Wilt on High

'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.

Flint picked up the phone and called the Drug Addiction Study Unit at the Ipford Hospital.

By lunchtime, Wilt was up and about. To be exact, he'd been up and about several times during the morning, in part to get another hot-water bottle from the freezer, but more often in a determined effort not to masturbate himself to death. It was all very well Eva supposing she'd benefit from the effects of whatever diabolical irritant she'd added to his homebrew, but to Wilt's way of thinking, a wife who'd damned near poisoned her husband didn't deserve what few sexual benefits he had to offer. Give her an inkling of satisfaction from this experiment and next time he'd land up in hospital with internal bleeding and a permanent erection. As it was, he had a hard time with his penis.

'I'll freeze the damn thing down,' had been Wilt's first thought and for a while it had worked, though painfully. But after a time he had drifted off to sleep and had woken an hour later with the awful impression that he'd taken it into his head to have an affair with a freshly caught Dover Sole. Wilt hurled himself off the thing and had then taken the bottle downstairs to put it back in the fridge before realizing that this wouldn't be particularly hygienic. He was in the process of washing it when the front doorbell rang. Wilt dropped the bottle on the draining-board, retrieved it from the sink when it slithered off and finally tried wedging it between the upturned teapot and a casserole dish in the drying rack, before going to answer the call.

It was not the postman as he expected, but Mavis Mottram. 'What are you doing at home?' she asked.