‘An irrational one perhaps?’
‘Neither the one wholly nor the other wholly. Just a man’
‘And a man is neither one thing nor the other?’
‘Dr Pittman, this is your province not mine but in my opinion man is capable of reasoning but not of acting within wholly rational limits. Man is an animal, a developed animal, though come to think of it all animals are developed if we are to believe Darwin. Let’s just say man is a domesticated animal with elements of wildness about him…’
‘And what sort of animal are you, Mr Wilt?’ said Dr Pittman. ‘A domesticated animal or a wild one?’
‘Here we go again. These splendidly simple dual categories that seem to obsess the modern mind. Either/Or Kierkegaard as that bitch Sally Pringsheim would say. No. I am not wholly domesticated. Ask my wife. She’ll express an opinion on the matter.’
‘In what respect are you undomesticated?’
‘I fart in bed, Dr Pittman. I like to fart in bed. It is the trumpet call of the anthropoid ape in me asserting its territorial imperative in the only way possible.’
‘In the only way possible?’
‘You haven’t met Eva,’ said Wilt. ‘When you do you’ll see that assertion is her forte not mine.’
‘You feel dominated by Mrs Wilt?’
‘I am dominated by Mrs Wilt.’
‘She bullies you? She assumes the dominant role?’
‘Eva is, Dr Pittman. She doesn’t have to assume anything. She just is.’
‘Is what?’
‘Now there’s the rub.’ said Wilt, ‘What’s today? You lose track of time in this place.’
‘Thursday.’
‘Well, today being Thursday, Eva is Bernard Leach.’
‘Bernard Leach?’
‘The potter, Dr Pittman, the famous potter,’ said Wilt. ‘Now tomorrow she’ll be Margot Fonteyn and on Saturday we play bridge with the Mottrams so she’ll be Omar Sharif. On Sunday she’s Elisabeth Taylor or Edna O’Brien depending on what the Colour Supplements have in store for me and in the afternoon we go for a drive and she’s Eva Wilt. It’s about the only time in the week I meet her and that’s because I’m driving and she’s got nothing to do but sit still and nag the pants off me.’
‘I begin to see the pattern.’ said Dr Pittman. ‘Mrs Wilt was…is given to role-playing. This made for an unstable relationship in which you couldn’t establish a distinctive and assertive role as a husband’
‘Dr Pittman,’ said Wilt, ‘a gyroscope may, indeed must, spin but in doing so it achieves a stability that is virtually unequalled. Now if you understand the principle of the gyroscope you may begin to understand that our marriage does not lack stability. It may be damned uncomfortable coming home to a centrifugal force but it bloody well isn’t unstable.’
‘But just now you told me that Mrs Wilt did not assume a dominant role. Now you tell me she is a forceful character.’
‘Eva is not forceful. She is a force. There’s a difference. And as for character, she has so many and they’re so varied it’s difficult to keep up with them all. Let’s just say she throws herself into whoever she is with an urgency and compulsiveness that is not always appropriate. You remember that series of Garbo pictures they showed on TV some years back? Well, Eva was La Dame Aux Camélias for three days after that and she made dying of TB look like St Vitus’ dance. Talk about galloping consumption’
‘I begin to get the picture,’ said Dr Pittman making a note that Wilt was a pathological liar with sado-masochistic tendencies.
‘I’m glad somebody does,’ said Wilt. ‘Inspector Flint thinks I murdered her and the Pringsheims in some sort of bloodlust and disposed of their bodies in some extraordinary fashion. He mentioned acid. I mean it’s crazy. Where on earth does one get nitric acid in the quantities necessary to dissolve three dead bodies, and one of them overweight at that? I mean it doesn’t bear thinking about.’
‘It certainly doesn’t,’ said Dr Pittman.
‘In any case do I look like a murderer?’ continued Wilt cheerfully. ‘Of course I don’t. Now if he’d said Eva had slaughtered the brutes, and in my opinion someone should’ve done years ago, I’d have taken him seriously. God help the poor sods who happen to be around when Eva takes it into her head she’s Lizzie Borden.’
Dr Pittman studied him predaciously.
‘Are you suggesting that Dr and Mrs Pringsheim were murdered by your wife?’ be asked. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’
‘No,’ said Wilt, ‘I am not. All I’m saying is that when Eva does things she does them wholeheartedly. When she cleans the house she cleans it. Let me tell you about the Harpic. She’s got this thing about germs…’
‘Mr Wilt,’ said Dr Pittman hastily. ‘I am not interested in what Mrs Wilt does with the Harpic. I have come here to understand you. Now then, do you make a habit of copulating with a plastic doll? Is this a regular occurrence?’
‘Regular?’ said Wilt. ‘Do you mean a normal occurrence or a recurring one? Now your notion of what constitutes a normal occurrence may differ from mine…’
‘I mean, do you do it often?’ interrupted Dr Pittman.
‘Do it?’ said Wilt. ‘I don’t do it at all.’
‘But I understood you to have placed particular emphasis on the fact that this doll had a vagina?’
‘Emphasis? I didn’t have to emphasize the fact. The beastly thing was plainly visible.’
‘You find vaginas beastly?’ said Dr Pittman stalking his prey into the more familiar territory of sexual aberration.
‘Taken out of context, yes,’ said Wilt sidestepping, ‘and with plastic ones you can leave them in context and I still find them nauseating.’
By the time Dr Pittman had finished the interview he was uncertain what to think. He got up wearily and made for the door.
‘You’ve forgotten your hat, doctor,’ said Wilt holding it out to him. ‘Pardon my asking but do you have them specially made for you?’
‘Well?’ said Inspector Flint when Dr Pittman came into his office. ‘What’s the verdict?’
‘Verdict? That man should be put away for life.’
‘You mean he’s a homicidal maniac?’
‘I mean, that no matter how he killed her Mrs Wilt must have been thankful to go. Twelve years married to that man…Good God, it doesn’t bear thinking about.’
‘Well, that doesn’t get us much forrader,’ said the Inspector, when the psychiatrist had left having expressed the opinion that while Wilt had the mind of an intellectual jackrabbit he couldn’t in all honesty say that he was criminally insane. ‘We’ll just have to see what turns up tomorrow.’
Chapter 15
What turned up on Friday was seen not only by Inspector Flint, Sergeant Yates, twelve other policemen, Barney and half a dozen construction workers, but several hundred Tech students standing on the steps of the Science block, most of the staff and by all eight members of the CNAA visitation committee who had a particularly good view from the windows of the mock hotel lounge used by the Catering Department to train waiters and to entertain distinguished guests. Dr Mayfield did his best to distract their attention.
‘We have structured the foundation course to maximize student interest,’ he told Professor Baxendale, who headed the committee, but the professor was not to be diverted. His interest was maximized by what was being unstructured from the foundations of the new Admin block.
‘How absolutely appalling.’ he muttered as Judy protruded from the hole. Contrary to Wilt’s hopes and expectations she had not burst. The liquid concrete had sealed her in too well for that and if in life she had resembled in many particulars a real live woman, in death she had all the attributes of a real dead one. As the corpse of a murdered woman she was entirely convincing. Her wig was matted and secured to her head at an awful angle by the concrete. Her clothes clung to her and cement to them while her legs had evidently been contorted to the point of mutilation and her outstretched arm had, as Barney had foretold, a desperate appeal about it that was most affecting. It also made it exceedingly difficult to extricate her from the hole. The legs didn’t help, added to which the concrete had given her a substance and stature approximate to that of Eva Wilt.