by Tom Sharpe
‘Like hell I should. I’ve had a bloody awful day at the Tech and I’ve got to go out to the prison to teach that ghastly creature McCullum, and I no sooner step into the bosom of my menagerie than I –’
The front doorbell rang loudly downstairs. ‘That’s bound to be Mr Leach nextdoor come to complain again,’ said Eva.
‘Sod Mr Leach,’ said Wilt and stepped back under the shower.
This time he learnt what it felt like to be scalded.
5
Things were hotting up for other people in Ipford as well. The Principal for one. He had just arrived home and was opening the drinks cabinet in the hope of dulling his memory of a disastrous day, when the phone rang. It was the Vice-Principal. ‘I’m afraid I’ve got some rather disturbing news,’ he said with a lugubrious satisfaction the Principal recognized. He connected it with funerals. ‘It’s about that girl we were looking for …’ The Principal reached for the gin bottle and missed the rest of the sentence. He got back in time to hear something about the boiler-room. ‘Say that again,’ he said, holding the bottle between his knees and trying to open it with one hand.
‘I said the caretaker found her in the boiler-room.’
‘In the boiler-room? What on earth was she doing there?’
‘Dying,’ said the Vice-Principal, affecting an even more sombre tone.
‘Dying?’ The Principal had the bottle open now and poured himself a large gin. This was even more awful than he expected.
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Where is she now?’ asked the Principal, trying to stave off the worst.
‘Still in the boiler-room.’
‘Still in the … But good God man, if she’s in that condition, why the devil haven’t you got her to hospital?’
‘She isn’t in that condition,’ said the Vice-Principal and paused. He too had had a hard day. ‘What I said was that she was dying. The fact of the matter is that she’s dead.’
‘Oh, my God,’ said the Principal and swigged neat gin. It was better than nothing. ‘You mean she died of an overdose?’
‘Presumably. I suppose the police will find out.’
The Principal finished the rest of the gin. ‘When did this happen?’
‘About an hour ago.’
‘An hour ago? I was still in my office an hour ago. Why the hell wasn’t I told?’
‘The caretaker thought she was drunk first of all and fetched Mrs Ruckner. She was taking an ethnic needlework class with Home Economics in the Morris block and –’
‘Never mind about that now,’ snapped the Principal. ‘A girl’s dead on the premises and you have to go on about Mrs Ruckner and ethnic needlework.’
‘I’m not going on about Mrs Ruckner,’ said the Vice-Principal, driven to some defiance, ‘I’m merely trying to explain.’
‘Oh, all right, I’ve heard you. So what have you done with her?’
‘Who? Mrs Ruckner?’
‘No, the damned girl, for God’s sake. There’s no need to be flippant.’
‘If you’re going to adopt that tone of voice, you’d better come here and see for yourself,’ said the Vice-Principal and put the phone down.
‘You bloody shit,’ said the Principal, unintentionally addressing his wife who had just entered the room.
*
At Ipford Police Station the atmosphere was fairly acrimonious too. ‘Don’t give me that,’ said Flint who had returned from a fruitless visit to the Mental Hospital to interview a patient who had confessed (quite falsely) to being the Phantom Flasher. ‘Give it to Hodge. He’s drugs and I’ve had my fill of the bloody Tech.’
‘Inspector Hodge is out,’ said the Sergeant, ‘and they specially asked for you. Personally.’
‘Pull the other one,’ said Flint. ‘Someone’s hoaxing you. The last person they want to see is me. And it’s mutual.’
‘No hoax, sir. It was the Vice-Principal himself. Name of Avon. My lad goes there so I know.’
Flint stared at him incredulously. ‘Your son goes to that hell-hole? And you let him? You must be out of your mind. I wouldn’t let a son of mine within a mile of the place.’
‘Possibly not,’ said the Sergeant, tactfully avoiding the observation that since Flint’s son was doing a five-year stretch, he wasn’t likely to be going any place. ‘All the same, he’s an apprentice plumber. Got day-release classes and he can’t opt out of them. There’s a law about it.’
‘You want my opinion, there ought to be a law stopping youngsters having anything to do with the sods who teach there. When I think of Wilt …’ He shook his head in despair.
