On the floor of the sitting-room at the Vicarage Eva Wilt struggled with the growing conviction that her dying day-was already over and done with. Certainly everyone she came into contact with seemed to think she was dead. The policeman she had spoken to on the phone had seemed disinclined to believe her assertion that she was alive and at least relatively well and had demanded proofs of her identity in the most disconcerting fashion. Eva had retreated stricken from the encounter with her confidence in her own continuing existence seriously undermined and it had only needed the reaction of the Rev St John Froude to her appearance in his house to complete her misery. His frantic appeals to the Almighty to rescue the soul of our dear departed, one Eva Wilt, deceased, from its present shape and unendurable form had affected Eva profoundly. She knelt on the carpet and sobbed while the Vicar stared at her over his glasses, shut his eyes, lifted up a shaky voice in prayer, opened his eyes, shuddered and generally behaved in a manner calculated to cause gloom and despondency in the putative corpse and when, in a last desperate attempt to get Eva Wilt, deceased, to take her proper place in the heavenly choir he cut short a prayer about ‘Man that is born of Woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery and struck up ‘Abide with me’ with many a semi-quaver, Eva abandoned all attempt at self-control and wailed ‘Fast falls the eventide’ most affectingly. By the time they had got to ‘I need thy presence every passing hour’ the Rev St John Froude was of an entirely contrary opinion. He staggered from the room and took sanctuary in his study. Behind him Eva Wilt espousing her new role as deceased with all the enthusiasm she had formerly bestowed on trampolines, judo and pottery, demanded to know where death’s sting was and where, grave, thy victory. ‘As if I bloody knew,’ muttered the Vicar and reached for the whisky bottle only to find that it too was empty. He sat down and put his hands over his ears to shut out the dreadful noise. On the whole ‘Abide with me’ was the last hymn he should have chosen. He’d have been better off with ‘there is a green hill far away’. It was less open to misinterpretation.
When at last the hymn ended he sat relishing the silence and was about to investigate the possibility that there was another bottle in the larder when there was a knock on the door and Eva entered.
‘Oh Father I have sinned,’ she shrieked, doing her level best, to wail and gnash her teeth at the same time. The Rev St John Froude gripped the arms of his chair and tried to swallow. It was not easy. Then overcoming the reasonable fear that delirium tremens had come all too suddenly he managed to speak. ‘Rise, my child.’ he gasped as Eva writhed on the rugs before him, ‘I will hear your confession.’
Chapter 20
Inspector Flint switched the tape recorder off and looked at wilt.
‘Well?’
‘Well what?’ said Wilt.
‘Is that her? Is that Mrs Wilt?’
Wilt nodded. ‘I’m afraid so.’
‘What do you mean you’re afraid so? The damned woman is alive. You should be fucking grateful. Instead of that you sit there saying you’re afraid so.’
Wilt sighed. ‘I was just thinking what an abyss there is between the person as we remember and imagine them and the reality of what they are. I was beginning to have fond memories of her and now…’
‘You ever been to Waterswick?’
Wilt shook his head. ‘Never.’
‘Know the Vicar there?’
‘Didn’t even know there was a Vicar there.’
‘And you wouldn’t know how she got there?’
‘You heard her,’ said Wilt. ‘She said she’d been on a boat.’
‘And you wouldn’t know anyone with a boat, would you?’
‘People in my circle don’t have boats, Inspector. Maybe the Pringsheims have a boat.’
Inspector Flint considered the possibility and rejected it. They had checked the boatyards out and the Pringsheims didn’t have a boat and hadn’t hired one either.
On the other hand the possibility that he had been the victim of some gigantic hoax, a deliberate and involved scheme to make him look an idiot, was beginning to take shape in his mind. At the instigation of this infernal Wilt he had ordered the exhumation of an inflatable doll and had been photographed staring lividly at it at the very moment it changed sex. He had instituted a round-up of pork pies unprecedented in the history of the country. He wouldn’t be at all surprised if Sweetbreads instituted legal proceedings for the damage done to their previously unspotted reputation. And finally, he had held an apparently innocent man for questioning for a week and would doubtless be held responsible for the delay and additional cost in building the new Administration block at the Tech. There were, in all probability, other appalling consequences to be considered, but that was enough to be going on with. And he had nobody to blame but himself. Or…Wilt. He looked at Wilt venomously.
Wilt smiled. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said.
‘You don’t,’ said the Inspector. ‘You’ve no idea.’
‘That we are all the creatures of circumstance, that things are never what they seem, that there’s more to this than meets…’