Wilt on High (24 page)

Which brought her round to anger again. Henry should have told her but he never did tell her really important things. He thought she was too stupid and perhaps she wasn’t very clever when it came to arguing about books and saying the right things at parties but at least she was practical and nobody could say that the quads weren’t getting a good education.

So the night passed. Eva sat in the kitchen and made cups of tea and worried and was angry and then blamed herself and wondered who to telephone and then decided it was best not to call anyone because they’d only be cross at being woken in the middle of the night and anyway there might be a perfectly natural explanation like the car had broken down or he’d gone to the Braintrees for a drink and had had to stay there because of the police and the breathalyser which would have been the sensible thing to do and so perhaps she ought to go back to bed and get some sleep … And always beside this bustle of conflicting thoughts and feelings there was the sense of guilt and the knowledge that she had been stupid to have listened to Mavis or to have gone anywhere near Dr Kores. Anyway, what
did Mavis know about sex? She’d never really said what went on between her and Patrick in bed – it wasn’t one of those things Eva would have dreamt of asking and even if she had Mavis wouldn’t have told her – and all she’d ever heard was that Patrick was having affairs with other women. There might be good reasons for that too. Perhaps Mavis was frigid or wanted to be too dominant or masculine or wasn’t very clean or something. Whatever the reason it was quite wrong of her to give Patrick those horrid steroid things or hormones and turn him into a sleepy fat person – well, you could hardly call him a man any longer could you? – who sat in front of the telly every night and couldn’t get on with his work properly. Besides, Henry wasn’t a bad husband. It was just that he was absent-minded and was always thinking about something or other that had no connection at all with what he was supposed to be doing. Like the time he’d been peeling the potatoes for Sunday lunch and he’d suddenly said the Vicar made Polonius sound like a bloody genius and there’d been no reason to say that because they hadn’t been to church for two Sundays running and she’d wanted to know who Polonius was and he wasn’t anyone at all, just some character in a play.

No, you couldn’t expect Henry to be practical and she didn’t. And of course they’d had their tiffs and disagreements, particularly about the quads. Why couldn’t he see they were special? Well, he did, but not in the right way, and calling them ‘clones’ wasn’t helpful. Eva could think
of other things he’d said that weren’t nice either. And then there was that dreadful business the other night with the cake icer. Goodness only knew what effect that had had on the girls’ ideas about men. And that really was the trouble with Henry, he didn’t know what romantic meant. Eva got up from the kitchen table and was presently calming her nerves by cleaning out the pantry. She was interrupted at six-thirty by Emmeline in her pyjamas.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked so unnecessarily that Eva rose to the bait.

‘It’s perfectly obvious,’ she snapped. ‘There’s no need to ask stupid questions.’

‘It wasn’t obvious to Einstein,’ said Emmeline, using the well-tried technique of luring Eva into a topic about which she knew nothing but which she had to approve.

‘What wasn’t?’

‘That the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.’

‘Well it is, isn’t it?’ said Eva, moving a tin of Epicure marmalade from the shelf with pilchards and tuna fish on it to the jam section where it looked out of place.

‘Of course it isn’t. Everyone knows that. It’s a curve. Where’s Daddy?’

‘I don’t see how … What do you mean “Where’s Daddy?”’ said Eva, completely thrown by this leap from the inconceivable to the immediate.

‘I was asking where he is,’ said Emmeline. ‘He’s not in, is he?’

‘No, he isn’t,’ said Eva, torn now between an inclination to give vent to her irritation and the need to keep calm. ‘He’s out.’

‘Where’s he gone?’ asked Emmeline.

‘He hasn’t gone anywhere,’ said Eva and moved the marmalade back to the pilchard shelf. Tins didn’t look right among the jam-jars. ‘He spent the night at the Braintrees.’

‘I suppose he got drunk again,’ said Emmeline. ‘Do you think he’s an alcoholic?’

Eva clutched a coffee jar dangerously. ‘Don’t you dare talk about your father like that!’ she snapped. ‘Of course he has a drink when he comes home at night. Nearly everyone does. It’s quite normal and I won’t have you saying things about your father.’

‘You say things about him,’ said Emmeline, ‘I heard you call him –’

‘Never mind what I say,’ said Eva. ‘That’s quite different.’

‘It isn’t different,’ Emmeline persisted, ‘not when you say he’s an alcoholic and anyway I was only asking a question and you’re always telling us to –’

‘Go up to your room at once,’ said Eva. ‘You’re not speaking to me in that fashion. I won’t have it.’

