Wilt on High

Chapter 2

They were burgeoning all over the place for Wilt as well, but he wouldn't have put the day into the category of one of his better ones. He had returned to his office smelling of The Pig In A Poke's best bitter and hoping he could do some work on his lecture at the airbase without being disturbed, only to find the County Advisor on Communication Skills waiting for him with another man in a dark suit. 'This is Mr Scudd from the Ministry of Education,' said the Advisor. 'He's making a series of random visits to Colleges of Further Education on behalf of the Minister, to ascertain the degree of relevance of certain curricula.'

'How do you do,' said Wilt, and retreated behind his desk. He didn't like the County Advisor very much, but it was as nothing to his terror of men in dark grey suits, and three-piece ones at that, who acted on behalf of the Minister of Education. 'Do take a seat.'

Mr Scudd stood his ground. 'I don't think there's anything to be gained from sitting in your office discussing theoretical assumptions,' he said. 'My particular mandate is to report my observations, my personal observations, of what is actually taking place on the classroom floor.'

'Quite,' said Wilt, hoping to hell nothing was actually taking place on any of his classroom floors. There had been a singularly nasty incident some years before when he'd had to stop what had the makings of a multiple rape of a rather too attractive student teacher by Tyres Two, who'd been inflamed by a passage in By Love Possessed which had been recommended by the Head of English.

'Then if you'll lead the way,' said Mr Scudd and opened the door. Behind him, even the County Advisor had assumed a hangdog look. Wilt led the way into the corridor.

'I wonder if you'd mind commenting on the ideological bias of your staff,' said Mr Scudd, promptly disrupting Wilt's desperate attempt to decide which class it would be safest to take the man into. 'I noticed you had a number of books on Marxism-Leninism in your office.'

'As a matter of fact, I do,' said Wilt and bided his time. If the sod had come on some sort of political witch-hunt, the emollient response seemed best. That way the bastard would land with his bum in the butter, but fast.

'And you consider them suitable reading matter for the working-class apprentices?'

'I can think of worse,' said Wilt.

'Really? So you admit to a left-wing tendency in your teaching.'

'Admit? I didn't admit to anything. You said I had books on Marxism-Leninism in my office. I don't see what that's got to do with what I teach.'

'But you also said you could think of worse reading material for your students,' said Mr Scudd.

'Yes,' said Wilt, 'that's exactly what I said.' The bloke was really getting on his wick now.

'Would you mind amplifying that statement?'

'Glad to. How about Naked Lunch for starters?'

'Naked Lunch?'

'Or Last Exit From Brooklyn. Nice healthy reading stuff for young minds, don't you think?'

'Dear God,' muttered the County Advisor, who had gone quite ashen.

Mr Scudd didn't look any too good either, though he inclined to puce rather than grey. 'Are you seriously telling me that you regard those two revolting books...that you encourage the reading of books like that?'

Wilt stopped outside a lecture room in which Mr Ridgeway was fighting a losing battle with a class of first-year A-level students who didn't want to hear what on he thought about Bismark. 'Who said anything about encouraging students to read any particular books?' he asked above the din.

Mr Scudd's eyes narrowed. 'I don't think you quite understand the tenor of my questions,' he said, 'I am here...' He stopped. The noise coming from Ridgeway's class made conversation inaudible.

'So I've noticed,' shouted Wilt.

The County Advisor staggered to intervene. 'I really think, Mr Wilt,' he began, but Mr Scudd was staring maniacally through the glass pane at the class. At the back, a youth had just passed what looked suspiciously like a joint to a girl with yellow hair in Mohawk style who could have done with a bra.

'Would you say this was a typical class?' he demanded and turned back to Wilt to make himself heard.

'Typical of what?' said Wilt, who was beginning to enjoy the situation. Ridgeway's inability to interest or control supposedly high motivated A-level students would prepare Scudd nicely for the docility of Cake Two and Major Millfield.

'Typical of the way your students are allowed to behave.'

'My students? Nothing to do with me. That's History, not Communication Skills.' And before Mr Scudd could ask what the hell they were doing standing outside a classroom with bedlam going on inside, Wilt had walked on down the corridor. 'You still haven't answered my question,' said Mr Scudd when he had caught up.

