by Tom Sharpe
‘You want me to question him?’ asked the Captain.
‘No, I’ll go on. Just keep the tape running. We’re going to need some help in this.’
He went back into his office and found Wilt lying on the couch fast asleep. ‘Just a few more questions, Mr Wilt,’ he said. Wilt stared blearily up at him and sat up.
‘What questions?’
The Colonel took a bottle from a cupboard. ‘Care for a Scotch?’
‘I’d care to go home,’ said Wilt.
22
In Ipford Police Station Inspector Flint was savouring his triumph. ‘It’s all there, sir,’ he told the Superintendent, indicating a pile of folders on the desk. ‘And it’s local. Swannell made the contact on a skiing trip to Switzerland. Nice clean place, Switzerland, and of course he says he was the one who was approached by this Italian. Threatened him, he says, and of course our Clive’s a nervous bloke as you know.’
‘Could have fooled me,’ said the Superintendent. ‘We nearly did the bugger for attempted murder three years ago. Got away because the bloke he scarred wouldn’t press charges.’
‘I was being ironical, sir,’ said Flint. ‘Just saying his story for him.’
‘Go on. How did it work?’
‘Simple really,’ continued Flint, ‘nothing too complicated. First they had to have a courier who didn’t know what he was doing. So they put the frighteners on Ted Lingon. Threaten him with a nitric acid facial if he doesn’t co-operate with his coach tours to the continent. Or so he claims. Anyway he’s got a regular run to the Black Forest with overnight stops. The stuff’s loaded aboard at Heidelberg without the driver knowing, comes through to Ostend and the night ferry to Dover and halfway across one of the crew dumps the muck over the side. Always on the night run so no one sees. Picked up by a friend of Annie Mosgrave’s who happens to be in his floating gin palace nearby and …’
‘Hang on a minute,’ said the Superintendent. ‘How the hell would anyone find a package of heroin in mid-Channel at night?’
‘The same way Hodge has been keeping tabs on Wilt. The muck’s in a bloody great suitcase with buoyancy and a radio signal that comes on the moment it hits the water. Bloke beams in on it, hauls it aboard and brings it round to a marker buoy in the Estuary and leaves it there for a frogman to pick up when the gin palace is back in the marina.’
‘Seems a risky way of going about things,’ said the Superintendent, ‘I wouldn’t trust tides and currents with that amount of money involved.’
‘Oh, they did enough practice runs to feel safe and tying it to the chain of the marker buoy made that part easy,’ said Flint. ‘And after that it was split three ways with the Hong Kong Charlies handling the London end and Roddie Eaton fixing this area and Edinburgh.’
The Superintendent studied his fingernails and considered the implications of Flint’s discoveries. On the whole they seemed entirely satisfactory, but he had a nasty feeling that the Inspector’s methods might not look too good in court. In fact it was best not to dwell on them. Defending counsel could be relied on to spell them out in detail to the jury. Threats to prisoners in gaol, murder charges that were never brought … On the other hand if Flint had succeeded, that idiot Hodge would be scuppered. That was worth a great many risks.
‘Are you quite certain Swannell and the rest haven’t been spinning you a yarn?’ he asked. ‘I mean I’m not doubting you or anything but if we go ahead now and they retract those statements in court, which they will do –’
‘I’m not relying on their statements,’ said Flint. ‘There’s hard evidence. I think when the search warrants are issued we’ll find enough heroin and Embalming Fluid on their premises and clothing to satisfy Forensic. They’ve got to have spilt some when they were splitting the packages, haven’t they?’
The Superintendent didn’t answer. There were some things he preferred not to know and Flint’s actions were too dubious for comfort. Still if the Inspector had broken a drug ring the Chief Constable and the Home Secretary would be well satisfied, and with crime organized the way it was nowadays there was no point in being too scrupulous. ‘All right,’ he said finally, ‘I’ll apply for the warrants.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ said Flint and turned to go. But the Superintendent stopped him.
‘About Inspector Hodge,’ he said. ‘I take it he’s been following a different line of investigation.’
