by Tom Sharpe
'The wonders of science. I've just been listening to Chesterton praising'
And I've just been listening to the Police Inspector,' cut in the V-P, 'on the subject of Miss Lynchknowle. He wants to see you.'
Wilt swallowed. Miss Lynchknowle hadn't anything to do with the prison. It didn't make sense. In any case, they couldn't have got on to him so quickly. Or could they? 'Miss Lynchknowle? What about her?'
'You mean you haven't heard?'
'Heard what?' said Wilt.
'She's the girl who was in the toilet,' said the V-P. 'She was found dead in the boiler-room last night.'
'Oh God,' said Wilt. 'How awful.'
'Quite. Anyway, we had the police swarming all over the place last night and this morning there's a new man here. He wants a word with you.'
They walked down the corridor to the Principal's office. Inspector Hodge was waiting there with another policeman. 'Just a matter of routine, Mr Wilt,' he said when the Vice-Principal had shut the door. 'We've already interviewed Mrs Bristol and several other members of the staff. Now I understand you taught the late Miss Lynchknowle?'
Wilt nodded. His previous experience with the police didn't dispose him to say more than he had to. The sods always chose the most damning interpretation.
'You taught her English?' continued the Inspector.
'I teach Senior Secretaries Three English, yes,' said Wilt.
'On Thursday afternoons at 2.15 p.m.?'
Wilt nodded again.
'And did you notice anything odd about her?'
'Odd?'
'Anything to suggest that she might be an addict, sir.'
Wilt tried to think. Senior Secretaries were all odd as far as he was concerned. Certainly in the context of the Tech. For one thing, they came from 'better families' than most of his other students and seemed to have stepped out of the fifties with their perms and their talk about Mummies and Daddies who were all wealthy farmers or something in the Army. 'I suppose she was a bit different from the other girls in the class,' he said finally. 'There was this duck, for instance.'
'Duck?' said Hodge.
'Yes, she used to bring a duck she called Humphrey with her to class. Bloody nuisance having a duck, in a lesson but I suppose it was a comfort to her having a furry thing like that.'
'Furry?' said Hodge. 'Ducks aren't furry. They have feathers.'
'Not this one,' said Wilt. 'Like a teddy bear. You know, stuffed. You don't think I'd have a live duck shitting all over the place in my class, do you?'
Inspector Hodge said nothing. He was beginning to dislike Wilt.
'Apart from that particular addiction, I can't think of anything else remarkable about her. I mean, she didn't twitch or seem unduly pale or even go in for those sudden changes of mood you tend to find with junkies.'
'I see,' said Hodge, holding back the comment that Mr Wilt seemed exceedingly well-informed on the matter of symptoms. 'And would you say there was much drug-taking at the College?'
'Not to my knowledge,' said Wilt. 'Though, come to think of it, I suppose there must be some with the numbers we've got. I wouldn't know. Not my scene.'
'Quite, sir,' said the Inspector, simulating respect.
'And now, if you don't mind,' said Wilt, 'I have work to do.' The Inspector didn't mind.
'Not much there,' said the Sergeant when he'd left.
'Never is with the really clever sods,' said Hodge.
'I still don't understand why you didn't ask him about going to the wrong toilet and what the secretary said.'
Hodge smiled. 'If you really want to know, it's because I don't intend to raise his suspicions one little iota. That's why. I've been checking on Mr Wilt and he's a canny fellow, he is. Scuppered old Flint, didn't he? And why? I'll tell you. Because Flint was fool enough to do what Wilt wanted. He pulled him in and put him through the wringer and Mr Wilt got away with bloody murder. I'm not getting caught the same way.'
'But he never did commit any murder. It was only a fucking inflatable doll he'd buried,' said the Sergeant.
'Oh, come off it. You don't think the bugger did that without he had a reason? That's a load of bull. No, he was pulling some other job and he wanted a cover, him and his missus, so they fly a kite and Flint falls for it. That old fart wouldn't know a decoy if it was shoved under his bloody snout. He was so busy grilling Wilt about that doll he couldn't see the wood for the trees.'