'Which one?'

Mr Scudd tried to remember. The sight of that bloody girl had thrown his concentration. 'The one about the pornographic and revoltingly violent reading matter,' he said finally.

'Interesting,' said Wilt. 'Very interesting.'

'What's interesting?'

'That you read that sort of stuff. I certainly don't.'

They went up a staircase and Mr Scudd made use of the handkerchief he kept folded for decoration in his breast pocket. 'I don't read that filth,' he said breathlessly when they reached the top landing.

'Glad to hear it,' said Wilt.

'And I'd be glad to hear why you raised the issue.' Mr Scudd's patience was on a short leash.

'I didn't,' said Wilt, who, having reached the classroom in which Major Millfield was taking Cake Two, had reassured himself that the class was as orderly as he'd hoped. 'You raised it in connection with some historical literature you found in my office.'

'You call Lenin's State and Revolution historical literature? I most certainly don't. It's communist propaganda of a particularly virulent kind, and I find the notion that it's being fed to young minds in your department extremely sinister.'

Wilt permitted himself a smile. 'Do go on,' he said. 'There's nothing I enjoy more than listening to a highly trained intelligence leapfrogging common sense and coming to the wrong conclusions. It gives me renewed faith in parliamentary democracy.'

Mr Scudd took a deep breath. In a career spanning some thirty years of uninterrupted authority and bolstered by an inflation-linked pension in the near future, he had come to have a high regard for his own intelligence and he had no intention of having it disparaged now. 'Mr Wilt,' he said, 'I would be grateful to know what conclusions I am supposed to draw from the observations that the Head of Communication Skills at this College has a shelf full of works of Lenin in his office.'

'Personally, I'd be inclined not to draw any,' said Wilt, 'but if you press me...'

'I most certainly do,' said Mr Scudd.

'Well, one thing's for certain. I wouldn't suppose that the bloke was a raving Marxist.'

'Not a very positive answer.'

'Not a very positive question, come to that,' said Wilt. 'You asked me what conclusions I'd arrive at and when I tell you I wouldn't arrive at any, you're still not satisfied. I don't see what more I can do.'

But before Mr Scudd could reply, the County Advisor forced himself to intervene. 'I think Mr Scudd simply wants to know if there's any political bias in the teaching in your department.'

'Masses,' said Wilt.

'Masses?' said Mr Scudd.

'Masses?' echoed the County Advisor.

'Absolutely stuffed with it. In fact, if you were to ask me...'

'I am,' said Mr Scudd. 'That's precisely what I'm doing.'

'What?' said Wilt.

'Asking you how much political bias there is,' said Mr Scudd, having recourse to his handkerchief again.

'In the first place, I've told you, and in the second, I thought you said you didn't think there was anything to be gained from discussing theoretical assumptions and you'd come to see for yourself what went on on the classroom floor. Right?' Mr Scudd swallowed and looked desperately at the County Advisor, but Wilt went on. 'Right. Well you just take a shuftie in there where Major Millfield is having a class with Fulltime Caterers brackets Confectionery and Bakery close brackets Year Two, affectionately known as Cake Two, and then come and tell me how much political bias you've managed to squeeze out of the visit.' And without waiting for any further questions, Wilt went back down the stairs to his office.

'Squeeze out?' said the Principal two hours later. 'You have to ask the Minister of Education's Personal Private Secretary how much political bias he can squeeze out of Cake Two?'

'Oh, is that who he was, the Minister of Education's own Personal Private Secretary?' said Wilt. 'Well, what do you known about that? Now if he'd been an HMI...'

'Wilt,' said the Principal with some difficulty, 'if you think that bastard isn't going to lumber us with one of Her Majesty's Inspectorsin fact I shouldn't be surprised if the entire Inspectorate doesn't descend upon usand all thanks to you, you'd better think again.'

Wilt looked round at the ad hoc committee that had been set up to deal with the crisis. It consisted of the Principal, the V-P, the County Advisor and, for no apparent reason, the Bursar. 'It's no skin off my nose how many Inspectors he rustles up. Only too glad to have them.'

