Wilt on High (8 page)

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 endowed 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 …’

‘That’s enough of that,’ interrupted the warder, ‘I don’t want to hear that word again. You’re supposed to be talking about books.’

‘Listen to Wilberforce,’ said McCullum, still looking
fixedly at Wilt, ‘bloody marvellous vocabulary he’s got, hasn’t he?’

Behind him the warder bridled. ‘My name’s not Wilberforce and you know it,’ he snapped.

‘Well then, I wasn’t talking about you, was I?’ said McCullum. ‘I mean everyone knows you’re Mr Gerard, not some fucking idiot who has to get someone literate to read the racing results for him. Now as Mr Wilt here was saying …’

Wilt tried to remember. ‘About Barbara Cartland being moron fodder,’ prompted McCullum.

‘Oh yes, well according to your theories, reading romantic novels is even more detrimental to working-class consciousness than … What’s the matter?’

Mr McCullum was smiling horribly at him through the mesh. ‘Screw’s pissed off,’ he hissed. ‘Knew he would. Got him on my payroll and his wife reads Barbara Cartland so he couldn’t stand to listen. Here, take this.’

Wilt looked at the rolled-up piece of paper McCullum was thrusting through the wire. ‘What is it?’

‘My weekly essay.’

‘But you write that in your notebook.’

‘Think of it like that,’ said McCullum, ‘and stash it fast.’

‘I’ll do no …’

Mr McCullum’s ferocious expression had returned. ‘You will,’ he said.

Wilt put the roll in his pocket and ‘Fireworks’ relaxed. ‘Don’t make much of a living, do you?’ he asked. ‘Live
in a semi and drive an Escort. No big house with a Jag on the forecourt, eh?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Wilt, whose taste had never been drawn to Jaguars. Eva was dangerous enough in a small car.

‘Right. Well now’s your chance to earn 50K.’

‘50K?’

‘Grand. Cash,’ said McCullum and glanced at the door behind him. So did Wilt, hopefully, but there was no sign of the warder. ‘Cash?’

‘Old notes. Small denominations and no traceability. Right?’

‘Wrong,’ said Wilt firmly. ‘If you think you can bribe me into …’

‘Gob it,’ said McCullum with a nasty grunt. ‘You’ve got a wife and four daughters and you live in a brick and mortar, address 45 Oakhurst Avenue. You drive an Escort, pale dogturd, number-plate HPR 791 N. Bank at Lloyds, account number 0737 … want me to go on?’ Wilt didn’t. He got to his feet but Mr McCullum hadn’t finished. ‘Sit down while you’ve still got knees,’ he hissed. ‘And daughters.’

Wilt sat down. He was suddenly feeling rather weak. ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

Mr McCullum smiled. ‘Nothing. Nothing at all. You just go off home and check that piece of paper and everything’s going to be just jake.’

‘And if I don’t?’ asked Wilt feeling weaker still.

‘Sudden bereavement is a sad affair,’ said McCullum, ‘very sad. Specially for cripples.’

Wilt gazed through the wire mesh and wondered, not for the first time in his life, though by the sound of things it might be the last, what it was about him that attracted the horrible. And McCullum was horrible, horrible and evilly efficient. And why should the evil be so efficient? ‘I still want to know what’s on that paper,’ he said.

‘Nothing,’ said McCullum, ‘it’s just a sign. Now as I see it Forster was the typical product of a middle-class background. Lots of lolly and lived with his old Ma …’

‘Bugger E. M. Forster’s mother,’ said Wilt. ‘What I want to know is why you think I’m going to …’

But any hope he had of discussing his future was ended by the return of the warder. ‘You can cut the lecture, we’re shutting up shop.’

‘See you next week, Mr Wilt,’ said McCullum with a leer as he was led back to his cell. Wilt doubted it. If there was one thing on which he was determined, it was that he would never see the swine again. Twenty-five years was far too short a sentence for a murdering gangster. Life should mean life and nothing less. He wandered miserably down the passage towards the main gates, conscious of the paper in his pocket and the awful alternatives before him. The obvious thing to do was to report McCullum’s threats to the warder on the gate. But the bastard had said he had one warder on his payroll and if one, why not more? In fact, looking back over the months, Wilt could remember several occasions when
McCullum had indicated that he had a great deal of influence in the prison. And outside too, because he’d even known the number of Wilt’s bank account. No, he’d have to report to someone in authority, not an ordinary screw.

‘Had a nice little session with “Fireworks”?’ enquired the warder at the end of the corridor with what Wilt considered to be sinister emphasis. Yes, definitely he’d have to speak to someone in authority.

At the main gate it was even worse. ‘Anything to declare, Mr Wilt?’ said the warder there with a grin, ‘I mean we can’t tempt you to stay inside, can we?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Wilt hurriedly.

‘You could do worse than join us, you know. All mod cons and telly and the grub’s not at all bad nowadays. A nice little cell with a couple of friendly mates. And they do say it’s a healthy life. None of the stress you get outside …’

But Wilt didn’t wait to hear any more. He stepped out into what he had previously regarded as freedom. It didn’t seem so free now. Even the houses across the road, bathed in the evening sunshine, had lost their moderate attraction; instead, their windows were empty and menacing. He got into his car and drove a mile along Gill Road before pulling into a side street and stopping. Then making sure no one was watching him, he took the piece of paper out of his pocket and unrolled it. The paper was blank. Blank? That didn’t make sense. He held it up to the light and stared at it
but the paper was unlined and as far as he could see, had absolutely nothing written on it. Even when he held it horizontally and squinted along it he could make out no indentations on the surface to suggest that a message had been written on it with a matchstick or the blunt end of a pencil. A man was coming towards him along the pavement. With a sense of guilt, Wilt put the paper on the floor and took a road map from the dashboard and pretended to be looking at it until the man had passed. Even then he checked in the rear-view mirror before picking up the paper again. It remained what it had been before, a blank piece of notepaper with a ragged edge as though it had been torn very roughly from a pad. Perhaps the swine had used invisible ink. Invisible ink? How the hell would he get invisible ink in prison? He couldn’t unless … Something in Wilt’s literary memories stirred. Hadn’t Graham Greene or Muggeridge mentioned using bird-shit as ink when he was a spy in the Second World War? Or was it lemon juice? Not that it mattered much. Invisible ink was meant to be invisible and if that bastard had intended him to read it, he’d have told him how. Unless, of course, the swine was clear round the bend and in Wilt’s opinion, anyone who’d murdered four people and tortured others with a blowtorch as part of the process of earning a living had to be bloody well demented. Not that that let McCullum off the hook in the least. The bugger was a murderer whether he was sane or not, and the sooner he fulfilled his own
predictions and became a cabbage the better. Pity he hadn’t been born one.