Sergeant Runk fought his way through the mixed metaphors and came out none the wiser. 'All the same,' he said finally, 'I can't see a lecturer here being into drugs, not pushing anyway. Where's the lifestyle? No big house and car. No country-club set. He doesn't fit the bill.'
'And no big salary here either,' said Hodge. 'So maybe he's saving up for his old age. Anyway, we'll check him out and he won't ever know.'
'I should have thought there were more likely prospects round about,' said the Sergeant. 'What about that Greek restaurant bloke Macropolis or something you've been bugging? We know he's been into heroin. And there's that fly boy down the Siltown Road with the garage we had for GBH. He was on the needle himself.'
'Yea, well he's inside, isn't he? And Mr Macropolis is out of the country right now. Anyway, I'm not saying it is Wilt. She could have been down in London getting it for all we know. In which case, it's off our patch. All I'm saying is, I'm keeping an open mind and Mr Wilt interests me, that's all.'
And Wilt was to interest him still further when they returned to the police station an hour later. 'Super wants to see you,' said the Duty Sergeant. 'He's got the Prison Governor with him.'
'Prison Governor?' said Hodge. 'What's he want?'
'You,' said the Sergeant, 'hopefully.'
Inspector Hodge ignored the crack and went down the passage to the Superintendent's office. When he came out half an hour later, his mind was alive with circumstantial evidence, all of which pointed most peculiarly to Wit. Wilt had been teaching one of the most notorious gangsters in Britain, now thankfully dead of an overdose of one of his own drugs. (The prison authorities had decided to use the presence of so much heroin in McCullum's mattress as the cause of death, rather than the phenobarb one, much to Chief Warder Blaggs' relief.) Wilt had been closeted with McCullum at the very time Miss Lynchknowle's body had been discovered. And, most significantly of all, Wilt, within an hour of leaving the prison and presumably on learning that the police were busy at the Tech, had rung the prison anonymously with a phoney message about a mass breakout and McCullum had promptly taken an overdose.
If that little lot didn't add up to something approaching a certainty that Wilt was involved, Hodge didn't know one. Anyway, add it to what he already knew of Wilt's past and it was certain. On the other hand, there was still the awkward little matter of proof. It was one of the disadvantages of the English legal system, and one Hodge would happily have dispensed with in his crusade against the underworld, that you had first to persuade the Director of Public Prosecutions that there was a case to be answered, and then go on to present evidence that would convince a senile judge and a jury of do-gooders, half of whom had already been nobbled, that an obvious villain was guilty. And Wilt wasn't an obvious villain. The bastard was as subtle as hell and to send the sod down would require evidence that was as hard as ferroconcrete.
'Listen,' Hodge said to Sergeant Runk and the small team of plain-clothes policemen who constituted his private crime squad, 'I don't want any balls-ups so this has got to be strictly covert and I mean covert. No one, not even the Super, is to know it's going on, so we'll code-name it Flint. That way, no one will suspect. Anyone can say Flint round this station and it doesn't register. That's one. Two is, I want Mr Wilt tailed twenty-four hours continuous. And another tail on his missus. No messing. I want to know what those people do every moment of the day and night from now on in.'
'Isn't that going to be a bit difficult?' asked Sergeant Runk. 'Day and night. There's no way we can put a tail in the house and...'
'Bug it is what we'll do,' said Hodge.
'Later. First off we're going to patternize their lives on a time-schedule basis. Right?'
'Right,' echoed the team. In their time, they had patternized the lives of a fish-and-chip merchant and his family who Hodge had suspected were into hard-core porn; a retired choirmasterthis time for boys; and a Mr and Mrs Pateli for nothing better than their name. In each case the patternizing had failed to confirm the Inspector's suspicions, which were in fact wholly groundless, but had established as incontrovertible facts that the fish-and-chip merchant opened his shop at 6 p.m. except Sundays, that the choirmaster was having a happy and vigorous love affair with a wrestler's wife, and in any case had an aversion amounting almost to an allergy for small boys, and that the Patelis went to the Public Library every Tuesday, that Mr Pateli did full-time unpaid work with the Mentally Handicapped, while Mrs Pateli did Meals on Wheels. Hodge had justified the time and expense by arguing that these were training sessions in preparation for the real thing.
