Wilt on High

by Tom Sharpe

  He hurried up the street and was presently letting himself surreptitiously into 45 Oakhurst Avenue with the resolve that if Eva was awake he would say the car had broken down and he’d taken it to a garage. It was better to be cunning than bloody-minded after all. In the event, there was no need to be anything more than quiet. Eva, who had spent the evening mending the quads’ clothes and who had discovered that they had cut imitation flies in their knickers as a blow for sexual equality, was fast asleep. Wilt climbed carefully into bed beside her and lay in the darkness thinking about drive and determination.

  *

  Drive and determination were very much in the air at the police station. Lord Lynchknowle’s phone call to the Chief Constable, and the news that the Home Secretary had promised Scotland Yard’s assistance, had put the skids under the Superintendent and had jerked him from his chair in front of the telly and back to the station for an urgent conference.

  ‘I want results and I don’t care how you get them,’ he told the meeting of senior officers inadvisedly. ‘I’m not having us known as the Fenland equivalent of Soho or Piccadilly Circus or wherever they push this muck. Is that clear? I want action.’

  Flint smirked. For once he was glad of Inspector Hodge’s presence. Besides, he could honestly claim that he had gone straight to the Tech and had made a very thorough investigation of the cause of death. ‘I think you’ll find all the preliminary details in my report, sir,’ he said. ‘Death was due to a massive overdose of heroin and something called Embalming Fluid. Hodge might know.’

  ‘It’s Phencyclidine or PCP,’ he said. ‘Comes under a whole series of names like Super Grass, Hog, Angel Dust and Killer Weed.’

  The Superintendent didn’t want a catalogue of names. ‘What’s the filth do, apart from kill kids, of course?’

  ‘It’s like LSD only a hell of a sight worse,’ said Hodge. ‘Puts them into psychosis if they smoke the stuff too much and generally blows their minds. It’s bloody murder.’

  ‘So we’ve gathered,’ said the Superintendent. ‘Where’d she get it is what I want to know. Me and the Chief Constable and the Home Secretary.’

  ‘Hard to say,’ said Hodge. ‘It’s a Yankee habit. Haven’t seen it over here before.’

  ‘So she went to the States and bought it there on holiday? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘She wouldn’t have fixed herself with the stuff if she had,’ said Hodge, ‘she’d have known better. Could have got it from someone in the University, I suppose.’

  ‘Well, wherever she got it,’ said the Superintendent grimly, ‘I want that source traced, and fast. In fact, I want this town clean of heroin and every other drug before we have Scotland Yard descending on us like a ton of bricks and proving we’re nothing but a bunch of country hicks. Those aren’t my words, they’re the Chief Constable’s. Now then, we’re quite certain she took this stuff herself? She couldn’t have been … well, given it against her will?’

  ‘Not according to my information,’ said Flint, recognizing the attempt to shift the investigation in his direction and clear Lord Lynchknowle’s name from any connection with the drug scene. ‘She was seen shooting herself with it in one of the Staff toilets at the Tech. If shooting’s the right word,’ said Flint, and looked across at Hodge, hoping to shift onto him the burden of keeping Scotland Yard at bay while screening the Lynchknowles.

  The Superintendent wasn’t interested. ‘Whatever,’ he said. ‘So there’s no question of foul play?’

  Flint shook his head. The whole beastly business of drugs was foul play but now didn’t seem the time to discuss the question. What was important from Flint’s point of view was to land Hodge with the problem up to his eyebrows. Let him foul this case up and his head really would be on the chopping-block. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘I did find it suspicious she was using the Staff toilet. Could be that’s the connection.’

  ‘What is?’ demanded the Superintendent.

  ‘Well, I’m not saying they are and I’m not saying they’re not,’ said Flint, with what he liked to think was subtle equivocation. ‘All I’m saying is some of the staff could be.’

