Wilt w-1

by Tom Sharpe

  ‘Shut up,’ shouted Flint, ‘I don’t care what you think. It’s what you’ve done and what you’ve said you’ve done that worries me. You’ve gone out of your way to mislead me…’

  ‘I’ve done nothing of the sort,’ said Wilt. ‘Until last night I had told you nothing but the truth and you wouldn’t accept it. Last night I handed you, in the absurd shape of a pork pie, a lie you wanted to believe. If you crave crap and use illegal methods like sleep deprivation to get it you can’t blame me for serving it up. Don’t come in here and bluster. If you’re stupid that’s your problem. Go and find my wife.’

  ‘Someone stop me from killing the bastard.’ yelled Flint, as he hurled himself from the room. He went to his office and sent for Sergeant Yates. ‘Cancel the pie hunt. It’s a load of bull,’ he told him.

  ‘Bull?’ said the Sergeant uncertainly.

  ‘Shit.’ said Flint. ‘He’s done it again.’

  ‘You mean…’

  ‘I mean that that little turd in there has led us up the garden path again.’

  ‘But how did he know about the factory and all that?’

  Flint looked up at him pathetically. ‘If you want to know why he’s a walking encyclopedia, you go and ask him yourself.’

  Sergeant Yates went out and returned five minutes later. ‘Meat One,’ he announced enigmatically.

  ‘Meet won?’

  ‘A class of butchers he used to teach. They took him round the factory’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Flint, ‘is there anybody that little swine hasn’t taught?’

  ‘He says they were most instructive.’

  ‘Yates, do me a favour. Just go back and find out all the names of the classes he’s taught. That way we’ll know what to expect next.’

  ‘Well I have heard him mention Plasterers Two and Gasfitters One…’

  ‘All of them, Yates, all of them. I don’t want to be caught out with some tale about Mrs Wilt being got rid of in Sewage Works because he once taught Shit Two.’ He picked the evening paper and glanced at the headlines. Police PROBE PIES FOR MISSING WIFE.

  ‘Oh my God,’ he groaned. ‘This is going to do our public image no end of good.’

  At the Tech the Principal was expressing the same opinion at a meeting of the Heads of Departments.

  ‘We’ve been held up to public ridicule,’ he said. ‘First it is popularly supposed that we make a habit of employing lecturers who bury their unwanted wives in the foundations of the new block. Secondly we have lost all chance of attain Polytechnic status by having the joint Honours degree turned down by the CNAA on the grounds that those facilities we do provide are not such as befit an institution of higher learning. Professor Baxendale expressed himself very forcibly on that point and particularly on a remark he heard from one the senior staff about necrophilia…’

  ‘I merely said…’ Dr Board began.

  ‘We all know what you said, Dr Board. And it may interest you to know that Dr Cox in his lucid moments is still refusing cold meat. Dr Mayfield has already tendered his resignation. And now to cap it all we have this.’

  He held app a newspaper across the top of whose second page there read SEX LECTURES STUN STUDENTS.

  ‘I hope you have all taken good note of the photograph,’ said the Principal bitterly, indicating a large and unfortunately angled picture of Judy hanging from the crane. ‘The article goes on…well never mind. You can read it for yourselves. I would merely like answers to the following questions. Who authorized the purchase of thirty copies of Last Exit From Brooklyn for use with Fitters and Turners?’

  Mr Morris tried to think who had taken FTs. ‘I think that must have been Watkins,’ he said. ‘He left us last term. He was only a part-time lecturer.’

  ‘Thank God we were spared him full-time.’ said the Principal. ‘Secondly which lecturer makes a habit of advocating to Nursery Nurses that they wear…er…Dutch Caps all the time?’

  ‘Well Mr Sedgwick is very keen on them.’ said Mr Morris.

  ‘Nursery Nurses or Dutch Caps?’ enquired the Principal.

  ‘Possibly both together?’ suggested Dr Board sotto voce.

  ‘He’s got this thing against the Pill,’ said Mr Morris.

  ‘Well please ask Mr Sedgwick to see me in my office on Monday at ten. I want to explain the terms under which he is employed here. And finally, how many lecturers do you know of who make use of Audio Visual Aid equipment to show blue movies to the Senior Secs?’

  Mr Morris shook his head emphatically. ‘No one in my department.’ he said.

  ‘It says here that blue movies have been shown,’ said the Principal. ‘in periods properly allocated to Current Affairs.’

