‘Waterswick Vicarage,’ he mumbled.
‘This is Fenland Constabulary,’ said a man. ‘We’ve just had a call from your number purporting to come from a Mrs Wilt!
‘Mrs Wilt?’ said the Rev St John Froude. ‘Mrs. Wilt? I’m afraid there must be some mistake. I don’t know any Mrs Wilt.’
‘The call definitely came from your phone, sir.’
The Rev St John Froude considered the matter. ‘This is all very peculiar,’ he said, ‘I live alone.’
‘You are the Vicar?’
‘Of course I’m the Vicar. This is the Vicarage and I am the Vicar.’
‘I see, sir. And your name is?’
‘The Reverend St John Froude…F…R…O…U…D…E.’
‘Quite sir, and you definitely don’t have a woman in the house.’
‘Of course I don’t have a woman in the house. I find the suggestion distinctly improper. I am a…’
‘I’m sorry, sir, but we just have to check these things out. We’ve had a call from Mrs Wilt, or at least a woman claiming to be Mrs Wilt, and it came from your phone…’
‘Who is this Mrs Wilt? I’ve never heard of a Mrs Wilt.’
‘Well sir. Mrs Wilt…it’s a bit difficult really. She’s supposed to have been murdered.’
‘Murdered?’ said the Rev St John Froude. ‘Did you say “murdered”?’
‘Let’s just say she is missing from home in suspicious circumstances. We’re holding her husband for questioning.’
The Rev St John Froude shook his head. ‘How very unfortunate.’ he murmured.
‘Thank you for your help, sir,’ said the Sergeant. ‘Sorry we have disturbed you.’
The Rev St John Froude put the phone down thoughtfully. The notion that he was sharing the house with a disembodied and recently murdered woman was not one that he had wanted to put to his caller. His reputation for eccentricity was already sufficiently widespread without adding to it. On the other hand what he had seen on the boat in Eel Stretch bore, now that he came to think of it, all the hallmarks of murder. Perhaps in some extraordinary way he had been a witness to a tragedy that had already occurred, a sort of post-mortem déja vu if that was the right way of putting it. Certainly if the husband were being held for questioning the murder must have taken place before…In which case…The Rev St John Froude stumbled through a series of suppositions in which Time with a capital T, and appeals for help from beyond the grave figured largely. Perhaps it was his duty to inform the police of what he had seen. He was just hesitating and wondering what to do when he heard those sobs again and this time quite distinctly. They came from the next room. He got up, braced himself with another shot of whisky and went next door. Standing in the middle of the room was a large woman whose hair straggled down over her shoulders and whose face was ravaged. She was wearing what appeared to be a shroud. The Rev St John Froude stared at her with a growing sense of horror. Then he sank to his knees.
‘Let us pray,’ he muttered hoarsely.
The ghastly apparition slumped heavily forward clutching the shroud to its bosom. Together they kneeled in prayer.
‘Check it out? What the hell do you mean “check it out”?’ said Inspector Flint who objected strongly to being woken in the middle of the afternoon when he had had no sleep for thirty-six hours and was trying to get some. ‘You wake me with some damned tomfoolery about a Vicar called Sigmund Freud…’
‘St John Froude,’ said Yates.
‘I don’t care what he’s called. It’s still improbable. If the bloody man says she isn’t there, she isn’t there. What am I supposed to do about it?’
‘I just thought we ought to get a patrol car to check, that’s all.’
‘What makes you think…’
‘There was definitely a call from a woman claiming to be Mrs Wilt and it came from that number. She’s called twice now. We’ve got a tape of the second call. She gave details of herself and they sound authentic. Date of birth, address, Wilt’s occupation, even the right name of their dog and the fact that they have yellow curtains in the lounge.’
‘Well, any fool can tell that. All they’ve got to do is walk past the house,’
‘And the name of the dog. It’s called Clem. I’ve checked that and she’s right.’
‘She didn’t happen to say what she’d been doing for the past week did she?’
‘She said she’d been on a boat,’ said Yates. ‘Then she rang off.’
Inspector Flint sat up in bed. ‘A boat? What boat?’
‘She rang off. Oh and another thing, she said she takes a size ten shoe. She does.’
‘Oh shit.’ said Flint, ‘All right, I’ll come down.’ He got out of bed and began to dress.
In his cell Wilt stared at the ceiling. After so many hours of interrogation his mind still reverberated with questions. ‘How did you kill her? Where did you put her? What did you with the weapon?’ Meaningless questions continually reiterated in the hope they would finally break him. But Wilt hadn’t broken. He had triumphed. For once in his life he knew himself to be invincibly right and everyone else totally wrong. Always before he had had doubts. Plasterers Two might after all, have been right about there being too many wogs in the country. Perhaps hanging was a deterrent. Wilt didn’t think so but he couldn’t be absolutely certain. Only time would tell. But in the case of Regina versus Wilt re the murder of Mrs Wilt there could be no question of his guilt. He could be tried, found guilty and sentenced, it would make no difference. He was innocent of the charge and if he was sentenced to life imprisonment the very enormity of the injustice done to him would compound his knowledge of his own innocence. For the very first time in his life Wilt knew himself to be free. It was as though the original sin of being Henry Wilt, of 34 Parkview Avenue, Ipford, lecturer in Liberal Studies at the Fenland College of Arts and Technology, husband of Eva Wilt and father of none, had been lifted from him. All the encumbrances of possessions, habits, salary and status, all the social conformities, the niceties of estimation of himself and other people which he and Eva had acquired, all these had gone. Locked in his cell Wilt was free to be. And whatever happened he would never again succumb to the siren calls of self-effacement. After the flagrant contempt and fury of Inspector Flint, the abuse and the opprobrium heaped on him for a week, who needed approbation? They could stuff their opinions of him. Wilt would pursue his independent course and put to good use his evident gifts of inconsequence. Give him a life sentence and a progressive prison governor and Wilt would drive the man mad within a month by the sweet reasonableness of his refusal to obey the prison rules. Solitary confinement and a regime of bread and water, if such punishments still existed, would not deter him. Give him his freedom and he would apply his new found talents at the Tech. He would sit happily on committees and reduce them to dissensions by his untiring adoption of whatever argument was most contrary to the consensus opinion. The race was not to the swift after all, it was to the indefatigably inconsequential and life was random, anarchic and chaotic. Rules were made to be broken and the man with the grasshopper mind was one jump ahead of all the others. Having established this new rule, Wilt turned on his side and tried to sleep but sleep wouldn’t come. He tried his other side with equal lack of success. Thoughts, questions, irrelevant answers and imaginary dialogues filled his mind. He tried counting sheep but found himself thinking of Eva. Dear Eva, damnable Eva, ebullient Eva and Eva irrepressibly enthusiastic. Like him she had sought the Absolute, the Eternal Truth which would save her the bother of ever having to think for herself again. She had sought it in Pottery, in Transcendental Meditation, in judo, on trampolines and most incongruously of all in Oriental Dance. Finally she had tried to find it in sexual emancipation, Women’s Lib and the Sacrament of the Orgasm in which she could forever lose herself. Which, come to think of it, was what she appeared to have done. And taken the bloody Pringsheims with her. Well she would certainly have some explaining to do when and if she ever returned. Wilt smiled to himself at the thought of what she would say when she discovered what her latest infatuation with the infinite had led to. He’d see to it that she had cause to regret it to her dying day.