Wilt on High w-3 Read online

  'Under control?' spluttered the Governor. 'Under control? If you think the Home Secretary's going to think "under control" means having child killers castrated by other prisoners, I can assure you you're not up-to-date with contemporary regulations. Now then, about Top Security.'

  'Nothing to worry about there, sir. They're all sleeping like babes.'

  'Odd,' said the Governor. 'If there was going to be an attempted breakout you'd think they were bound to be involved. You're sure they're not shamming?'

  'Positive, sir,' said Blaggs proudly. 'The first thing I did, sir, by way of a precaution, was to lace their cocoa with that double-strength sleeping stuff.'

  'Sweet Jesus,' moaned the Governor, trying to imagine the consequences of the Chief Warder's experiment in preventive sedation if news leaked out to the Howard League for Penal Reform. 'Did you say "double strength"?'

  The Chief Warder nodded. 'Same stuff we had to use on Fidley that time he saw the Shirley Temple film and went bananas. Mind you, he's not going to get a hard-on after tonight, not if he's wise.'

  'But that was double-strength phenobarb,' squawked the Governor.

  'That's right, sir. So I gave them double strength like it said. Went out like lights they did.'

  The Governor could well believe it. 'You've gone and given four times the proper dose to those men,' he moaned, 'probably killed the brutes. That stuff's lethal. I never told you to do that.'

  Chief Warder Blaggs looked crestfallen. 'I was only doing what I thought best, sir. I mean those swine are a menace to society. Half of them are psychopathic killers.'

  'Not the only psychopaths round here,' muttered the Governor.

  He was about to order a medical team into the prison to stomach-pump the villains Blaggs had sedated, when the warder by the phone intervened. 'We could always say Wilson poisoned them,' he said, 'I mean, that's what they're terrified of. Remember that time they went on dirty strike and Mr Blaggs here let Wilson do some washing up in the kitchen?'

  The Governor did, and would have preferred to forget it. Putting a mass poisoner anywhere near a kitchen had always struck him as insane.

  'Did the trick, sir. They came off dirtying their cells double quick.'

  'And went on hunger strike instead,' said the Governor.

  'And Wilson didn't like it much either, come to that,' said the warder, for whom the incident evidently had pleasant memories. 'Said we'd no right making him wash up in boxing gloves. Proper peeved he was'

  'Shut up,' yelled the Governor, trying to get back to a world of comparative sanity, but he was interrupted by the phone.

  'It's for you, sir,' said the Chief Warder significantly.

  The Governor grabbed it. 'I understand you have some information to give me about an escape plan,' he said, and realized he was talking to the buzz of a pay phone. But before he could ask the Chief Warder how he knew it was for him, the coin dropped. The Governor repeated his statement.

  'That's what I'm phoning about,' said the caller. 'Is there any truth in the rumour?'

  'Any truth in the...' said the Governor. 'How the devil would I know? You were the one to bring the matter up.'

  'News to me,' said the man. 'That is Ipford Prison, isn't it?'

  'Of course it's Ipford Prison and what's more, I'm the Governor. Who the hell did you think I was?'

  'Nobody,' said the man, now sounding decidely perplexed, 'nobody at all. Well, not nobody exactly but...well...you don't sound like a Prison Governor. Anyway, all I'm trying to find out is if there's been an escape or not.'

  'Listen,' said the Governor, beginning to share the caller's doubts about his own identity, 'you phoned earlier in the evening with information about an escape plot and'

  'I did? You off your rocker or something? I've been out covering a burst bloody bulkloader on Bliston Road for the last three bloody hours and if you think I've had time to call you, you're bleeding barmy.'

  The Governor struggled with the alliteration before realizing something else was wrong. 'And who am I speaking to?' he asked, mustering what little patience he still retained.

  'The name's Nailtes,' said the man, 'and I'm from the Ipford Evening News and'

  The Governor slammed the phone down and turned on Blaggs. 'A bloody fine mess you've landed us in,' he shouted. 'That was the Evening News wanting to know if there's been an escape.'

  Chief Warder Blaggs looked dutifully abashed. 'I'm sorry if there's been some mistake...' he began and brought a fresh torrent of abuse on his head.

  'Mistake? Mistake?' yelled the Governor. 'Some maniac rings up with some fucking cock-and-bull story about an escape and you have to poison...' But further discussion was interrupted by news of a fresh crisis. Three safe-breakers, who had been transferred from a cell designed to hold one Victorian convict to another occupied by four Grievous Bodily Harm merchants from Glasgow, known as the Gay Gorbals, had begun to fulfil Wilt's prophesy by escaping and demanding to be closeted with some heterosexual murderers for protection.

  The Governor found them arguing their case with warders in B Block. 'We're not going in with a load of arse-bandits and that's a fact,' said the spokesman.

  'It's only a temporary move,' said the Governor, himself temporizing. 'In the morning'

  'We'll be suffering from AIDS,' said the safebreaker.

