did next. And don’t give me any hogwash about having amnesia. The doctors say your brain hasn’t been damaged. At least not any more than it was before you got into this scrape.’
‘I can tell you what I did up to a certain point but after that until I woke up in that Terminal Ward I haven’t a clue. The last thing I remember was being in a wood soaked to the skin and stumbling forward over a root or something and falling. From then on, nothing. I can’t help you any further.’
‘OK, let’s go back a bit. Where had you come from?’ said the Inspector.
‘That’s the point. I don’t know. I was on a walking tour.’
‘From where to where?’
‘I didn’t know. In fact I didn’t want to know. I just wanted to go nowhere. You see what I mean?’
Flint shook his head. ‘Not one bloody word,’ he said. ‘You didn’t want to know. You just wanted to go. And that makes sense? Not to me it doesn’t. A lot of gibberish is what it sounds like to me. Deliberate gibberish. Like lies. You had to know where you wanted to go.’
Wilt sighed. He’d known Inspector Flint on and off for a good number of years and he should have predicted the Inspector wouldn’t understand that he didn’t want to know where he was going. He tried to explain again.
‘I wanted to get away from Ipford, the Tech, the routine of going to work, if you can call it work, and clear my mind of all that junk by finding England without any preconceptions.’
Flint tried to grasp what Wilt was saying and failed as usual. ‘So how come you ended up in Meldrum Slocum?’ he said in a desperate attempt to get some sanity into the conversation. ‘You must have come from somewhere.’
‘I told you. From a wood. And anyhow I was pissed.’
‘And I’m pissed off with having the mickey taken out of me,’ snarled Flint and went back to Dr Dedge’s office and banged on the door only to be told to fuck off.
‘All I want to know is if that bloody man is well enough to go home. Just tell me that.’
‘Listen!’ shouted the psychiatrist. ‘I don’t give a damn whether he is well or not. Get
