‘Fenland College of Arts and Technology,’ said the girl on the switchboard.
‘It’s me again,’ said Eva, ‘I want to speak to Mr Wilt.’
‘I’m very sorry but Mr Wilt isn’t here.’
‘But where is he? I’ve dialled home and…’
‘He’s at the Police Station.’
‘He’s what?’ Eva said.
‘He’s at the Police Station helping the police with their enquiries…’
‘Enquiries? What enquiries?’ Eva shrieked.
‘Didn’t you know?’ said the girl ‘It’s been in all the papers. He’s been and murdered his wife…’
Eva took the phone from her ear and stared at it in horror. The girl was still speaking but she was no longer listening. Henry had murdered his wife. But she was his wife. It wasn’t possible. She couldn’t have been murdered. For one horrible moment Eva Wilt felt sanity slipping from her. Then she put the receiver to her ear again.
‘Are you there?’ said the girl.
‘But I am his wife.’ Eva shouted. There was a long silence at the other end and she heard the girl telling someone that there was a crazy woman on the line who said she was Mrs Wilt and what ought she to do.
‘I tell you I am Mrs Wilt. Mrs Eva Wilt.’ she shouted but the line had gone dead. Eva put the phone down weakly. Henry at the Police Station…Henry had murdered her…Oh God. The whole world had gone mad. And here she was naked in a Vicarage at…Eva had no idea where she was. She dialled 999.
‘Emergency Services. Which department do you require?’ said the operator.
‘Police,’ said Eva. There was a click and a man’s voice came on.
‘Police here.’
‘This is Mrs Wilt,’ said Eva.
‘Mrs Wilt?’
‘Mrs Eva Wilt. Is it true that my husband has murdered…I mean has my husband…oh dear I don’t know what to say.’
‘You say you’re Mrs Wilt. Mrs. Eva Wilt?’ said the man.
Eva nodded and then said. ‘Yes.’
‘I see.’ said the man dubiously. ‘You’re quite sure you’re Mrs Wilt?’
‘Of course I’m sure. That’s what I’m ringing about.’
‘Might I enquire where you’re calling from?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Eva. ‘You see I’m in this house and I’ve got no clothes and…oh dear.’ The Vicar was coming up the path on to the terrace.
‘If you could just give us the address.’
‘I can’t stop now,’ said Eva and put the phone down. For moment she hesitated and then grabbing the ivy from the desk she rushed out of the room.
‘I tell you I don’t know where she is,’ said Wilt. ‘I expect you’ll find her under missing persons. She has passed from the realm of substantiality into that of abstraction.’
‘What the hell do you mean by that?’ asked the Inspector, reaching for his cup of coffee. It was eleven o’clock on Saturday morning but he persisted. He had twenty-eight hours to get to the truth.
‘I always warned her that Transcendental Meditation carried potential dangers,’ said Wilt, himself in a no-man’s-land between sleeping and walking. ‘But she would do it.’
‘Do what?’
‘Meditate transcendentally. In the lotus position. Perhaps she has gone too far this time. Possibly she has transmogrified herself’
‘Trans what?’ said Inspector Flint suspiciously.
‘Changed herself in some magical fashion into something else.’
‘Jesus, Wilt, if you start on those pork pies again…’
‘I was thinking of something more spiritual, Inspector, something beautiful.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Ah but think. Here am I sitting in this room with you as a direct result of going for walks with the dog and thinking dark thoughts about murdering my wife. From those hours of idle fancy I have gained the reputation of being a murderer without committing a murder. Who is to say but that Eva, whose thoughts were monotonously beautiful has not earned herself a commensurately beautiful reward? To put it in your terms, Inspector, we get what we ask for.’
‘I fervently hope so, Wilt,’ said the Inspector.
‘Ah,’ said Wilt, ‘but then where is she? Tell me that. Mere speculation will not do…’
‘Me tell you?’ shouted the Inspector upsetting his cup of coffee. ‘You know which hole in the ground you put her in or which cement mixer or incinerator you used.’