'You may be but I rather doubt...' The Principal hesitated. The County Advisor's presence didn't make for a free flow of opinion on the deficiencies of other departments. 'I take it that any remarks I make will be treated as off the record and entirely confidential,' he said finally.

'Absolutely,' said the County Advisor, 'I'm only interested in Liberal Studies and...'

'How nice to hear that term used again. That's the second time this afternoon,' said Wilt.

'And you might have added the bloody studies,' snarled the Advisor, 'instead of leaving the wretched man with the impression that that other idiot lecturer was a fee-paying member of the Young Liberals and a personal friend of Peter Tatchell.'

'Mr Tatchell isn't a Young Liberal,' said Wilt. 'To the best of my knowledge he's a member of the Labour Party, left of centre of course, but...'

'And a fucking homosexual.'

'I've no idea. Anyway, I thought the compassionate word was "gay".'

'Shit,' muttered the Principal.

'Or that if you prefer,' said Wilt, 'though I'd hardly describe the term as compassionate. Anyway, as I was saying...'

'I am not interested in what you are saying. It's what you said in front of Mr Scudd that matters. You deliberately led him to believe that this College, instead of being devoted to Further Education...'

'I like that "devoted". I really do,' interrupted Wilt.

'Yes, devoted to Further Education, Wilt, and you led him to think we employ nobody but paid-up members of the Communist Party and at the other extreme a bunch of lunatics from the National Front.'

'Major Millfield isn't a member of any party to the best of my knowledge,' said Wilt. 'The fact that he was discussing the social implications of immigration policies'

'Immigration policies!' exploded the County Advisor. 'He was doing no such thing. He was talking about cannibalism among wogs in Africa and some swine who keeps heads in his fridge.'

'Idi Amin,' said Wilt.

'Never mind who. The fact remains that he was demonstrating a degree of racial bias that could get him prosecuted by the Race Relations Board and you had to tell Mr Scudd to go in and listen.'

'How the hell was I to know what the Major was on about? The class was quiet and I had to warn the other lecturers that the sod was on his way. I mean if you choose to pitch up out of the blue with a bloke who's got no official status...'

'Official status?' said the Principal. 'I've already told you Mr Scudd just happens to be'

'Oh, I know all that and it still doesn't add up. The point is he walks into my office with Mr Reading here, noses his way through the books on the shelf, and promptly accuses me of being an agent of the bleeding Comintern.'

'And that's another thing,' said the Principal. 'You deliberately left him with the impression that you use Lenin's whatever it was called...'

'The State and Revolution,' said Wilt.

'As teaching material with day-release apprentices. Am I right, Mr Reading?'

The County Advisor nodded weakly. He still hadn't recovered from those heads in the fridge or the subsequent visit to Nursery Nurses who had been deep in a discussion on the impossible and utterly horrifying topic of post-natal abortion for the physically handicapped. The bloody woman had been in favour of it.

'And that's just the beginning,' continued the Principal, but Wilt had had enough.

'The end,' he said. 'If he'd bothered to be polite, it might have been different but he wasn't. And he wasn't even observant enough to see that those Lenin books belong to the History Department, were stamped to that effect, and were covered with dust. To the best of my knowledge, they've been on that shelf ever since my office was changed and they used to use them for the A-level special subject on the Russian Revolution.'

'Then why didn't you tell him that?'

'Because he didn't ask. I don't see why I should volunteer information to total strangers.'

'What about Naked Lunch? You volunteered that all right,' said the County Advisor.

'Only because he asked for worse reading material and I couldn't think of anything more foul.'

'Thank the Lord for small mercies,' murmured the Principal.

'But you definitely stated that the teaching in your department is stuffedyes, you definitely used the word "stuffed"with political bias. I heard you myself,' continued the County Advisor.

'Quite right too,' said Wilt. 'Considering I'm lumbered with forty-nine members of staff, including part-timers, and all the teaching they ever do is to natter away to classes and keep them quiet for an hour, I should think their political opinions must cover the entire spectrum, wouldn't you?'

'That isn't the impression you gave him.'

'I'm not here to give impressions,' said Wilt, 'I'm a teacher as a matter of unquestionable fact, not a damned public-relations expert. All right, now I've got to take a class of Electronics Engineers for Mr Stott who's away ill.'

