The Wilt Alternative (21 page)

'But there's got to be some motive for his actions.'

Flint laughed abruptly. 'Motive? With Henry Wilt? Not on your life. You can think of a
thousand good motives, ten thousand if you like, for what he does but at the end of the day he'll
come up with the one explanation you never even dreamt of. Wilt's the nearest thing to Ernie you
could wish to meet.'

'Ernie?' said the Superintendent. 'Who the hell is Ernie?

'That ruddy computer they use for the premium bonds, sir. You know, the one that picks numbers
out at random. Well, Wilt's a random man, if you know what I mean.'

'I don't think I want to,' said the Superintendent. 'I thought all I had to cope with was a
nice simple ordinary siege, instead of which this thing is developing into a madhouse.'

'While we're on that subject,' said the psychologist, 'I really do think it's very important
to resume communications with the people in the top flat. Whoever is up there and holding the
Schautz woman is in a highly disturbed state. She could be in grave danger.'

'No "could" about it,' said Flint. 'Is.'

'All right. I suppose we'll have to risk it,' said the Superintendent. 'Give the go-ahead for
the helicopter to move in with a field telephone, sergeant.'

'Any orders regarding Mrs Wilt, sir?'

'You'd better ask the Inspector here. He seems to be the expert on the Wilt family. What sort
of woman is Mrs Wilt? And don't say she's a random one.'

'I wouldn't really like to say,' said Flint, 'except that she's a very powerful woman.'

'What do you think she plans to do then? She obviously didn't leave the police station without
some aim in mind.'

'Well, knowing Wilt as well as I do, sir, I have to admit I've grave doubts about her having a
mind at all. Any normal woman would have been in a nut-house years ago living with a man like
that.'

'You're not suggesting she's some sort of psychopath as well?'

'No, sir,' said Flint, 'all I'm saying is that she can't have any nerves worth speaking
about.'

'That's a big help. So we've got a bunch of terrorists armed to the teeth, some sort of nutter
in the shape of Wilt and a woman on the loose with a hide like a rhino. Put that little lot
together and we've got ourselves one hell of a combination. All right, sergeant, put out an alert
for Mrs Wilt and see that they take her into custody before anyone else gets hurt.'

The Superintendent crossed to the window and looked at the Wilts' house. Under the glare of
the floodlights it stood out against the night sky like a monument erected to commemorate the
stolidity and unswerving devotion to boredom of English middle-class life. Even the Major was
moved to comment.

'Sort of suburban son-et-lumière, what? he murmured.

'Lumière perhaps,' said the Superintendent, 'but at least we're spared the son.'

But not for long. From somewhere seemingly close at hand there came a series of terrible
wails. The Wilt quads were giving tongue.

A mile away Eva Wilt moved towards her home with a fixed resolve that was wholly at variance
with her appearance. The few people who noticed her as she bustled down narrow streets saw only
an ordinary housewife in a hurry to fix her husband's supper and put the children to bed. But
beneath her homely look Eva Wilt had changed. She had shed her cheerful silliness and her
borrowed opinions and had only one thought in mind. She was going home and no one was going to
stop her. What she would do when she got there she had no idea, and in a vague way she was aware
that home was not simply a place. It was also what she was, the wife of Henry Wilt and mother of
the quads, a working woman descended from a line of working women who had scrubbed floors, cooked
meals and held families together in spite of illnesses and deaths and the vagaries of men. It
wasn't a clearly defined thought but it was there driving her forward almost by instinct. But
with instinct there came thought.

