'Just a number. I can't'
'Get it,' said Flint. Mrs Jardin went out of the room and Flint sat looking at the titles in the bookshelves. They meant very little to him and told him only that she'd read or at least bought a great many books on sociology, economics, the Third World and penal reform. It didn't impress Flint. If the woman had really wanted to do something about the conditions of prisoners, she'd have got a job as a wardress and lived on low wages, instead of dabbling in prison visits and talking about the poor calibre of the staff who had to do society's dirty work. Stick up her taxes to build better prisons and she'd soon start squealing. Talk about hypocrisy.
Mrs Jardin came back with a piece of paper. 'That's the number,' she said, handing it to him. Flint looked at it. A London phone box.
'When did you have to call?'
'They said between 9.30 and 9.40 at night the day before I had to collect the packet.'
Flint changed direction. 'How many times did you collect?'
'Only three.'
He got to his feet. It was no use. They'd know Mac was dead, even if it hadn't been announced in the papers, so there was no point in supposing they'd make another drop, but at least they were operating out of London. Hodge was on the wrong track. On the other hand, Flint himself couldn't be said to be on the right one. The trail stopped at Mrs Jardin and a public telephone in London. If McCullum had still been alive...
Flint left the house and drove over to the prison. 'I'd like to take a look at Mac's list of visitors,' he told Chief Warder Blaggs, and spent half an hour writing names in his notebook, together with addresses.
'Someone in that little lot had to be running messages,' he said when he finished. 'Not that I expect to get anywhere, but it's worth trying.'
Afterwards, back at the Station, he had checked them on the Central Records Computer and cross-referenced for drug dealing, but the one link he was looking for, some petty criminal living in Ipford or nearby, was missing. And he wasn't going to waste his time trying to tackle London. In fact, if he were truthful, he had to admit he was wasting his time even in Ipford except...except that something told him he wasn't. It nagged at his mind. Sitting in his office, he followed that instinct. The girl had been seen by her flat-mate down by the marina. Several times. But the marina was just another place like the telephone kiosk on the London Road. It had to be something more definite, something he could check out.
Flint picked up the phone and called the Drug Addiction Study Unit at the Ipford Hospital.
By lunchtime, Wilt was up and about. To be exact, he'd been up and about several times during the morning, in part to get another hot-water bottle from the freezer, but more often in a determined effort not to masturbate himself to death. It was all very well Eva supposing she'd benefit from the effects of whatever diabolical irritant she'd added to his homebrew, but to Wilt's way of thinking, a wife who'd damned near poisoned her husband didn't deserve what few sexual benefits he had to offer. Give her an inkling of satisfaction from this experiment and next time he'd land up in hospital with internal bleeding and a permanent erection. As it was, he had a hard time with his penis.
'I'll freeze the damn thing down,' had been Wilt's first thought and for a while it had worked, though painfully. But after a time he had drifted off to sleep and had woken an hour later with the awful impression that he'd taken it into his head to have an affair with a freshly caught Dover Sole. Wilt hurled himself off the thing and had then taken the bottle downstairs to put it back in the fridge before realizing that this wouldn't be particularly hygienic. He was in the process of washing it when the front doorbell rang. Wilt dropped the bottle on the draining-board, retrieved it from the sink when it slithered off and finally tried wedging it between the upturned teapot and a casserole dish in the drying rack, before going to answer the call.
