Miss Schautz stopped in her tracks. 'The police? You phoned the police?'
'Couldn't actually,' said Wilt, 'some blighter had pulled the phone out of the wall. Can't think why. I mean with all that shooting going on...'
But Gudrun Schautz was no longer listening. She was clambering along the plank towards the luggage and Wilt could hear her rummaging among the suitcases. So long as the bitch didn't look in the water tank. To distract her attention Wilt poked his head through the door and switched off the light.
'Better not show a light,' he explained as she stumbled about in the pitch darkness cursing, 'don't want anyone to know we're up here. Best just to lie low until they go away.'
A stream of incomprehensible but evidently malevolent German greeted this suggestion, and after fruitlessly groping about for the bag for several more minutes Gudrun Schautz climbed down into the kitchen, breathing heavily.
Wilt decided to strike again. 'No need to be so upset, my dear. After all, this is England and nothing nasty can happen to you here.'
He placed a comforting arm round her shoulders. 'And anyway you've got me to look after you. Nothing to worry about.'
'Oh my God,' she said and suddenly began to shake with silent laughter. The thought that she had only this weak and stupid little coward to look after her was too much for the murderess. Nothing to worry about! The phrase suddenly took on a new and horribly inverted meaning and like a revelation she saw its truth, a truth she had been fighting against all her life. The only thing she had to worry about was nothing. Gudrun Schautz looked into oblivion, an infinity of nothingness and was filled with terror. With a desperate need to escape the vision she clung to Wilt and her raincoat hung open.
'I say...' Wilt began, realizing this new threat but Gudrun Schautz's mouth closed over his, her tongue flickering, while her hand dragged his fingers up to a breast. The creature who had brought only death into the world was now turning in her panic to the most ancient instinct of all.
Chapter 15
Gudrun Schautz was not the only person in Ipford to look oblivion in the face. The manager of Wilt's bank had spent an exceedingly disturbing afternoon with Inspector Flint who kept assuring him that it was of national importance that he shouldn't phone his wife to cancel their dinner engagement and refusing to allow him to communicate with his staff and several clients who had made appointments to see him. The manager had found these aspersions on his discretion insulting and Flint's presence positively lethal to his reputation for financial probity
'What the hell do you imagine the staff are thinking with three damned policemen closeted in my office all day?' he demanded, dropping the diplomatic language of banking for more earthy forms of address. He had been particularly put out by having to choose between urinating in a bucket procured from the caretaker or suffer the indignity of being accompanied by a policeman every time he went to the toilet.
'If a man can't pee in his own bank without having some bloody gendarme breathing down his neck all I can say is that things have come to a pretty pass.'
'Very aptly put, sir,' said Flint, 'but I'm only acting under orders and if the Anti-Terrorist Squad say a thing's in the national interest then it is.'
'I can't see how it's in the national interest to stop me relieving myself in private,' said the manager. 'I shall see that a complaint goes to the Home Office.'
'You do that small thing,' said Flint, who had his own reasons for feeling disgruntled. The intrusion of the Anti-Terrorist Squad into his patch had undermined his authority. The fact that Wilt was responsible only maddened him still further and he was just speculating on Wilt's capacity for disrupting his life when the phone rang.
'I'll take it if you don't mind,' he said and lifted the receiver.
'Mr Fildroyd of Central Investment on the line, sir, said the telephonist.
Flint looked at the bank manager. 'Some bloke called Fildroyd. Know anyone of that name?'
'Fildroyd? Of course I do.'
'Is he to be trusted?'
'Good Lord, man, Fildroyd to be trusted? He's in charge of the entire bank's investment policy.'
'Stocks and shares, eh?' asked Flint who had once had a little flutter in Australian bauxite and wasn't likely to forget the experience. 'In that case I wouldn't trust him further than I could throw him.'
He relayed this opinion in only slightly less offensive terms to the girl on the switchboard. A distant rumble suggested that Mr Fildroyd was on the line.
'Mr Fildroyd wants to know who's speaking,' said the girl.
'Well you just tell Mr Fildroyd that it's Inspector Flint of the Fenland Constabulary and if he knows what's good for him he'll keep his trap shut.'
He put the phone down and turned to the manager who was looking distinctly seedy. 'What's the matter with you?' Flint asked.
'Matter? Nothing, nothing at all. Only that you've just led the entire Central Investment Division to suppose I'm suspected of some serious crime.'
'Landing me with Mr Henry Wilt is a serious crime,' said Flint bitterly, 'and if you want my opinion this whole thing's a put-up job on Wilt's part to get himself another slice of publicity.'
'As I understood it Mr Wilt was the innocent victim of '
'Innocent victim my foot. The day that sod's innocent I'll stop being a copper and take holy fucking orders.
'Charming way of expressing yourself, I must say,' said the bank manager.
But Flint was too engrossed in a private line of speculation to note the sarcasm. He was recalling those hideous days and nights during which he and Wilt had been engaged in a dialogue on the subject of Mrs Wilt's disappearance. There were still dark hours before dawn when Flint would wake sweating at the memory of Wilt's extraordinary behaviour and swearing that one day he would catch the little sod out in a serious crime. And today had seemed the ideal opportunity, or would have done if the Anti-Terrorist Squad hadn't intervened. Well, at least they were having to cope with the situation but if Flint had had his way he would have discounted all that talk about German au pairs as so much hogwash and remanded Wilt in custody on a charge of being in possession of stolen money, never mind where he said he had got it from.
But when at five he left the bank and returned to the police station it was to discover that Wilt's account seemed yet again to correspond, however implausibly, with the facts.
'A siege?' he said to the desk sergeant. 'A siege at Willington Road? At Wilt's house?'
'Proof of the pudding's in there, sir,' said the sergeant indicating an office. Flint crossed to the window and glanced in.
Like some monolith to maternity Eva Wilt sat motionless on a chair staring into space, her mind evidently absent and with her children in the house in Willington Road. Flint turned away and for the umpteenth time wondered what it was about this woman and her apparently insignificant husband that had brought them together and by some strange fusion of incompatibility had turned them into a catalyst for disaster. It was a recurring enigma, this marriage between a woman whom Wilt had once described as a centrifugal force and a man whose imagination fostered bestial fantasies involving murder, rape, and those bizarre dreams that had come to light during the hours of his interrogation. Since Flint's own marriage was as conventionally happy as he could wish, the Wilts' was less a marriage in his eyes than some rather sinister symbiotic arrangement of almost vegetable origin, like mistletoe growing on an oak tree. There was certainly a vegetable-looking quality about Mrs Wilt sitting there in silence in the office and Inspector Flint shook his head sadly.