Wilt on High (20 page)

‘You’ll get me slit for this,’ said the Bull when he’d finished with Mrs Jardin, the Prison Visitor.

‘I don’t know why,’ said Flint. ‘Mr Blaggs here isn’t going to say who told him and it doesn’t necessarily have to come out at your trial.’

‘Christ,’ said the Bull. ‘You’re not still going on with that, are you?’

‘You tell me,’ said Flint, maintaining the pressure. By the time he left the prison three hours later, Inspector Flint was almost a happy man. True, the Bull hadn’t told him everything, but then he hadn’t expected him to. In all likelihood, the fool didn’t know much more, but he’d given Flint enough names to be going on with. Best of all, he’d grassed too far to back out, even if the threat of a murder charge lost its effect. The Bull would indeed get himself sliced by some other prisoner if the news
ever got out. And the Bear was going to be Flint’s next target.

‘Being a copper’s a dirty business sometimes,’ he thought as he drove back to the police station. But drugs and violence were dirtier still. Flint went up to his office and began to check out some names.

Ted Lingon’s name rang a bell – two bells, when he put his lists together. And Lingon ran a garage. Promising. But who was Annie Mosgrave?

‘Who?’ said Major Glaushof.

‘Some guy who teaches English or something evenings. Name of Wilt,’ said the Duty Lieutenant. ‘H. Wilt.’

‘I’ll be right over,’ said Glaushof. He put the phone down and went through to his wife.

‘Don’t wait up, honey,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a problem.’

‘Me too,’ said Mrs Glaushof, and settled back to watch Dallas on BBC. It was kind of reassuring to know Texas was still there and it wasn’t damp and raining all the time and goddam cold like Baconheath, and people still thought big and did big things. So she shouldn’t have married an Airbase Security Officer with a thing going for German Shepherds. And to think he’d seemed so romantic when she’d met him back from Iran. Some security there. She should have known.

Outside, Glaushof climbed into his jeep with the three dogs and drove off between the houses towards the gates to Civilian Quarters. A group of men were standing well back from Wilt’s Escort in the parking lot. Glaushof deliberately skidded the jeep to a stop and got out.

‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘A bomb?’

‘Jesus, I don’t know,’ said the Lieutenant, who was listening to a receiver. ‘Could be anything.’

‘Like he’s left his CB on,’ a Corporal explained, ‘only there’s two of them and they’re bleeping.’

‘Know any Brit who has two CBs running continuously the same time?’ asked the Lieutenant. ‘No way, and the frequency’s wrong. Way too high.’

‘So it could be a bomb,’ said Glaushof. ‘Why the fuck did you let it in?’

In the darkness and under threat of being blown to bits by whatever diabolical device the car concealed, Glaushof edged away. The little group followed him.

‘Guy comes every Friday, gives his lecture, has coffee and goes on home no problem,’ said the Lieutenant.

‘So you let him drive right through with that lot buzzing and you don’t stop him,’ said Glaushof. ‘We could have a Beirut bomb blast on our hands.’

‘We didn’t pick up the bleep till later.’

‘Too later,’ said Glaushof, ‘I’m not taking any chances. I want the sand trucks brought up but fast. We’re going to seal that car. Move.’

‘It ain’t no bomb,’ said the Corporal, ‘not sending like that. With a bomb the signals would be coming in.’

‘Whatever,’ said Glaushof, ‘it’s a breach of security and it’s going to be sealed.’

‘If you say so, Major,’ said the Corporal and disappeared across the parking lot. For a moment, Glaushof hesitated and considered what other action he should take. At least he’d acted promptly to protect the base and his own career. As Base Security Officer, he’d always been against these foreign lecturers coming in with their subversive
talks. He’d already discovered a geographer who’d sneaked a whole lot of shit about the dangers to bird-life from noise pollution and kerosene into his lectures on the development of the English landscape. Glaushof had had him busted as a member of Greenpeace. A car with radios transmitting continuously suggested something much more serious. And something much more serious could be just what he needed.

Glaushof ran through a mental checklist of enemies of the Free World: terrorists, Russian spies, subversives, women from Greenham Common … whatever. It didn’t matter. The key thing was that Base Intelligence had fouled things up and it was up to him to rub their faces in the shit. Glaushof smiled to himself at the prospect. If there was one man he detested, it was the Intelligence Officer. Nobody heard of Glaushof, but Colonel Urwin with his line to the Pentagon and his wife in with the Base Commander’s so they were invited to play Bridge Saturday nights, oh sure, he was a big noise. And a Yale man. Screw him. Glaushof intended to. ‘This guy … what did you say his name is?’ he asked the Lieutenant.

