"Not all j.a.panese are little," Penelope pointed out. "Some of those wrestlers are fearfully fat."
"Like Auntie Joan," said Samantha. "She"s disgusting."
In the surveillance truck across the road Palowski and Murphy nodded agreement.
The next remark was of a different and more intriguing sort.
"I don"t know why we"re writing all this down now. The incriminating evidence is all there on the tape."
"Miss Sprockett would have a fit if we played that to the cla.s.s. She"s as butch as can be. I"d like to hear her opinion of Uncle Wally."
"It"s just a pity we haven"t got it on video," said Emmeline. "Uncle Wally trying to find Auntie Joan"s "thing" and giving it to her up the b.u.m. We could make our fortunes."
"We could have made our fortunes if you"d done what I wanted instead of putting the backup tape on the sound system," Josephine said. "I wonder what it sounds like. It"s long past six. Uncle Wally"s going to go absolutely bananas. He"d have paid a terrific amount of money for that tape. An absolute fortune. I mean if people find out"
"If?" said Emmeline. "I"d say he"ll kill us when he finds out."
But Samantha shook her head. "He won"t," she said smugly. "I"ve hidden the original tape where he"ll never find it."
"Where?" the others demanded but Samantha wasn"t telling.
"Just somewhere he"s never going to find it. I"m not telling you anything else. Emmy might go and tell him."
"I wouldn"t. You know I wouldn"t," said the aggrieved Emmeline.
"You said that when we put that stuff on the Revd Vascoe"s computer and then you"
"It wasn"t me. It was Penny said I was the one who put it there."
"Well, so you did. You were the one thought of it. And anyway I didn"t tell Mummy. She knows you because you"re always the one who fouls things up."
"I don"t care about that," said Samantha. "And I"m still not telling and no one is going to make me. So there."
The discussion moved on to the coming visit to the Florida Keys. Uncle Wally had said he wanted to take them shark fishing in his boat and Auntie Joan and Eva wanted to fly to Miami to do some shopping.
But downstairs Wally Immelmann"s plans were being altered by the second.
"You telling me someone"s tried to burglarise the Bear Fort?" he shouted down the phone at Sheriff Stallard who had got back to Wilma and had partially recovered his hearing and had called to find out how to get in touch with Mr Immelmann.
"I don"t know about burglarising," the Sheriff shouted back. "All I know is there"s a guy over Lossville says he"s going to sue for nuisance and contravention of the Obscenity Regulations. Had difficulty hearing him myself."
"Must be the f.u.c.king bears have set the system off. That guy is always complaining. And what"s he mean about Obscenity Regulations? It"s only a prolonged Frankie Sinatra. He sings "My Way"."
"If you say so, Mr Immelmann, I guess I got to believe you," said the Sheriff. "Though frankly"
"I lie. The tape I got on is Abba. The Abba group. Real soothing stuff from way back."
For a moment Sheriff Stallard hesitated. He didn"t want to cross Wally Immelmann but if that was Abba and real soothing his name wasn"t Harry Stallard.
"Anyway, I"m just calling to ask you to cut the stuff off. You got a remote control or something?"
"A remote control? Are you crazy? There"s no remote control can cover twenty-five miles with forest and mountains in between. You think I can bounce it off a satellite."
"I guess I thought you might have some way of shutting it off," said the Sheriff.
"Not from here I haven"t. Got myself a generator so the power can"t be cut off. Anyhow, what"s it to you?"
Sheriff Stallard decided the time had come to break the news. "I mean, what you and Mrs Immelmann are discussing over that sound system you"ve built up there isn"t something you"d want to hear. The guy in Lossville says"
"f.u.c.k the little s.h.i.t," said Wally. "I told you he is always complaining." He paused. The Sheriff"s last statement had hit him. "What do you mean, what me and Mrs Immelmann are discussing?"
Sheriff Stallard gritted his teeth. This was going to be the hard bit. "I don"t really like to say, sir," he muttered. "It"s kind of intimate."
"Intimate?" Wally yelled. "Are you f.u.c.king drunk or mad or something? Me and Mrs Immelmann?"
The Sheriff had had enough. He was getting real mad now. "And Dr Cohen!" he shouted back. There was a gasp and silence on the line. "You still there, Mr Immelmann?"
Mr Immelmann was still there. Just. He just wasn"t hearing right. He couldn"t be.
"What was that last you said?" he asked finally and in a weak voice.
"I said you and Mrs Immelmann are discussing intimate personal details about...well, I guess you know what you were talking about."
"Like what?" Wally demanded.
"Well, like Dr Cohen and"
"s.h.i.t!" yelled Wally. "You telling me the b.a.s.t.a.r.d over in Lossville...oh, my G.o.d!"
