turn so nasty and throw her and the quads out of the house. The only answer she could come up with was that their return had been necessitated by Wally Immelmann’s two heart attacks.
‘Couldn’t have happened to a better bloke,’ said Wilt. ‘Mind you, the way he swilled vodka with his steak at the Tavern in the Park and followed it up with that murderous drink he called A Bed of Nails, I’m surprised he’s lived so long.’
And with the happy thought that the ghastly Wally was finally getting his comeuppance he went to his study and made a long and uncomplimentary entry about Mr Immelmann in his diary. He hoped it would be the bastard’s obituary.
Chapter 37
In the two separate bedrooms which they occupied at 45 Oakhurst Avenue the quads were each compiling dossiers for Miss Sprockett which, had he seen them, would definitely have finished Uncle Wally off. Josephine was concentrating on his sexual relations with Maybelle with emphasis on ‘forced unnatural acts’; Penelope, who had a natural gift for mathematics and statistics, was listing the vastly different rates of pay between whites and blacks at Immelmann Enterprises and other industries in Wilma; Samantha was comparing execution numbers in various states and Wally’s expressed preference for public hangings and floggings to be mandatorily shown on prime-time television instead of less inhumane methods; and finally Emmeline was describing his collection of weapons and their use in language that was calculated to horrify the teachers at the Convent, in particular Wally’s description of flame-throwers and ‘barbecuing Nips’. All in all they were ensuring that the havoc they had caused in Wilma itself would be compounded by the justified disgust their dossiers would provoke among the parents of the girls at the Convent and their friends in Ipford.
Down at the police station Inspector Flint was enjoying himself too, berating Hodge and the two men from the US Embassy.
‘Brilliant,’ he said. ‘You come in with Hodge here and refuse to identify yourselves clearly or explain why you’ve come and expect me to kowtow to you. And now you’re back to tell me there’s not a shred of evidence of any drugs in this man Immelmann’s place. Well, let me tell you, this isn’t the Gulf and I’m not an Iraqi.’ By the time he’d finished working off his feelings he was in a good humour. The Americans weren’t but there was nothing they could say. They left and Flint could hear them calling him an arrogant Brit and, best of all, blaming Hodge for misleading them. He went down to the canteen and had a coffee. For the first time he appreciated Wilt’s view of the world. Ruth Rottecombe still maintained, in spite of the pressure brought to bear on her, that she had no idea who, if anyone, had murdered her husband, and the Scotland Yard detectives were at long last beginning to believe her. Harold Rottecombe’s shoe and the sock with the hole in it had been found, the shoe wedged in the stream and the sock on the ground in the field. Much as they wanted a conviction, they were forced to admit that his death might well have been purely accidental.
Wilt’s account of getting drunk on whisky in the wood had been substantiated by the discovery of an empty bottle of Famous Grouse with his fingerprints on it under a tree. His route had been worked out by the police in Oston; there had been a thunderstorm and everything fitted his account exactly. All that remained was to uncover the person who had set fire to the Manor House but that was proving impossible too. Bert Addle had burnt his boots and the clothes he had been wearing, and had washed and scrubbed the pick-up he had borrowed. The friend who owned it and who had been in Ibiza on holiday at the time had no idea it had been used in his absence.
