Part 14 (1/2)

'All they'll do is ask you a few simple questions and let you go,' Flint told him. 'Anyway, it's a d.a.m.ned 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 a.s.sessed.

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 a.n.a.lysis 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 b.u.t.ts in a desperate effort to a.s.suage 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 a.n.a.lyser tank back of the old drive-in,' Murphy told the men who had been checking what came out of the toilets and bathrooms in the Starfighter.

'You think we can get a hundred thousand gallons from a pool into this thing? You've got to be crazy. You should have taken a sample right at the start.'

'Oh sure, first thing you do is test for illegal substances in swimming-pools. That's genius. Like dope carriers always dump the stuff there. What they do then? Wait till the water evaporates? Jesus, we've got some real geniuses round here.'

They reported back to the office in Atlanta.

'We've been given the run-around. Either Sol was sucker bait and someone else was running the stuff or those Poles were selling foot powder. What's Was.h.i.+ngton say?'

'Says you've screwed up.'

'That f.u.c.ker Campito was a f.u.c.king decoy,' said Palowski as they left the office. 'Had to be. Just let me get my hands on the b.a.s.t.a.r.d I'll castrate the swine.'

'Too late,' said Murphy. 'They've found his body in the Evergladesor the bits of it the alligators left.'

As the DEA team pulled out of Wilma, Wally Immelmann lay in the Coronary Unit staring bleakly at the ceiling and cursing the day he'd ever got married to that fat b.i.t.c.h Joanie or allowed her to bring her G.o.ddam niece over with those terrible girls. They had ruined his marriage and his reputation with that d.a.m.ned recording and he wouldn't be able to show his face in Wilma again. Not that he cared too much about his marriageat times he was grateful to the little b.i.t.c.hes for wrecking it. Infinitely more infuriating were the business consequences of their obscene emails. Immelmann Enterprises had lost virtually every customer he had cultivated over the past fifteen years and several of them were threatening him with lawsuits. He had tried to contact his lawyers only to be told that they no longer wished to represent a man who was mad enough to send messages calling them 'c.o.c.ksuckers' and 'motherf.u.c.kers', not to mention announcing to the world in the crudest terms and at one thousand decibels that he made a habit of sodomising his wife. Even Congressman Herb Reich had been a recipient of one of the more abusive emails. To cap it all Maybelle's statement to Sheriff Stallard hadn't helped either. The news that the most prominent businessman in Wilma regularly had s.e.x with black employees had spread all over the county and almost certainly was known right across the State. In short, he was a ruined man. He'd have to leave town and change his name and hole up somewhere he wasn't known. And it was all that f.u.c.king Joanie's fault. He should never have married the b.i.t.c.h.

In her cell in yet another police station in yet another town Ruth Rottecombe felt the same way about her marriage to the late Shadow Minister for Social Enhancement. She should have known he was just the sort of idiot to get himself murdered at a time when she needed his support and influence most desperately. After all, that was what she had married him for, and she had cultivated that drunken swine Battleby to ensure that Harold's seat in Parliament remained absolutely secure. She tried frantically to make sense out of the chaotic series of events that had led up to his disappearance, but the noises coming from a drunk who alternated whining pleas to be let out of the cell next to hers with vomiting, and on the other side what sounded like a foul-mouthed psychotic on some extremely powerful hallucinogenic drug, made anything approaching rational thought impossible. So was getting any sleep. Every half-hour the cell door was opened, the light turned on and a sinister female detective asked her insistently if she was all right.

'No, I'm f.u.c.king not,' she had squawked at her time and time again. 'Haven't you got anything better to do than turn the light on and come in and ask that d.a.m.n-fool question?'

Each time the detective had said she was just making sure she hadn't committed suicide and she had finally left the light on all the time. After three such sleepless nights Ruth Rottecombe was almost prepared to confess she had murdered Harold. Instead she refused to answer any more questions.

'I did not, repeat not, murder Harold. I didn't harm him in any way at all. I have no idea who did, either. And that's my last word.'

'All right, we'll talk about something we know you did do,' the senior detective said. 'We have proof that you drove to Ipford New Estate with a man in the back of your Volvo estate and dumped him there. We also have proof that he had been in your garage and had been bleeding. You know all that so'

'I've told you I won't answer any more questions!' Ruth shouted hoa.r.s.ely.

'I'm not asking any. I'm telling you what is undeniable evidence.'

'Oh, G.o.d, why can't you stop? I know all that and it is deniable.'