‘American airbases,’ said Flint. ‘He’s got it into his head that’s where the stuff’s been coming in.’
‘In that case we’d better call him off.’
But Flint had other plans in mind. ‘If I might make a suggestion, sir,’ he said, ‘the fact that the Drug Squad is pointing in the wrong direction has its advantages. I mean Hodge has drawn attention away from our investigations and it would be a pity to put up a warning signal until we’ve made our arrests. In fact it might help to encourage him a bit.’
The Superintendent looked at him doubtfully. The last thing the Head of the Drug Squad needed was encouraging. He was demented enough already. On the other hand …
‘And how exactly is he to be encouraged?’ he asked.
‘I suppose you could say the Chief Constable was looking for an early arrest,’ said Flint. ‘It’s the truth after all.’
‘I suppose there’s that to it,’ said the Superintendent wearily. ‘All right, but you’d better be right with your own cases.’
‘I will be, sir,’ said Flint and left the room. He went down to the car pool where Sergeant Yates was waiting.
‘The warrants are all settled,’ he said. ‘Have you got the stuff?’
Sergeant Yates nodded and indicated a plastic packet on the back seat. ‘Couldn’t get a lot,’ he said, ‘Runkie reckoned we’d no right to it. I had to tell him it was needed for a lab check.’
‘Which it will be,’ said Flint. ‘And it’s all the same batch?’
‘It’s that all right.’
‘No problem then,’ said Flint as they drove out, ‘we’ll look at Lingon’s coach first and then Swannell’s boat and the back garden and leave enough for Forensic to pick up.’
‘What about Roddie Eaton?’
Flint took a pair of cotton gloves from his pocket. ‘I thought we’d leave these in his dustbin,’ he said. ‘We’ll use them on the coach first. No need to bother going to Annie’s. There will be something there anyway, and besides, the rest of them will try to get lighter sentences by pointing the finger at her. All we need is three of them as guilty as sin and facing twenty years and they’ll drop everyone else in the shit with them.’
‘Bloody awful way of going about police work,’ said Yates after a pause. ‘Planting evidence and all.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Flint. ‘We know they’re traffickers, they know it, and all we’re doing is giving them a bit of their own medicine. Homeopathic, I call it.’
*
That wasn’t the way Inspector Hodge would have described his work. His obsessive interest in the Wilts’ extraordinary domestic activities had been alarmingly aggravated by the noises coming from the listening devices installed in the roof space. The quads were to blame. Driven up to their rooms by Eva who wanted them out of the way so that she could think what to do about Henry, they had taken revenge by playing long-playing records of Heavy Metal at one hundred watts per channel. From where Hodge and Runk sat in the van it sounded as though 45 Oakhurst Avenue was being blown apart by an endless series of rhythmic explosions.
‘What the fuck’s wrong with those bugs?’ Hodge squealed, dragging the earphones from his head.
‘Nothing,’ shouted the operator. ‘They’re highly sensitive …’
‘So am I,’ yelled Hodge, stubbing his little finger into his ear in an attempt to get his hearing back, ‘and something’s definitely wrong.’
‘They’re just picking up one hell of a lot of interference. Could be any number of things produce that effect.’
‘Like a fifty-megaton rock concert,’ said Runk. ‘B
loody woman must be stone deaf.’
‘Like hell,’ said Hodge. ‘This is deliberate. They must have scanned the place and spotted they were being bugged. And turn that damned thing off. I can’t hear myself think.’
‘Never known anyone who could,’ said Runk. ‘Thinking doesn’t make a sound. It’s an –’
‘Shut up,’ yelled Hodge, who didn’t need a lecture on the workings of the brain. For the next twenty minutes he sat in comparative silence trying to figure out his next move. At every stage of his campaign he had been outmanoeuvred and all because he hadn’t been given the authority and back-up he needed. And now the Superintendent had sent a message demanding an immediate arrest. Hodge had countered with a request for a search warrant and had been answered with a vague remark that the matter would be considered. Which meant, of course, that he’d never get that warrant. He was on the point of returning to the station and demanding the right to raid the house when Sergeant Runk interrupted his train of thought.