They would be waiting for her in Farringdon Avenue so she would avoid it. Instead of she would
cross the river by the iron footbridge and go round by Barnaby Road and then across the fields
where she had taken the children blackberrying only two months ago and enter the garden at the
back. And then? She would have to wait and see. If there was any way of entering the house and
joining the children she would take it. And if the terrorists killed her it was better than
losing the quads. The main thing was that she would be there to protect them. Beneath this
uncertain logic there was rage. Like her thoughts it was vague and diffuse and focused as much on
the police as on the terrorists. If anything she blamed the police more. To her the terrorists
were criminals and murderers and the police were there to save the public from such people. That
was their job, and they hadn't done it properly. Instead they had allowed her children to be
taken hostage and were now playing a sort of game in which the quads were merely pieces. It was a
simple view but Eva's mind saw things simply and straightforwardly. Well, if the police wouldn't
act she would.

It was only when she reached the footbridge over the river that she saw the full magnitude of
the problem facing her. Half a mile away the house in Willington Road stood in an aura of white
light. Around it the street lamps glimmered dimly and the other houses were black shadows. For a
moment she paused, gripping the handrail and wondering what to do, but there was no point in
hesitating. She had to go on. She went down the iron steps and along Barnaby Road until she came
to the footpath across the field. She went through and followed it until she reached the muddy
patch by the next gate. A group of bullocks stirred in the darkness near her but Eva had no fear
of cattle. They were part of the natural world to which she felt she properly belonged.

But on the far side of the gate everything was unnatural. Against the sinister white glare of
the floodlights she could see men with guns and when she had climbed the gate she stooped down
and spotted the coils of barbed wire. They ran right across the field from Farringdon Avenue.
Willington Road had been sealed off. Again instinct provoked cunning. There was a ditch to her
left and if she made her way along it...But there would be a man there to stop her. She needed
something to divert his attention. The bullocks would do. Eva opened the gate and then trudging
through the mud shooed the beasts into the next field before closing the gate again. She shooed
them still further and the bullocks scattered and were presently moving slowly forward in their
usual inquisitive way. Eva scrambled down into the ditch and began to wade along it. It was a
muddy ditch, half filled with water and as she went weeds gathered around her knees and the
occasional bramble scratched her face. Twice she put her hand into clumps of stinging-nettles but
Eva hardly felt them. Her mind was too occupied with other problems. Mainly the lights. They
glared at the house with a brilliance that made it seem unreal and almost like looking at a
photographic negative where all the tones were reversed and windows which should have shone with
light were black squares against a lighter background. And all the time from somewhere across the
field there came the incessant beat of an engine. Eva peered over the edge of the ditch and made
out the dark shape of a generator. She knew what it was because John Nye had once explained how
electricity was made when he had been trying to persuade her to install a Savonius rotor which
ran off windpower. So that was how they were lighting the house. Not that it helped her. The
generator was out in the middle of the field and she couldn't possibly reach it. Anyway, the
bullocks were proving a useful distraction. They had gathered in a group round one of the armed
men and he was trying to get rid of them. Eva went back into the ditch and stumbling along came
to the barbed wire.

As she had expected it coiled down into the water and it was only by reaching down the full
length of her arm that she could find the bottom strand. She pulled it up and then stooping down
so that she was almost submerged managed to wriggle her way underneath By the time she reached
the hedge that ran along the backs of all the gardens she was soaked to the skin and her hands
and legs were covered with mud, but the cold didn't affect her. Nothing mattered except the fear
that she would be stopped before she reached the house. And there were bound to be more armed men
in the garden.

Eva stood knee-deep in the mud and waited and watched. Noises came to her out of the night.
There was certainly someone in Mrs Haslop's garden. The smell of cigarette smoke told her so, but
her main attention was fixed on her own back garden and the lights that blazed her home into a
fearful isolation. A man moved from the back of the summerhouse and crossed to the gate into the
field. Eva watched him stroll away towards the generator. And still she waited with the cunning
that sprang from some deep instinct. Another man moved behind the summerhouse, a match flared in
the darkness as he lit a cigarette, and Eva, like some primeval amphibian, climbed slowly from
the ditch and on her hands and knees crawled forward along the hedge. All the time her eyes were
fixed on the glowing tip of the cigarette. By the time she reached the gate she could see the
man's face each time he took a deep puff, and the gate was open. It swung slightly in the breeze,
never quite shutting. Eva began to crawl through it when her knee touched something cylindrical
and slippery. She felt down with a hand and found a thick plastic-coated cable. It ran through
the gateway to the three floodlights stationed on the lawn. All she had to do was cut it and the
lights would go off. And there were secateurs in the greenhouse. But if she used them she might
electrocute herself. Better to take the axe with the long handle and that was by the woodpile on
the far side of the summerhouse. If only the man with the cigarette would go she could reach it
in no time. But what would make him move? If she threw a stone at the greenhouse he would
certainly investigate.

