In the Sheriff’s office Harry Stallard refused to believe Baxter’s report. ‘A new sniffer dog died after licking the water in the swimming-pool? Why in the name of God should they empty the pool? The dog probably fell in and drowned.’
But Baxter was adamant. ‘There was something dissolved down the bottom and they wanted to see what it was.’
‘Sure. One drowned hound dog.’
‘All I know is they had special wet suits and masks. And there was this special container to put it in to fly it up to the Chemical Warfare Research Center in Washington for analysis,’ Baxter told him. ‘They reckon it could be linked to Al Qaeda it’s that toxic.’
‘In Wilma? In Wilma? That’s out-of-this-world crazy. Who the hell’s going to use a highly toxic substance in a one-horse town like Wilma?’
Baxter pondered the question. ‘Could be that Saddam Hussein bastard. Got to test it someplace, I guess,’ he said finally.
‘So why choose Wilma; he’s got all those Kurds he gassed? You tell me that.’
‘Or that other guy Ossam been…The one who did the Twin Towers.’
‘Bin Laden,’ said the Sheriff. ‘Sure. So he chooses Wally Immelmann’s swimming-pool and takes out a hound dog? And that makes sense?’
‘Shit, I don’t know. Nothing makes sense. Hooking the toilets and all up to that tanker back of the old drive-in was crazy.’
Sheriff Stallard pushed his hat back and wiped the sweat from his face. ‘I don’t believe what I’m hearing. This isn’t happening. Not in Wilma it’s not. It can’t be. Wally Immelmann’s in with goddam terrorists. And that ain’t possible, no way, Billy, no way. I mean it’s way out impossible.’
Baxter shrugged. ‘That mega-decibel sound system was impossible too. You heard it. You know.’
The Sheriff did know. He was never going to forget it. He sat thinking. Or trying to. In the end he succeeded and the impossible became slightly more possible and his own position less insecure. People did go loco. ‘Get me Maybelle,’ he said. ‘Bring her in. She’s the one who’ll know.’
One person who definitely didn’t know was Eva. She had finally been allowed out of the Visitors’ Room only to be told that the patient Wilt was still unconscious but she could go and see him provided Mavis Mottram didn’t accompany her. Having been in Eva Wilt’s maudlin company for three hours Mavis had no intention of spending any more time or sympathy on her. She slunk out of the hospital a broken woman, cursing the day she’d met anyone so stupid and mawkishly sentimental. Eva’s feelings about Mavis had changed too. She was all bluff and bravado and a bully to boot and had no staying power.
Through the door of the ward Eva had glimpsed Inspector Flint sitting by the bed, apparently reading a newspaper. In fact he wasn’t reading it at all; he was using it as a shield to hide what was being done to a man who, if appearances were anything to go by, had recently been trepanned or had had an exceedingly nasty accident with some sort of circular saw. Whatever it was Flint didn’t want to see it. He had never been a particularly squeamish man and his experience of mutilated corpses had hardened him to inanimate horrors, but he was less able to cope with those involving modern surgery and in particular found pulsing brains in adult males (babies were different) decidedly unnerving.
‘Can’t you put a screen round the bed while you’re doing whatever you are doing to that poor bloke?’ he’d asked only to be told he could leave the ward if he was so wimpish and anyway it wasn’t a bloke but a woman and this was a unisex ward.
‘You could have fooled me,’ Flint retorted. ‘Though come to think of it, I daresay unisex is about right. It’s impossible to tell what sex anyone is in here.’
It was not a remark that endeared him to three women nearby who had been under the illusion that they were still relatively attractive and sexy. Flint didn’t care. He tried to interest himself more vicariously in a scandal involving a well-known rugby player who had gone to a massage parlour in Swansea only to find his wife working there and had tackled the owner or, as the latter had put it from the witness box, ‘had gone apeshit’, when he saw Wilt looking at him.
Flint put the paper down and smiled. ‘Hello, Henry. Feeling any better?’