‘Mr Avon said something about your discreet approach being needed,’ the Sergeant went on, ‘and anyway, they don’t know how she died. I mean, it doesn’t have to be an overdose.’
Flint perked up. ‘Discreet approach my arse,’ he muttered. ‘Still, a genuine murder there makes a change.’ He lumbered to his feet and went down to the car pool and drove down to Nott Road and the Tech. A patrol car was parked outside the gates. Flint swept past it and parked deliberately in the space reserved for the Bursar. Then with the diminished confidence he always felt when returning to the Tech, he entered the building. The Vice-Principal was waiting for him by the Enquiries Desk. ‘Ah, Inspector, I’m so glad you could come.’
Flint regarded him suspiciously. His previous visits hadn’t been welcomed. ‘All right, where’s the body?’ he said abruptly and was pleased to see the Vice-Principal wince.
‘Er … in the boiler-room,’ he said. ‘But first there’s the question of discretion. If we can avoid a great deal of publicity it would really be most helpful.’
Inspector Flint cheered up. When the sods started squealing about publicity and the need for discretion, things had got to be bad. On the other hand, he’d had enough lousy publicity from the Tech himself. ‘If it’s anything to do with Wilt …’ he began, but the Vice-Principal shook his head.
‘Nothing like that, I assure you,’ he said. ‘At least, not directly.’
‘What’s that mean, not directly?’ said Flint warily. With Wilt, nothing was ever direct.
‘Well, he was the first to be told that Miss Lynchknowle had taken an overdose but he went to the wrong loo.’
‘Went to the wrong loo?’ said Flint and bared his teeth in a mock smile. A second later the smile had gone. He’d smelt trouble. ‘Miss who?’
‘Lynchknowle. That’s what I meant about … well, the need for discretion. I mean …’
‘You don’t have to tell me. I know, don’t I just,’ said Flint rather more coarsely than the Vice-Principal liked. ‘The Lord Lieutenant’s daughter gets knocked off here and you don’t want him to …’ He stopped and looked hard at the V-P. ‘How come she was here in the first place? Don’t tell me she was shacked up with one of your so-called students.’
‘She was one of our students,’ said the Vice-Principal, trying to maintain some dignity in the face of Flint’s patent scepticism. ‘She was Senior Secs Three and …’
‘Senior Sex Three? What sort of course is that, for hell’s sake? Meat One was sick enough considering they were a load of butcher’s boys, but if your telling me you’ve been running a class for prostitutes and one of them’s Lord Lynchknowle’s ruddy daughter …’
‘Senior Secretaries,’ spluttered the Vice-Principal, ‘a very respectable course. We’ve always had excellent results.’
‘Like deaths,’ said Flint. ‘All right, let’s have a look at your latest victim.’
With the certainty now that he’d done the wrong thing in asking for Flint, the Vice-Principal led the way across the quad.
But the Inspector hadn’t finished. ‘I hear you’ve been putting it out as a self-administered OD. Right?’
‘OD?’
‘Overdose.’
‘Of course. You’re not seriously suggesting it could have been anything else?’
Inspector Flint fingered his moustache. ‘I’m not in a position to suggest anything. Yet. I’m asking w
hy you say she died of drugs.’
‘Well, Mrs Bristol saw a girl injecting herself in the staff toilet and went to fetch Wilt …’
‘Why Wilt of all people? Last person I’d fetch.’
‘Mrs Bristol is Wilt’s secretary,’ said the V-P and went on to explain the confused course of events. Flint listened grimly. The only part he enjoyed was hearing how Wilt had been dealt with by Miss Hare. She sounded like a woman after his own heart. The rest fitted in with his preconceptions of the Tech.
‘One thing’s certain,’ he said when the Vice-Principal had finished, ‘I’m not drawing any conclusions until I’ve made a thorough examination. And I do mean thorough. The way you’ve told it doesn’t make sense. One unidentified girl takes a fix in a toilet and the next thing you know Miss Lynchknowle is found dead in the boiler-room. How come you assume it’s the same girl?’
The Vice-Principal said it just seemed logical. ‘Not to me it doesn’t,’ said Flint. ‘And what was she doing in the boiler-room?’