'What's the matter with him?' asked the Principal inadvertently.

'Having another nervous breakdown. Understandably,' said Wilt and left the room.

Behind him the members of the Committee looked wanly at the door. 'Do you really imagine this man Scudd will get the Minister to call for an enquiry?' asked the Vice-Principal.

'That's what he told me,' said the Advisor. 'There are certain to be questions in the House after what he saw and heard. It wasn't simply the sex that got his goat, though that was bad enough in all conscience. The man's a Catholic and the emphasis on contraception'

'Don't,' whispered the Principal.

'No, the thing that really upset him was being told to go and fuck himself by a drunken lout in Motor Mechanics Three. And Wilt, of course.'

'Isn't there something we can do about Wilt?' the Principal asked despairingly as he and the Vice-Principal returned to their offices.

'I don't see what,' said the V-P. 'He inherited half his staff and since he can't get rid of them, he has to do what he can.'

'What Wilt can do is land us with questions in Parliament, the total mobilization of Her Majesty's Inspectorate and a public enquiry into the way this place is run.'

'I shouldn't have thought they'd go to the lengths of a public enquiry. This man Scudd may have influence but I very much doubt...'

'I wouldn't. I saw the swine before he left and he was practically demented. What in God's name is post-natal abortion anyway?'

'Sounds rather like murder...' the Vice-Principal began, but the Principal was way ahead of him on a thought process that would lead to his forced retirement. 'Infanticide. That's it. Wanted to know if I was aware that we were running a course on Infanticide for future Nannies and asked if we had an evening class for Senior Citizens on Euthanasia or Do-It-Yourself Suicide. We haven't, have we?'

'Not to my knowledge.'

'If we had I'd ask Wilt to run it. That bloody man will be the end of me.'

At the Ipford Police Station, Inspector Flint shared his feelings. Wilt had already screwed his chances of becoming a Superintendent and Flint's misery had been compounded by the career of one of his sons, Ian, who had left school and home before taking his A-levels, and after graduating on marijuana and a suspended prison sentence had gone on to be seized by Customs and Excise loaded with cocaine at Dover. 'Bang goes any hope of promotion,' Flint had said morosely when his son was sent down for five years, and had brought down on his own head the wrath of Mrs Flint who blamed him for her son's delinquency. 'If you hadn't been so interested in your own blooming work and getting on and all, and had taken a proper father's interest in him, he wouldn't be where he is now,' she had shouted at him, 'but no, it had to be Yes Sir, No Sir, Oh certainly Sir, and any rotten night work you could get. And week-ends. And what did Ian ever see of his own father? Nothing. And when he did it was always this crime or that villain and how blooming clever you'd been to nick him. That's what your career's done for your family. B. all.'

And for once in his life, Flint wasn't sure she wasn't right. He couldn't bring himself to put it more positively than that. He'd always been right. Or in the right. You had to be to be a good copper, and he certainly hadn't been a bent one. And his career had had to come first.

'You can talk,' he'd said somewhat gratuitously, since it was about the only thing he'd ever allowed her to do apart from the shopping and washing up and cleaning the house and whining on about Ian, feeding the cat and the dog and generally skivvying for him. 'If I hadn't worked my backside off, we wouldn't have the house or the car and you wouldn't have been able to take the little bastard to the Costa...'

'Don't you dare call him that!' Mrs Flint had shouted, putting the hot iron on his shirt and scorching it in her anger.

'I'll call him what I bloody well like. He's a rotten villain like all the rest of them.'

'And you're a rotten father. About the only thing you ever did as a father was screw me, and I mean screw, because it wasn't anything else as far as I was concerned.'

