‘I wanted to get away from Ipford, the Tech, the routine of going to work, if you can call it work, and clear my mind of all that junk by finding England without any preconceptions.’
Flint tried to grasp what Wilt was saying and failed as usual. ‘So how come you ended up in Meldrum Slocum?’ he said in a desperate attempt to get some sanity into the conversation. ‘You must have come from somewhere.’
‘I told you. From a wood. And anyhow I was pissed.’
‘And I’m pissed off with having the mickey taken out of me,’ snarled Flint and went back to Dr Dedge’s office and banged on the door only to be told to fuck off.
‘All I want to know is if that bloody man is well enough to go home. Just tell me that.’
‘Listen!’ shouted the psychiatrist. ‘I don’t give a damn whether he is well or not. Get him out of here. He’ll be the death of me. Is that good enough for you?’
‘Would you say he ought to be in a mental hospital?’ asked Flint.
‘I can’t think of a better place for the swine!’ yelled Dr Dedge.
‘In that case I’ll need you to certify him.’
He was answered by a moan. ‘I can’t do that. He’s not certifiably insane,’ the psychiatrist said and opened the door. He was in his underpants. He hesitated for a moment and came to a decision. ‘I tell you what I will do. I’ll recommend him for assessment and leave the doctors at the Methuen to make the decision.’
And on this note he crossed to his desk and filled in a form and handed it to the Inspector. ‘That will get him off my back at any rate.’
Flint went back to Wilt. ‘You heard what he said. You don’t have to stay here any longer.’
‘What did he mean by assessment?’
‘Don’t ask me. I’m not a psychiatrist,’ said the Inspector.
‘Nor is he, come to that,’ said Wilt but he got out of bed and began looking for his clothes. There weren’t any. ‘I’m not going anywhere dressed like this,’ he said, indicating the long nightdress he’d been given in the Geriatric Ward.
Flint went back to Dr Dedge whose temper hadn’t improved. ‘In the clothes he came in, of course,’ he snarled through the door.
‘But they were taken away as evidence that he’d been assaulted.’
‘Try the Morgue. There’s bound to be a corpse down there with clothes his size. Now leave me alone to get some sleep.’
The Inspector went down the corridor, asked directions to the Morgue and, having finally found it and explained his reason for coming, was called a grave robber and told to get the hell out. In a fury he went back and snitched a white coat from a male nurse’s dressing room when its owner was in the lavatory. Ten minutes later Wilt, dressed in the white coat which was far too short to cover his hospital gown, was in the bus with Flint, on his way to the Methuen Mental Hospital protesting vehemently that he didn’t need ‘assessing’.
‘All they’ll do is ask you a few simple questions and let you go,’ Flint told him. ‘Anyway, it’s a damned 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 assessed.
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 analysis 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 butts in a desperate effort to assuage 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 analyser 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 Washington say?’
‘Says you’ve screwed up.’
‘That fucker Campito was a fucking decoy,’ said Palowski as they left the office. ‘Had to be. Just let me get my hands on the bastard I’ll castrate the swine.’
‘Too late,’ said Murphy. ‘They’ve found his body in the Everglades–or 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 bitch Joanie or allowed her to bring her goddam niece over with those terrible girls. They had ruined his marriage and his reputation with that damned recording and he wouldn’t be able to show his face in Wilma again. Not that he cared too much about his marriage–at times he was grateful to the little bitches 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 ‘cocksuckers’ and ‘motherfuckers’, 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 sex 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 fucking Joanie’s fault. He should never have married the bitch.
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.