by Tom Sharpe
‘Tell you what?’ asked Wilt.
‘Who sent you?’ said Glaushof.
Wilt considered the question. As far as he could tell it didn’t have much bearing on what was happening to him except that it had nothing whatsoever to do with reality. ‘Sent me?’ he said. ‘Is that what you said?’
‘That’s what I said.’
‘I thought it was,’ said Wilt and relapsed into a meditative silence.
‘So?’ said Glaushof.
‘So what?’ asked Wilt, in an attempt to restore his morale slightly by combining insult with enquiry.
‘So who sent you?’
Wilt sought inspiration in a portrait of President Eisenhower behind Glaushof’s head and found a void. ‘Sent me?’ he said, and regretted it. Glaushof’s expression contrasted unpleasantly with that of the late President. ‘Nobody sent me.’
‘Listen,’ said Glaushof, ‘this far you’ve had it easy. Doesn’t mean it’s going to stay that way. It could get very nasty. Now, are you going to talk or not?’
‘I’m perfectly prepared to talk,’ said Wilt, ‘though I must say your definition of easy isn’t mine. I mean being gassed and –’
‘You want to hear my definition of nasty?’ asked Glaushof.
‘No,’ said Wilt hastily, ‘Certainly not.’
‘So talk.’
Wilt swallowed. ‘Any particular subject you’re interested in?’ he enquired.
‘Like who your contacts are,’ said Glaushof.
‘Contacts?’ said Wilt.
‘Who you’re working for. And I don’t want to hear any crap about teaching at the Fenland College Of Arts and Technology. I want to know who set this operation up.’
‘Yes,’ said Wilt, once more entering a mental maze and losing himself. ‘Now when you say “this operation” I wonder if you’d mind …’ He stopped. Glaushof was staring at him even more awfully than before. ‘I mean I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘You don’t, huh?’
‘I’m afraid not. I mean if I did –’
Glaushof shook a finger under Wilt’s nose. ‘A guy could die in here and nobody would know,’ he said. ‘If you want to go that way you’ve only to say so.’
‘I don’t,’ said Wilt, trying to focus on the finger as a means of avoiding the prospect of his going any way. ‘If you’d just ask me some questions I could answer …’
Glaushof backed off. ‘Let’s start with where you got the transmitters,’ he said.
‘Transmitters?’ said Wilt. ‘Did you say transmitters? What transmitters?’
‘The ones in your car.’
‘The ones in my car?’ said Wilt. ‘Are you sure?’
Glaushof gripped the edge of the desk behind him and thought wistfully about killing people. ‘You think you can come in here, into United States territory and –’
‘England,’ said Wilt stolidly. ‘To be precise the United Kingdom of England, Scotland –’
‘Jesus,’ said Glaushof, ‘You little commie bastard, you have the nerve to talk about the Royal Family …’
‘My own country,’ said Wilt, finding strength in the assuredness that he was British. It was something he had never really thought much about before. ‘And for your information, I am not a communist. Possibly a bastard, though I like to think otherwise. You’d have to ask my mother about that and she’s been dead ten years. But definitely not a communist.’
‘So what’s with the radio transmitters in your car?’
‘You said that before and I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. Are you sure you’re not mistaking me for someone else?’
‘You’re named Wilt, aren’t you?’ shouted Glaushof.
‘Yes.’
‘And you drive a beat-up Ford, registration plates HPR 791 N, right?’
Wilt nodded. ‘I suppose you could put it like that,’ he said. ‘Though frankly my wife –’
‘You saying your wife put those transmitters in your car?’
‘Good Lord no. She hasn’t a clue about things like that. Anyway, what on earth would she want to do that for?’
‘That’s what you’re here to tell me, boy,’ said Glaushof. ‘You ain’t leaving till you do, you better believe it.’
Wilt looked at him and shook his head. ‘I must say I find that difficult,’ he muttered. ‘I come here to give a lecture on British Culture, such as it is, and the next thing I know I’m in the middle of some sort of raid and there’s gas all over the place and I wake up in a bed with doctors sticking needles into me and …’
He stopped. Glaushof had taken a revolver out of the desk drawer and was loading it. Wilt watched him apprehensively. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but I’d be grateful if you’d put that … er … thing away. I don’t know what you’ve got in mind but I can assure you I am not the person you should be talking to.’
