'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