  ‘Wentworth did show them Women in Love,’ said the Head of English.

  ‘Well never mind. There’s just one more point I want to mention. ‘We are not going to conduct an Evening Class in First Aid with particular reference to the Treatment of Abdominal Hernia for which it was proposed to purchase an inflatable doll. From now on we are going to have to cut our coats to suit our cloth.’

  ‘On the grounds of inflation?’ asked Dr Board.

  ‘On the grounds that the Education Committee has been waiting for years for an opportunity to cut back our budget,’ said the Principal. That opportunity has now been given them. The fact that we have been providing a public service by keeping, to quote Mr Morris, “a large number of mentally unbalanced and potentially dangerous psychopaths off the streets” unquote seems to have escaped their notice.’

  ‘I presume he was referring to the Day Release Apprentices,’ said Dr Board charitably.

  ‘He was not.’ said the Principal. ‘Correct me if I am wrong, Morris, but hadn’t you in mind the members of the Liberal Studies Department?’

  The meeting broke up. Later that day Mr Morris sat down to compose his letter of resignation.

  Chapter 19

  From the window of an empty bedroom on the first floor of the Vicarage, Eva Wilt watched the Rev St John Froude walk pensively down the path to the church. As soon as he had passed out of sight she went downstairs and into the study. She would phone Henry again. If he wasn’t at the Tech he must be at home. She crossed to the desk and was about to pick up the phone when she saw the ivy. Oh dear, she had forgotten all about the ivy and she had left it where he was bound to have seen it. It was all so terribly embarrassing. She dialled 34 Parkview Avenue and waited. There was no reply. She put they phone down and dialled the Tech. And all the time she watched the gate into the churchyard in case the Vicar should return.

  ‘Fenland College of Arts and Technology,’ said the girl on the switchboard.

  ‘It’s me again,’ said Eva, ‘I want to speak to Mr Wilt.’

  ‘I’m very sorry but Mr Wilt isn’t here.’

  ‘But where is he? I’ve dialled home and…’

  ‘He’s at the Police Station.’

  ‘He’s what?’ Eva said.

  ‘He’s at the Police Station helping the police with their enquiries…’

  ‘Enquiries? What enquiries?’ Eva shrieked.

  ‘Didn’t you know?’ said the girl ‘It’s been in all the papers. He’s been and murdered his wife…’

  Eva took the phone from her ear and stared at it in horror. The girl was still speaking but she was no longer listening. Henry had murdered his wife. But she was his wife. It wasn’t possible. She couldn’t have been murdered. For one horrible moment Eva Wilt felt sanity slipping from her. Then she put the receiver to her ear again.

  ‘Are you there?’ said the girl.

  ‘But I am his wife.’ Eva shouted. There was a long silence at the other end and she heard the girl telling someone that there was a crazy woman on the line who said she was Mrs Wilt and what ought she to do.

  ‘I tell you I am Mrs Wilt. Mrs Eva Wilt.’ she shouted but the line had gone dead. Eva put the phone down weakly. Henry at the Police Station…Henry had murdered her…Oh God. The whole world had gone mad. And here she was naked in a Vicarage at…Eva
had no idea where she was. She dialled 999.

  ‘Emergency Services. Which department do you require?’ said the operator.

  ‘Police,’ said Eva. There was a click and a man’s voice came on.

  ‘Police here.’

  ‘This is Mrs Wilt,’ said Eva.

  ‘Mrs Wilt?’

  ‘Mrs Eva Wilt. Is it true that my husband has murdered…I mean has my husband…oh dear I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘You say you’re Mrs Wilt. Mrs. Eva Wilt?’ said the man.

  Eva nodded and then said. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see.’ said the man dubiously. ‘You’re quite sure you’re Mrs Wilt?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure. That’s what I’m ringing about.’

  ‘Might I enquire where you’re calling from?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Eva. ‘You see I’m in this house and I’ve got no clothes and…oh dear.’ The Vicar was coming up the path on to the terrace.

  ‘If you could just give us the address.’

  ‘I can’t stop now,’ said Eva and put the phone down. For moment she hesitated and then grabbing the ivy from the desk she rushed out of the room.

  ‘I tell you I don’t know where she is,’ said Wilt. ‘I expect you’ll find her under missing persons. She has passed from the realm of substantiality into that of abstraction.’

