The Wilt Alternative (22 page)

'Doubt it. Could have left a suicide squad to cover their retreat, or rigged up a machine gun
with a timing device to fire at intervals. Can't trust the buggers an inch.'

Flint radioed for medical help and ordered two constables to carry the Superintendent through
the neighbouring gardens to Farringdon Avenue, a process that was impeded by the SGS men
searching for escaping terrorists. It was half an hour before silence descended on Willington
Road and the listening devices had confirmed that there was still human presence in the
house.

There was also apparently something vertebrate lying on the Wilts' lawn. Flint, returning from
the ambulance, found the Major grasping a revolver and preparing to make a sortie.

'Got one of the bastards by the sound of things,' he said as a massive heartbeat issued from
an amplifier linked to a listening device. 'Going out to bring him in. Probably wounded in the
cross-fire.'

He dashed out into the darkness and a few minutes later there was a yell, the sound of a
violent struggle involving an extremely vigorous object and sections of the fence between the two
gardens. Flint switched the amplifier off. Now that the massive heartbeat had gone there were
other even more disturbing sounds coming from the machine. But what was finally dragged through
the shattered conservatory was worst of all. Never the most attractive of women in Flint's eyes,
Eva Wilt daubed in mud, weeds and soaked to the skin which showed through her torn dress in
several places, now presented a positively prehistoric appearance. She was still struggling as
the six SGS men bundled her into the room. The Major followed with a black eye.

'Well at least we've got one of the swine, 'he said.

'I'm not one of the swine,' shouted Eva, 'I'm Mrs Wilt. You've no right to treat me like
this.'

Inspector Flint retreated behind a chair. 'It's certainly Mrs Wilt,' he said. 'Mind telling us
what you were trying to do?'

Front the carpet Eva regarded him with loathing.

'I was trying to join my children. I've got a right to.'

'I've heard that one before,' said Flint. 'You and your rights. I suppose Henry put you up to
this?'

'He did nothing of the sort. I don't even know what's happened to him. For all I know he's
dead.' And she promptly burst into tears.

'All right, you can let her go now, chaps,' said the Major at last convinced that his captive
was not one of the terrorists. 'You could have got yourself killed, you know.'

Eva ignored him and got to her feet. 'Inspector Flint, you're a father yourself. You must know
what it means to be separated from your loved ones in their hour of need.'

'Yes, well...' said the Inspector awkwardly. Weeping Neanderthal women aroused mixed emotions
in him and in any case his particular loved ones were two teenage louts with an embarrassing
taste for vandalism. He was grateful for an interruption from one of the technicians in charge of
the listening devices.

'Getting something peculiar, Inspector,' he said. 'Want to hear it?'

Flint nodded. Anything was better than appeals for sympathy from Eva Wilt. It wasn't. The
technician switched the amplifier on.

'That's coming from Boom Number 4,' he explained as a series of grunts, groans, ecstatic cries
and the insistent creaking of bedsprings issued from the loudspeaker.

'Boom Number 4? That's not a boom, that's a...'

'Sounds like a fucking sex maniac, begging the lady's pardon,' said the Major. But Eva was
listening too intently to care.

'Where's it coming from?'

'Attic flat, sir. The one where you-know-who is.'

But the subterfuge was wasted on Eva. 'Yes, I do,' she shrieked, 'that's my Henry. I'd know
that moan anywhere.'

A dozen disgusted eyes turned on her but Eva was unabashed. After all she had been through in
so short a time this new revelation destroyed the last vestiges of her social discretion.

'He's making love to some other woman. Just wait till I lay my hands on him,' she screamed in
fury and would have dashed out into the night again if she hadn't been seized.

'Handcuff the bitch,' shouted the Inspector, 'and take her back to the station and see she
doesn't get out again I want maximum security this time and I don't mean maybe.'

'Doesn't sound as if her husband does either, come to that,' said the Major as Eva was dragged
off and the unequivocal evidence of Wilt's first affair continued to pulsate through the
Communications Centre. Flint emerged from behind the chair and sat down.

'Well at least she's proved me right. I said the little bastard was in this thing up to his
eyeballs.'