Flint had taken himself out of the house and back to the police station thinking dark thoughts about women and how their place was in the home, or ought to be, and he was going to be the laughing-stock of the Fenland Constabulary with cracks about him visiting the nick over in Bedford to see his own homegrown convict and a drug pusher at that, and what he'd do to the first sod who called him Snowy and harrying...And all the time there was, on the very edge of his mind, a sense of grievance against Henry fucking Wilt. It had always been there, but now it came back stronger than ever: Wilt had buggered his career with that doll of his and then the siege. Oh, yes, he'd almost admired Wilt at one stage but that was a long time ago, a very long time indeed. The little sod was sitting pretty in his house at Oakhurst Avenue and a good salary at the ruddy Tech, and one day he'd probably be the Principal of the stinking place. Whereas any hope Flint had ever had of rising to Super, and being posted to some place Wilt wasn't, had gone up in smoke. He was stuck with being Inspector Flint for the rest of his natural, and stuck with Ipford. As if to emphasize his lack of any hope, they'd brought Inspector Hodge in as Head of the Drug Squad and a right smart-arse he was too. Oh, they'd tried to butter over the crack, but the Super had called Flint in to tell him personally, and that had to mean something. That he was a dead-beat and they couldn't trust him in the drugs game, because his son was inside. Which had brought on another of his headaches which he'd always thought were migraines, only this time the police doctor had diagnosed hypertension and put him on pills.

'Of course I'm hypertense,' Flint had told the quack. 'With the number of brainy bastards round here who ought to be behind bars, any decent police officer's got to be tense. He wouldn't be any good at nailing the shits if he weren't. It's an occupational hazard.'

'It's whatever you like to call it, but I'm telling you you've got high blood pressure and...'

'That's not what you said a moment ago,' Flint had flashed back. 'You stated I had tension. Now then, which is it, hypertension or high blood pressure?'

'Inspector,' the doctor had said, 'you're not interrogating a suspect now.' (Flint had his reservations about that.) 'And I'm telling you as simply as I can that hypertension and high blood pressure are one and the same thing. I'm putting you on one diuretic a day'

'One what?'

'It helps you pass water.'

'As if I needed anything to make me do that. I'm up twice in the blasted night as it is.'

'Then you'd better cut down on your drinking. That'll help your blood pressure, too.'

'How? You tell me not to be tense and the one thing that helps is a beer or two in the local.'

'Or eight,' said the doctor, who'd seen Flint in the pub. 'Anyway, it'll bring your weight down.'

'And make me piss less. So you give me a pill to make me piss more and tell me to drink less. Doesn't make sense.'

By the time Inspector Flint left the surgery, he still didn't know what the pills he had to take did for him. Even the doctor hadn't been able to explain how beta-blockers worked. Just said they did and Flint would have to stay on them until he died.

A month later the Inspector could tell the doctor how they worked. 'Can't even type any more,' he said, displaying a pair of large hands with white fingers. 'Look at them. Like bloody celery sticks that have been blanched.'

'Bound to have some side-effects. I'll give you something to relieve those symptoms.'

'I don't want any more of the piss pills,' said Flint. 'Those bleeding things are dehydrating me. I'm on the bloody trot all the time and it's obvious there's not enough blood left in me to get to my fingers. And that's not all. You want to try working some villain over and being taken short just when he's coming up with a confession. I tell you, it's affecting my work.'

The doctor looked at him suspiciously and thought wistfully of the days when his patients didn't answer back and police officers were of a different calibre to Flint. Besides, he didn't like the expression 'working some villain over'. 'We'll just have to try you out on some other medications,' he said, and was startled by the Inspector's reaction.

'Try me out on some other medicines?' he said belligerently. 'Who are you supposed to be treating, me or the bloody medicines? I'm the one with blood pressure, not them. And I don't like being experimented with. I'm not some bleeding dog, you know.'

'I suppose not,' said the doctor, and had doubled the Inspector's dose of beta-blockers but under a different trade name, added some pills to counter the effect on his fingers, and changed the name of the diuretics. Flint had gone back to his office from the chemist feeling like a walking medicine cabinet.

A week later, he was hard put to it to say what he felt like. 'Fucking awful is all I know,' he told Sergeant Yates who'd been unwise enough to enquire. 'I must have passed more bleeding water in the last six weeks than the Aswan Dam. And I've learnt one thing, this bloody town doesn't have enough public lavatories.'

'I should have thought there were enough to be going on with,' said Yates, who'd once had the unhappy experience of being arrested by a uniformed constable while loitering in the public toilets near the cinema in plain clothes trying to apprehend a genuine loo-lounger.