  ‘What the hell do you mean by that?’ asked the Inspector, reaching for his cup of coffee. It was eleven o’clock on Saturday morning but he persisted. He had twenty-eight hours to get to the truth.

  ‘I always warned her that Transcendental Meditation carried potential dangers,’ said Wilt, himself in a no-man’s-land between sleeping and walking. ‘But she would do it.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Meditate transcendentally. In the lotus position. Perhaps she has gone too far this time. Possibly she has transmogrified herself’

  ‘Trans what?’ said Inspector Flint suspiciously.

  ‘Changed herself in some magical fashion into something else.’

  ‘Jesus, Wilt, if you start on those pork pies again…’

  ‘I was thinking of something more spiritual, Inspector, something beautiful.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Ah but think. Here am I sitting in this room with you as a direct result of going for walks with the dog and thinking dark thoughts about murdering my wife. From those hours of idle fancy I have gained the reputation of being a murderer without committing a murder. Who is to say but that Eva, whose thoughts were monotonously beautiful has not earned herself a commensurately beautiful reward? To put it in your terms, Inspector, we get what we ask for.’

  ‘I fervently hope so, Wilt,’ said the Inspector.

  ‘Ah,’ said Wilt, ‘but then where is she? Tell me that. Mere speculation will not do…’

  ‘Me tell you?’ shouted the Inspector upsetting his cup of coffee. ‘You know which hole in the ground you put her in or which cement mixer or incinerator you used.’

  ‘I was speaking metaphorically…I mean rhetorically,’ said Wilt. ‘I was trying to imagine what Eva would be if her thoughts such as they are took on the substance of reality. My secret dream was to become a ruthless man of action, decisive, unhindered by moral doubts or considerations of conscience, a Hamlet transformed into Henry the Fifth without the patriotic fervour that inclines one to think that he would not have approved of the Common Market, a Caesar…’

  Inspector Flint had heard enough. ‘Wilt,’ he snarled, ‘I don’t give a damn what you wanted to become. What I want to know is what has become of your wife.’

  ‘I was just coming to that,’ said Wilt. ‘What we’ve got to establish first is what I am.’

  ‘I know what you are, Wilt. A bloody word merchant, a verbal contortionist, a fucking logic-chopper, a linguistic Houdini, an encyclopedia of unwanted information…’ Inspector Flint ran out of metaphors.

  ‘Brilliant, Inspector, brilliant. I couldn’t have put it better myself. A logic-chopper, but alas not a wife one. If we follow the same line of reasoning Eva in spite of all her beautiful thoughts and meditations has remained as unchanged as I. The ethereal eludes her. Nirvana slips ever from her grasp. Beauty and truth evade her. She pursues the absolute with a flyswatter and pours Harpic down the drains of Hell itself…’

  ‘That’s the tenth time you have mentioned Harpic,’ said the Inspector, suddenly alive to a new dreadful possibility. ‘You didn’t…’

  Wilt shook his head. ‘There you go again. So like poor Eva. The literal mind that seeks to seize the evanescent and clutches fancy by its non-existent throat. That’s Eva for you. She will never dance Swan Lake. No management would allow her to fill the stage with water or install a double bed and Eva would insist.’

  Inspector Flint got up. ‘This is getting us nowhere fast.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Wilt, ‘nowhere at all. We are what we are and nothing we can do will alter the fact. The mould that forms our natures remains unbroken. Call it heredity, call it chance…’

  ‘Call it a load of codswallop.’ said Flint and left the room. He needed his sleep and he intended to get it.

  In the passage he met Sergeant Yates.

  ‘There’s been an emergency call from a woman claiming to be Mrs Wilt,’ the Sergeant said.

  ‘Where from?’

  ‘She wouldn’t say where she was,’ said Yates. ‘She just said she didn’t know and that site had no clothes on…’

  ‘Oh one of those,’ said the Inspector. ‘A bloody nutter. What the hell are you wasting my time for? As if we didn’t have, enough on our hands without that.’

  ‘I just thought you’d want to know. If she calls again we’ll try and get a fix on the number.’

  ‘As if I cared,’ said Flint and hurried off in search of his lost sleep.

