‘Are you arresting me?’ Wilt asked as they walked in a tight group across the road to the police car.
‘No,’ said Inspector Flint, ‘you’re just helping the police with their enquiries. It will be on the news tonight.’
‘My dear Braintree, of course we’ll do all we can,’ said the Vice-Principal. ‘Wilt has always been a loyal member of staff and there has obviously been some dreadful mistake. I’m sure you needn’t worry. The whole thing will right itself before long.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ said Braintree, ‘but there are complicating factors. For one thing there’s Eva…’
‘Eva? Mrs Wilt? You’re not suggesting…’
‘I’m not suggesting anything. All I’m saying is…well, she’s missing from home. She walked out on Henry last Friday.
‘Mrs Wilt walked…well I hardly knew her, except by reputation of course. Wasn’t she the woman who broke Mr Lockyer’s collar-bone during a part-time Evening Class in judo some years back?’
‘That was Eva,’ said Braintree.
‘She hardly sounds the sort of woman who would allow Wilt to put her down…’
‘She isn’t,’ said Braintree hastily. ‘If anyone was liable to be murdered in the Wilt household it was Henry. I think the police should be informed of that.’
They were interrupted by the Principal who came in with a copy of the evening paper. ‘You’ve seen this I suppose,’ he said, waving it distraughtly. ‘It’s absolutely appalling.’ He put the paper down on the desk and indicated the headlines. MURDERED WOMAN BURIED IN CONCRETE AT TECH. LECTURER HELPING POLICE.
‘Oh dear,’ said the Vice-Principal. ‘Oh dear. How very unfortunate. It couldn’t have come at a worse moment’
‘It shouldn’t have come at all,’ snapped the Principal. ‘And that’s not all. I’ve already had half a dozen phone calls from parents wanting to know if we make a habit of employing murderers on the full-time staff. Who is this fellow Wilt anyway?’
‘He’s in Liberal Studies,’ said the Vice-Principal. ‘He’s been with us ten years.’
‘Liberal Studies. I might have guessed it. If they’re not poets mangoes they’re Maoists or…I don’t know where the hell Morris gets them from. And now we’ve got a blasted murderer. God knows what I’m going to tell the Education Committee tonight. They’ve called an emergency meeting for eight.’
‘I must say I resent Wilt being called a murderer,’ said Braintree loyally. ‘There is nothing to suggest that he has murdered anyone.’
The Principal studied him for a moment and then looked back at the headlines. ‘Mr Braintree, when someone is helping the police with their enquiries into a murder it may not be proven that he is a murderer but the suggestion is there.’
‘This certainly isn’t going to help us get the new CNAA degree off the ground,’ intervened the Vice-Principal tactfully. ‘We’ve got a visit from the Inspection Committee scheduled for Friday.’
‘From what the police tell me it isn’t going to help get the new Administration block off the ground either,’ said the Principal. ‘They say it’s going to take at least three days to bore down to the bottom of that pile and then they’ll have to drill through the concrete to get the body out That means they’ll have to put a new pile down and we’re already well behind schedule and our building budget has been halved. Why on earth couldn’t he have chosen somewhere else to dispose of his damned wife’
‘I don’t think…’ Braintree began.
‘I don’t care what you think,’ said the Principal, ‘I’m merely telling you what the police think.’
Braintree left them still wrangling and trying to figure out ways and means of counteracting the adverse publicity the case had already brought the Tech. He went down to the Liberal Studies office and found Mr Morris in a state of despair. He was trying to arrange stand-in lecturers for all Wilt’s classes.
‘But he’ll probably be back in the morning,’ Braintree said.
‘Like hell he will.’ said Mr Morris. ‘When they take them in like that they keep them. Mark my words. The police may make mistakes, I’m not saying they don’t, but when they act this swiftly they’re on to a sure thing. Mind you. I always thought Wilt was a bit odd.’
‘Odd? I’ve just come from the VP’s office. You want to hear what the Principal’s got to say about Liberal Studies staff.’
‘Christ.’ said Mr Morris, ‘don’t tell me.’
‘Anyway what’s so odd about Henry?’
‘Too meek and mild for my liking. Look at the way he accepted remaining a Lecturer Grade Two all these years.’
‘That was hardly his fault.’
‘Of course it was his fault. All he had to do was threaten to resign and go somewhere else and he’d have got promotion like a shot. That’s the only way to get on in this place. Make your presence felt’
‘He seems to have done that now,’ said Braintree. ‘The Principal is already blaming him for throwing the building programme off schedule and if we don’t get the joint Honours degree past the CNAA, Henry’s going to be made the scapegoat. It’s too bad. Eva should have had more sense than to walk out on him like that.’
Mr Morris took a more sombre view. ‘She’d have shown a damned sight more sense if she’d walked out on him before the sod took it into his head to beat her to death and dump her down that bloody shaft. Now who the hell can I get to take Gasfitters one tomorrow?’
Chapter 10
At 34 Parkview Avenue Wilt sat in the kitchen with Clem while the detectives ransacked the house. ‘You’re not going to find anything incriminating here,’ he told Inspector Flint.
‘Never you mind what we’re going to find. We’re just having a look.’
He sent one detective upstairs to examine Mrs Wilt’s clothes or what remained of them.
‘If she went away she’d have taken half her wardrobe,’ he said. ‘I know women. On the other hand if she’s pushing up twenty tons of premix she wouldn’t need more than what she’s got on.’
Eva’s wardrobe was found to be well stocked. Even Wilt had to admit that she hadn’t taken much with her.
‘What was she wearing when you last saw her?’ the Inspector asked.
‘Lemon loungers.’ said Wilt.
‘Lemon what?’
‘Pyjamas,’ said Wilt, adding to the list of incriminating evidence against him. The Inspector made a note of the fact in his pocketbook.
‘In bed, was she?’
‘No,’ said Wilt. ‘Round at the Pringsheims.’
The Pringsheims? And who might they be?’
‘The Americans I told you about who live in Rossiter Grove.’
‘You haven’t mentioned any Americans to me.’ said the Inspector.
‘I’m sorry. I thought I had. I’m getting muddled. She went away with them.’
‘Oh did she? And I suppose we’ll find they’re missing too?’
‘Almost certainly,’ said Wilt. ‘I mean if she was going away with them they must have gone too and if she isn’t with them I can’t imagine where she has got to.’
‘I can,’ said the Inspector looking with distasteful interest at a stain on a sheet one of the detectives had found in the dirty linen basket. By the time they left the house the incriminating evidence consisted of the sheet, an old dressing-gown cord that had found its way mysteriously into the attic, a chopper that Wilt had once used to open a tin of red lead, and a hypodermic syringe which Eva had got from the vet for watering cacti very precisely during her Indoor Plant phase. There was also a bottle of tablets with no label on it.