Something in the Starfighter Mansion had crashed on to something else, like a table.
‘Mr Immelmann, Mr Immelmann, oh shit!’ shouted the Sheriff. ‘Baxter, get an ambulance over there fast. Sounds like Wally’s had a heart attack.’
Chapter 20
There are in parts of most English industrial towns areas of such urban dereliction that only the most desperately self-pitying junkies and alcoholics, the discards of a concerned and caring society, choose to live there. A few old people, who would rather live anywhere else but can’t afford to move, inhabit the top floors of the tower blocks and curse the day the local authority demolished their nineteenth-century back-to-backs in the 1960s ostensibly in the interests of health and hygiene. More correctly, in the interests of ambitious architects anxious to earn reputations and of local councillors anxious to line their pockets with hand-outs from developers whose only interest was in making vast profits.
One of these areas is on the edge of Ipford and it was towards this that Mrs Rottecombe drove. She knew the place fairly well, too well for her ever to mention it now. One of her first long list of clients before she had married Harold Rottecombe had had a cottage ten miles from Ipford and she had spent weekends there. When the customer had most inconsiderately gone to his Maker while on the job she had moved hurriedly to London to avoid the inquest. She had changed her name and had adopted that of a maternal aunt who had Alzheimer’s and was incapable of remembering who she herself was let alone whether her niece was her daughter or not. The ruse worked. After that, it was simply a question of finding a respectable husband, and being a shrewd and ambitious woman she had made the acquaintance of Harold Rottecombe by becoming a worker in his local constituency office. From there to the Registry Office had been an easy task. Harold, for all his political acumen, had no idea what he had married. He would never know unless…unless it came to a divorce. In short, Ruth Rottecombe, reverting to the language of her adolescence, ‘had him by the balls’. And the further he climbed the greasy pole of politics the less he would want her past to become public knowledge. So far, the only mistake she had made was in associating with Bob Battleby. And, of course, in having to get rid of the man in the back of the Volvo in such a way that he couldn’t talk or, if he did, no one would believe him. Whoever he was, her instincts told her he was an educated married man and not a reporter for some filthy tabloid. Trying to explain to his wife or the police how he had lost his trousers was not going to be an easy one.
By the time she reached Ipford it was getting dark. She skirted the town and approached the derelict estate by a back road. The place was far worse than she’d remembered. There was no one about and no lights in any of the windows, most of which were boarded up. Illiterates with spray cans had covered walls with obscene graffiti. Ruth pulled into a dark alleyway where there were no street lights, parked under a looming tower block and switched off the Volvo estate. She got out and looked cautiously around her and up at the black or boarded-up windows on either side of the alley. In the distance she could hear the sound of lorries on the motorway but otherwise there was no sound of life. Three minutes later she had removed the newspapers and cardboard boxes, unwrapped the Elastoplast from his wrists and removed the gag, and was dragging Wilt by the feet into the gutter, in the process banging his head on the kerb. Then she slammed the back of the estate and drove on only to find she was in a cul-de-sac. She reversed the car and drove back the way she had come, her headlights picking out the almost naked figure of Wilt. She was glad to see his head had begun to bleed again. What she didn’t see was a plywood board covering a window standing partly open on the second floor of the tower block above as she turned right and headed for the motorway. She was by this time tired but euphoric. She had rid herself of a dangerous threat to Harold’s reputation and her own influence. What she forgot as she drove back to Meldrum Slocum was to get rid of Wilt’s jeans, boots, socks and rucksack which were still under the cardboard boxes. By the time she reached Leyline Lodge she was exhausted and slumped into bed. Far behind her the plywood board in the tower block had long since closed again.
An hour later a group of drunk skinheads passed the head of the alley, spotted the body and came up to have a look at it.
‘A bloody old poofter,’ said one of them, drawing the conclusion from the lack of Wilt’s jeans. ‘Let’s put the boot in.’ And having expressed their feelings for gays by kicking him in the ribs a few times and once in the face, they staggered off laughing. Wilt felt nothing. He had found an Older England than he’d expected but he still didn’t know it.
A feeble dawn had broken when he was found by a police car. Two constables got out and looked down at him.
‘Best call an ambulance. This one’s a right mess. Tell them it’s urgent.’
While the WPC used the car radio the other looked around. Above his head the plywood board opened.
‘Happened around three hours ago,’ said an old woman. ‘A woman in a white car came and dragged him out. Then some young bastards gave him a kicking just for the fun of it.’
The constable peered up at her. ‘You should have called us, mother,’ he said.
‘What with, I’d like to know? Think I’ve got a phone?’
‘Don’t suppose you have. What are you doing here anyway? Last time you were down the road.’
The old woman poked her head further out. ‘Think I’m staying in one place round here? Not likely. I may be cabbage-looking but I ain’t that green. Got to keep moving so those young swine don’t get me.’
The policeman took out a notebook. ‘Get a look at the number-plate of the car?’ he asked.
‘What, in this dark? Course I didn’t. Saw a woman though. Rich bitch by the look of her. Not from round here.’
‘We can drive you down with us to the station. You’ll be safe enough down there.’
‘I don’t mean that. I want to go back where I came from. That’s what I mean, copper.’
But before the constable could ask where that was the Woman Police Officer returned with the news that no ambulances were available. There had been a major accident involving two coaches full of schoolchildren on a trip abroad, a petrol tanker and a lorry carrying pigs on the motorway twenty miles away and every available ambulance and fire engine had been sent to the scene.
‘Pigs?’ queried the constable.
‘At least they think it was pigs. The Duty Sergeant’s been told the smell of roast pork is appalling.’
‘Never mind about that. What about the school kids?’
‘They’re in the ambulances. The two coaches skidded on the pig fat and turned over,’ the WPC told him.
‘Oh well, we’d better put this bastard in the back of the car and take him down the hospital ourselves.’
Above their heads the old woman had closed the plywood board again and disappeared. With Wilt lying prone on the back seat they drove to Ipford General Hospital and met with a hostile reception.
‘Oh, all right,’ said a distraught doctor called by the nurse in A&E. ‘It will be difficult with this damned accident. We haven’t any spare beds. We haven’t even a spare trolley. I’m not even sure we’ve got any spare corridors, and just to make working in what amounts to a human abattoir so fulfilling, we’ve got a major catastrophe on our hands, four doctors off sick and the usual shortage of nursing staff. Why can’t you take him home? He’s less likely to die there.’