The Vice-Principal looked miserably down the steps at the door and resisted the temptation to say she’d been dying. That might work with the Principal but Inspector Flint’s manner didn’t suggest he’d respond kindly to statements of the obvious. ‘I’ve no idea. Perhaps she just felt like going somewhere dark and warm.’
‘And perhaps she didn’t,’ said Flint. ‘Anyway, I’ll soon find out.’
‘I just hope you will be discreet,’ said the V-P, ‘I mean it’s a very sensitive …’
‘Bugger discretion,’ said Flint, ‘all I’m interested in is the truth.’
*
Twenty minutes later, when the Principal arrived, it was all too obvious that the Inspector’s search for the truth had assumed quite alarming dimensions. The fact was that Mrs Ruckner, more accustomed to the niceties of ethnic needlework than resuscitation, had allowed the body to slip behind the boiler: that the boiler hadn’t been turned off added a macabre element to the scene. Flint had refused to allow it to be moved until it had been photographed from every possible angle, and he had summoned fingerprint and forensic experts from the Murder Squad along with the police surgeon. The Tech car park was lined with squad cars and an ambulance and the buildings themselves seemed to be infested with policemen. And all this in full view of students arriving for evening classes. To the Principal, it appeared as if the Inspector was intent on attracting the maximum adverse publicity.
‘Is the man mad?’ he demanded of the Vice-Principal, stepping over a white tape that had been laid on the ground outside the steps to the boiler-room.
‘He says he’s treating it as a murder case until he’s proved it isn’t,’ said the Vice-Principal weakly, ‘and I wouldn’t go down there if I were you.’
‘Why the hell not?’
‘Well, for one thing there’s a dead body and …’
‘Of course there’s a dead body,’ said the Principal, who had been in the War and frequently mentioned the fact. ‘Nothing to be squeamish about.’
‘If you say so. All the same …’
But the Principal had already gone down the steps into the boiler-room. He was escorted out a moment later looking decidedly unwell. ‘Jesus wept! You could have told me they were holding an autopsy on the spot,’ he muttered. ‘How the hell did she get in that state?’
‘I rather think Mrs Ruckner …’
‘Mrs Ruckner? Mrs Ruckner?’ gurgled the Principal, trying to equate what he had just seen in some way with the tenuous figure of the part-time lecturer in ethnic needlework and finding it impossible. ‘What the hell has Mrs Ruckner got to do with that … that …’
But before he could express himself at all clearly, they were joined by Inspector Flint. ‘Well, at least we’ve got a real dead corpse this time,’ he said, timing his cheerfulness nicely. ‘Makes a change for the Tech, doesn’t it?’
The Principal eyed him with loathing. Whatever Flint might feel about the desirability of real dead corpses littering the Tech he didn’t share Flint’s opinions. ‘Now look here, Inspector …’ he began in an attempt to assert some authority.
But Flint had opened a cardboard box. ‘I think you had better look in here first,’ he said. ‘Is this the sort of printed matter you encourage your students to read?’
The Principal stared down into the box with a horrid fascination. If the cover of the top magazine was anything to go by – it depicted two women, a rack and a revoltingly androgynous man clad in chains and a … the Principal preferred not to think what it looked like – the entire box was filled with printed matter he wouldn’t have wanted his students to know about, let alone read.
‘Certainly not,’ he said, ‘that’s downright pornography.’
‘Hard core,’ said Flint, ‘and there’s more where this little lot came from. Puts a new complexion on things, doesn’t it?’
‘Dear God,’ muttered the Principal, as Flint trotted off across the quad, ‘are we to be spared nothing? That bloody man seems to find the whole horrible business positively enjoyable.’
‘It’s probably because of that terrible incident with Wilt some years back,’ said the V-P. ‘I don’t think he’s ever forgotten it.’
‘Nor have I,’ said the Principal, looking gloomily round at the buildings in which he had once hoped to make a name for himself. And in a sense it seemed he had. Thanks to so many things that were connected, in his mind, with Wilt. It was the one topic on which he would have agreed with the Inspector. The little bastard ought to be locked up.
