Wilt on High:

  ‘I don’t see why you’re doing it then,’ said Eva, beginning to have an awful feeling herself.

  ‘Because, if I didn’t know better, I’d think some bloody sadist had larded my waterworks with pepper, that’s why.’

  ‘With pepper?’

  ‘Or ground glass and curry powder,’ said Wilt. ‘Add a soupçon of mustard gas and you’ll have the general picture. Or sensation. Something ghastly anyway. And now if you don’t mind …’

  But before he could get to work with the icing syringe again Eva had stopped him. ‘There must be an antidote,’ she said. ‘I’ll phone Dr Kores.’

  Wilt’s eyes bulged in his head. ‘You’ll do what?’ he demanded.

  ‘I said I’ll –’

  ‘I heard you,’ shouted Wilt. ‘You said you’d ring that bloody herbal homothrope Dr Kores and I want to know why.’

  Eva looked desperately round the kitchen but there was no comfort now to be found in the Magimix or the le Creuset saucepans hanging by the stove and certainly none in the herb chart on the wall. That beastly woman had poisoned Henry and it was all her own fault for having listened to Mavis. But Wilt was staring at her dangerously and she had to do something immediately. ‘I just think you ought to see a doctor,’ she said. ‘I mean, it could be serious.’

  ‘Could be?’ yelled Wilt, now thoroughly alarmed. ‘It fucking well is and you still haven’t told me –’

  ‘Well, if you must know,’ interrupted Eva, fighting back, ‘you shouldn’t have had so much beer.’

  ‘Beer? My God, you bitch, I knew there was something wrong with the muck,’ shouted Wilt and hurled himself at her across the kitchen.

  ‘I only meant –’ Eva began, and then dodged round the pine table to avoid the syringe. She was saved by the quads.

  ‘What’s Daddy doing with cream all over his genitals?’ asked Emmeline. Wilt stopped in his tracks and stared at the four faces in the doorway. As usual, the quads were employing tactics that always nonplussed him. To combine the whimsy of ‘Daddy’, particularly with the inflection Emmeline gave the word, with the anatomically exact was calculated to disconcert him. And why not ask him instead of referring to him so objectively? For a moment he hesitated and Eva seized her opportunity.

  ‘That’s nothing to do with you,’ she said and ostentatiously shielded them from the sight. ‘It’s just that your father isn’t very well and –’

  ‘That’s right,’ shouted Wilt, who could see what was coming, ‘slap all the blame on me.’

  ‘I’m not blaming you,’ said Eva over her shoulder. ‘It’s –’

  ‘That you lace my beer with some infernal irritant and bloody well poison me, and then you have the gall to tell them I’m not very well. I’ll say I’m not well. I’m –’

  A hammering sound from the Gamers’ wall diverted his attention. As Wilt hurled the syringe at the Laughing Cavalier his mother-in-law had given them when she’d sold her house and which Eva claimed reminded her of her happy childhood there, Eva hustled the quads upstairs. When she came down again, Wilt had resorted to ice-cubes.

  ‘I do think you ought to see a doctor,’ she said.

  ‘I should have seen one before I married you,’ said Wilt. ‘I suppose you realize I might be dead by now. What the hell did you put in my beer?’

  Eva looked miserable. ‘I only wanted to help our marriage,’ she said, ‘and Mavis Mottram said –’

  ‘I’ll strangle the bitch!’

  ‘She said Dr Kores had helped Patrick and –’

  ‘Helped Patrick?’ said Wilt, momentarily distracted from his ice-packed penis. ‘The last time I saw him he looked as if he could do with a bra. Said something about not having to shave so much either.’

  ‘That’s what I mean. Dr Kores gave Mavis something to cool his sexual ardour and I thought …’ She paused. Wilt was looking at her dangerously again.

  ‘Go on, though I’d question the use of “thought”.’

  ‘Well, that she might have something that would pep …’

  ‘Pep?’ said Wilt. ‘Why not say ginger and have done with it? And why the hell should I need pepping up anyway? I’m a working man … or was, with four damned daughters, not some demented sex pistol of seventeen.’

  ‘I just thought … I mean it occurred to me if she could do so much for Patrick …’ (here Wilt snorted) ‘… she might be able to help us to have a … well, a more fulfilling sex life.’