‘Wilt,’ said the Lieutenant.

‘Where are you holding him?’

‘Not holding him anyplace,’ said the Lieutenant. ‘Called you first thing we picked up the signals.’

‘So where is he?’

‘I guess he’s over lecturing someplace,’ said the Lieutenant. ‘His details are in the guardhouse. Schedule and all.’

They hurried across the parking lot to the gates to the civilian quarters and Glaushof studied the entry in Wilt’s file. It was brief and uninformative. ‘Lecture Hall 9,’ said the Lieutenant. ‘You want me to have him picked up?’

‘No,’ said Glaushof, ‘not yet. Just see no one gets out, is all.’

‘No way he can except over the new fence,’ said the Lieutenant, ‘and I don’t see him getting far. I’ve switched the current on.’

‘Fine,’ said Glaushof. ‘So he comes out you stop him.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said the Lieutenant, and went out to check the guards, while Glaushof picked up the phone and called the Security Patrol. ‘I want Lecture Hall 9 surrounded,’ he said, ‘but nobody to move till I come.’

He sat on staring distractedly at the centrepage of
Playgirl
featuring a male nude which had been pinned to the wall. If this bastard Wilt could be persuaded to talk, Glaushof’s career would be made. So how to get him in the right frame of mind? First of all, he had to know what was in that car. He was still puzzling over tactics when the Lieutenant coughed discreetly behind him. Glaushof reacted violently. He didn’t like the implications of that cough. ‘Did you pin this up?’ he shouted at the Lieutenant.

‘Negative,’ said the Lieutenant, who disliked the question almost as much as Glaushof had hated the cough. ‘No, sir, I did not. That’s Captain Clodiak.’

‘That’s Captain Clodiak?’ said Glaushof, turning back to examine the picture again. ‘I knew she … he …
You’ve got to be kidding, Lieutenant. That’s not the Captain Clodiak I know.’

‘She put it there, sir. She likes that sort of thing.’

‘Yes, well I guess she’s a pretty feisty woman,’ said Glaushof to avoid the accusation that he was discriminatory. In career prospect terms, it was almost as dangerous as being called a faggot. Not almost; it was worse.

‘I happen to be Church of God,’ said the Lieutenant, ‘and that is irreligious according to my denomination.’

But Glaushof wasn’t to be drawn into a discussion. ‘Could be,’ he said. ‘Some other time, huh?’ He went out and back to the parking lot where the Corporal, now accompanied by a Major and several men from the Demolition and Excavation section, had surrounded Wilt’s car with four gigantic dumpers filled with sand, sweeping aside a dozen other vehicles in the process. As he approached, Glaushof was blinded by two searchlights which had suddenly been switched on. ‘Douse those mothers,’ he shouted, stumbling about in the glare. ‘You want them to know in Moscow what we’re doing?’ In the darkness that followed this pronouncement, Glaushof banged into the wheelhub of one of the dumptrucks.

‘Okay, so I go in without lights,’ said the Corporal. ‘No problem. You think it’s a bomb, I don’t. Bombs don’t transmit CB.’ And before Glaushof could remind him to call him ‘Sir’ in future, the Corporal had walked across to the car.

‘Mr Wilt,’ said Mrs Ofrey, ‘would you like to elucidate on the question of the rôle of women in British society with particular regard to the part played in professional life by the Right Honorable Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher and …’

Wilt stared at her and wondered why Mrs Ofrey always read her questions from a card and why they seldom had anything to do with what he had been talking about. She must spend the rest of the week thinking them up. And the questions always had to do with the Queen and Mrs Thatcher, presumably because Mrs Ofrey had once dined at Woburn Abbey with the Duke and Duchess of Bedford and their hospitality had affected her deeply. But at least this evening he was giving her his undivided attention.

From the moment he’d entered the lecture room, he’d been having problems. The bandage he had wound round his loins had come undone on the drive over, and before he could do anything about it one end had begun to worm its way down his right trouser leg. To make matters worse, Captain Clodiak had come late and had seated herself in front of him with her legs crossed, and had promptly forced Wilt to press himself against the lectern to quell yet another erection or, at least, hide the event from his audience. And by concentrating on Mrs Ofrey, he had so far managed to avoid a second glance at Captain Clodiak.