  'Aids?'

  'Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. We want some good, clean murderer, not those filthy swine with anal herpes. A stretch is one thing and so's a bang to rights but not the sort of stretch those Scotch sods would give us and we're fucked if we're going to be banged to wrong. This is supposed to be a prison, not Dotheboys Hall.'

  By the time the Governor had pacified them and sent them back to their own cell, he was beginning to have his doubts about the place himself. In his opinion, the prison felt more like a mad-house. His next visit, this time to Top Security, made an even worse impression. A sepulchral silence hung over the floodlit building and, as the Governor passed from cell to cell, he had the illusion of being in a charnel-house. Wherever he looked, men who in other circumstances he would happily have seen dead, looked as though they were. Only the occasional ghastly snore suggested otherwise. For the rest, the inmates hung over the sides of their beds or lay grotesquely supine on the floor in attitudes that seemed to indicate that rigor mortis had already set in.

  'Just let me find the swine who started this little lot,' he muttered. 'I'll...I'll...I'll...' He gave up. There was nothing in the book of legal punishments that would fit the crime.

  Chapter 7

  By the time Wilt left The Glassblowers' Arms, his desperation had been alleviated by beer and his inability to get anywhere near the phone. He'd moved onto beer after three whiskies, and the change had made it difficult for him to be in two places at the same time, a prerequisite, it seemed, for finding the phone unoccupied. For the first half hour, a girl had been engaged in an intense conversation on reversed charges, and when Wilt had returned from the toilet, her place had been taken by an aggressive youth who had told him to bugger off. After that, there seemed to be some conspiracy to keep him away from the phone. A succession of people had used it and Wilt had ended up sitting at the bar and drinking, and generally arriving at the conclusion that things weren't so bad after all, even if he did have to walk home instead of driving.

  'The bastard's in prison,' he told himself as he left the pub. 'And what's more, he's not coming out for twenty years, so what have I got to worry about? Can't hurt me, can he?'

  All the same, as he made his way along the narrow streets towards the river, he kept glancing over his shoulder and wondering if he was being followed. But apart from a man with a small dog and a couple who passed him on bicycles, he was alone and could find no evidence of menace. Doubtless that would come later. Wilt tried to figure out a scenario. Presumably, McCullum had given him the piece of paper as a token message, an indication that he was to be some sort of link-man. Well, there was an easy way out of that one; he wouldn't go near the b
loody prison again. Might make things awkward as far as Eva was concerned though. He'd just have to make himself scarce on Monday nights and pretend he was still teaching the loathsome McCullum. Shouldn't be too difficult and anyway, Eva was so engrossed in the quads and their so-called development, she hardly noticed what he was doing. The main thing was that he still had the airbase job and that brought the real money in.

  But in the meantime, he had more immediate problems to deal with. Like what to tell Eva when he got home. He looked at his watch and saw that it was midnight. After midnight and without the car. Eva would certainly demand an explanation. What a bloody world it was, where he spent his days dealing with idiotic bureaucrats who interfered at the Tech, and was threatened by maniacs in prison, and after all that, came home to be bullied into lying by a wife who didn't believe he'd done a stroke of work all day. And in a bloody world, only the bloody-minded made any mark. The bloody-minded and the cunning. People with drive and determination. Wilt stopped under a street light and looked at the heathers and azaleas in Mr Sands' garden for the second time that day, but this time with a resurgence of those dangerous drives and determinations which beer and the world's irrationality induced in him. He would assert himself. He would do something to distinguish himself from the mass of dull, stupid people who accepted what life handed out to him and then passed on probably into oblivion (Wilt was never sure about that) without leaving more than the fallacious memories of their children and the fading snapshots in the family album. Wilt would be...well, anyway, Wilt would be Wilt, whatever that was. He'd have to give the matter some thought in the morning.

  In the meantime, he'd deal with Eva. He wasn't going to stand any nonsense about where have you been? or what have you been up to this time? He'd tell her to mind her own...No, that wouldn't do. It was the sort of challenge the damned woman was waiting for and would only provoke her into keeping him awake half the night discussing what was wrong with their marriage. Wilt knew what was wrong with their marriage; it had been going on for twenty years and Eva had had quads instead of having one at a time. Which was typical of her. Talk about never doing things by halves. But that was beside the point. Or was it? Perhaps she'd had quads to compensate in some ghastly deterministic and genetical way for marrying only half a man. Wilt's mind shot off on a tangent once again as he considered the fact, if it was one, that after wars the birthrate of males shot up as if nature with a capital N was automatically compensating for their shortage. If Nature was that intelligent, it ought to have known better than to make him attractive to Eva, and vice versa. He was driven from this line of thought by another attribute of Nature. This time its call. Well, he wasn't peeing in a rose bush again. Once was enough.

  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 could 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 stuffs 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 drop-outs 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 Embalming 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.