  ‘By poisoning me with Spanish Fly? Some fulfilment that is,’ said Wilt. ‘Well, let me tell you something now. For your information, I am not some fucking sex processor like that Magimix, and if you want the sort of sex life those idiotic women’s magazines you read seem to suggest is your due, like fifteen times a week, you’d better find another husband because I’m buggered if I’m up to it. And the way I feel now, you’ll be lucky if I’m ever up to it again.’

  ‘Oh Henry!’

  ‘Sod off,’ said Wilt, and hobbled through to the downstairs loo with his mixing bowl of ice cubes. At least they seemed to help and the pain was easing off now.

  *

  As the sound of discord inside the house died down, Inspector Hodge and the Sergeant made their way back down Oakhurst Avenue to their car. They hadn’t been able to hear what was being said, but the fact that there had been some sort of terrible row had heightened Hodge’s opinion that the Wilts were no ordinary criminals. ‘The pressure’s beginning to tell,’ he told Sergeant Runk. ‘If we don’t find him calling on his friends within a day or two, I’m not the man I think I am.’

  ‘If I don’t get some sleep, I won’t be either,’ said Runk, ‘and I’m not surprised that bloke next door wants to sell his house. Must be hell living next to people like that.’

  ‘Won’t have to much longer,’ said Hodge, but the mention of Mr Gamer had put a new idea in his mind. With a bit of collaboration from the Gamers, he’d be in a position to hear everything that went on in the Wilts’ house. On the other hand, with their car transformed into a mobile radio station, he was expecting an early arrest.

  11

  All the following day, while Wilt lay in bed with a hot-water bottle he’d converted into an ice-pack by putting it into the freezer compartment of the fridge and Inspector Hodge monitored Eva’s movements about Ipford, Flint followed his own line of investigation. He checked with Forensic and learnt that the high-grade heroin found in McCullum’s cell corresponded in every way to that discovered in Miss Lynchknowle’s flat and almost certainly came from the same source. He spent an hour with Mrs Jardin, the prison visitor, wondering at the remarkable capacity for self-deception that had already allowed her to put the blame on everyone else for McCullum’s death. Society was to blame for creating the villain, the education authorities for his wholly inadequate schooling, commerce and industry for failing to provide him with a responsible job, the judge for sentencing him …

  ‘He was a victim of circumstances,’ said Mrs Jardin.

  ‘You might say that about everybody,’ said Flint, looking at a corner cupboard containing pieces of silver that suggested Mrs Jardin’s circumstances allowed her the wherewithal to be the victim of her own sentimentality. ‘For instance, the three men who threatened to carve you up with –’

  ‘Don’t,’ said Mrs Jardin, shuddering at the memory.

  ‘Well, they were victims too, weren’t they? So’s a rabid dog, but that’s no great comfort when you’re bitten by one, and I put drug pushers in that category.’ Mrs Jardin had to agree. ‘So you wouldn’t recognize them again?’ asked Flint, ‘not if they were wearing stockings over their heads like you said.’

  ‘They were. And gloves.’

  ‘And they took you down the London Road and showed you where the drop was going to be made.’

  ‘Behind the telephone box opposite the turn-off to Brindlay. I was to stop and go into the phone box and pretend to make a call, and then, if no one was about, I had to come out and pick up the package and go straight home. They said they’d be watchi
ng me.’

  ‘And I don’t suppose it ever occurred to you to go straight to the police and report the matter?’ asked Flint.

  ‘Naturally it did. That was my first thought, but they said they had more than one officer on their payroll.’

  Flint sighed. It was an old tactic, and for all he knew the sods had been telling the truth. There were bent coppers, a lot more than when he’d joined the force, but then there hadn’t been the big gangs and the money to bribe, and if bribery failed, to pay for a contract killing. The good old days when someone was always hanged if a policeman was murdered, even if it was the wrong man. Now, thanks to the do-gooders like Mrs Jardin, and Christie lying in the witness box and getting that mentally subnormal Evans topped for murders Christie himself had committed, the deterrent was no longer there. The world Flint had known had gone by the board, so he couldn’t really blame her for giving in to threats. All the same, he was going to remain what he had always been, an honest and hardworking policeman.