Emmeline retreated and Eva slumped down at the kitchen table again. It was really too trying of Henry not to have instilled some sense of respect in the quads. It was always left to her to be the disciplinarian. He should have more authority. She went back into the larder and
saw to it that the packets and jars and tins did exactly what she wanted. By the time she had finished she felt a little better. Finally she chased the quads into dressing quickly.

‘We’ll have to catch the bus this morning,’ she announced when they came in to breakfast. ‘Daddy has the car and –’

‘He hasn’t,’ said Penelope, ‘Mrs Willoughby has.’

Eva, who had been pouring tea, spilt it. ‘What did you say?’

Penelope looked smug. ‘Mrs Willoughby has the car.’

‘Mrs Willoughby? Yes, I know I’ve spilt some tea, Samantha. What do you mean, Penny? She can’t have.’

‘She has,’ said Penelope looking smugger still. ‘The milkman told me.’

‘The milkman? He must have been mistaken,’ said Eva.

‘He isn’t. He’s scared stiff of the Hound of Oakhurst Avenue and he only delivers at the gate and that’s where our car is. I went and saw it.’

‘And was your father there?’

‘No, it was empty.’

Eva put the teapot down unsteadily and tried to think what this meant. If Henry wasn’t in the car …

‘Perhaps Daddy’s been eaten by the Hound,’ suggested Josephine.

‘The Hound doesn’t eat people. It just tears their throats out and leaves their bodies on the waste ground at the bottom of the garden,’ said Emmeline.

‘It doesn’t. It only barks. It’s quite nice if you give it lamb chops and things,’ said Samantha, unintentionally dragging Eva’s attention away from the frightful possibility that Henry might in his drunken state have mistaken the house and ended up mauled to death by a Great Dane. And then again with Dr Kores’ potion still coursing through his veins …

Penelope put the idea into words. ‘He’s more likely to have been eaten by Mrs Willoughby,’ she said. ‘Mr Gamer says she’s sex-mad. I heard him tell Mrs Gamer that when she said she wanted it.’

‘Wanted what?’ demanded Eva, too stunned by this latest revelation to be concerned about the chops missing from the deep-freeze. She could deal with that matter later.

‘The usual thing,’ said Penelope with a look of distaste. ‘She’s always going on about it and Mr Gamer said she was getting just like Mrs Willoughby after Mr Willoughby died on the job and he wasn’t going the same way.’

‘That’s not true,’ said Eva in spite of herself.

‘It is too,’ said Penelope. ‘Sammy heard him, didn’t you?’

Samantha nodded.

‘He was in the garage playing with himself like Paul in 3B does and we could hear ever so easily,’ she said. ‘And he’s got lots of
Playboys
in there and books and she came in and said …’

‘I don’t want to hear,’ said Eva, finally dragging her
attention away from this fascinating topic. ‘It’s time to get your things on. I’ll go and fetch the car …’ She stopped. It was clearly one thing to say she was going to fetch the car from a neighbour’s front garden, but just as clearly there were snags. If Henry was in Mrs Willoughby’s house she’d never be able to live the scandal down. All the same something had to be done and it was a scandal enough already for the neighbours to see the Escort there. With the same determination with which Eva always dealt with embarrassing situations she put on her coat and marched out of the front door. Presently she was sitting in the Escort trying to start it. As usual when she was in a hurry the starter motor churned over and nothing happened. To be exact, something did but not what she had hoped. The front door opened and the Great Dane loped out followed by Mrs Willoughby in a dressing-gown. It was, in Eva’s opinion, just the sort of dressing-gown a sex-mad widow would wear. Eva wound down the window to explain that she was just collecting the car and promptly wound it up again. Whatever Samantha’s finer feelings might persuade her about the dog, Eva mistrusted it.

‘I’m just going to take the girls to school,’ she said by way of rather inadequate explanation.

Outside the Great Dane barked and Mrs Willoughby mouthed something that Eva couldn’t hear. She wound the window down two inches. ‘I said I’m just going to …’ she began.