But there were disadvantages in concentrating so intently on Mrs Ofrey too. Even though she wore enough curiously patterned knitwear to have subsidized several
crofters in Western Scotland, and her few charms were sufficiently muted by wool to make some sort of antidote to the terrifying chic of Captain Clodiak – Wilt had already noted the Captain’s blouse and what he took to be a combat skirt in shantung silk – Mrs Ofrey was still a woman. In any case, she evidently liked to be socially exclusive and sat by herself to the left of the rest of the class, and by the time he’d got halfway through his lecture, he’d become positively wry-necked in his regard for her. Wilt had switched his attention to an acned clerk from the PX stores whose other courses were karate and aerobics and whose interest in British Culture was limited to unravelling the mysteries of cricket. That hadn’t worked too well either, and after ten minutes of almost constant eye-contact and Wilt’s deprecating observations on the effect of women’s suffrage on the voting patterns in elections since 1928, the man had begun to shift awkwardly in his chair and Wilt had suddenly realized the fellow thought he was being propositioned. Not wanting to be beaten to pulp by a karate expert, he had tried alternating between Mrs Ofrey and the wall behind the rest of the class, but each time it seemed that Captain Clodiak was smiling more significantly. Wilt had clung to the lectern in the hope that he’d manage to get through the hour without ejaculating into his trousers. He was so worried about this that he hardly noticed that Mrs Ofrey had finished her question. ‘Would you say that view was correct?’ she said by way of a prompt.

‘Well … er … yes,’ said Wilt, who couldn’t recall
what the question was anyway. Something to do with the Monarchy being a matriarchy. ‘Yes, I suppose in a general way I’d go along with you,’ he said, wedging himself more firmly against the lectern. ‘On the other hand, just because a country has a female ruler, I don’t think we can assume it’s not male-dominated. After all, we had Queen Boadicea in Pre-Roman Britain and I wouldn’t have thought there was an awful lot of Women’s Lib about then, would you?’

‘I wasn’t asking about the feminist movement,’ said Mrs Ofrey, with a nasty inflection that suggested she was a pre-Eisenhower American, ‘my question was directed to the matriarchal nature of the Monarchy.’

‘Quite,’ said Wilt, fighting for time. Something desperate seemed to have happened to the cricket box. He’d lost touch with the thing. ‘Though just because we’ve had a number of Queens … well, I suppose we’ve had almost as many as we’ve had kings … must have had more, come to think of it? Is that right? I mean, each king had to have a queen …’

‘Henry VIII had a whole heap of them,’ said an astro-navigational expert, whose reading tastes seemed to suggest she would have preferred life in some sort of airconditioned and deodorized Middle Ages. ‘He must have been some man.’

‘Definitely,’ said Wilt, grateful for her intervention. At this rate, the discussion might spread and leave him free to find that damned box again. ‘In fact he had five. There was Katherine of …’

‘Excuse me asking, Mr Wilt,’ interrupted an engineer, ‘but do old Queens count as Queens? Like they’re widows. Is a King’s widow still a Queen?’

‘She’s a Queen Mother,’ said Wilt, who by this time had his hand in his pocket and was searching for the box. ‘It’s purely titular of course. She –’

‘Did you say “titular”?’ asked Captain Clodiak, endowing the word with qualities Wilt had never intended and certainly didn’t need now. And her voice suited her face. Captain Clodiak came from the South. ‘Would you care to amplify what titular means?’

‘Amplify?’ said Wilt weakly. But before he could answer, the engineer had interrupted again.

‘Pardon me breaking in, Mr Wilt,’ he said, ‘but you’ve got kind of something hanging out of your leg.’

‘I have?’ said Wilt, clutching the lectern even more closely. The attention of the entire class was now focused on his right leg. Wilt tried to hide it behind his left.

‘And by the look of it I’d say it was something important to you.’

Wilt knew damned well what it was. With a lurch, he let go of the lectern and grabbed his trouser leg in a vain attempt to stop the box but the beastly thing had already evaded him. It hung for a moment almost coyly half out of the trouser cuff and then slid onto his shoe. Wilt’s hand shot out and smothered the brute and the next moment he was trying to get it into his pocket. The box didn’t budge. Still attached to the bandage by the plaster he had used, it refused to come without the bandage. As Wilt
tried to drag it away it became obvious he was in danger of splitting the seam of his trousers. It was also fairly obvious that the other end of the bandage was still round his waist and had no intention of coming off. At this rate, he’d end up half-naked in front of the class and suffering from a strangulated hernia into the bargain. On the other hand, he could hardly stay half-crouching there and any attempt to drag the bloody thing up the inside of his trousers from the top was bound to be misinterpreted. In fact, by the sound of things, his predicament already had been. Even from his peculiar position, Wilt was aware that Captain Clodiak had got to her feet, a bleeper was sounding and the astro-navigator was saying something about codpieces.