An hour later a group of drunk skinheads passed the head of the alley, spotted the body and came up to have a look at it.
‘A bloody old poofter,’ said one of them, drawing the conclusion from the lack of Wilt’s jeans. ‘Let’s put the boot in.’ And having expressed their feelings for gays by kicking him in the ribs a few times and once in the face, they staggered off laughing. Wilt felt nothing. He had found an Older England than he’d expected but he still didn’t know it.
A feeble dawn had broken when he was found by a police car. Two constables got out and looked down at him.
‘Best call an ambulance. This one’s a right mess. Tell them it’s urgent.’
While the WPC used the car radio the other looked around. Above his head the plywood board opened.
‘Happened around three hours ago,’ said an old woman. ‘A woman in a white car came and dragged him out. Then some young bastards gave him a kicking just for the fun of it.’
The constable peered up at her. ‘You should have called us, mother,’ he said.
‘What with, I’d like to know? Think I’ve got a phone?’
‘Don’t suppose you have. What are you doing here anyway? Last time you were down the road.’
The old woman poked her head further out. ‘Think I’m staying in one place round here? Not likely. I may be cabbage-looking but I ain’t that green. Got to keep moving so those young swine don’t get me.’
The policeman took out a notebook. ‘Get a look at the number-plate of the car?’ he asked.
‘What, in this dark? Course I didn’t. Saw a woman though. Rich bitch by the look of her. Not from round here.’
‘We can drive you down with us to the station. You’ll be safe enough down there.’
‘I don’t mean that. I want to go back where I came from. That’s what I mean, copper.’
But before the constable could ask where that was the Woman Police Officer returned with the news that no ambulances were available. There had been a major accident involving two coaches full of schoolchildren on a trip abroad, a petrol tanker and a lorry carrying pigs on the motorway twenty miles away and every available ambulance and fire engine had been sent to the scene.
‘Pigs?’ queried the constable.
‘At least they think it was pigs. The Duty Sergeant’s been told the smell of roast pork is appalling.’
‘Never mind about that. What about the school kids?’
‘They’re in the ambulances. The two coaches skidded on the pig fat and turned over,’ the WPC told him.
‘Oh well, we’d better put this bastard in the back of the car and take him down the hospital ourselves.’
Above their heads the old woman had closed the plywood board again and disappeared. With Wilt lying prone on the back seat they drove to Ipford General Hospital and met with a hostile reception.
‘Oh, all right,’ said a distraught doctor called by the nurse in A&E. ‘It will be difficult with this damned accident. We haven’t any spare beds. We haven’t even a spare trolley. I’m not even sure we’ve got any spare corridors, and just to make working in what amounts to a human abattoir so fulfilling, we’ve got a major catastrophe on our hands, four doctors off sick and the usual shortage of nursing staff. Why can’t you take him home? He’s less likely to die there.’
All the same, Wilt was finally lifted on to a stretcher, and space in a long corridor