Ten minutes later, after an exceedingly acrimonious
exchange in which Mrs Willoughby had challenged Eva’s right to park in other people’s drives and Eva had only been prevented by the presence of the Hound from demanding the right to search the house for her Henry and had been forced to confine herself to a moral critique of the dressing-gown, she drove the quads furiously to school. Only when they had left was Eva thrown back on her own worries. If Henry hadn’t left the car at that awful woman’s – and she really couldn’t see him braving the Great Dane unless he’d been blind drunk and then he wouldn’t have held much interest for Mrs Willoughby – someone else must have. Eva drove to the Braintrees and came away even more worried. Betty was sure Peter had said he hadn’t seen henry nearly all week. It was the same at the Tech. Wilt’s office was empty and Mrs Bristol was adamant that he hadn’t been in since Wednesday. Which left only the prison.

With a terrible sense of foreboding Eva used the phone in Wilt’s office. By the time she put it down again panic had set in. Henry not at the prison since Monday? But he taught that murderer every Friday … he didn’t. He never had. And he wasn’t going to teach him on Mondays either now because Mac wasn’t a burden on the state, as you might say. But he had given McCullum lessons on Friday. Oh no, he hadn’t. Prisoners in that category couldn’t have cosy little chats every night of the week, now could they? Yes, he was quite sure. Mr Wilt never came to the prison on Fridays.

Sitting alone in the office, Eva’s reactions swung from panic to anger and back again. Henry had been deceiving her. He’d lied. Mavis was right, he had had another woman all the time. But he couldn’t have. She’d have known. He couldn’t keep a thing like that to himself. He wasn’t practical or cunning enough. There’d have been something to tell her like hairs on his coat or lipstick or powder or something. And why? But before she could consider that question Mrs Bristol had poked her head round the door to ask if she’d like a cup of coffee. Eva braced herself to face reality. No one was going to have the satisfaction of seeing her break down.

‘No thank you,’ she said, ‘it’s very kind of you but I must be off.’ And without allowing Mrs Bristol the opportunity to ask anything more Eva marched out and walked down the stairs with an air of deliberate fortitude. It had almost cracked by the time she had reached the car but she hung on until she had driven back to Oakhurst Avenue. Even then, with all the evidence of treachery around her in the shape of Henry’s raincoat and the shoes he’d put out to polish and hadn’t and his briefcase in the hall, she refused to give way to self-pity. Something was wrong. Something that proved Henry hadn’t walked out on her. If only she could think.

It had something to do with the car. Henry would never have left it in Mrs Willoughby’s drive. No, that wasn’t it. It was … She dropped the car keys on the kitchen table and recognized their importance. They’d been in the car when she’d gone to fetch it and among
them on the ring was the key to 45 Oakhurst Avenue. Henry had left her without any warning and without leaving a message but he had left the key to the house? Eva didn’t believe it. Not for one moment. In that case her instinct had been right and something dreadful had happened to him. Eva put the kettle on and tried to think what to do.

‘Listen, Ted,’ said Flint. ‘You play it the way you want. If you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours. No problems. All I’m saying is –’

‘If I scratch your back,’ said Lingon, ‘I won’t have a fucking back to be scratched. Not one you’d want to scratch anyway, even if you could find it under some bloody motorway. Now would you mind just getting out of here?’

Inspector Flint settled himself in a chair and looked round the tiny office in the corner of the scruffy garage. Apart from a filing cabinet, the usual nudey calendar, a telephone and the desk, the only thing it contained of any interest to him was Mr Lingon. And in Flint’s view Mr Lingon was a thing, a rather nasty thing, a squat, seedy and corrupt thing. ‘Business good?’ he asked with as little interest as possible. Outside the glass cubicle a mechanic was hosing down a Lingon Coach which claimed to be de luxe.

Mr Lingon grunted and lit a cigarette from the stub of his last one. ‘It was till you turned up,’ he said. ‘Now
do me a favour and leave me alone. I don’t know what you’re on about.’

‘Smack,’ said Flint.

‘Smack? What’s that supposed to mean?’

Flint ignored the question. ‘How many years did you do last time?’ he enquired.

‘Oh Jesus,’ said Lingon. ‘I’ve been inside. Years ago. But you sods never let up, do you? Not you. A little bit of breaking and entering, someone gets done over two miles away. You name it, who do you come and see? Who’s on record? Ted Lingon. Go and put the pressure on him. That’s all you buggers can ever think of. No imagination.’

Flint shifted his attention from the mechanic and looked at Mr Lingon. ‘Who needs imagination?’ he said. ‘A nice signed statement, witnessed and everything clean and above-board and no trade. Much better than imagination. Stands up in court.’