Wilt on High

Chapter 24

It was the end of term at the Tech and the staff were seated in the auditorium, as evidently bored as the students they themselves had previously lectured there. Now it was the Principal's turn. He had spent ten excruciating minutes doing his best to disguise his true feelings for Mr Spirey of the Building Department who was finally retiring, and another twenty trying to explain why financial cuts had ended any hope of rebuilding the engineering block at the very time when the College had been granted the staggering sum of a quarter of a million pounds by an anonymous donor for the purchase of textbooks. In the front row Wilt sat poker-faced among the other Heads of Departments and feigned indifference. Only he and the Principal knew the source of the donation and neither of them could ever tell. The Official Secrets Act had seen to that. The money was the price of Wilt's silence. The deal had been negotiated by two nervous officials from the United States Embassy and in the presence of two rather more menacing individuals ostensibly from the legal division of the Home Office. Not that Wilt had been worried by their attitude. Throughout the discussion he had basked in the sense of his own innocence and even Eva had been overawed and then impressed by the offer of a new car. But Wilt had turned that down. It was enough to know that the Principal, while never understanding why, would always be unhappily aware that the Fenland College of Arts and Technology was once again indebted to a man he would have liked to fire. Now he was lumbered with Wilt until he retired himself.

Only the quads had been difficult to silence. They had enjoyed pumping ammonia over the Lieutenant and disabling sentries with pepper too much not to want to make their exploits known.

'We were only rescuing Daddy from that sexy woman,' said Samantha when Eva rather unwisely asked them to promise never to talk about what had happened.

'And you'll have to rescue your Mother and me from Dartmoor if you don't keep your damned traps shut,' Wilt had snapped. 'And you know what that means.'

'What?' asked Emmeline, who seemed to be looking forward to the prospect of a prison break.

'It means you'll be taken into care by horrible foster parents and not as a bloody group either. You'll be split up and you won't be allowed to visit one another and...' Wilt had launched into a positively Dickensian description of foster homes and horrors of child abuse. By the time he'd finished the quads were cowed and Eva had been in tears. Which was the first time that had happened and was another minor triumph. It wouldn't last, of course, but by the time they spilled the beans the immediate dangers would be over and nobody would believe them anyway.

But the argument had aroused Eva's suspicions again. 'I still want to know why you lied to me all those months about teaching at the prison,' she said as they undressed that night.

Wilt had an answer for that one too. 'You heard what those men from MI5 said about the Official Secrets Act.'

'MI5?' said Eva. 'They were from the Home Office. What's MI5 got to do with it?'

'Home Office, my foot, Military Intelligence,' said Wilt. 'And if you choose to send the quads to the most expensive school for pseudo-prodigies and expect us not to starve...

The argument had rumbled on into the night but Eva hadn't needed much convincing. The officials from the Embassy had impressed her too much with their apologies and there had been no talk of women. Besides, she had her Henry home again and it was obviously best to forget that anything had happened at Baconheath.

And so Wilt sat on beside Dr Board with a slight sense of accomplishment. If he was fated to fall foul of other people's stupidity and misunderstanding he had the satisfaction of knowing that he was no one's victim. Or only temporarily. In the end he beat them and circumstances. It was better than being a successful bore like Dr Mayfieldor worse still, a resentful failure.

'Wonders never cease,' said Dr Board when the Principal finally sat down and they began to file out of the auditorium, 'a quarter of a million in actual textbooks? It must be a unique event in British education. Millionaires who give donations usually provide better buildings for worse students. This one seems to be a genius.'

Wilt said nothing. Perhaps having some common sense was a form of genius.

At Ipford Police Station ex-Inspector Hodge, now merely Sergeant Hodge, sat at a computer terminal in Traffic Control and tried to confine his thoughts to problems connected with flow-patterns and off-peak parking systems. It wasn't easy. He still hadn't recovered from the effects of Agent Incapacitating or, worse still, from the enquiry into his actions the Superintendent had started and the Chief Constable had headed.

And Sergeant Runk hadn't been exactly helpful. 'Inspector Hodge gave me to understand the Superintendent had authorized the bugging of Mr Wilt's car,' he said in evidence. 'I was acting on his orders. It was the same with their house.'

'Their house? You mean to say their house was bugged too?'

'Yes, sir. It still is for all I know,' said Runk, 'we had the collaboration of the neighbours, Mr Gamer and his wife.'

'Dear God,' muttered the Chief Constable, 'if this ever gets to the gutter press...'

'I don't think it will, sir,' said Runk, 'Mr Gamer has moved out and his missus has put the house up for sale.'

'Then get those bloody devices out of there before someone has the place surveyed,' snarled the Chief Constable before dealing with Hodge. By the time he had finished the Inspector was on the verge of a breakdown himself and had been demoted to Sergeant in the Traffic Section with the threat of being transferred to the police dog training school as a target if he put his foot wrong just once again.

To add insult to injury he had seen Flint promoted to Head of the Drug Squad.

'The chap seems to have a natural talent for that kind of work,' said the Chief Constable. 'He's done a remarkable job.'

The Superintendent had his reservations but he kept them to himself. 'I think it runs in the family,' he said judiciously.

And for a fortnight during the trial Flint's name had appeared almost daily in the Ipford Chronicle and even in some of the national dailies. The police canteen too had buzzed with his praises. Flint the Drug Buster. Almost Flint the Terror of the Courtroom. In spite of all the efforts the defence counsel had made, with every justification, to question the legality of his methods, Flint had countered with facts and figures, times, dates, places and with exhibits, all of which were authentic. He had stepped down from the witness box still retaining the image of the old-fashioned copper with his integrity actually enhanced by the innuendoes. It was enough for the public to look from him to the row of sleazy defendants in the dock to see where the interests of justice lay. Certainly the Judge and jury had been convinced. The accused had gone down with sentences that ranged from nine years to twelve and Flint had gone up to Superintendent.

