'I don't. I mean an authorized prison visitor, a bloody licensed busybody. They come in and treat us officers like we've committed the ruddy crimes and the villains are all bloody orphans who didn't get enough teat when they were toddlers. Right, well, this bitch of a PV, name of Jardin, was the one McCullum got to bring his stuff in.'
'Christ,' said Flint. 'What did she do that for?'
'Scared,' said Blaggs. 'Some of Mac's nastier mates on the outside paid her a visit with razors and a bottle of nitric acid and threatened to leave her looking like a cross between a dog's dinner and a leper with acne unless...You get the message?'
'Yes,' said Flint, who'd begun to sympathize with the prison visitor, though for the life of him he couldn't visualize what a leper with acne looked like. 'And you mean she walked in and announced the fact?'
'Oh dear me, no,' said Blaggs. 'Starts off we've done for MrI ask you, Misterfucking McCullum ourselves. Practically said I'd hanged the sod myself, not that I'd have minded. So we took her down the morgueof course it just happened the prison quack was doing an autopsy at the time and didn't much like the look of things by the sound of it, using a saw he was, tooand he wasn't having any crap about anyone doing anything to the bugger. Right, well when she'd come to, like, and he's saying the swine died of drug overdose and anyone who said different'd end up in court for slander, she cracked. Tears all over the place and practically down on her knees in front of the Governor. And it all comes out how she's been running heroin into the prison for months. Ever so bleeding sorry and all.'
'I should bloody well think so,' said Flint. 'When's she going to be charged?'
Mr Blaggs drank his beer mournfully. 'Never,' he grunted.
'Never? But smuggling anything, let alone drugs, into a prison is an indictable offence,'
'Don't tell me,' said Blaggs. 'On the other hand, the Governor don't want no scandal, can't afford one with his job up for grabs and anyway, she'd done a social service in a way by shoving the bugger where he belongs.'
'There is that,' said Flint. 'Does Hodge know this?'
The Chief Warder shook his head. 'Like I said, the Governor don't want no publicity. Anyway, she claimed she thought the stuff was talcum powder. Like hell, but you know what a Rumpole would do with a defence like that. Prison authorities entirely to blame, and so on. Negligence, the lot.'
'Did she say where she got the heroin?' asked Flint.
'Picked it up back of a telephone box on the London Road at night. Never saw the blokes who delivered it.'
'And it won't have been any of the lot who'd threatened her either.'
By the time the Inspector left the pub, he was a happy man. Hodge was way offline, and Flint had a conscience-stricken prison visitor to question. He wasn't even worried about the effect of four pints of the best bitter being flushed through his system by those bloody piss-pills. He'd already charted his route home by way of three relatively clean public lavatories.
Chapter 10
But if Flint's mood had changed for the better, Inspector Hodge's hadn't. His interpretation of Wilt's behaviour had been coloured by the accident at the end of Nott Road. 'The bastard's got to know we're onto him, ramming a police car like that,' he told Sergeant Runk, 'so what's he do?'
'Buggered if I know,' said the Sergeant, who preferred early nights and couldn't think at all clearly at one in the morning.
'He goes for an early arrest, knowing we've got no hard evidence and will have to let him go.'
