‘No, I’m not prepared to answer any questions,’ she said when one reporter began to ask if it was true that–’I am far too upset. I can’t bear cruelty to animals and what those two men did was quite dreadful. No, my husband is in London. If you want to talk to him, you’ll find him there. I’m going to get some rest. It’s been a very distressing day. I’m sure you can see that.’
What the reporters could see was that Butcher Cassidy and the Flashgun Kid must have been completely insane to go anywhere near such fearsome dogs, and as for kicking the bitch…well, they must have been bent on suicide with that enormous Wilfred around. As Mrs Rottecombe went back to the house, opinion was divided among the men at the gate. Some were delighted that Butcher and Flashgun had finally met their match while others seemed to think they had shown immense courage, courage far beyond the call of duty, in pursuit of a story. No one was prepared to follow their example and presently the convoy moved off.
Mrs Rottecombe watched them go and then went back to the house to attend to Wilt.
She put his boots, socks and trousers into a garbage bag. She would dump them somewhere along the way. For a moment she considered taking Wilfred and Pickles but decided against it. She needed to be totally anonymous and people might remember seeing the dogs in the car. Then she checked the bottom of the drive from a bedroom window and was relieved to see that the reporters had left. At 9 p.m. she drove down to the road and was on her way south towards Ipford.
Chapter 15
Being up at the cabin overlooking Lake Sassaquassee with the quads wasn’t making Uncle Wally feel even slightly safer. Not that it was a cabin. As Sheriff Stallard had said Wally Immelmann had built himself an ante-bellum mansion there and had felled nearly every tree for half a mile around the place because Auntie Joan was frightened of bears and wasn’t going to go walking in the woods where she couldn’t see if there were bears about. And beyond the open space she’d insisted on his erecting an extremely strong wire fence to make sure as hell bears didn’t get in and start marauding around the house and coming through the picture windows that looked out over the terrace and the swimming-pool (she wasn’t swimming in the lake because she’d heard there were snakes that swam too, water moccasins and cottonmouths) and the barbecue area and all. It was the ‘all’ that excited the Wilt girls. And had always excited Wally which is why he had taken such pains and paid so much to collect it.
‘That there is a Sherman tank. Went right through the Second World War,’ he told them proudly. ‘Up Omaha Beach on D-Day with General Patton–they say he rode into battle on it–and on all the way to Berlin. Well, not right to Berlin because that General Montgomery chickened out taking the city but it got pretty damn close. Best battle tank there was. Now over here is a Huey ‘copter with a Puff the Magic Dragon in the door. Knocked the sh…knocked the charlies out in ‘Nam like they didn’t know what hit them. That gun could fire thousands of rounds in no time at all. And this here is a howitzer that was with General MacArthur in Korea and when that baby fired, those yellow-bellies knew that Uncle Sam meant business. Same with this baby.’ He indicated a flame-thrower. ‘Went in on Okinawa barbecuing Nips like–’
‘Barbecuing whats?’ Emmeline asked.
‘Japs,’ said Uncle Wally proudly. ‘Shoots flame out the nozzle here and zaps a guy and you got a turkey roast up and running on the hoof. Those bastards were torched in their hundreds. And this here is a napalm bomb. You know what napalm is. It’s great stuff. Like cooking oil and jello. You want a village fry-up all you need do is drop one of those and–boom!–you’ve got a charlie roasted better than anything you’ve ever seen. Now this is a missile I got from Germany when we won the Cold War. Put a nuclear warhead on that sweetheart and a town five times the size of Wilma you wouldn’t even find on a map it would go so fast. The Russkies knew that, which is how we saved the world from Communism. They weren’t going risk nuclear annihilation, no way.’
All over the grounds there were the mementoes of terrible wars but the pride of Uncle Wally’s military collection was a B-52. It stood on the other side of the house where it could be seen through the picture window even at night with lights set in the ground shining up on it, a black monstrous bomber with fifty-eight missions over Vietnam and Iraq painted in symbols on the side; it was, as Wally said, capable of flying twelve thousand miles and dropping an H-bomb that would take out the biggest city in the world.
‘What does ‘take out’ mean, Uncle Wally?’ Josephine asked with seeming innocence. But Wally Immelmann was too immersed in his dream of a world made safe by mass destruction to notice.
‘It means first you get the blast wave and second the fireball and third you get radiation and fifteen, sixteen million people dead. That’s what it means, honey. Used to keep them flying round the clock, the Strategic Air Force, and all ready to go if the President of the US of A pressed the button. Course we got better weapons now but in their day that baby ruled the sky. And the world. We don’t need anything that big now. Got ICBMs and Stealth bombers and Cruise missiles and neutron bombs and stuff no one knows about that can cross the Atlantic like in less than an hour. Best of all there’s lasers in outer space that can fry anywhere on earth at the speed of light.’
By the time they got back to the house Uncle Wally was in a genial and generous mood.
‘Those girls of yours are smart, real smart,’ he told Eva who had been watching rather nervously from a distance. ‘I’ve been giving them a history lesson why we win wars and nobody can get near us technologywise. Isn’t that so, girls?’
‘Yes, Uncle Wally,’ said the quads in unison. Eva looked at them suspiciously. She knew that unison. It was a portent.
That night while Uncle Wally was watching baseball and having his fifth bourbon on the rocks, and Eva and Auntie Joan were talking family back in England, Samantha found an old portable tape recorder in Wally’s romper room. It was a reel-to-reel one with an automatic cut-out when the tape came to the end and it had a four-hour reel on it. By the time Wally and his wife staggered up to the bedroom it was running under the doublewide. And Wally wanted a hump.
‘Aw, come on, honey pie,’ he said. ‘We aren’t getting any younger and–’
‘Speak for yourself,’ said Auntie Joan. She wasn’t in a good mood. Eva had told her that Maude, who was Auntie Joan’s sister, had decided to become a lesbian and was living with a gay who’d had a sex-change operation. That wasn’t the sort of family news she wanted. Wally humping her wasn’t what she wanted either. Could be something to be said for becoming a lesbian.
‘I am speaking for myself,’ Wally said. ‘Only person I can speak for. You don’t have a goddam prostate or if you do I haven’t heard that Dr Hellster I go to in Atlanta speak about it. He tells me I got to keep it up or else.’
‘Keep it up? You haven’t got it to keep up. Leastways I haven’t noticed it lately. You sure you haven’t left it in the bathroom along with your hairpiece? Like trying to get some action out of a sea slug.’