'Well, you can think again,' snapped Flint. 'I was caught short in Canton Street yesterday, and do you think I could find one? Not on your nelly. Had to use a lane between two houses and nearly got nabbed by a woman hanging her washing on the line. One of these days I'll be done for flashing.'

'Talking about flashing, we've had another report of a case down by the river. Tried it out on a woman of fifty this time.'

'Makes a change from those Wilt bitches and Councillor Birkenshaw. Get a good look at the brute?'

'She said she couldn't see it very well because he was on the other side but she had the impression it wasn't very...'

'It? It?' shouted Flint. 'I'm not interested in it. I'm talking about the bugger's mug. How the hell do you think we're going to identify the maniac. Have a prick parade and ask the victims to go along studying cocks? The next thing you'll be doing is issuing identikits of penises.'

'She couldn't see his face. He was looking down.'

'And peeing, I daresay. Probably on the same fucking tablets I'm doomed to. Anyway, I wouldn't take the evidence of a fifty-year-old blasted woman. They're all sex-mad at that age. I should know. My old woman's practically off her rocker about it and I keep telling her that the ruddy quack's lowered my blood pressure so much I couldn't get the fucking thing up even if I wanted to. Know what she said?'

'No,' said Sergeant Yates, who found the subject rather distasteful, and anyway it was obvious he didn't know what Mrs Flint had said and he didn't want to hear. The whole notion of anyone wanting the Inspector was beyond him. 'She had the gall to tell me to do it the other way.'

'The other way?' said Yates in spite of himself.

'The old soixante-neuf. Disgusting. And probably illegal. And if anyone thinks I'm going to go down at my age, and on my ruddy missus at that, they're clean off their fucking rockers.'

'I should think they'd have to be,' said the Sergeant almost pitifully. He'd always been relatively fond of old Flint, but there were limits. In a frantic attempt to change the topic to something less revolting, he mentioned the Head of the Drug Squad. He was just in time. The Inspector had just begun a repulsive description of Mrs Flint's attempts to stimulate him. 'Hodge? What's that bloody cock-sucker want now?' Flint bawled, still managing to combine the two subjects.

'Phone-tapping facilities,' said Yates. 'Reckons he's on to a heroin syndicate. And a big one.'

'Where?'

'Won't say, not to me any road.'

'What's he want my permission for? Got to ask the Super or the Chief Constable and I don't come into it. Or do I?' It had dawned on Flint that this might be a subtle dig at him about his son. 'If that bastard thinks he's going to take the piss out of me...' he muttered and stopped.

'I shouldn't think he could,' said Yates, getting his own back, 'not with those tablets you're on.'

But Flint hadn't heard. His mind had veered off along lines determined more than he knew by beta-blockers, vasodilators and all the other drugs he was on, but which combined with his natural hatred for Hodge and the accumulated worries of his job and his family to turn him into an exceedingly nasty man. If the Head of the Drug Squad thought he was going to put one over on him he'd got another thing coming. 'There are more ways of stuffing a cat than filling it with cream,' he said with a gruesome smile.

Sergeant Yates looked at him doubtfully. 'Shouldn't it be the other way round?' he asked, and immediately regretted any reference to other way round. He'd had enough of Mrs Flint's thwarted sex life, and stuffing cats was definitely out. The old man must be off his rocker.

'Quite right,' said the Inspector. 'We'll fill the bugger with cream all right. Got any idea who he wants to tap?'

'He's not telling me that sort of thing. He reckons the uniform branch aren't to be trusted and he doesn't want any leaks.' The word was too much for Inspector Flint. He shot out of his chair and was presently finding temporary relief in the toilet.

By the time he returned to his office, his mood had changed to the almost dementedly cheerful. 'Tell him we'll give him all the co-operation he needs,' he told the Sergeant, 'only too pleased to help.'

'Are you sure?'

'Of course I'm sure. He's only got to come and see me. Tell him that.'

'If you say so,' said Yates and left the room a puzzled man. Flint sat on in a state of drug-induced bemusement. There was only one bright spot on his limited horizon. If that bastard Hodge wanted to foul up his career by making unauthorized phone taps, Flint would do all he could to encourage him. Fortified by this sudden surge of optimism, he absent-mindedly helped himself to another beta-blocker.