Wilt in Nowhere

Chapter 23

In Ipford General Hospital Wilt still hadn’t come round. He’d been moved from the corridor to make room for six youngsters injured in the pig inferno. Finally after forty-eight hours Wilt was taken into X-ray and diagnosed as suffering from severe concussion and three badly bruised ribs, but there was no sign of a fractured skull. From there he was wheeled to what was called the Neurological Ward. As usual it was full.

‘Of course it was a crime,’ said the Duty Sergeant grumpily when the doctor at the hospital phoned the police station to ask what exactly had happened. ‘The bugger was mugged and dumped unconscious in the street behind the New Estate. What he was doing there we’ve no idea. Probably drunk or…well, your guess is as good as mine. He wasn’t wearing any trousers. Being in that district he was asking for it.’

‘Any identity?’ the doctor asked.

‘One of our men saw him and thought he recognised him as a lecturer at the Tech. Name of Wilt. Mr Henry Wilt. He taught Communications Studies and–’

‘So what’s his address? Oh, never mind, you can inform his relatives he’s been mugged and is in Ipford Hospital.’ And he rang off angrily.

In his office Inspector Flint leapt to his feet and barged into the passage. ‘Did I hear you say ‘Henry Wilt’?’

The Sergeant nodded. ‘He’s up at the hospital. Been mugged according to some quack who…’

But Flint was no longer listening. He hurried down to the police station car park and headed for the hospital.

It was a frustrated Inspector Flint who finally found Wilt in the overcrowded maze that was Ipford General Hospital. To begin with he’d been directed to Neurology only to find Wilt had been moved to Vasectomy.

‘What on earth for? I understood he had been mugged. What’s he need a vasectomy for?’

‘He doesn’t. He was only here temporarily. Then he was taken to Hysterectomy.’

‘Hysterectomy? Dear God,’ said Flint faintly. He could just begin to understand why a man who must presumably have been an active participant in helping to foist those dreadful quads on the world might deserve a vasectomy to prevent him inflicting any more nightmares; hysterectomy was something else again. ‘But the blighter’s a man. You can’t give a man a hysterectomy. It’s not possible.’

‘That’s why he was moved to Infectious Diseases 3. They had a spare bed there. At least I think it was ID 3,’ the nurse told him. ‘I know someone died there this morning. Mind you, they always do.’

‘Why?’ asked Flint incautiously.

‘Aids,’ said the nurse, pushing an obese woman on a trolley past him.

‘But they can’t put a man who’s been beaten up and is bleeding in the same bed as a bloke who’s just died of Aids. It’s outrageous. Bloody near condemning him to death.’

‘Oh, they sterilise the sheets and all that,’ said the nurse over her shoulder.

It was a pale, frustrated and appalled Inspector who finally found Wilt in Unisex 8 which was reserved for geriatrics who had had a variety of operations that required them to wear catheters, drips and in several cases tubes protruding from various other orifices. Flint couldn’t see why it was called a unisex ward. Multi-sex would have been more accurate though just as unpleasant. To take his attention away from a patient of indeterminate sex–for once Flint preferred the politically correct word ‘gender’–who clearly had an almost continuous incontinence problem and what amounted to a phobic horror of catheters, the Inspector tried to concentrate on Wilt. His condition was pretty awful too. His scalp was bandaged and his face badly bruised and swollen but the Ward Sister assured Flint that he’d soon recover consciousness. Flint said he sincerely hoped so.

Shortly afterwards the old man in the next bed had convulsions and his false teeth fell out. A nurse put them back and called the Sister who took her time coming.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ she demanded. Even to Flint’s medically untutored way of thinking, the question seemed gratuitous. How the hell could the old fellow know what was wrong with him?

‘How would I know? I just get these hot flushes. I had a prostate operation on Tuesday,’ he said.

‘And a very successful one too. You’ve done nothing but grumble since you came here. You’re just a grotty old man. I’ll be glad to see the back of you.’

The nurse intervened. ‘But he’s eighty-one, Sister,’ she said.

‘And a very healthy eighty-one he is too,’ the Sister replied and swept off to deal with the patient who had dragged his catheter out for the fifth time. It was perfectly obvious what ‘gender’ he was now. To avoid witnessing the reinsertion of the catheter, and a fresh bout of convulsions by the old man in the next bed, Flint turned to look at Wilt and found an eye staring at him. Wilt had recovered consciousness and, if the eye was anything to go by, didn’t like what he was seeing. Flint wasn’t enjoying it much either. He stared back and wondered what to do. But the eye closed abruptly. Flint turned to the nurse to ask her if an open eye was an indication that the patient had recovered consciousness but the nurse was having difficulty putting the old man’s dentures back into his mouth again. When she had succeeded Flint asked again.

‘Couldn’t say, not really,’ she said. ‘I’ve known some of them die with their eyes wide open. Of course they glaze over a bit blue later on. That way you know they’ve gone.’

‘Charming,’ said the Inspector and turned back but Wilt’s eyes were firmly shut. The sight of the Inspector sitting beside the bed had so startled him he had almost forgotten his dreadful headache and how awful he felt. Whatever had happened to him–and he had no idea where he’d been or what he’d done the vaguely familiar figure sitting and staring at him was not a reassuring one. Not that he recognised Flint. And presently he fell into a coma again and Flint sent for Sergeant Yates.

‘I’m off home for a bit of lunch and a kip,’ he told him. ‘Let me know the moment he comes round and on no account let that idiot Hodge know he’s here. He’ll have Wilt charged for drug dealing before the poor bugger’s conscious.’

He went down the seemingly endless corridors and drove home.