Hallucinations couldn’t come any worse than this.
By the time Eva reached Emmeline the rat was hidden in her jeans. As mad hysteria broke out in the concourse and spread through the entire hospital and even into the Secure Area, Eva, dragging Emmeline and the other three girls, who were enjoying the chaos Freddy’s imitation of a rampaging breast had caused, forced her way through the deluded mass struggling in the doorway and, thanks to her size and strength, out into the open air. By the time they reached the car Wilt was already inside it and cowering in the back seat.
‘Get in and cover your father,’ Eva ordered. ‘We mustn’t let him be seen by the guard on the gate.’
The next moment Wilt was on the floor and the four girls were kneeling on top of him. As Eva started the car and drove down the drive she glanced in the rear-view mirror and glimpsed a dishevelled Inspector Flint hurtle out of the door of the hospital, trip and land face down on the gravel. Eva put her foot on the accelerator and five minutes later they were through the gates and heading for Oakhurst Avenue.
Chapter 36
Inspector Flint arrived in his office in a state of confusion. His conversation with Eva had confirmed him in his belief that whatever mess Henry Wilt had got himself into he was not responsible for the death of Harold Rottecombe. Tripping on the gravel and then being trampled over by a herd of maddened lunatics had given him fresh insight into Wilt’s inconsequential view of life. Things just happened to people for no good reason and, while Flint had previously believed that every effect had to have a rational cause, he now realised that the purely accidental was the norm. In short, nothing made sense. The world was as mad as the inmates of the hospital he had just left.
In an effort to regain something approaching equanimity he ordered Sergeant Yates to bring him the notes on the Rottecombe murder case he’d received from the Chief Superintendent who had been cross-examining Ruth the Ruthless. Flint read them through and came to the conclusion that, far from being involved in the death of the Shadow Minister for Social Enhancement, Wilt had himself been the victim of an assault. Everything pointed to the Shadow Minister’s wife. Wilt’s blood in the garage and in the Volvo, the fact that she was seen in Ipford New Estate and caught on the motorway camera in the middle of the night, and in Flint’s opinion that she had been on sado-masochistic terms with the paedophile ‘Bobby Beat Me’ Battleby whose house had been torched. In addition there was a motive. Wilt had been in the lane behind Meldrum Manor. His jeans had been found there two days after the fire but they hadn’t been there when the police had searched the lane on the day after the fire. It followed that they had been put there in order to implicate him in the arson. Finally and most damning of all his knapsack, socks and boots had been recovered from the attic in Leyline Lodge and he was hardly likely to have put them there himself. No, everything pointed to Mrs Rottecombe. Wilt had no reason to kill her husband and if the Shadow Minister suspected or, worse still, knew his wife had connived in the fire, she had every reason to want him dead. At this point Flint spotted a flaw. Wilt hadn’t been found dead. He’d certainly been assaulted by some young thugs on the New Estate and the Rottecombe bitch had brought him there without his jeans or walking boots. Why had they been removed? That was the mystery. He went back to the theory that she’d needed them to indicate that he’d been involved in the arson of the Manor. But why leave them in the lane two days later than the fire? That only deepened the mystery. The Inspector gave up.
