Wilt on High (17 page)

Eva climbed out of bed and putting a dressing-gown on, went down to investigate. The next moment all thoughts of making love had gone. Wilt was standing in the middle of the kitchen with her cake-icing syringe in one hand and his penis in the other. In fact, the two seemed to be joined together.

Eva groped for words. ‘And what do you think you’re doing?’ she demanded when she could speak.

Wilt turned a crimson face towards her. ‘Doing?’ he asked, conscious that the situation was one that was open to any number of interpretations and none of them nice.

‘That’s what I said, doing,’ said Eva.

Wilt looked down at the syringe. ‘As a matter of fact …’ he began, but Eva was ahead of him.

‘That’s my icing syringe.’

‘I know it is. And this is my John Thomas,’ said Wilt. Eva regarded the two objects with equal disgust. She would never be able to ice a cake with the syringe again and how she could ever have found anything faintly attractive about Wilt’s John Thomas was beyond her. ‘And for your information,’ he continued, ‘that is your moisturizing cream on the floor.’

Eva stared down at the jar. Even by the peculiar standards of 45 Oakhurst Avenue there was something disorientating about the conjunction – and conjunction was the right word – of Wilt’s thingamajig and the icing syringe and the presence on the kitchen floor of a jar of her moisturizing cream. She sat down on a stool.

‘And for your further information,’ Wilt went on, but Eva stopped him. ‘I don’t want to hear,’ she said.

Wilt glared at her lividly. ‘And I don’t want to feel,’ he snarled. ‘If you think I find any satisfaction in squirting whatever’s in that emulsifier you use for your face up my whatsit at three o’clock in the morning, I can assure you I don’t.’

‘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.

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 watching 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.