‘No? So who should that be, your controller?’
‘Controller?’ said Wilt.
‘Controller,’ said Glaushof.
‘That’s what I thought you said, though to be perfectly honest I still don’t see that it helps very much. I don’t even know what a controller is.’
‘Then you better start inventing one. Like the guy in Moscow who tells you what to do.’
‘Look,’ said Wilt, desperately trying to get back to some sort of reality which didn’t include controllers in Moscow who told him what to do, ‘there’s obviously been some terrible mistake.’
‘Yea, and you made it coming in here with that equipment. I’m going to give you one last chance,’ said Glaushof, looking along the barrel of the gun with a significance Wilt found deeply alarming. ‘Either you spell it out like it is or …’
‘Quite,’ said Wilt. ‘Point taken, to use a ghastly expression. What do you want me to tell you?’
‘The whole deal. How you were recruited, who you contact and where, what information you’ve given …’
Wilt stared miserably out the window as the list rolled on. He had never supposed the world to be a particularly sensible place and airbases were particularly nonsensical, but to be taken for a Soviet spy by a lunatic American who played with revolvers was to enter a new realm of insanity. Perhaps that’s what had happened. He’d gone clean out of his tiny. No, he hadn’t. The gun was proof of some kind of reality, one that was taken for granted by millions of people all over the world but which had somehow never come anywhere near Oakhurst Avenue or the Tech or Ipford. In a sense his own little world with its fundamental beliefs in education and books and, for want of a better word, sensibility, was the unreal one, a dream which no one could ever hope to live in for long. Or at all, if this madman with his cliché talk of guys dying in here and nobody knowing had his way. Wilt turned back and made one last attempt to regain the world he knew.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘if you want the facts I’ll give them to you but only with men from MI5 present. As a British subject I demand that right.’
Glaushof snorted. ‘Your rights ended the moment you passed that guardhouse,’ he said. ‘You’re telling me what you know. I’m not playing footsy with a lot of suspect faggots from British Intelligence. No way. Now talk.’
‘If it’s all the same to you I think it would be better written down,’ said Wilt, playing for time and trying frantically to think what he could possibly confess. ‘I mean, all I need is a pen and some sheets of paper.’
For a moment Glaushof hesitated before deciding that there was something to be said for a confession written out in Wilt’s own hand. That way no one could say he’d beaten it out of the little bastard. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You can use that table.’
Three hours later Wilt had finished and six pages were covered with his neat and practically illegible handwriting. Glaushof took them and tried to read. ‘What you trying to do? Didn’t anybody ever teach you to write properly?’
Wilt shook his head wearily. ‘If you can’t read, take it to someone who can. I’ve had it,’ he said and put his head on his arms on t
he table. Glaushof looked at his white face and had to agree. He wasn’t feeling too good himself. But at least Colonel Urwin and the idiots in Intelligence were going to feel worse. With a fresh surge of energy he went into the office next door, made photocopies of the pages and was presently marching past the guards outside Communications. ‘I want transcripts made of these,’ he told the head of the typists’ pool. ‘And absolute security.’ Then he sat down and waited.
18
‘A warrant? A search warrant for 45 Oakhurst Avenue? You want to apply for a search warrant?’ said the Superintendent.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Inspector Hodge, wondering why it was that what seemed like a perfectly reasonable request to him should need querying quite so repetitively. ‘All the evidence indicates the Wilts to be carriers.’
‘I’m not sure the magistrate is going to agree,’ said the Superintendent. ‘Circumstantial evidence is all it amounts to.’
‘Nothing circumstantial about Wilt going out to that airbase and giving us the run-around, and I wouldn’t say her going to that herb farm was circumstantial either. It’s all there in my report.’
‘Yes,’ said the Superintendent, managing to imbue the word with doubt. ‘What’s not there is one shred of hard evidence.’
‘That’s why we need the search, sir,’ said Hodge. ‘There’ve got to be traces of the stuff in the house. Stands to reason.’