  ‘Even so we could have given you protection,’ he said, ‘and they wouldn’t have been bothered with you once you’d stopped visiting McCullum.’

  ‘I know that now,’ said Mrs Jardin, ‘but at the time I was too frightened to think clearly.’

  Or at all, thought Flint, but he didn’t say it. Instead, he concentrated on the method of delivery. No one dropped a consignment of heroin behind a telephone kiosk without ensuring it was going to be picked up. Then again, they didn’t hang around after the drop. So there had to be some way of communicating. ‘What would have happened if you’d been ill?’ he asked. ‘Just supposing you couldn’t have collected the package, what then?’

  Mrs Jardin looked at him with a mixture of contempt and bewilderment she evidently felt when faced with someone who concentrated so insistently on practical matters and neglected moral issues. Besides, he was a policeman and ill-educated. Policemen didn’t find absolution as victims. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  But Flint was getting angry. ‘Come off the high horse,’ he said, ‘you can squeal you were forced into being a runner, but we can still charge you with pushing drugs and into a prison at that. Who did you have to phone?’

  Mrs Jardin crumbled. ‘I don’t know his name. I had to call a number and …’

  ‘What number?’

  ‘Just a number. I can’t –’

  ‘Get it,’ said Flint. Mrs Jardin went out of the room and Flint sat looking at the titles in the bookshelves. They meant very little to him and told him only that she’d read or at least bought a great many books on sociology, economics, the Third World and penal reform. It didn’t impress Flint. If the woman had really wanted to do something about the conditions of prisoners, she’d have got a job as a wardress and lived on low wages, instead of dabbling in prison visits and talking about the poor calibre of the staff who had to do society’s dirty work. Stick up her taxes to build better prisons and she’d soon start squealing. Talk about hypocrisy.

  Mrs Jardin came back with a piece of paper. ‘That’s the number,’ she said, handing it to him. Flint looked at it. A London phone box.

  ‘When did you have to call?’

  ‘They said between 9.30 and 9.40 at night the day before I had to collect the packet.’

  Flint changed direction. ‘How many times did you collect?’

  ‘Only three.’

  He got to his feet. It was no use. They’d know Mac was dead, even if it hadn’t been announced in the papers, so there was no point in supposing they’d make another drop, but at least they were operating out of London. Hodge was on the wrong track. On the other hand, Flint himself couldn’t be said to be on the right one. The trail stopped at Mrs Jardin and a public telephone in London. If McCullum had still been alive …

  Flint left the house and drove over to the prison. ‘I’d like to take a look at Mac’s list of visitors,’ he told Chief Warder Blaggs, and spent half an hour writing names in his notebook, together with addresses.

  ‘Someone in that little lot had to be running messages,’ he said when he finished. ‘Not that I expect to get anywhere, but it’s worth trying.’

  Afterwards, back at the Station, he had checked them on the Central Records Computer and cross-referenced for drug dealing, but the one link he was looking for, some petty criminal living in Ipford or nearby, was missing. And he wasn’t going to waste his time trying to tackle London. In fact, if he were truthful, he had to admit he was wasting his time even in Ipford except … except that something told him he wasn’t. It nagged at his mind. Sitting in his office, he followed that instinct. The girl had been seen by her flat-mate down by the marina. Several times. But the marina was just another place like the telephone kiosk on the London Road. It had to be something more definite, something he could check out.

  Flint picked up the phone and called the Drug Addiction Study Unit at the Ipford Hospital.

  *

  By lunchtime, Wilt was up and about. To be exact, he’d been up and about several times during the morning, in part to get another hot-water bottle from the freezer, but more often in a determined effort not to masturbate himself to death. It was all very well Eva supposing she’d benefit from the effects of whatever diabolical irritant she’d added to his homebrew, but to Wilt’s way of thinking, a wife who’d damned near poisoned her husband didn’t deserve what few sexual benefits he had to offer. Give her an inkling of satisfaction from this experiment and next time he’d land up in hospital with internal bleeding and a permanent erection. As it was, he had a hard time with his penis.