  ‘Could be what, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘Involved in pushing,’ said Flint. ‘I mean, that’s why it’s been so difficult to get a lead on where the stuff’s coming from. Nobody’d suspect lecturers to be pushing the muck, would they?’ He paused before putting the boot in. ‘Take Wilt for example, Mr Henry Wilt. Now there’s a bloke I wouldn’t trust further than I could throw him and even then I wouldn’t turn my back. This isn’t the first time we’ve had trouble over there, you know. I’ve got a file on that sod as thick as a telephone directory and then some. And he’s Head of the Liberal Studies Department at that. You should see some of the dropouts he’s got working for him. Beats me why Lord Lynchknowle let his daughter go to the Tech in the first place.’ He paused again. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Inspector Hodge making notes. The bastard was taking the bait. So was the Superintendent.

  ‘You may have something there, Inspector,’ he said. ‘A lot of teachers are hangovers from the sixties and seventies and that rotten scene. And the fact that she was spotted in the Staff toilet …’ It was this that did it. By the time the meeting broke up, Hodge was committed to a thorough investigation of the Tech and had been given permission to send in undercover agents.

  ‘Let me have a list of the names and I’ll forward it to the Chief Constable,’ said the Superintendent. ‘With the Home Secretary involved, there shouldn’t be any difficulty, but for God’s sake, get some results.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Inspector Hodge, and went off to his office a happy man.

  So did Flint. Before leaving the station, he called in on the Head of the Drug Squad with Wilt’s file. ‘If this is any use …’ he said and dropped it on the desk with apparent reluctance. ‘And any other help I can give you, you’ve only to ask.’

  ‘I will,’ said Inspector Hodge, with the opposite intention. If one thing was certain, it was that Flint would get no credit for breaking the case. And so, while Flint drove home and unwisely helped himself to a brown ale before going to bed, Hodge sat on in his office planning the campaign that would lead to his promotion.

  He was still there two hours later. Outside, the street lamps had gone off and Ipford slept, but Hodge sat on, his mind already infected with the virus of ambition and hope. He had gone carefully through Flint’s report on the discovery of the body and for once he could find no fault with the Inspector’s conclusions. They were confirmed by the preliminary report from Forensic. The victim had died from an overdose of heroin mixed with Emblaming Fluid. It was this last which interested Hodge.

  ‘American,’ he muttered yet again, and checked with the Police National Computer on the incidence of its use. Negligible, as he had thought. All the same, the drug was extremely dangerous and its spread in the States had been so rapid that it had been described as the syphilis of drug abuse. Crack this case and Hodge’s name would be known, not simply in Ipford, but through the Lord Lieutenant to the Home Secretary and … Hodge’s dreams pursued his name before returning to the present. He picked up Wilt’s file doubtfully. He hadn’t been in Ipford at the time of the Great Doll Case and its ghastly effects on Flint’s career, but he’d heard about it in the canteen, where it was generally acknowledged that Mr Henry Wilt had outfoxed Inspector Flint. Made him look a damned fool was the usual verdict, but it had never been clear what Wilt had really been up to. No one in his right mind went round burying inflatable dolls dressed in his wife’s clothes at the bottom of piling-holes with twenty tons of concrete on top of them. And Wilt had. It followed that either Wilt hadn’t been in his right mind, or that he’d been covering some other crime. Diverting suspicion. Anyway, the sod had got away with whatever he’d been up to and had screwed Flint into the bargain. So Flint had a grudge against the bastard. That was generally acknowledged too.

  It was therefore with justified suspicion that Hodge turned to W
ilt’s file and began to read in detail the transcript of his interrogation. And as he read, a certain grim respect for Wilt grew in his mind. The sod hadn’t budged from his story, in spite of being kept awake and deluged with questions. And he had made Flint look the idiot he was. Hodge could see that, just as he could see why Flint had a grudge against him. But above all his own intuition told him that Wilt had to have been guilty of something. Just had to be. And he’d been too clever for the old bugger. Which explained why Flint had been prepared to hand the file over to him. He wanted this Wilt nailed. Only natural. All the same, knowing Flint’s attitude to him, Hodge was amazed he had given him the file. Not with all that stuff showing what a moron he was. Must be something else there. Like the old man knew when he was beaten? And certainly he looked it lately. Sounded it too, so maybe giving him the file was tacitly acknowledging the fact. Hodge smiled to himself. He’d always known he was the better man and that his chance to prove it would come. Well, now it bloody well had.