From the pillow Wilt studied that smile and found it difficult to interpret. It wasn’t the sort of smile to give him any confidence. Inspector Flint’s false teeth were too loose for that and besides, he had seen Flint smile maliciously in the past too often to find the sight at all reassuring. He didn’t feel any better.
‘Better than what?’ he asked.
Flint’s smile disappeared and with it most of his sympathy. He began to doubt whether Wilt’s brain had been affected at all by being mugged. ‘Well, better than you did before.’
‘Before what?’ said Wilt, fighting for time to find out what was going on. It was obvious he was in hospital and that he had bandages round his head but that was about all that was obvious.
Flint’s hesitation before replying did nothing to give him any confidence in his own innocence. ‘Before this thing happened,’ he said finally.
Wilt tried to think. He had no idea what had happened. ‘I can’t say I do,’ he replied. It seemed a reasonable answer to a question he didn’t understand.
That wasn’t the way Inspector Flint saw it. He was already beginning to lose the thread of the conversation and as always with Wilt he was being led into a swamp of misunderstanding. The sod never did say anything that was at all clear-cut. ‘When you say you can’t say you do, just exactly what do you mean?’ he enquired and tried to smile again. That didn’t help.
Wilt’s caution went into overdrive. ‘Just that,’ he said.
‘And ‘just that’ means?’
‘What I said. Just that,’ Wilt said.
Again Flint’s smile vanished. He leant forward. ‘Listen, Henry, all I want to know is–’
He got no further. Wilt had decided on new avoiding tactics. ‘Who’s Henry?’ he asked abruptly.
A new look of doubt came on Flint’s face and his lean forward ground to a halt. ‘Who’s Henry? You want to know who Henry is?’
‘Yes. I don’t know of any Henrys. Except kings and princes of course and I wouldn’t know any of them, would I? Never met one and I’m not likely to. Have you ever met a king or a prince?’
For a second the look on the Inspector’s face had changed from doubt to certainty. Now it swung back again. With Wilt nothing was certain and even that was doubtful in these circumstances. Wilt was uncertainty personified. ‘No. I haven’t met a king or a prince and I don’t want to. All I want to know–’
‘That’s the second time you’ve said that,’ said Wilt. ‘And what I want to know is who I am.’
At that moment Eva shoved her way into the room. She had waited long enough and she wasn’t spending another two hours in that revoltingly dirty waiting room. She was going to her husband’s side.
‘Oh, darling, are you in terrible pain, my pet?’
Wilt opened his eyes with a silent curse. ‘What’s it got to do with you? And who are you calling “darling”?’
‘But…oh, God! I’m your Eva, your wife.’
‘Wife? What do you mean? I haven’t got a wife,’ Wilt moaned. ‘I’m a…I’m a…I don’t know what I am.’
In the background Inspector Flint agreed wholeheartedly. He didn’t know what Wilt was either. Never had and never would. About the nearest he’d ever got to it was that Wilt was the most devious bastard he’d come across in all the years he’d been in the police force. With Eva, now weeping copiously, you knew precisely where you stood. Or lay. At the bottom of the pile. To that extent Wilt had told the truth. Family first with those ghastly quads; Eva second, along with her material possessions–or, as Wilt’s solicitor had once put it, ‘like living with a dishwasher cum vacuum cleaner that thinks it thinks’–and finally whatever latest fad or so-called philosophical twaddle she had heard about. Even Greenpeace had found her militancy too much. The Keeper of the Seal Culling Station at Worthcombe Bay had, in giving evidence in court against her from his wheelchair, said that if she represented Greenpeace, he shuddered to think what Greenwar would be like. In fact the man’s language had been so filthy that only his injuries prevented the magistrate from holding him in contempt. And finally at the very bottom of the pile was Mr Henry Wilt, lawfully wedded husband of Mrs Eva Wilt, poor bugger. No wonder he deliberately refused to recognise her.