"He called in to say it was all over the district up there, and we thought you might want to know."
"I might want to know? I might want...What else did he say?"
"Could you cut it off is what he really wanted because the noise is driving his wife crazy. And what you and Mrs Immelmann are shouting about, like your s.e.x life and what she didn"t want you to do to her, isn"t helping."
Wally could well imagine it. The knowledge was driving him crazy too, trying to work out how what he and Joanie had said in the bedroom was coming out of the sound system at a thousand decibels plus. It wasn"t possible.
"The thing is, there has to be some way to shut it down," the Sheriff insisted. "We got the National Guard team moving in. Maybe...Mr Immelmann, are you all right?"
Something in the Starfighter Mansion had crashed on to something else, like a table.
"Mr Immelmann, Mr Immelmann, oh s.h.i.t!" shouted the Sheriff. "Baxter, get an ambulance over there fast. Sounds like Wally"s had a heart attack."
Chapter 20.
There are in parts of most English industrial towns areas of such urban dereliction that only the most desperately self-pitying junkies and alcoholics, the discards of a concerned and caring society, choose to live there. A few old people, who would rather live anywhere else but can"t afford to move, inhabit the top floors of the tower blocks and curse the day the local authority demolished their nineteenth-century back-to-backs in the 1960s ostensibly in the interests of health and hygiene. More correctly, in the interests of ambitious architects anxious to earn reputations and of local councillors anxious to line their pockets with hand-outs from developers whose only interest was in making vast profits.
One of these areas is on the edge of Ipford and it was towards this that Mrs Rottecombe drove. She knew the place fairly well, too well for her ever to mention it now. One of her first long list of clients before she had married Harold Rottecombe had had a cottage ten miles from Ipford and she had spent weekends there. When the customer had most inconsiderately gone to his Maker while on the job she had moved hurriedly to London to avoid the inquest. She had changed her name and had adopted that of a maternal aunt who had Alzheimer"s and was incapable of remembering who she herself was let alone whether her niece was her daughter or not. The ruse worked. After that, it was simply a question of finding a respectable husband, and being a shrewd and ambitious woman she had made the acquaintance of Harold Rottecombe by becoming a worker in his local const.i.tuency office. From there to the Registry Office had been an easy task. Harold, for all his political ac.u.men, had no idea what he had married. He would never know unless...unless it came to a divorce. In short, Ruth Rottecombe, reverting to the language of her adolescence, "had him by the b.a.l.l.s". And the further he climbed the greasy pole of politics the less he would want her past to become public knowledge. So far, the only mistake she had made was in a.s.sociating with Bob Battleby. And, of course, in having to get rid of the man in the back of the Volvo in such a way that he couldn"t talk or, if he did, no one would believe him. Whoever he was, her instincts told her he was an educated married man and not a reporter for some filthy tabloid. Trying to explain to his wife or the police how he had lost his trousers was not going to be an easy one.
By the time she reached Ipford it was getting dark. She skirted the town and approached the derelict estate by a back road. The place was far worse than she"d remembered. There was no one about and no lights in any of the windows, most of which were boarded up. Illiterates with spray cans had covered walls with obscene graffiti. Ruth pulled into a dark alleyway where there were no street lights, parked under a looming tower block and switched off the Volvo estate. She got out and looked cautiously around her and up at the black or boarded-up windows on either side of the alley. In the distance she could hear the sound of lorries on the motorway but otherwise there was no sound of life. Three minutes later she had removed the newspapers and cardboard boxes, unwrapped the Elastoplast from his wrists and removed the gag, and was dragging Wilt by the feet into the gutter, in the process banging his head on the kerb. Then she slammed the back of the estate and drove on only to find she was in a cul-de-sac. She reversed the car and drove back the way she had come, her headlights picking out the almost naked figure of Wilt. She was glad to see his head had begun to bleed again. What she didn"t see was a plywood board covering a window standing partly open on the second floor of the tower block above as she turned right and headed for the motorway. She was by this time tired but euphoric. She had rid herself of a dangerous threat to Harold"s reputation and her own influence. What she forgot as she drove back to Meldrum Sloc.u.m was to get rid of Wilt"s jeans, boots, socks and rucksack which were still under the cardboard boxes. By the time she reached Leyline Lodge she was exhausted and slumped into bed. Far behind her the plywood board in the tower block had long since closed again.
An hour later a group of drunk skinheads pa.s.sed the head of the alley, spotted the body and came up to have a look at it.
"A b.l.o.o.d.y old poofter," said one of them, drawing the conclusion from the lack of Wilt"s jeans. "Let"s put the boot in." And having expressed their feelings for gays by kicking him in the ribs a few times and once in the face, they staggered off laughing. Wilt felt nothing. He had found an Older England than he"d expected but he still didn"t know it.