  ‘I’ll freeze the damn thing down,’ had been Wilt’s first thought and for a while it had worked, though painfully. But after a time he had drifted off to sleep and had woken an hour later with the awful impression that he’d taken it into his head to have an affair with a freshly caught Dover Sole. Wilt hurled himself off the thing and had then taken the bottle downstairs to put it back in the fridge before realizing that this wouldn’t be particularly hygienic. He was in the process of washing it when the front doorbell rang. Wilt dropped the bottle on the draining-board, retrieved it from the sink when it slithered off and finally tried wedging it between the upturned teapot and a casserole dish in the drying rack, before going to answer the call.

  It was not the postman as he expected, but Mavis Mottram. ‘What are you doing at home?’ she asked.

  Wilt sheltered behind the door and pulled his dressing-gown tightly round him. ‘Well, as a matter of fact …’ he began.

  Mavis pushed past him and went through to the kitchen. ‘I just came round to see if Eva could organize the food side of things.’

  ‘What things?’ asked Wilt, looking at her with loathing. It was thanks to this woman that Eva had consulted Dr Kores. Mavis ignored the question. In her dual rôle as militant feminist and secretary of Mothers Against The Bomb, she evidently considered Wilt to be part of the male subspecies. ‘Is she going to be back soon?’ she went on.

  Wilt smiled unpleasantly and shut the kitchen door behind him. If Mavis Mottram was going to treat him like a moron, he felt inclined to behave like one. ‘How do you know she’s not here?’ he asked, testing the blade of a rather blunt breadknife against his thumb.

  ‘The car’s not outside and I thought … well, you usually take it …’ She stopped.

  Wilt put the breadknife on the magnetic holder next to the Sabatier ones. It looked out of place. ‘Phallic,’ he said. ‘Interesting.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Lawrentian,’ said Wilt, and retrieved the icing syringe from a plastic bucket where Eva had been soaking it in Dettol in an attempt to persuade herself she would be able to use the thing again.

  ‘Lawrentian?’ said Mavis, beginning to sound genuinely alarmed.

  Wilt put the syringe on the counter and wiped his hands. Eva’s washing-up gloves caught his eye. ‘I agree,’ he said and began putting the gloves on.

  ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ asked Mavis, suddenly remembering Wilt and the inflat
ed doll. She moved round the kitchen table towards the door and then thought better of it. Wilt in a dressing-gown and no pyjama trousers, and now wearing a pair of rubber gloves and holding a cake-icing syringe, was an extremely disturbing sight. ‘Anyway, if you’ll ask her to call me, I’ll explain about the food side of …’ Her voice trailed off.

  Wilt was smiling again. He was also squirting a yellowish liquid into the air from the syringe. Images of some demented doctor in an early horror movie flickered in her mind. ‘You were saying something about her not being here,’ said Wilt and stepped back in front of the door. ‘Do go on.’

  ‘Go on about what?’ said Mavis with a distinct quaver.

  ‘About her not being here. I find your interest curious, don’t you?’

  ‘Curious?’ mumbled Mavis, desperately trying to find some thread of sanity in his inconsequential remarks. ‘What’s curious about it? She’s obviously out shopping and –’

  ‘Obviously?’ asked Wilt, and gazed vacantly past her out of the window and down the garden. ‘I wouldn’t have said anything was obvious.’

  Mavis involuntarily followed his gaze and found the back garden almost as sinister as Wilt with washing-up gloves and that bloody syringe. With a fresh effort, she forced herself to turn back and speak normally. ‘I’ll be off now,’ she said and moved forward.

  Wilt’s fixed smile crumbled. ‘Oh, not so soon,’ he said. ‘Why not put the kettle on and have some coffee? After all, that’s what you’d do if Eva was here. You’d sit down and have a nice talk. And you and Eva had so much in common.’

  ‘Had?’ said Mavis and wished to God she’d kept her mouth shut. Wilt’s awful smile was back again. ‘Well, if you’d like a cup yourself, I suppose I’ve got time.’ She crossed to the electric kettle and took it to the sink. The hot-water bottle was lying on the bottom. Mavis lifted it out and experienced another ghastly frisson. The hot-water bottle wasn’t simply not hot, it was icy cold. And behind her Wilt had begun to grunt alarmingly. For a moment Mavis hesitated before swinging round. This time there was no mistaking the threat she was facing. It was staring at her from between the folds of Wilt’s dressing-gown. With a squeal, she hurled herself at the back door, dragged it open, shot out and with a clatter of dustbin lids, was through the gate and heading for the car.