‘If he’s what you say he is,’ said the Superintendent.
‘Look,’ said Hodge, ‘he knew he was being tailed when he went out to Baconheath. He had to know. Drives around in circles for half an hour when he comes out and gives us the slip –’
‘And that’s another thing,’ interrupted the Superintendent, ‘your bugging the blighter’s car without authorization. I consider that highly reprehensible. I want that understood clearly right now. Anyway, he may have been drunk.’
‘Drunk?’ said Hodge, finding it difficult to make the transition between unauthorized bugging being reprehensible, which in his opinion it wasn’t, and Wilt being drunk.
‘When he came out of Baconheath. Didn’t know whether he was coming or going and went round in circles. Those Yanks drink rye. Sickly muck but it goes down so easily you don’t notice.’
Inspector Hodge considered the suggestion and rejected it. ‘I don’t see how a drunk could drive that fast, not on those roads without killing himself. And choosing a route that’d take him out of radio contact.’
The Superintendent studied the report again. It didn’t make comfortable reading. On the other hand there was something in what Hodge had said. ‘If he wasn’t pissed why leave the car outside someone else’s house?’ he asked but Hodge had already concocted an answer to that one.
‘Shows how clever the little bastard is,’ he said. ‘Not giving anything away, that bloke. He knows we’re onto him and he needs an explanation for all that run-around he’s given us so he plays pissed.’
‘If he’s that bloody clever you’re not going to find anything in his house and that’s for sure,’ said the Superintendent and shook his head. ‘No, he’d never have the stuff on his own doorstep. He’d have it stored somewhere miles away.’
‘He’s still got to move it,’ said Hodge, ‘and that means the car. Look, sir, Wilt’s the one who goes to the airbase, he collects the stuff there and on the way home he hands it over to a third party who distributes it. That explains why he took such pains to lose us. There was a whole twenty minutes when we weren’t picking up any signals. That could have been when he was offloading.’
‘Could have been,’ said the Superintendent, impressed in spite of himself. ‘Still, that only goes to prove my point. You go for a search warrant for his house you’re going to end up with egg all over your face. More important, so am I. So that’s out. You’ll have to think of some other way.’
Hodge returned to his office and took it out on Sergeant Runk. ‘The way they carry on it’s a bloody wonder we ever nick any bugger. And you had to go and sign for those fucking transmitters …’
‘You don’t think they give them out without being signed for,’ said Runk.
‘You didn’t have to land me in the shit by putting “Authorized by Superintendent Wilkinson for covert surveillance.” He loved that.’
‘Well, wasn’t it? I mean I thought you’d got permission …’
‘Oh no, you didn’t. We pulled that stroke in the middle of the night and he’d been home since five. And now we’ve got to retrieve the bloody things. That’s something you can do tonight.’
And having, as he hoped, ensured that the Sergeant would spend the day regretting his indiscretion, the Inspector got up and stared out of the window for inspiration. If he couldn’t get a search warrant … He was still pondering the question when his attention was distracted by a car parked down below. It looked hideously familiar.
The Wilts’ Escort. What the hell was it doing outside the police station?
*
Eva sat in Flint’s office and held back the tears. ‘I didn’t know who else to come to,’ she said. ‘I’ve been to the Tech and phoned the prison and Mrs Braintree hasn’t seen him and he usually goes there if he’s … well, if he wants a change. But he hasn’t been there or the hospital or anywhere else I can think of and I know you don’t like him or anything but you are a policeman and you have been … helpful in the past. And you do know Henry.’ She stopped and looked appealingly at the Inspector.
It wasn’t a look that held much appeal for Flint and he certainly didn’t like the notion that he knew Wilt. He’d tried to understand the blighter, but even at his most optimistic he’d never supposed for one moment that he’d got anywhere near fathoming the horrible depths of Wilt’s extraordinary character. The sod came into the category of an enigma made all the more impossible to understand by his choice of Eva as a wife. It was a relationship Flint had always preferred not to think about, but here she was sitting foursquare on a chair in his office telling him, evidently without the slightest regard for his feelings, even as though it were some sort of compliment, that he knew her Henry. ‘Has he ever gone off like this before?’ he asked, with the private thought that in Wilt’s shoes he’d have been off like a flash – before the wedding.
