Wilt got up and asked to go to the toilet. As usual the constable came with him and stood outside the door.
‘Do you have to?’ said Wilt. ‘I’m not going to hang myself with the chain.’
‘To see you don’t beat your meat,’ said the constable coarsely.
Wilt sat down. Beat your meat. What a hell of an expression. It called to mind Meat One. Meat One? It was a moment of inspiration. Wilt got up and flushed the toilet. Meat One would keep them busy for a long time. He went back to the pale green room where the light buzzed. Flint was waiting for him.
‘You going to talk now?’ he asked.
Wilt shook his head. They would have to drag it out of him if his confession was to be at all convincing. He would have to hesitate, start to say something, stop, start again, appeal to Flint to stop torturing him, plead and start again. This trout needed tickling. Oh well, it would help to keep him awake.
‘Are you going to start again at the beginning?’ he asked
Inspector Flint smiled horribly. ‘Right at the beginning.’
‘All right,’ said Wilt. ‘have it your own way, just don’t keep asking me if I gave the dog Chappie or Bonzo. I can’t stand all that talk about dog food.’
Inspector Flint rose to the bait. ‘Why not?’
‘It gets on my nerves,’ said Wilt, with a shudder.
The Inspector leant forward. ‘Dog food gets on your nerves?’ he said.
Wilt hesitated pathetically. ‘Don’t go on about it,’ he said. ‘Please don’t go on.’
‘Now then, which was it, Bonzo or Chappie?’ said the Inspector, scenting blood.
Wilt put his head in his hands. ‘I won’t say anything. I won’t. Why must you keep asking me about food? Leave me alone.’ His voice rose hysterically and with it Inspector Flint’s hopes. He knew when he had touched the nerve. He was on to a good thing.
Chapter 18
‘Dear God,’ said Sergeant Yates, ‘but we had pork pies for lunch yesterday. It’s too awful.’
Inspector Flint rinsed his mouth out with black coffee and spat into the washbasin. He had vomited twice and felt like vomiting again.
‘I knew it would be something like that.’ he said with a shudder. ‘I just knew it. A man who could pull that doll-trick had to have something really filthy up his sleeve.’
‘But they may all have been eaten by now,’ said the Sergeant. Flint looked at him balefully.
‘Why the hell do you think he laid that phoney trail?’ he asked. ‘To give them plenty of time to be consumed. His expression “consumed”, not mine. You know what the shelf life of a pork pie is?’
Yates shook his head.
‘Five days. Five days. So they went out on Tuesday which leaves us one day to find them or what remains of them. I want every pork pie in East Anglia picked up. I want every fucking sausage and steak and kidney pie that went out of Sweetbreads Meat Factory this week found and brought in. And every tin of dog food.’
‘Dog food?’
‘You heard me,’ said Inspector Flint staggering out of the washroom. ‘And while you’re about it you’d better make it cat food too. You never know with Wilt,’ He’s capable of leading us up the garden path in one important detail.’
‘But if they went into pork pies what’s all this about dog food?’
‘Where the hell do you think he put the odds and ends and I do mean ends?’ Inspector Flint asked savagely. ‘You don’t imagine he was going to have people coming in and complaining they’d found a tooth or a toenail in the Sweetbreads pie they had bought that morning. Not Wilt. That swine thinks of everything. He drowns them in their own bath. He puts them in plastic garbage bags and locks the bags in the garage while he goes home and sticks the doll down that fucking hole. Then on Sunday he goes back and picks them up and spends the day at the meat factory all by himself…Well if you want to know what be did on Sunday you can read all about it in his statement. It’s more than my stomach can stand.’
The Inspector went back hurriedly into the washroom. He’d been living off pork pies since Monday. The statistical chances of his having partaken of Mrs Wilt were extremely high.
When Sweetbreads Meat and Canning Factory opened at eight, Inspector Flint was waiting at the gate. He stormed into the manager’s office and demanded to speak to him.
‘He’s not here yet,’ said the secretary. ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’
‘I want a list of every establishment you supply with pork pies, steak and kidney pies, sausages and dog food,’ said the Inspector.
‘I couldn’t possibly give you that information,’ said the secretary. ‘It’s extremely confidential.’
‘Confidential? What the hell do you mean confidential’
‘Well I don’t know really. It’s just that I couldn’t take it on myself to provide you with inside information…’ She stopped. Inspector Flint was staring at her with a quite horrible expression on his face.
‘Well, miss,’ he said finally, ‘while we’re on the topic of inside information, it may interest you to know that what has been inside your pork pies is by way of being inside information. Vital information.’
‘Vital information? I don’t know what you mean. Our pies contain perfectly wholesome ingredients.’
‘Wholesome?’ shouted the Inspector. ‘You call three human bodies wholesome? You call the boiled, bleached, minced and cooked remains of three murdered bodies wholesome?’
‘But we only use…’ the secretary began and fell sideways, off her chair in a dead faint.
‘Oh for God’s sake,’ shouted the Inspector, ‘you’d think a silly bitch who can work in an abattoir wouldn’t be squeamish…’ Find out who the manager is and where he lives and tell him to come down here at the double.’
He sat down in a chair while Sergeant Yates rummaged in the desk. ‘Wakey, wakey,’ he said, prodding the secretary with his foot. ‘If anyone has got a right to lie down on the job, it’s me. I’ve been on my feet for three days and nights and I’ve been an accessory after the fact of murder.’
‘An accessory?’ said Yates. ‘I don’t see how you can say that.’
‘Can’t you? Well what would you call helping to dispose parts of a murder victim? Concealing evidence of a crime?’
‘I never thought of it that way,’ said Yates.
‘I did,’ said the Inspector, ‘I can’t think of anything else.
In his cell Wilt stared up at the ceiling peacefully. He was astonished that it had been so easy. All you had to do was tell people what they wanted to hear and they would believe you no matter how implausible your story might be. And three days and nights without sleep had suspended Inspector Flint’s disbelief with a vengeance. Then again Wilt’s hesitations had been timed perfectly and his final confession a nice mixture of conceit and matter-of-factness. On the details of the murder he had been coldly precise and in describing their disposal he had been a craftsman taking pride in his work. Every now and then when he got to a difficult spot he would veer away into a manic arrogance at once boastful and cowardly with ‘You’ll never be able to prove it. They’ll have disappeared without trace now. And the Harpic had come in useful once again, adding a macabre touch of realism about evidence being flushed down thousands of U-bends with Harpic being poured after it like salt from a salt cellar. Eva would enjoy that when he told her about it, which was more than could be said for Inspector Flint. He hadn’t even seen the irony of Wilt’s remark that while he had been looking for the Pringsheims they had been under his nose all the time. He had been particularly upset by the crack about gut reactions and the advice to stick to health foods in future. Yes, in spite of his tiredness Wilt had enjoyed himself watching the Inspector’s bloodshot eyes turn from glee and gloating self-satisfaction to open amazement and finally undisguised nausea. And when finally Wilt had boasted that they would never be able to bring him to trial without the evidence, Flint had responded magnificently.