'And this is it,' continued Hodge. 'If we can nail this one down before Scotland Yard takes over we'll be quids in. We're also going into a surveillance mode at the Tech. I'm going over to see the Principal about it now. In the meantime, Pete and Reg can move into the canteen and the Student's Common Room and make out they're mature students chucked out for dope at Essex or some other University.'
Within an hour, Operation Flint was underway. Pete and Reg, suitably dressed in leather garments that would have alarmed the most hardened Hell's Angels, had already emptied the Students' Common Room at the Tech by their language and their ready assumption that everyone there was on heroin. In the Principal's office, Inspector Hodge was having more or less the same effect on the Principal and the V-P, who found the notion that the Tech was the centre for drug distribution in Fenland particularly horrifying. They didn't much like the idea of being lumbered with fifteen educationally subnormal coppers as mature students.
'At this time of year?' said the Principal. 'Dammit, it's April. We don't enrol mature students this term. We don't enrol any, come to that. They come in September. And anyway, where the hell would we put them?'
'I suppose we could always call them "Student Teachers",' said the V-P. 'That way they could sit in on any classes they wanted to without having to say very much.'
'Still going to look bloody peculiar,' said the Principal. 'And frankly, I don't like it at all.'
But it was the Inspector's assertion that the Lord Lieutenant, the Chief Constable and, worst of all, the Home Secretary didn't like what had been going on at the Tech that turned the scales.
'God, what a ghastly man,' said the Principal, when Hodge had left. 'I thought Flint was foul enough, but this one's even bloodier. What is it about policemen that is so unpleasant? When I was a boy, they were quite different.'
'I suppose the criminals were, too,' said the V-P. 'I mean, it can't be much fun with sawn-off shotguns and hooligans hurling Molotov cocktails at you. Enough to turn any man bloody.'
'Odd,' said the Principal, and left it at that.
Meanwhile Hodge had put the Wilts under surveillance. 'What's been happening?' he asked Sergeant Runk.
'Wilt's still at the Tech so we haven't been able to pick him up yet, and his missus hasn't done anything much except the shopping.'
But even as he spoke, Eva was already acting in a manner calculated to heighten suspicion. She had been inspired to phone Dr Kores for an appointment. Where the inspiration came from she couldn't have said, but it had partly to do with an article she had read in her supermarket magazine on sex and the menopause entitled 'No Pause In The Pause, The Importance of Foreplay In The Forties', and partly with the glimpse she'd had of Patrick Mottram at the check-out counter where he usually chatted up the prettiest girl. On this occasion, he had ogled the chocolate bars instead and had ambled off with the glazed eyes of a man for whom the secret consumption of half a pound of Cadbury's Fruit and Nut was the height of sensual experience. If Dr Kores could reduce the randiest man in Ipford to such an awful condition, there was every possibility she could produce the opposite effect in Henry.
Over lunch, Eva had read the article again and, as always on the subject of sex, she was puzzled. All her friends seemed to have so much of it, either with their husbands or with someone, and obviously it was important, otherwise people wouldn't write and talk so much about it. All the same, Eva still had difficulty reconciling it with the way she'd been brought up. Mind you, her mother had been quite wrong going on about remaining a virgin until she was married. Eva could see that now. She certainly wasn't going to do the same with the quads. Not that she'd have them turn into little tarts like the Flatten girls, wearing make-up at fourteen and going around with rough boys on motorbikes. But later on, when they were eighteen and at university, then it would be all right. They'd need experience before they got married instead of getting married to get...Eva stopped herself. That wasn't true, she hadn't married Henry just for sex. They'd been genuinely in love. Of course, Henry had groped and fiddled but never nastily like some of the boys she'd gone out with. If anything, he'd been rather shy and embarrassed and she'd had to encourage him. Mavis was right to call her a full-blooded woman. She did like sex but only with Henry. She wasn't going to have affairs, especially not with the quads in the house. You had to set an example and broken homes were bad. On the other hand, so were homes where both parents were always quarrelling and hated one another. So divorce was a good thing too. Not that anything like that threatened her marriage. It was just that she had a right to a more fulfilling love life and if Henry was too shy to ask for help, and he certainly was, she'd have to do it for him. So she had phoned Dr Kores and had been surprised to learn that she could come at half-past two.