But Flint's achievement led beyond the courtroom to areas where discretion still prevailed.

'She brought the stuff back from her cousins in California?' spluttered Lord Lynchknowle when the Chief Constable visited him. 'I don't believe a word of it. Downright lie.'

'Afraid not, old chap. Absolutely definite. Smuggled the muck back in a bottle of duty-free whisky.'

'Good God. I thought she'd got it at that rotten Tech. Never did agree with her going there. All her mother's fault.' He paused and stared vacuously out across the rolling meadows. 'What did you say the stuff was called?'

'Embalming Fluid,' said the Chief Constable, 'Or Angel Dust. They usually smoke it.'

'Don't see how you can smoke embalming fluid,' said Lord Lynchknowle. 'Mind you, there's no understanding women, is there?'

'None at all,' said the Chief Constable and with the assurance that the coroner's verdict would be one of accidental death he left to deal with other women whose behaviour was beyond his comprehension.

In fact it was at Baconheath that the results of Hodge's obsession with the Wilt family were being felt most keenly. Outside the airbase Mavis Mottram's group of Mothers Against The Bomb had been joined by women from all over the country and had turned into a much bigger demonstration. A camp of makeshift huts and tents was strung out along the perimeter fence, and relations between the Americans and the Fenland Constabulary had not been improved by scenes on TV of middle-aged and largely respectable British women being gassed and dragged in handcuffs to camouflaged ambulances.

To make matters even more awkward Mavis' tactics of blockading the civilian quarters had led to several violent incidents between US women who wanted to escape the boredom of the base to go souvenir-hunting in Ipford and Norwich and MABs who refused to let them out or, more infuriatingly, allowed them to leave only to stop them going back. These fracas were seen on TV with a regularity that had brought the Home Secretary and the Secretary of State for Defence into conflict, each insisting that the other was responsible for maintaining law and order.

Only Patrick Mottram had benefited. In Mavis' absence he had come off Dr Kores' hormones and had resumed his normal habits with Open University students.

Inside the airbase, too, everything had changed. General Belmonte, still suffering from the effect of seeing a giant penis circumcise itself and then turn into a rocket and explode, had been retired to a home for demented veterans in Arizona where he was kept comfortably sedated and could sit in the sun dreaming of happy days when his B52 had blasted the empty jungle in Vietnam. Colonel Urwin had returned to Washington and a cat-run garden in which he grew scented narcissi to perfection and employed his considerable intelligence to the problem of improving Anglo-American relations.

It was Glaushof who had suffered the most. He had been flown to the most isolated and radioactive testing ground in Nevada and consigned to duties in which his own personal security was in constant danger and his sole responsibility. And sole was the word. Mona Glaushof with Lieutenant Harah in tow had hit Reno for a divorce and was living comfortably in Texas on the alimony. It was a change from the dank Fenlands and the sun never ceased to shine.

It shone too on Eva and 45 Oakhurst Avenue as she bustled about the house and wondered what to have for supper. It was nice to have Henry home and somehow more assertive than he had been before. 'Perhaps,' she thought as she Hoovered the stairs, 'we ought to get away by ourselves for a week or two this summer.' And her thoughts turned to the Costa Brava.

But it was a problem Wilt had already solved. Sitting in The Pig In A Poke with Peter Braintree he ordered two more pints.

After all I've been through this term I'm not having my summer made hellish in some foul camp site by the quads,' he said cheerfully. 'I've made other arrangements. There's an adventure school in Wales where they do rock-climbing and pony-trekking. They can work their energy off on that and the instructors. I've rented a cottage in Dorset and I'm going down there to read Jude The Obscure again.'

'Seems a bit of a gloomy book to take on holiday,' said Braintree.

'Salutary,' said Wilt, 'a nice reminder that the world's always been a crazy place and that we don't have such a bad time of it teaching at the Tech. Besides, it's an antidote to the notion that intellectual aspirations get you anywhere.'

'Talking about aspirations,' said Braintree, 'what on earth are you going to do with the thirty thousand quid this lunatic philanthropist has allotted your department for textbooks?'

Wilt smiled into his pint of best bitter. 'Lunatic philanthropists' was just about right for the Americans with their airbases and nuclear weapons, and the educated idiots in the State Department who assumed that even the most ineffectual liberal do-gooder must be a homicidal Stalinist and a member of the KGBand who then shelled out billions of dollars trying to undo the damage they'd done.

'Well, for one thing I'm going to donate two hundred copies of Lord of the Flies to Inspector Flint,' he said finally.

'To Flint? Why him of all people? What's he want with the damned things?'

'He's the one who told Eva I was out at...' Wilt stopped. There was no point in breaking the Official Secrets Act. 'It's a prize,' he went on, 'for the first copper to arrest the Phantom Flasher. It seems an appropriate title.'

'I daresay it does,' said Braintree. 'Still, two hundred copies is a bit disproportionate. I can't imagine even the most literate policeman wanting to read two hundred copies of the same book.'

'He can always hand them out to the poor sods at the airbase. Must be hell trying to cope with Mavis Mottram. Not that I disagree with her views but the bloody woman is definitely demented.'

'Still leaves you with a hell of a lot of new books to buy,' said Braintree. 'I mean, it's all right for me because the English Department needs books but I shouldn't have thought Communication and'

'Don't use those words. I'm going back to Liberal Studies and to hell with all that bloody jargon. And if Mayfield and the rest of the social-economic structure merchants don't like it, they can lump it. I'm having it my way from now on.'

'You sound very confident,' said Braintree.

'Yes,' said Wilt with a smile.

And he was.

The End