‘That jam session’s stopped,’ he said. ‘Coming through nice and quiet.’
Hodge grabbed the earphones and listened. Apart from a rattling sound he couldn’t identify (but which came in fact from Emmeline’s hamster Percival getting some exercise in her wheel) the house in Oakhurst Avenue was silent. Odd. The place hadn’t ever been silent before when the Wilts were at home. ‘The car still outside?’ he asked the technician.
The man turned to the car monitor. ‘Nothing coming through,’ he muttered and swung the aerial. ‘They must have been using that din to dismantle the transmitters.’
Behind him Inspector Hodge verged on apoplexy. ‘Jesus, you moron,’ he yelled, ‘you mean you haven’t been checking that fucking car all this time?’
‘What do you think I am? A bleeding octopus with ears?’ the radio man shouted back. ‘First I have to cope with all those stupid bugs you laced the house with and at the same time I’ve got two direction indicators to listen in to. And what’s more I’m not a moron.’
But before Hodge could get into a real fight Sergeant Runk had intervened. ‘I’m getting a faint signal from the car,’ he said. ‘Must be ten miles away.’
‘Where?’ yelled Hodge.
‘East, as before,’ said Runk. ‘They’re heading back to Baconheath.’
‘Then get after them,’ Hodge shouted, ‘this time the shit isn’t going to get back home before I’ve nabbed him. I’ll seal that fucking base off if it’s the last thing I do.’
*
Oblivious of the ill-feeling building up behind her Eva drove steadily towards the airbase. She had no conscious plan, only the determination to force the truth, and Wilt, out of somebody even if that meant setting fire to the car or lying naked in the roadway outside the gates. Anything to gain publicity. And for once Mavis had agreed with her and been helpful too. She had organized a group of Mothers Against The Bomb, some of whom were in fact grandmothers, had hired a coach and had telephoned all the London papers and BBC and Fenland Television to ensure maximum coverage for the demonstration.
‘It gives us an opportunity to focus the world’s attention on the seductive nature of capitalist military-industrial world domination,’ she had said, leaving Eva with only the vaguest idea what she meant but with the distinct feeling that Wilt was the ‘It’ at the beginning of the sentence. Not that Eva cared what anyone said; it was what they did that counted. And Mavis’s demonstration would help divert attention away from her own efforts to get into the camp. Or, if she failed to do that, she would see to it that the name Henry Wilt reached the millions of viewers who watched the news that night.
‘Now I want you all to behave nicely,’ she told the quads as they drove up to the camp gates. ‘Just do what Mummy tells you and everything is going to be all right.’
‘It isn’t going to be all right if Daddy’s been staying with an American lady,’ said Josephine.
‘Fucking,’ said Penelope, ‘not staying with.’
Eva braked sharply. ‘Who said that?’ she demanded, turning a livid face on the quads in the back seat.
‘Mavis Motty did,’ said Penelope. ‘She’s always going on about fucking.’
Eva took a deep breath. There were times when the quads’ language, so carefully nurtured towards mature self-expression at the School for the Mentally Gifted, seemed appallingly inappropriate. And this was one of those times. ‘I don’t care what Mavis said,’ she declared, ‘and anyway it isn’t like that. Your father has simply been stupid again. We don’t know what’s happened to him. That’s why we’ve come here. Now you behave yourselves and –’
‘If we don’t know what’s happened to him how do you know he’s been stupid?’ asked Samantha, who had always been hot on logic.
‘Shut up,’ said Eva and started the car again.
Behind her the quads silently assumed the guise of four nice little girls. It was misleading. As usual they had prepared themselves for the expedition with alarming ingenuity. Emmeline had armed herself with several hatpins that had once belonged to Grandma Wilt; Penelope had filled two bicycle pumps with ammonia and sealed the ends with chewing-gum; Samantha had broken into all their piggy banks and had then bought every tin of pepper she could from a perplexed greengrocer; while Josephine had taken several of Eva’s largest and most pointed Sabatier knives from the magnet board in the kitchen. In short, the quads were happily looking forward to disabling as many airbase guards as they could and were only afraid that the affair would pass off peacefully. In the event their fears were almost realized.