Eva had set off with an unnoticed escort of two cars and four policemen and had caught the bus at the bottom of Perry Road to Silton and Dr Kores' shambolic herb farm. 'I don't suppose she has time to keep it tidy,' Eva thought as she made her way past a number of old frames and a rusty cultivator to the house. All the same, she was slightly dismayed by the lack of organization. If it had been her garden, it wouldn't have looked like that. But then anything organic tended to go its own way, and Dr Kores did have a reputation as an eccentric. In fact, she had prepared herself to be confronted by some wizened old creature with a plaid shawl when the door opened and a severe woman in a white coat stood looking at her through strangely tinted dark glasses.
'Ms Wilt?' she said. Was there just the hint of a V for the W? But before Eva could consider this question, she was being ushered down the hallway and into a consulting-room. Eva looked round apprehensively as the doctor took a seat behind the desk. 'You are having problems?' she asked.
Eva sat down. 'Yes,' she said, fiddling with the clasp of her handbag and wishing she hadn't made the appointment.
'With your husband I think you said, yes?'
'Well, not with him exactly,' said Eva, coming to Henry's defence. After all, it wasn't his fault he wasn't as energetic as some other men. 'It's just that he's...well...not as active as he might be.'
'Sexually active?' Eva nodded.
'How old?' continued Dr Kores.
'You mean Henry? Forty-three. He'll be forty-four next March. He's a'
But Dr Kores was clearly uninterested in Wilt's astrological sign. 'And the sexual gradient has been steep?'
'I suppose so,' said Eva, wondering what a sexual gradient was.
'Maximum weekly activity please.'
Eva looked anxiously at an Anglepoise lamp and tried to think. 'Well, when we were first married...' she paused.
'Go on,' Dr Kores ordered.
'Well, Henry did it three times one night I remember,' said Eva, blurting the statement out. 'He only did it once of course.'
The doctor's ballpen stopped. 'Please explain,' she said. 'First you said he was sexually active three times in one night. And second you said he was only once. Are you saying there was seminal ejaculation only on the first occasion?'
'I don't really know,
' said Eva. 'It's not easy to tell, is it?'
Dr Kores eyed her doubtfully. 'Let me put it another way. Was there a penile spasm at the climax of each episode?'
'I suppose so,' said Eva. 'It's so long ago now and all I remember is that he was ever so tired next day.'
'In which year did this take place?' asked the doctor, having written down 'Penile spasm uncertain.'
'1963. In July,' said Eva. 'I remember that because we were on a walking holiday in the Peak District and Henry said he's peaked out.'
'Very amusing,' said Dr Kores dryly. 'And that is his maximum sexual attainment?'
'He did it twice in 1970 on his birthday...'
'And the plateau was how many times a week?' asked Dr Kores, evidently determined to prevent Eva from intruding anything remotely human into the discussion.
'The plateau? Oh, well it used to be once or twice but now I'm lucky if it's once a month and sometimes we go even longer.'
Dr Kores licked her thin lips and put the pen down. 'Mrs Wilt,' she said, leaning on the desk and forming a triangle with her fingertips and thumbs. 'I deal exclusively with the problems of the female in a male-dominated social context, and to speak frankly, I find your attitude to your relationship with your husband unduly submissive.'
'Do you really?' said Eva, beginning to perk up. 'Henry always says I'm too bossy.'
'Please,' said the doctor with something approaching a shudder, 'I'm not in the least interested in your husband's opinions or in his person. If you choose to be, that is your business. Mine is to help you as an entirely independent being and, to be truthful, I find your self-objectivization highly distasteful.'
'I'm sorry,' said Eva, wondering what on earth self-objectivization was.
'For instance, you have repeatedly stated that and I quote "He did it three times" and again "He did it twice..."'
'But he did,' Eva protested.
'And who was the "It"? You?' said the doctor vehemently.
'I didn't mean it that way...' Eva began but Dr Kores was not to be stopped. 'And the very word "did" or "done" is a tacit acceptance of marital rape. What would your husband say if you were to do him?'