'Right, but what you don't know is that we have a witness who saw you drag the man out of the back of your car and dump him in the road. A very reliable witness indeed.' He paused to let this sink into Ruth Rottecombe's weary mind before going on. 'What we now need to know is why if, as you've said repeatedly, you don't have any idea what he had done to land up lying unconscious and bleeding in your garageyou drove him down to that New Estate.'

Ruth began to cry. This time she wasn't faking the tears. 'Harold found him there when he came back from London. At least he said he had. He was out of his mind and tried to pin the blame on me. He was shouting and raving and said I'd picked the man up to have s.e.x with him. I thought he was going to kill me.'

'Go on. Give us the rest.'

'He made me go out to the garage and look at the b.l.o.o.d.y man. I'd never seen him in my life. I swear I hadn't.'

'What happened then?'

'The telephone rang and it was some b.l.o.o.d.y newspaper said they wanted to interview Harold about bringing young men to the house, you know, rent-boys.'

For another hour they went on with the questions and got nowhere. In the end they left her sobbing in the Interrogation Room with her head on the table, and went into another office.

'Could be true except for one thing,' said the senior Scotland Yard man. 'That bit of cloth from this fellow Wilt's jeans found in the garage and the fact that they discovered those jeans in the lane behind the Manor House two days after the fire and they hadn't been there when they searched the area the first time. Second, he wasn't wearing any when he was picked up in Ipford. On top of that all his gear, the boots, socks and knapsack, were in the attic of the Rottecombe house.'

'You think she planted the jeans there?'

'I'm d.a.m.ned sure someone did.'

'Christ, what a case. And London's demanding a quick arrest,' said the Superintendent.

They were interrupted by a Woman Sergeant. 'She's pa.s.sed out or is pretending to have,' she told them. 'We've put her back in the cell.'

The CID man picked up the phone and called Ipford. When he put it down again he shook his head. 'They've moved the bloke Wilt to a mental hospital for what they call 'a.s.sessment', whatever that means. I suppose to see if he's a psychopath.' He paused and considered the possibilities. There didn't seem to be many rational ones.

One of the other detectives took up the theme. 'Whoever set this little lot up had to be d.a.m.ned abnormal. And this bloke Wilt has been in some weird trouble before. Could be he was paid to torch the house.'

The senior CID man gave the matter some thought. 'I suppose it's just possible but this Inspector Flint doesn't think so. Reckons the man Wilt's too b.l.o.o.d.y incompetent. Wouldn't know how to set fire to a pile of newspapers soaked in petrol, he's that impractical. In any case, if he'd come to set fire to the house he wouldn't have left such an obvious trail staying at bed and breakfasts and giving his real name. No, there has to be someone else. What beats me is that he and that d.a.m.ned Shadow Minister had head wounds. The Shadow Minister's dead and this other fellow might well have been if they hadn't found him in the road when they did. No, I reckon this Rottecombe cow knows more than she's letting on. I don't care if she has pa.s.sed out. I'm going to break her. She knows more than she's telling. In any case her background stinks. False birth certificate, high-cla.s.s prost.i.tute who dupes an MP into marrying her, and on top of that she goes in for sado-masochism with that drunken paedophile swine, Battleby. And of course he's tried to s.h.i.+ft the blame on to her. Says she deliberately encouraged him to become an alcoholic so she could control him. I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't an element of truth there.'

And so the questioning went on and got nowhere.

Chapter 35.

At the Methuen Mental Hospital the female psychiatrist a.s.signed to a.s.sessing Wilt's psychological state was having as much difficulty. Wilt had pa.s.sed all the standard visual and symbolic tests with such surprising ease that the psychiatrist could have sworn he'd spent considerable time practising doing them. His verbal skills were even more disconcerting. Only his att.i.tude to s.e.x remained suspicious. It appeared that he found copulation boring and exhausting, not to say ludicrous and fairly repulsive. His admiration for the procreative habits of earthworms and amoebas who simply reproduced by dividing themselves, voluntarily in the case of amoebas and, as far as Wilt knew, involuntarily by earthworms when they were cut in half by a spade, seemed to indicate a severely depressed libido. Since the lady shrink was completely ignorant on the subject of amoebas and earthworms but keen on what little s.e.x her looks attracted, this information came as a nasty revelation to her.

'Are you saying you would rather bisect yourself than sleep with your wife?' she asked, hoping to draw the inference that Wilt had a tendency towards a split personality.

'Of course not,' Wilt replied indignantly. 'Mind you, when you meet my wife you'll understand why I might be.'

'Your wife does not attract you physically?'