hospital phoned the police station to ask what exactly had happened. ‘The bugger was mugged and dumped unconscious in the street behind the New Estate. What he was doing there we’ve no idea. Probably drunk or…well, your guess is as good as mine. He wasn’t wearing any trousers. Being in that district he was asking for it.’
‘Any identity?’ the doctor asked.
‘One of our men saw him and thought he recognised him as a lecturer at the Tech. Name of Wilt. Mr Henry Wilt. He taught Communications Studies and–’
‘So what’s his address? Oh, never mind, you can inform his relatives he’s been mugged and is in Ipford Hospital.’ And he rang off angrily.
In his office Inspector Flint leapt to his feet and barged into the passage. ‘Did I hear you say ‘Henry Wilt’?’
The Sergeant nodded. ‘He’s up at the hospital. Been mugged according to some quack who…’
But Flint was no longer listening. He hurried down to the police station car park and headed for the hospital.
It was a frustrated Inspector Flint who finally found Wilt in the overcrowded maze that was Ipford General Hospital. To begin with he’d been directed to Neurology only to find Wilt had been moved to Vasectomy.
‘What on earth for? I understood he had been mugged. What’s he need a vasectomy for?’
‘He doesn’t. He was only here temporarily. Then he was taken to Hysterectomy.’
‘Hysterectomy? Dear God,’ said Flint faintly. He could just begin to understand why a man who must presumably have been an active participant in helping to foist those dreadful quads on the world might deserve a vasectomy to prevent him inflicting any more nightmares; hysterectomy was something else again. ‘But the blighter’s a man. You can’t give a man a hysterectomy. It’s not possible.’
‘That’s why he was moved to Infectious Diseases 3. They had a spare bed there. At least I think it was ID 3,’ the nurse told him. ‘I know someone died there this morning. Mind you, they always do.’
‘Why?’ asked Flint incautiously.
‘Aids,’ said the nurse, pushing an obese woman on a trolley past him.
‘But they can’t put a man who’s been beaten up and is bleeding in the same bed as a bloke who’s just died of Aids. It’s outrageous. Bloody near condemning him to death.’
‘Oh, they sterilise the sheets and all that,’ said the nurse over her shoulder.
It was a pale, frustrated and appalled Inspector who finally found Wilt in Unisex 8 which was reserved for geriatrics who had had a variety of operations that required them to wear catheters, drips and in several cases tubes protruding from various other orifices. Flint couldn’t see why it was called a unisex ward. Multi-sex would have been more accurate though just as unpleasant. To take his attention away from a patient of indeterminate sex–for once Flint preferred the politically correct word ‘gender’–who clearly had an almost continuous incontinence problem and what amounted to a phobic horror of catheters, the Inspector tried to concentrate on Wilt. His condition was pretty awful too. His scalp was bandaged and his face badly bruised and swollen but the Ward Sister assured Flint that he’d soon recover consciousness. Flint said he sincerely hoped so.
Shortly afterwards the old man in the next bed had convulsions and his false teeth fell out. A nurse put them back and called the Sister who took her time coming.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ she demanded. Even to Flint’s medically untutored way of thinking, the question seemed gratuitous. How the hell could the old fellow know what