  The Rev St John Froude spent an uneasy day. His investigation of the church had revealed nothing untoward and there was no sign that an obscene ritual (a Black Mass had crossed his mind) had been performed there. As he walked back to the Vicarage he was glad to note that the sky over Eel Stretch was empty and that the contraceptives had disappeared. So had the ivy on his desk. He regarded the space where it had been with apprehension and helped himself to whisky. He could have sworn there had been a sprig of ivy there when he had left. By the time he had finished what remained in the bottle his mind was filled with weird fancies. The Vicarage was strangely noisy. There were odd creaks from the staircase and inexplicable sounds from the upper floor as if someone or something was moving stealthily about but when the Vicar went to investigate the noises ceased abruptly. He went upstairs and poked his head into several empty bedrooms. He came down again and stood in the hall listening. Then he returned to his study and tried to concentrate on his sermon, but the feeling that he was not alone persisted. The Rev St John Froude sat at his desk and considered the possibility of ghosts. Something very odd was going on. At one o’clock he went down the hall to the kitchen for lunch and discovered that a pint of milk had disappeared from the pantry and that the remains of an apple pie that Mrs Snape who did his cleaning twice weekly had brought him had also vanished. He made do with baked beans on toast and tottered upstairs for his afternoon nap. It was while he was there that he first heard the voices. Or rather one voice. It seemed to come from his study. The Rev St John Froude sat up in bed. If his ears weren’t betraying him and in view of the morning’s weird events he was inclined to believe that they were he could have sworn someone had been using his telephone. He got up and put on his shoes. Someone was crying. He went out on to the landing and listened. The sobbing had stopped. He went downstairs and looked in all the rooms on the ground floor but, apart from the fact that a dust cover had been removed from one of the armchairs in the unused sitting-room, there was no sign of anyone. He was just about to go upstairs again when the telephone rang. He went into the study and answered it.

  ‘Waterswick Vicarage,’ he mumbled.

  ‘This is Fenland Constabulary,’ said a man.
‘We’ve just had a call from your number purporting to come from a Mrs Wilt!

  ‘Mrs Wilt?’ said the Rev St John Froude. ‘Mrs. Wilt? I’m afraid there must be some mistake. I don’t know any Mrs Wilt.’

  ‘The call definitely came from your phone, sir.’

  The Rev St John Froude considered the matter. ‘This is all very peculiar,’ he said, ‘I live alone.’

  ‘You are the Vicar?’

  ‘Of course I’m the Vicar. This is the Vicarage and I am the Vicar.’

  ‘I see, sir. And your name is?’

  ‘The Reverend St John Froude…F…R…O…U…D…E.’

  ‘Quite sir, and you definitely don’t have a woman in the house.’

  ‘Of course I don’t have a woman in the house. I find the suggestion distinctly improper. I am a…’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, but we just have to check these things out. We’ve had a call from Mrs Wilt, or at least a woman claiming to be Mrs Wilt, and it came from your phone…’

  ‘Who is this Mrs Wilt? I’ve never heard of a Mrs Wilt.’

  ‘Well sir. Mrs Wilt…it’s a bit difficult really. She’s supposed to have been murdered.’

  ‘Murdered?’ said the Rev St John Froude. ‘Did you say “murdered”?’

  ‘Let’s just say she is missing from home in suspicious circumstances. We’re holding her husband for questioning.’

  The Rev St John Froude shook his head. ‘How very unfortunate.’ he murmured.

  ‘Thank you for your help, sir,’ said the Sergeant. ‘Sorry we have disturbed you.’

  The Rev St John Froude put the phone down thoughtfully. The notion that he was sharing the house with a disembodied and recently murdered woman was not one that he had wanted to put to his caller. His reputation for eccentricity was already sufficiently widespread without adding to it. On the other hand what he had seen on the boat in Eel Stretch bore, now that he came to think of it, all the hallmarks of murder. Perhaps in some extraordinary way he had been a witness to a tragedy that had already occurred, a sort of post-mortem déja vu if that was the right way of putting it. Certainly if the husband were being held for questioning the murder must have taken place before…In which case…The Rev St John Froude stumbled through a series of suppositions in which Time with a capital T, and appeals for help from beyond the grave figured largely. Perhaps it was his duty to inform the police of what he had seen. He was just hesitating and wondering what to do when he heard those sobs again and this time quite distinctly. They came from the next room. He got up, braced himself with another shot of whisky and went next door. Standing in the middle of the room was a large woman whose hair straggled down over her shoulders and whose face was ravaged. She was wearing what appeared to be a shroud. The Rev St John Froude stared at her with a growing sense of horror. Then he sank to his knees.