‘I was speaking metaphorically…I mean rhetorically,’ said Wilt. ‘I was trying to imagine what Eva would be if her thoughts such as they are took on the substance of reality. My secret dream was to become a ruthless man of action, decisive, unhindered by moral doubts or considerations of conscience, a Hamlet transformed into Henry the Fifth without the patriotic fervour that inclines one to think that he would not have approved of the Common Market, a Caesar…’
Inspector Flint had heard enough. ‘Wilt,’ he snarled, ‘I don’t give a damn what you wanted to become. What I want to know is what has become of your wife.’
‘I was just coming to that,’ said Wilt. ‘What we’ve got to establish first is what I am.’
‘I know what you are, Wilt. A bloody word merchant, a verbal contortionist, a fucking logic-chopper, a linguistic Houdini, an encyclopedia of unwanted information…’ Inspector Flint ran out of metaphors.
‘Brilliant, Inspector, brilliant. I couldn’t have put it better myself. A logic-chopper, but alas not a wife one. If we follow the same line of reasoning Eva in spite of all her beautiful thoughts and meditations has remained as unchanged as I. The ethereal eludes her. Nirvana slips ever from her grasp. Beauty and truth evade her. She pursues the absolute with a flyswatter and pours Harpic down the drains of Hell itself…’
‘That’s the tenth time you have mentioned Harpic,’ said the Inspector, suddenly alive to a new dreadful possibility. ‘You didn’t…’
Wilt shook his head. ‘There you go again. So like poor Eva. The literal mind that seeks to seize the evanescent and clutches fancy by its non-existent throat. That’s Eva for you. She will never dance Swan Lake. No management would allow her to fill the stage with water or install a double bed and Eva would insist.’
Inspector Flint got up. ‘This is getting us nowhere fast.’
‘Precisely,’ said Wilt, ‘nowhere at all. We are what we are and nothing we can do will alter the fact. The mould that forms our natures remains unbroken. Call it heredity, call it chance…’
‘Call it a load of codswallop.’ said Flint and left the room. He needed his sleep and he intended to get it.
In the passage he met Sergeant Yates.
‘There’s been an emergency call from a woman claiming to be Mrs Wilt,’ the Sergeant said.
‘Where from?’
‘She wouldn’t say where she was,’ said Yates. ‘She just said she didn’t know and that site had no clothes on…’
‘Oh one of those,’ said the Inspector. ‘A bloody nutter. What the hell are you wasting my time for? As if we didn’t have, enough on our hands without that.’
‘I just thought you’d want to know. If she calls again we’ll try and get a fix on the number.’
‘As if I cared,’ said Flint and hurried off in search of his lost sleep.
The Rev St John Froude spent an uneasy day. His investigation of the church had revealed nothing untoward and there was no sign that an obscene ritual (a Black Mass had crossed his mind) had been performed there. As he walked back to the Vicarage he was glad to note that the sky over Eel Stretch was empty and that the contraceptives had disappeared. So had the ivy on his desk. He regarded the space where it had been with apprehension and helped himself to whisky. He could have sworn there had been a sprig of ivy there when he had left. By the time he had finished what remained in the bottle his mind was filled with weird fancies. The Vicarage was strangely noisy. There were odd creaks from the staircase and inexplicable sounds from the upper floor as if someone or something was moving stealthily about but when the Vicar went to investigate the noises ceased abruptly. He went upstairs and poked his head into several empty bedrooms. He came down again and stood in the hall listening. Then he returned to his study and tried to concentrate on his sermon, but the feeling that he was not alone persisted. The Rev St John Froude sat at his desk and considered the possibility of ghosts. Something very odd was going on. At one o’clock he went down the hall to the kitchen for lunch and discovered that a pint of milk had disappeared from the pantry and that the remains of an apple pie that Mrs Snape who did his cleaning twice weekly had brought him had also vanished. He made do with baked beans on toast and tottered upstairs for his afternoon nap. It was while he was there that he first heard the voices. Or rather one voice. It seemed to come from his study. The Rev St John Froude sat up in bed. If his ears weren’t betraying him and in view of the morning’s weird events he was inclined to believe that they were he could have sworn someone had been using his telephone. He got up and put on his shoes. Someone was crying. He went out on to the landing and listened. The sobbing had stopped. He went downstairs and looked in all the rooms on the ground floor but, apart from the fact that a dust cover had been removed from one of the armchairs in the unused sitting-room, there was no sign of anyone. He was just about to go upstairs again when the telephone rang. He went into the study and answered it.