him out of here. He’ll be the death of me. Is that good enough for you?’
‘Would you say he ought to be in a mental hospital?’ asked Flint.
‘I can’t think of a better place for the swine!’ yelled Dr Dedge.
‘In that case I’ll need you to certify him.’
He was answered by a moan. ‘I can’t do that. He’s not certifiably insane,’ the psychiatrist said and opened the door. He was in his underpants. He hesitated for a moment and came to a decision. ‘I tell you what I will do. I’ll recommend him for assessment and leave the doctors at the Methuen to make the decision.’
And on this note he crossed to his desk and filled in a form and handed it to the Inspector. ‘That will get him off my back at any rate.’
Flint went back to Wilt. ‘You heard what he said. You don’t have to stay here any longer.’
‘What did he mean by assessment?’
‘Don’t ask me. I’m not a psychiatrist,’ said the Inspector.
‘Nor is he, come to that,’ said Wilt but he got out of bed and began looking for his clothes. There weren’t any. ‘I’m not going anywhere dressed like this,’ he said, indicating the long nightdress he’d been given in the Geriatric Ward.
Flint went back to Dr Dedge whose temper hadn’t improved. ‘In the clothes he came in, of course,’ he snarled through the door.
‘But they were taken away as evidence that he’d been assaulted.’
‘Try the Morgue. There’s bound to be a corpse down there with clothes his size. Now leave me alone to get some sleep.’
The Inspector went down the corridor, asked directions to the Morgue and, having finally found it and explained his reason for coming, was called a grave robber and told to get the hell out. In a fury he went back and snitched a white coat from a male nurse’s dressing room when its owner was in the lavatory. Ten minutes later Wilt, dressed in the white coat which was far too short to cover his hospital gown, was in the bus with Flint, on his way to the Methuen Mental Hospital protesting vehemently that he didn’t need ‘assessing’.
‘All they’ll do is ask you a few simple questions and let you go,’ Flint told him. ‘Anyway, it’s a damned sight better than being sectioned.’
‘And what precisely does that mean?’ Wilt asked.
‘Being declared insane and held against your will.’
Wilt said nothing. He’d changed his mind about being assessed.
Chapter 34
In Wilma the Drug Enforcement Agents had given up their surveillance of the Starfighter Mansion. An autopsy of the sniffer dog and the analysis of the remains of the capsule on the bottom of the pool had indicated nothing in the least suspicious. The dog had died of natural causes almost certainly brought on by a lifetime’s diet of drugs to give him the nose for heroin, crack cocaine, ecstasy, opium, LSD, marijuana and anything else that came on the market. In short the dog was a raving drug addict and recently it had been forced to inhale tobacco smoke, the latest banned substance, to such an extent that shortly before its death it had eaten two cigarette butts in a desperate effort to assuage this new addiction. All in all it had been a thoroughly sick dog.
The same could not be said for the water in the pool. It had recently been emptied and refilled and there were no traces of illegal substances in the one hundred thousand gallons of fresh water.
‘You should have hooked the pool outlet up to the analyser tank back of the old