Eva felt around on the path and had just found a piece of flint when the need for throwing it
ended. A loud chattering noise was coming from behind her and turning her head she could make out
the shape of a helicopter coming low over the field. And the man had moved. He was on his feet
and had walked round the summerhouse so that his back was towards her. Eva crawled through the
gate, got to her feet and ran for the woodpile. On the other side of the summerhouse the man
didn't hear her. The helicopter was nearer now and its rotors drowned her movements Already Eva
had the axe and had returned to the cable and as the helicopter passed overhead she swung the axe
down. A moment later the house had disappeared and the night had become intensely dark. She
stumbled forward, trampled across the herb garden and reached the lawn before she realized that
she seemed to be in the middle of a tornado. Above her the helicopter blades thrashed the air,
the machine veered sideways, something swung past her head and a moment later there came the
sound of breaking glass. Mrs de Frackas' conservatory was being demolished. Eva stopped in her
tracks and threw herself flat on the lawn. From inside the house there came the rattle of
automatic fire, and bullets riddled the summerhouse. She was in the middle of some awful battle
and everything had suddenly gone horribly wrong.

In Mrs de Frackas' conservatory Superintendent Misterson had been watching the helicopter
moving in towards the balcony window with the field telephone dangling beneath it, when the world
had suddenly vanished. After the brilliance of the floodlights he could see nothing but he could
still feel and hear and before he could grope his way back into the drawing-room he both felt and
heard. He certainly felt the field telephone on the side of his head and he vaguely heard the
sound of breaking glass. A second later he was on the tiled floor and the whole damned place
seemed to be cascading glass, potted geraniums, begonia semperflorens and soilless compost. It
was the latter that prevented him from expressing his true feelings.

'You bleeding maniac...' he began before choking in the dust storm. The Superintendent rolled
on to his side and tried to avoid the debris but things were still falling from the shelves and
Mrs de Frackas' treasured Cathedral Bell plant had detached itself from the wall and had draped
him with tendrils. Finally as he tried to fight his way out of this home-grown jungle a large
Camellia 'Donation' in a heavy clay pot toppled from its pedestal and put an end to his misery.
The head of the Anti-Terrorist Squad lay comfortably unconscious on the tiles and made no
comment.

But in the Communications Centre comments flew thick and fast. The Major yelled orders to the
helicopter pilot while two operators wearing headphones were clutching their ears and screaming
that some fucking lunatic was bouncing on the parabolic listening devices. Only Flint remained
cool and comparatively detached. Ever since he had first learnt that Wilt was involved in the
case he had known that something appalling was bound to happen. In Flint's mind the name Wilt
spelt chaos, a sort of cosmic doom against which there was no protection, except possibly prayer,
and now that catastrophe had struck he was secretly pleased. It proved his premonition right and
the Superintendent's optimism entirely wrong. And so while the Major ordered the helicopter pilot
to get the hell out, Flint picked his way through the rubble in the conservatory and disentangled
his unconscious superior from the foliage.

'Better call an ambulance,' he told the Major as he dragged the injured man into the
Communications Centre, 'the Super looks as if he's bought it.'

The Major was too busy to be concerned. 'That's your business. Inspector,' he said. 'I've got
to see those swine don't get away.'

'Sounds as though they're still in the house,' said Flint as the sporadic firing continued
from Number 9, but the Major shook his head.