normal heterosexual and a father to boot. Now if you want to make me do some more absurdly simple mental tests, I will happily oblige. What I don’t intend to do is discuss my marital sex life any further. You can do that with Eva. I think I can hear her voice now. How clever of her to come to my side at such an opportune moment. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll get police protection.’
Leaving the shrink open-mouthed and gaping through her spectacles he hurried from the room and moved down the passage away from the sound of Eva demanding to see her darling Henry. In the background the quads could be heard telling someone who didn’t like what he was confronted with that he wasn’t seeing double. ‘We aren’t twins, we’re quadruplets,’ they sang in unison.
Wilt hurried on, trying to find a door that wasn’t locked and failing. At that moment Inspector Flint emerged from his refuge in the Visitors’ Toilet, Eva barged out of the Waiting Room and the psychiatrist left her office and peered shortsightedly to see what on earth was happening and collided with Eva. In the melee that followed, the psychiatrist, who had been bowled over and was helped to her feet by the Inspector, revised her opinion of Wilt.
If the formidable woman who had knocked her down was Mrs Wilt–and the presence of the four almost identical teenage girls seemed to indicate that she must be–she could fully understand his lack of interest in marital sex. And his need for police protection. She groped around for her glasses, perched them on her nose and retreated to her office. Eva and Inspector Flint followed; Eva to apologise and Flint more reluctantly to find out how Wilt’s assessment had gone.
The psychiatrist looked at Eva doubtfully and decided not to object to her presence. ‘You want to know my opinion of the patient?’ she asked.
The Inspector nodded. In Eva’s company the less said the soonest mended seemed entirely appropriate.
‘He seems to be perfectly normal. I did all the routine tests we apply in these cases and I should say he has no symptoms of abnormality. There is absolutely no reason why he should not return home.’
She closed the file and stood up.
‘I told you so. There’s nothing wrong with him. You heard her,’ Eva said sharply to Flint. ‘You’ve got no right to hold him any longer. I’m going to take him home.’
‘I really think we should continue this conversation in private,’ said the Inspector.
‘Don’t mind me. I just happen to work here and this is my office,’ said the psychiatrist, obviously anxious to get this formidably dangerous woman who knocked people over out of the place. ‘You can go and continue your discussion in the Visitors’ Room.’
Flint followed Eva out into the passage and into the Waiting Room.
‘Well?’ Eva said as the Inspector shut the door. ‘I want to know what’s been going on, bringing Henry to an awful place like this.’
‘Mrs Wilt, if you’ll just sit down, I’ll do my best to explain,’ he said.
Eva sat down. ‘You’d better,’ she snapped.
Flint tried to think how to put the situation to her as reasonably as possible. He didn’t want her to go berserk. ‘I had Mr Wilt brought here for simple assessment to get him out of the hospital before two Americans from the US Embassy arrived to question him about something that happened in the States. Something to do with drugs. I don’t know what it was and I don’t want to know. More importantly he’s suspected of being somehow involved in the murder of a Shadow Minister, a man called Rottecombe, and…Yes, I know he couldn’t murder–’ he began but Eva was on her feet.