The Major shuddered. 'I can think of pleasanter ways of putting it, but it rather sounds as if
you're right.'

'Of course I am,' said Flint smugly. 'I know friend Wilt's little tricks.'

'I'm glad I don't,' said the Major. 'If you ask me we ought to get the psycho to analyse this
little lot.'

'It's all going down on the tape, sir,' said the radio man.

'In that case turn that filthy din off,' said Flint. 'I've got enough on my hands without
having to listen to Wilt having it off.'

'Couldn't agree more,' said the Major, struck by the accuracy of the term, 'the fellow must
have nerves of steel. Dashed if I could get it up in the circumstances.'

'You'd be surprised what that little bugger can get up to in any circumstances,' said Flint,
'and married to that maternal mastodon of his, is it any wonder? I'd just as soon go to bed with
a giant clam as climb in with Eva Wilt.'

'I suppose there's something in that,' said the Major fingering his black eye cautiously. 'She
certainly packs one hell of a punch. Can't stay around. Got to go and get those floodlights going
again.'

He wandered out and Flint sat on wondering what to do. Now that the Superintendent was out of
action he supposed he must be in charge of the case. It was not a promotion he wanted. About the
only consolation he could find was the thought that Henry Wilt was about to get his final
comeuppance.

In fact Wilt was concentrating his mind on just the opposite. The state of his manhood, so
recently repaired, demanded it. Besides, adultery was not his forte and he had never found the
process of making love when he didn't feel up to it at all appealing. And since when he felt like
it Eva usually didn't, reserving her moments of passion until the quads were safely asleep and
Wilt would have been given half a chance, he had become accustomed to a sort of split sexuality
in which he did one thing while thinking about another. Not that Eva was satisfied with one
thing. Her interest, while more single-minded than his, was infinitely eclectic in matters of
procedure and Wilt had learnt to accept being bent, crushed, twisted and generally contorted
along lines suggested by the manuals Eva consulted. They had titles like How to Keep your
Marriage Young or Making Love the Natural Way. Wilt had objected that their marriage wasn't young
and that there was nothing natural about risking strangulated hernia by using the coitus position
advocated by Dr Eugene van Yonk. Not that his arguments ever did any good. Eva replied by making
unpleasant references to his adolescence and unwarranted accusations about what he did in the
bathroom when she wasn't there and in the end he had been driven to prove his normality by doing
what he considered thoroughly abnormal. But if Eva had been vigorously experimental in bed Gudrun
Schautz was a demented carnivore.

From the moment in the kitchen when she had first latched on to him in a frenzy of blatant
lust, Wilt had been bitten, scratched, licked, chewed and sucked with a violence and lack of
discrimination that was frankly insulting, not to say dangerous, and which had led him to wonder
why the bitch bothered to shoot people when she could just as easily have done them to death in
more lawful and decidedly nastier ways. Anyway, nobody in his right mind could sensibly accuse
him of being an unfaithful husband. If anything, quite the opposite; only the most dutiful and
conscientious family man would have put himself so much at risk as to get voluntarily into bed
with a wanted murderess. Wilt found the adjective singularly inappropriate and it was only by
concentrating his imagination on Eva when he had first met her that he could evoke a modicum of
desire. It was this flaccid response that provoked Gudrun Schautz. The bitch was not only a
murderess; she managed to combine political terror with the expectation that Wilt was a male
chauvinist pig who would launch himself into her without a second thought.

Wilt's views on the matter were different. It was one of the tenets of his confused philosophy
that you didn't mess about with other women once you were married. And bouncing up and down on an
extremely nubile young woman undoubtedly came into the category of messing about. On the other
hand there was the interesting paradox that he was spiritually closer to Eva now than when he was
actually making love to her and thinking about something else. More practically there wasn't a
hope in hell of having an orgasm. The catheter had put paid to that for the time being he could
bounce away until the cows came home, but he was no more going to put his penis to the test of a
genuine erection than fly to prevent this dreadful possibility he alternated his vision of a
youthful Eva with images of himself and the execrable Schautz lying on the autopsy table in a
terminal coitus interruptus. Considering the din they were making it seemed all too likely and it
was certainly a most effective anti-aphrodisiac. Besides, it had the additional advantage of
confusing the Schautz woman. She was evidently accustomed to more committed lovers and Wilt's
erratic fervour threw her.