As they stopped at the gatehouse and were approached by a sentry there were none of those signs of preparedness that had been so obvious the day before. In an effort to maintain that everything was normal and in a ‘No Panic Situation’ Colonel Urwin had ordered the removal of the concrete blocks in the roadway and had instilled a fresh sense of politeness in the officer in charge of entry to civilian quarters. A large Englishwoman with permed hair and a carload of small girls didn’t seem to pose any threat to USAAF security.
‘If you’ll just pull over there I’ll call up the Education Office for you,’ he told Eva who had decided not to mention Captain Clodiak this time. Eva drove past the barrier and parked. This was proving much easier than she had expected. In fact for a moment she doubted her judgement. Perhaps Henry wasn’t there after all and she had made some terrible mistake. The notion didn’t last long. Once again the Wilts’ Escort had signalled its presence and Eva was just telling the quads that everything was going to be all right when the Lieutenant appeared from the guardhouse with two armed sentries. ‘Pardon me, ma’am,’ he said, ‘but I’d be glad if you’d step over to the office.’
‘What for?’ asked Eva.
‘Just a routine matter.’
For a moment Eva gazed blankly up at his face and tried to think. She had steeled herself for a confrontation and words like ‘stepping over to the office’ and ‘a routine matter’ were somehow threateningly bland. All the same she opened the door and got out.
‘And the children too,’ said the Lieutenant. ‘Everybody out of there.’
‘Don’t you touch my daughters,’ said Eva, now thoroughly alarmed. It was obvious she had been tricked into the base. But this was the opportunity the quads had been waiting for. As the Lieutenant reached for the door handle Penelope poked the end of the bicycle pump through the window and Josephine pointed a carving knife. It was Eva’s action that saved him from the knife. She wrenched at his arm and at the same time the ammonia hit him. As the stuff wafted up from his soaked jacket and the two sentries hurled themselves on Eva, the Lieutenant gasped for air and dashed for the guardhouse vaguely aware of the sound of girlish laughter behind him. It sounded demonic to him. Half suffocated he stumbled into the office and pressed the Alert button.
*
‘It rather sounds as if we have another problem,’ said Colonel Urwin as sirens wailed over the base.
‘Don’t include me,’ said Wilt. ‘I’ve got problems of my own l
ike trying to explain to my wife what the hell’s been happening to me the last God knows how many days.’
But the Colonel was on the phone to the guardhouse. For a moment he listened and then turned to Wilt. ‘Your wife a fat woman with four daughters?’
‘You could put it like that, I suppose,’ said Wilt, ‘though frankly I’d leave the “fat” bit out if you meet her. Why?’
‘Because that’s what just hit the main gate,’ said the Colonel and went back to the phone. ‘Hold everything … What do you mean you can’t? She’s not … Jesus … Okay, okay. And cut those fucking sirens.’ There was a pause and the Colonel held the phone away from his ear and stared at Wilt. Eva’s shouted demands were clearly audible now that the sirens had stopped.
‘Give me back my husband,’ she yelled, ‘and take your filthy paws off me … If you go anywhere near those children …’ The Colonel put the phone down.
‘Very determined woman, is Eva,’ said Wilt by way of explanation.
‘So I’ve gathered,’ said the Colonel, ‘and what I want to know is what she’s doing here.’
‘By the sounds of things, looking for me.’
‘Only you told us she didn’t know you were here. So how come she’s out there fighting mad and …’ He stopped. Captain Fortune had entered the room.
‘I think you ought to know the General’s on the line,’ he announced. ‘Wants to know what’s going on.’
‘And he thinks I know?’ said the Colonel.
‘Well, someone has to.’
‘Like him,’ said the Colonel, indicating Wilt, ‘and he’s not saying.’
‘Only because I haven’t a clue,’ said Wilt with increasing confidence, ‘and without wishing to be unnecessarily didactic I’d say no one in the whole wide world knows what the hell’s going on anywhere. Half the world’s population is starving and the overfed half have a fucking death-wish, and –’