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bedrooms to ask what had happened.
    ‘Nothing,’ whimpered Wilt on that occasion as he crawled upstairs, holding the bowl with one hand and his scrotum with the other. ‘It’s just that Mummy is hungry.’
    ‘For walnuts?’
    ‘Yes, for walnuts. You know she says they’re good for you.’
    ‘Then why are you all doubled up?’ Penelope had asked on that memorably agonising night.
    ‘Because she mistook me for a damned tree,’ groaned Wilt, and shut the bedroom door.
    The quads were not deceived. Emmeline’s penetrating voice could be heard quite clearly. ‘Mummy’s got the hot pants again,’ she told the others on the landing. ‘I think she’s into S&M.’
    An observation that put all thought of sex from Eva’s mind. She got out of bed, poked her head round the door and gave the quads hell. Then she got back into bed and gave Wilt hell, too, though in a way which thankfully didn’t involve anything physically disabling.
    Tonight he went to sleep with the consoling thought that having the quads at home for the holidays would have its advantages after all.

Chapter 6
    Meanwhile at the police station Inspector Flint had time on his hands. He spent it staring out of the window and mulling over that perennial puzzle, Mr Henry Wilt. Ever since the sense of liberation he’d felt when Wilt had been mugged the previous summer, he’d come to the conclusion that the man was some sort of born victim, with a genius for getting himself into catastrophic situations and then wriggling out of them like a greased eel. On the other hand, he had a truly God-given and at times diabolical capacity for equivocation and, while being interrogated, for giving answers of such dizzying inconsequentiality that they had on a number of occasions driven Flint almost to the point of lunacy himself. The Inspector had lookedup both ‘equivocation ‘and ‘inconsequentiality’ in the dictionary at the public library and had concluded both words definitely applied to Henry Wilt. In fact, the fellow was almost admirable in his own diabolical sort of way.
    Flint’s feelings about Superintendent Hodge were, however, quite the opposite. There was absolutely nothing to admire about Hodge. In short, Flint loathed him, and would have termed him a ‘bloody nincompoop’ to his face if Hodge hadn’t wielded influence higher up the chain of command.
    Instead he expressed his opinion in private to Sergeant Yates, who demonstrated that he shared Flint’s feelings for the Superintendent by referring to Hodge as ‘that stupid bugger’. Outside the sun shone down. Staring across the park from his window, the Inspector idly wondered what Wilt was up to now.
    Wilt was definitely not looking forward to being inspected by Lady Clarissa.
    ‘Now you’ve got to be on your best behaviour,’ Eva had told him rather more often than he liked. ‘And don’t forget to say you went to Porterhouse College in Cambridge.’
    ‘In other words, lie through my teeth? I told you, I never went near the place.’
    ‘That isn’t a nice thing to say to me, and it’s only a small fib anyway. You’ve got to impress her.’
    ‘Oh, sure. And all she’s got to do is phone thecollege, ask if I went there, and then she’ll be hellishly impressed, won’t she just! And her bloody husband’s bound to ask me if I was in the First Boat and what I think about the new Master who’s probably a woman in any case.’
    Eva was looking puzzled.
    ‘I don’t see what boats have to do with it. We’ve all been in boats at some point or other. Even I’ve been on a boat … it was on the Norfolk Broads, and rather jolly now I come to think of it.’
    ‘They have to do with rowing, dear, and Porterhouse is a rowing college. It has frequently been Head of the River and is renowned for being filled with hearties. Do you know the difference between a hearty and an arty, by the way?’
    ‘No,’ said Eva, ‘I don’t. And if you’re talking about gays, I don’t want to hear any