'You like it some other way, Liebling?' she asked as Wilt receded for the umpteenth time.

'In the bath,' said Wilt who had suddenly become conscious that the terrorists below might
decide to take a hand and that baths were more bulletproof than beds. Gudrun Schautz laughed. 'So
funny, ja. In the bath!'

At that moment the floodlights went out and the roar of the helicopter could be heard. The
noise seemed to spur her to a new frenzy of lust.

'Quick, quick,' she moaned, 'they're coming.'

'Buggered if I am,' muttered Wilt but the murderess was too busy trying to exorcise oblivion
to hear him and as Mrs de Frackas' conservatory disintegrated and rapid gunfire sounded below he
was hurtled once more into a maelstrom of lust that had nothing to do with real sex at all. Death
was going through the motions of life and Wilt, unaware that his part in this grisly performance
was being monitored for posterity, did his best to play his role. He tried thinking about Eva
again.

Downstairs in the kitchen Chinanda and Baggish were having a hard time thinking at all. All
the complexities of life from which they had tried to escape into the idiotic and murderous
fanaticism of terror seemed suddenly to have combined against them. They fired frantically into
the darkness, and for one proud moment imagined they had hit the helicopter. Instead, the thing
had apparently bombed the house next door. When they finally stopped shooting they were assailed
by the yells of quads in the cellar. To make matters worse, the kitchen had become a health
hazard. Eva's highly polished tiles were a slick of vomit and after Baggish had twice landed on
his backside they had retreated to the hall to consider their next move. It was then that they
heard the extraordinary noises emanating from the attic.

'They're raping Gudrun,' said Baggish and would have gone to her rescue if Chinanda hadn't
stopped him.

'It's a trap the police pigs are setting. They want to get us upstairs and then they rush the
house and rescue the hostages. We stay down here.'

'With that noise? How long do you think we can go on with all that yelling? We each need to
sleep by turns and with them crying is impossible.'

'So we stop them,' said Chinanda and led the way down to the cellar where Mrs de Frackas was
sitting on a wooden chair while the quads demanded mummy.

'Shut up, you hear me! You want to see your mummy you stop that noise,' Baggish shouted. But
the quads only yelled the louder.

'I should have thought coping with small children would have been an essential part of your
training,' said Mrs de Frackas unsympathetically Baggish rounded on her. He still hadn't got over
her suggestion that his proper métier was selling dirty Postcards in Port Said.

'You make them quiet yourself,' he told her, waving his automatic in her face, 'or else we
'

'My dear boy, there are some things you have yet to learn,' said the old lady 'By the time you
reach my age dying is so imminent that I can't be bothered to worry about it. In any case I have
always been an advocate of euthanasia. So much more sensible, don't you think, than putting one
on a drip or one of those life-support machines or whatever they call them. I mean, who wants to
keep a senile old person alive when she's no use to anyone?'

'I don't,' said Baggish fervently. Mrs de Frackas looked at him with interest.

'Besides, being a Moslem, you'd be doing me a favour. I've always understood that death in
battle was a guarantee of salvation according to the Prophet, and while I can't say I'm actually
battling I should have thought being shot by a murderer amounts to the same thing.'

'We are not murderers,' shouted Baggish, 'we are freedom fighters against international
imperialism!'

'Which serves to prove my point,' continued Mrs de Frackas imperturbably. 'You're fighting and
I am self-evidently a product of the Empire. If you kill me I should, according to your
philosophy, go straight to heaven.'

'We are not here to discuss philosophy,' said Chinanda. 'You stupid old woman, what do you
know about the suffering of the workers?'

Mrs de Frackas turned her attention to his clothes. 'Rather more than you do by the cut of
your coat, young man. It may not be obvious but I spent several years working in a children's
hospital in the slums of Calcutta and I think I know what misery means. Have you ever done a hard
day's work in your life?'