  He turned back to Flint’s report on Miss Lynchknowle again and read it through carefully. There was nothing wrong with Flint’s methods and it was only when he came to the bit about Wilt having gone to the wrong toilet that Inspector Hodge saw where the old man had made a mistake. He read through it again.

  ‘Principal reported Wilt went to toilet on the second floor when he should have gone to the one on fourth floor.’ And later ‘Wilt’s secretary, Mrs Bristol, said she told Wilt to go to Ladies’ staff toilet on the fourth floor. Claimed she’d seen girl there before.’ It fitted. Another of clever Mr Wilt’s little moves, to go to the wrong toilet. But Flint hadn’t spotted that or he’d have interviewed the sod. Hodge made a mental note to check Mr Wilt’s movements. But surreptitiously. There was no point in putting him on his guard. Hodge made more notes. ‘Tech laboratory facilities provide means of making Embalming Fluid. Check,’ was one. ‘Source heroin,’ another. And all the time while he concentrated, part of his mind ran on different lines, involving romantic-sounding places like the ‘Golden Triangle’ and the ‘Golden Crescent’, those jungle areas of Thailand and Burma and Laos, or in the case of the ‘Golden Crescent’, the laboratories of Pakistan from which heroin came into Europe. In Hodge’s mind, small dark men, Pakis, Turks, Iranians and Arabs, converged on Britain by donkey or container truck or the occasional ship: always at night, a black and sinister movement of the deadly opiates financed by men who lived in large houses and belonged to country clubs and had yachts. And then there was the Sicilian Connexion with Mafia murders almost daily on the streets of Palermo. And finally the ‘pushers’ in England, little runts like Flint’s son doing his time in Bedford. That again could be an explanation for Flint’s change of attitude, his ruddy son. But the romantic picture of distant lands and evil men was the dominant one, and Hodge himself the dominant figure in it, a lone ranger in the war against the most insidious of all crimes.

  Reality was different of course, and converged with Hodge’s mental geography only in the fact that heroin did come from Asia and Sicily and that an epidemic of terrible addiction had come to Europe, and only the most determined and intelligent police action and international co-operation would bring it to a halt. Which, since the Inspector in spite of his rank was neither intelligent nor possessed of more than a vivid imagination, was where he came unstuck. In place of intelligence, there was only determination, the determination of a man without a family and with few friends, but with a mission. And so Inspector Hodge worked on through the night planning the action he intended to take. It was four in the morning when he finally left the station and walked round the corner to his flat for a few hours’ sleep. Even then, he lay in the darkness gloating over Flint’s discomfiture. ‘The sod’s getting his comeuppance,’ he thought before falling asleep.

  *

  On the other side of Ipford, in a small house with a neat garden distinguished by a nicely symmetrical goldfish pond with a stone cherub in the middle, Inspector Flint would have agreed, though the cause of his problem had rather more to do with brown ale and those bloody piss pills than with Hodge’s future. On the latter score, he was quietly confident. He went back to bed wondering if it wouldn’t be a wise move to take some leave. He had a fortnight due to him, and anyway he could justifiably claim his doctor had told him to take it easy. A trip to the Costa Brava, or maybe Malta? The only trouble there was that Mrs Flint tended to get randy in the heat. It was about the only time she did these days, thank God. Perhaps Cornwall would be a better bet. On the other hand, it would be a pity to miss watching Hodge come unstuck and if Wilt didn’t run rings round the shit, Flint wasn’t the man he thought he was. Talk about tying two cats together by their tails!