*
And in a sense Wilt was. To prevent Eva from learning that he spent Friday evenings at Baconheath Airbase he devoted himself on Mondays to tutoring a Mr McCullum at Ipford Prison and then led her to suppose he had another tutorial with him four evenings later. He felt rather guilty about this subterfuge but excused himself with the thought that if Eva wanted to buy an expensive education plus computers for four daughters, she couldn’t seriously expect his salary, however augmented by HM Prison Service, to pay for it. The airbase lectures did that and anyway Mr McCullum’s company constituted a form of penance. It also had the effect of assuaging Wilt’s sense of guilt. Not that his pupil didn’t do his damnedest to instil one. A sociology lecturer from the Open University had given him a solid grounding in that subject and Wilt’s attempts to further Mr McCullum’s interest in E. M. Forster and Howards End were constantly interrupted by the convict’s comments on the socio-economically disadvantaged environment which had led him to end up where and what he was. He was also fairly fluent on the class war, the need for a preferably bloody revolution and the total redistribution of wealth. Since he had spent his entire life pursuing riches by highly illegal and unpleasant means, ones which involved the deaths of four people and the use of a blowtorch as a persuader on several gentlemen in his debt, thus earning himself the soubriquet ‘Fireworks Harry’ and 25 years from a socially prejudiced judge, Wilt found the argument somewhat suspect.
He didn’t much like Mr McCullum’s changes of mood either. They varied from whining self-pity, and the claim that he was deliberately being turned into a cabbage, through bouts of religious fervour during which the name Longford came up rather too often, and finally to a bloody-minded belligerence when he threatened to roast the fucking narks who’d shopped him. On the whole, Wilt preferred McCullum the cabbage and was glad that the tutorials were conducted through a grille of substantial wire mesh and in the presence of an even more substantial warder. After Miss Hare and the verbal battering he’d had from Eva, he could do with some protection and this evening Mr McCullum’s mood had nothing to do with vegetables. ‘Listen,’ he told Wilt thickly, ‘you don’t have a clue, do you? Think you know everything but you haven’t done time. Same with this E. M. Forster. He was a middle-class scrubber too.’
‘Possibly,’ said Wilt, recognizing that this was not one of the nights on which to press Mr McCullum too frankly on the need to stick to the subject. ‘He was certainly middle-class. On the other hand, this may have end
owed him with the sensitivity needed to –’
‘Fuck sensitivity. Lived with a pig, that’s how sensitive he was, dirty sod.’
Wilt considered this estimation of the private life of the great author dubious. So, evidently, did the warder. ‘Pig?’ said Wilt, ‘I don’t think he did you know. Are you sure?’
‘Course I’m sure. Fucking pig by the name of Buckingham.’
‘Oh, him,’ said Wilt, cursing himself for having encouraged the beastly man to read Forster’s biography as background material to the novels. He should have realized that any mention of policemen was calculated to put ‘Fireworks Harry’ in a foul mood. ‘Anyway, if we look at his work as a writer, as an observer of the social scene and …’
McCullum wasn’t having any of that. ‘The social scene my eye and Betty Martin. Spent more time looking up his own arsehole.’
‘Well, metaphorically I suppose you could …’
‘Literally,’ snarled McCullum, and turned the pages of the book. ‘How about this? January second “… have the illusion I am charming and beautiful … blah, blah … but would powder my nose if I wasn’t found out … blah, blah … The anus is clotted with hairs …” And that’s in your blooming Forster’s diary. A self-confessed narcissistic fairy.’
‘Must have used a mirror, I suppose,’ said Wilt, temporarily thrown by this revelation. ‘All the same his novels reflect …’
‘I know what you’re going to say,’ interrupted McCullum. ‘They have social relevance for their time. Balls. He could have got nicked for what he did, slumming it with one of the State’s sodding hatchet men. His books have got about as much social relevance as Barbara bloody Cartland’s. And we all know what they are, don’t we? Literary asparagus.’
‘Literary asparagus?’
‘Chambermaid’s delight,’ said Mr McCullum with peculiar relish.
‘It’s an interesting theory,’ said Wilt, who had no idea what the beastly man was talking about, ‘though personally I’d have thought Barbara Cartland’s work was pure escapism whereas …’