A feeble dawn had broken when he was found by a police car. Two constables got out and looked down at him.
"Best call an ambulance. This one"s a right mess. Tell them it"s urgent."
While the WPC used the car radio the other looked around. Above his head the plywood board opened.
"Happened around three hours ago," said an old woman. "A woman in a white car came and dragged him out. Then some young b.a.s.t.a.r.ds gave him a kicking just for the fun of it."
The constable peered up at her. "You should have called us, mother," he said.
"What with, I"d like to know? Think I"ve got a phone?"
"Don"t suppose you have. What are you doing here anyway? Last time you were down the road."
The old woman poked her head further out. "Think I"m staying in one place round here? Not likely. I may be cabbage-looking but I ain"t that green. Got to keep moving so those young swine don"t get me."
The policeman took out a notebook. "Get a look at the number-plate of the car?" he asked.
"What, in this dark? Course I didn"t. Saw a woman though. Rich b.i.t.c.h by the look of her. Not from round here."
"We can drive you down with us to the station. You"ll be safe enough down there."
"I don"t mean that. I want to go back where I came from. That"s what I mean, copper."
But before the constable could ask where that was the Woman Police Officer returned with the news that no ambulances were available. There had been a major accident involving two coaches full of schoolchildren on a trip abroad, a petrol tanker and a lorry carrying pigs on the motorway twenty miles away and every available ambulance and fire engine had been sent to the scene.
"Pigs?" queried the constable.
"At least they think it was pigs. The Duty Sergeant"s been told the smell of roast pork is appalling."
"Never mind about that. What about the school kids?"
"They"re in the ambulances. The two coaches skidded on the pig fat and turned over," the WPC told him.
"Oh well, we"d better put this b.a.s.t.a.r.d in the back of the car and take him down the hospital ourselves."
Above their heads the old woman had closed the plywood board again and disappeared. With Wilt lying p.r.o.ne on the back seat they drove to Ipford General Hospital and met with a hostile reception.
"Oh, all right," said a distraught doctor called by the nurse in A&E. "It will be difficult with this d.a.m.ned accident. We haven"t any spare beds. We haven"t even a spare trolley. I"m not even sure we"ve got any spare corridors, and just to make working in what amounts to a human abattoir so fulfilling, we"ve got a major catastrophe on our hands, four doctors off sick and the usual shortage of nursing staff. Why can"t you take him home? He"s less likely to die there."
All the same, Wilt was finally lifted on to a stretcher, and s.p.a.ce in a long corridor was found for him. Fortunately, Wilt was still unconscious.
Chapter 21.
Uncle Wally was not so lucky. He was fully conscious and wishing to h.e.l.l he wasn"t. He had come out of Intensive Care, had refused to see Auntie Joanie and was having a most unpleasant conversation with Dr Cohen who was telling him a man of his age...well, a man of any age deserved an infarct if he did what he"d done to his wife or any other person for that matter. It was, he said, contra natura.
"Contra what?" Wally gasped. The only Contras he"d heard of had fought the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
"Against nature. The sphincter is designed to let excreta out not"
"s.h.i.t! What"s excrecha?"
"What you just said. s.h.i.t," said Dr Cohen. "Now, like I was saying, the sphincter"
"I don"t even know what a sphincter is."
"a.s.shole," said Dr Cohen ambiguously.
Wally took umbrage. "You calling me an a.s.shole?" he yelled.
Dr Cohen hesitated. Wally Immelmann might be a first-rate business man but...The guy was sick. He didn"t want to kill the idiot.
"I am merely trying to explain the physiological consequences of putting...putting things up someone"s a.n.u.s instead of in the normal way."
Wally gaped at him and turned a nasty colour. He couldn"t find words for his feelings.
Dr Cohen continued. "Not only could you give your dear wife Aids but"
Wally Immelmann found words. "Aids?" he yelled. "What"s all this about my having Aids? I haven"t got Aids. I"m not a f.a.ggot."
"I"m not saying you are. I don"t care. What you do is your own business. I am merely telling you that what you have been doing to your wife can be physically damaging to her. Not can be. Is. She could be wearing tampons the rest of her life."
"Who says I do what you"re saying I do to her?" demanded Wally inadvisedly.
Dr Cohen sighed. He"d had just about all he could stomach from Wally Immelmann. "As a matter of fact you do," he snapped. "You can be heard miles away shouting at Mrs Immelmann about giving it to her up the a.s.s. People are taking tours up near Lake Sa.s.saqua.s.see just to hear you."
Wally"s eyes bulged in his suffused face. "You mean...oh my G.o.d, they haven"t cut the loudspeakers off? They"ve got to."