‘No, never,’ said Eva, ‘that’s what’s so worrying. I know you think he’s … peculiar, but he’s really been a good husband.’
‘I’m sure he has,’ said Flint for want of anything more reassuring to say. ‘You don’t think he’s suffering from amnesia?’
‘Amnesia?’
‘Loss of memory,’ said Flint. ‘It hits people who’ve been under strain. Has anything been happening lately that might have caused him to flip … to have a nervous breakdown?’
‘I can’t think of anything in particular,’ said Eva, determined to keep any mention of Dr Kores and that dreadful tonic out of the conversation. ‘Of course the children get on his nerves sometimes and there was that horrible business at the Tech the other day with that girl dying. Henry was ever so upset. And he’s been teaching at the prison …’ She stopped again as she remembered what had been really worrying her. ‘He’s been teaching a dreadful man called McCullum on Monday evenings and Fridays. That’s what he told me anyway, only when I phoned the prison they said he never had.’
‘Had what?’ asked Flint.
‘Never been there on Fridays,’ said Eva, tears welling up in her eyes at this proof that Henry, her Henry, had lied to her.
‘But he went out every Friday and that’s where he told you he was going?’
Eva nodded dumbly and for a moment Flint almost felt sorry for her. A fat middle-aged woman with four bloody tearaway kids who turned the house into a blooming bearpit and she hadn’t known what Wilt was up to? Talk about being as thick as two short planks. Well, it was about time she learnt. ‘Look, Mrs Wilt, I know this isn’t easy to …’ he began but to his amazement Eva was there before him.
‘I know what you’re going to say,’ she interrupted, ‘but it isn�
�t true. If it had been another woman why did he leave the car in Mrs Willoughby’s?’
‘Leave the car in Mrs Willoughby’s? Who’s Mrs Willoughby?’
‘She lives at Number 65, and that’s where the car was this morning. I had to go and get it. Why would he want to do that?’
It was on the tip of Flint’s tongue to say that’s what he’d have done in Wilt’s place, dump the car down the road and run like hell, when something else occurred to him.
‘You wait here,’ he said and left the room. In the corridor he hesitated for a moment and tried to think who to ask. He certainly wasn’t approaching Hodge but there was always Sergeant Runk. And Yates could find out for him. He turned into the open-plan office where the Sergeant was sitting at a typewriter.
‘Got an enquiry for you, Yates,’ he said. ‘Have a word with your mate Runk and find out where they tailed Wilt last night. I’ve got his missus in my office. And don’t let him know I’m interested, understand? Just a casual enquiry on your part.’ He sat on the edge of the desk while Yates was gone five minutes.
‘Right balls-up,’ said the Sergeant when he returned. ‘They followed the little bugger out to Baconheath airbase with a radio tail. He’s in there an hour and a half and comes out driving like a maniac. Runkie reckons Wilt knew they were on to him, the way he drove. Anyway they lost him, and when they did find the car it was outside some house down the road from the Wilts’ with a fucking big dog trying to tear the front door down to get at Hodge. That’s about the strength of it.’
Flint nodded, and kept his excitement to himself. He’d already done enough to make Hodge look the fucking idiot he was; he’d broken the Bull and Clive Swannell and that little shit Lingon, signed statements and all; and all the time Hodge had been harrying Wilt. So why drop him in it any further?
Why not? The deeper the bugger sank the less he’d be likely to surface. And not only Hodge but Wilt too. The bastard had been the original cause of all Flint’s misfortunes and to be able to drag him through the mire together with Hodge was justice at its most perfect. Besides, Flint still had to make the catch with Lingon, so a diversion was just what he needed. And if ever there was a diversion ready to hand it was sitting in his office in the shape of Mrs Eva Wilt. The only problem was how to point her in Hodge’s direction without anyone learning what he had done. It was a risk he had to take. He’d better check first, though. Flint went to a phone and looked up the Baconheath number.