  *

  And so the night wore on. At the Prison, the activities Wilt had initiated went on. At two, another prisoner in D Block set fire to his mattress, only to have it extinguished by an enterprising burglar using the slop bucket. But it was in Top Security that matters were more serious. The Governor had been disconcerted to find two prisoners wide awake in McCullum’s cell, and because it was McCullum’s cell, he had been wary of entering without at least six warders to ensure his safety, and six warders were hard to find, partly because they shared the Governor’s apprehension and partly because they were busy elsewhere. Lacking their support, the Governor was forced to conduct a dialogue with McCullum’s companions through the cell door. Known as the Bull and the Bear, they acted as McCullum’s bodyguards.

  ‘Why aren’t you men asleep?’ demanded the Governor.

  ‘Might be if you hadn’t turned the ruddy light on,’ said the Bull, who had once made the mistake of falling madly in love with a bank manager’s wife, only to be betrayed when he had fulfilled her hopes by murdering her husband and robbing the bank of fifty thousand pounds. She had gone on to marry a stockbroker.

  ‘That’s no way to speak to me,’ said the Governor, peering suspiciously through the peep-hole. Unlike the other two prisoners, McCullum appeared to be fast asleep. One hand hung limply over the side of his bunk, and his face was unnaturally pallid. Considering that the swine was usually a nasty ruddy colour, the Governor was perturbed. If anyone was likely to be involved in an escape plot, he’d have sworn McCullum was. In which case, he’d have been … The Governor wasn’t sure what he’d have been, but he certainly wouldn’t have been fast asleep, with his face that ghastly grey colour, while the Bull and the Bear were wide awake. There was something distinctly fishy about his being asleep.

  ‘McCullum,’ shouted the Governor, ‘McCullum, wake up.’

  McCullum didn’t move. ‘Blimey,’ said the Bear, sitting up. ‘What the fuck’s going on?’

  ‘McCullum,’ yelled the Governor, ‘I am ordering you to wake up.’

  ‘What the fuck’s up with you?’ yelled the Bull. ‘Middle of the bleeding night and some screw has to go off his nut and go round fucking waking people up. We got fucking rights, you know, even if we are in nick and Mac isn’t going to like this.’

  The Governor clenched his teeth and counted to ten. Being called a screw wasn’t what he liked either. ‘I am simply trying to ascertain that Mr McCullum is all right,’ he said. ‘Now will you kindly wake him up.’

  ‘All right? All right? Why shouldn’t he be all right?’ asked the Bear.

  The Governor didn’t say. ‘It’s merely a precautionary measure,’ he answered. McCullum’s refusal to show any sign of life – and in fact from his attitude and complexion to show just the opposite – was getting to him. If it had been anyone else, he’d have opened the cell door and gone in. But the swine could well be shamming, and with the Bull and the Bear to help him, might be planning to overpower a warder going in to see what was wrong. With a silent curse on the Chief Warder for making his life so difficult, the Governor hurried off to get assistance. Behind him, the Bull and the Bear expressed their feelings about fucking screws who left the fucking light on all fucking night, when it occurred to them that there might be something to be said for checking
McCullum after all. The next moment, Top Security was made hellish by their shouts.

  ‘He’s fucking dead,’ screamed the Bear, while the Bull made a rudimentary attempt to resuscitate McCullum by applying what he thought was artifical respiration, and which in fact meant hurling himself on the body and expelling what remained of breath from his victim’s lungs.

  ‘Give him the fucking kiss of life,’ ordered the Bear, but the Bull had reservations. If McCullum wasn’t dead, he had no intention of bringing him back to consciousness to find he was being kissed, and if he had coughed it, he didn’t fancy kissing a corpse.

  ‘Squeamish sod,’ yelled the Bear, when the Bull stated his views on the question. ‘Here, let me get at him.’ But even then he was put off by McCullum’s coldness. ‘You bloody murderers,’ he shouted through the cell door.

  ‘You’ve done it this time,’ said the Governor. He had found the Chief Warder in the office enjoying a cup of coffee. ‘You and your infernal sedatives.’

  ‘Me?’ said the Chief Warder.

  The Governor took a deep breath. ‘Either McCullum’s dead or he’s shamming very convincingly. Get me ten warders and the doctor. If we hurry, we may be in time to save him.’