by Dick Francis
I retreated down the unvarnished nitty-gritty fire stairs until I was back on the working-office floor, standing there indecisively, wondering if the measurers still barred my purpose.
I heard voices, growing louder and stopping on the other side of the door. I was prepared to go into a busy-employee routine, but it appeared they preferred the elevator to the stairs. The lifting machinery whirred on the other side of the stairwell, the voices moved into the elevator and diminished to zero. I couldn’t tell whether they’d gone up or down, and I was concerned only that they’d all gone and not left one behind.
There was no point in waiting. I opened the fire door, stepped onto the carpet and right towards Mrs. Dove’s domain.
I had the whole office floor to myself.
Great.
Mrs. Dove’s door was locked twice: an old-looking mortise and a new knob with a keyhole in the center. These were locks I liked. There could be no nasty surprises like bolts or chains or wedges on the inside: also the emphatic statement of two locks probably meant that there were things of worth to guard.
The mortise lock took a whole minute, with the ghost of my old master breathing disapprovingly down my neck. The modem lock took twenty seconds of delicate probing. One had to “feel” one’s way through. False fingers for that, as for much else, were useless.
Once inside Mrs. Dove’s office, I spent time relocking the door so that anyone outside trying it for security would find it as it should be. If anyone came in with keys, I would have warning enough to hide.
Mrs. Dove’s cote was large and comfortable, with a wide desk, several of the Scandinavian-design armchairs and grainy blow-up black and white photographs of racing horses around the walls. Along one side there were the routine office machines—fax, copier, and large print-out calculator, and, on the desk, a computer, shrouded for the weekend in a fitted cover. There were multiple filing cabinets and a tall white-painted and—as I discovered—locked cupboard.
Mrs. Dove had a window with louvered blinds and a . distant view of the Mersey. Mrs. Dove’s office was managing director stuff.
I had only a vague idea of what I was looking for. The audited accounts I’d seen in Companies House seemed not to match the actual state of affairs at Frodsham. The audit did, of course, refer to a year gone by, to the first with Owen Yorkshire in charge, but the fragile bottom-line profit, as shown, would not suggest or justify expensive publicity campaigns or televised receptions for the notables of Liverpool.
The old French adage “look for the lady” was a century out of date, my old teacher had said. In modem times it should be “look for the money,” and shortly before he died, he had amended that to “follow the paper.” Shady or doubtful transactions, he said, always left a paper trail. Even in the age of computers, he’d insisted that paper showed the way; and over and over again I’d proved him right.
The paper in Mrs. Dove’s office was all tidied away in the many filing cabinets, which were locked.
Most filing cabinets, like these, locked all drawers simultaneously with a notched vertical rod out of sight within the right-hand front comer, operated by a single key at the top. Turning the key raised the rod, allowing all the drawers to open. I wasn’t bad at opening filing cabinets.
The trouble was that Topline Foods had little to hide, or at least not at first sight. Pounds of paper referred to orders and invoices for incoming supplies; pounds more to sales, pounds more to the expenses of running an industry, from insurance to wages, to electricity to general maintenance.
The filing cabinets took too long and were a waste of time. What they offered was the entirely respectable basis of next year’s audit.
I locked them all again and, after investigating the desk drawers themselves, which held only stationery, took the cover off the computer and switched it on, pressing the buttons for List Files, and Enter. Scrolls of file names appeared and I tried one at random: “Aintree.”
Onto the screen came details of the lunch given the day before the Grand National, the guest list, the menu, a summary of the speeches and a list of the coverage given to the occasion in the press.
Nothing I could find seemed any more secret. I switched it off, replaced the cover and turned my lock pickers to the tall white cupboard.
The feeling of time running out, however irrational, shortened my breath and made me hurry. I always envied the supersleuths in films who put their hands on the right papers in the first ten seconds and, this time, I didn’t know if the right paper even existed.
It turned out to be primarily not a paper but a second computer.
Inside the white cupboard, inside a drop-down desk arrangement in there, I came across a second keyboard and a second screen. I switched the computer on and nothing happened, which wasn’t astounding as I found an electric lead lying alongside, disconnected. I plugged it into the computer and tried again, and with a grumble or two the machine became ready for business.
I pressed List Files again, and this time found myself looking not at individual subjects, but at Directories, each of which contained file names such as “Formula A.”
What I had come across were the more private records, the electronic files, some very secret, some not.
In quick succession I highlighted the “Directories” and brought them to the screen until one baldly listed “Quint”: but no amount of button pressing got me any further.
Think.
The reason I couldn’t get the Quint information onto the screen must be because it wasn’t in the computer.
OK? OK. So where was it?
On the shelf above the computer stood a row of box files, numbered 1 to 9, but not one labeled Quint.
I lifted down number 1 and looked inside. There were several letters filed in there, also a blue computer floppy disk in a clear cover. According to the letters, box file number 1 referred to loans made to Topline Foods, loans not repaid on the due date. There was also a mention of “sweeteners” and “quid pro quos.” I fed the floppy disk into the drive slot in the computer body and got no further than a single, unhelpful word on the screen: PASSWORD?
Password? Heaven knew. I looked into the box files one by one and came to Quint in number 6. There were three floppies in there, not one.
I fed in the first.
PASSWORD?
Second and third disks—PASSWORD?
Bugger, I thought.
Searching for anything helpful, I lifted down a heavy white cardboard box, like a double-height shoebox, that filled the rest of the box-file shelf. In there was a row of big black high-impact plastic protective coverings. I picked out one and unlatched its fastenings, and found inside it a videotape, but a tape of double the ordinary width. A label on the tape said Broadcast Quality Videotape. Underneath that was a single word, Betacam. Under that was the legend “Quint Series. 15 X 30 secs.”
I closed the thick black case and tried another one. Same thing. Quint series. 15 X 30 sees. All of the cases held the same.
These double-size tapes needed a special tape player not available in Mrs. Dove’s office. To see what was on these expensive tapes meant taking one with me.
I could, of course, simply put one of them inside my tracksuit jacket and walk out with it. I could take all the “password” disks. If I did I was (a) stealing, (b) in danger of being found carrying the goods, and (c) making it impossible for any information they held to be used in any later legal inquiry. I would steal the information itself, if I could, but not the software.
Think.
As I’d told Charles at Aynsford, I’d had to learn a good deal about computers just to keep a grip on the accelerating world, but the future became the present so fast that I could never get ahead.
Someone tried to open the door.
There was no time to restore the room to normal. I could only speed across the carpet and stand where I would be hidden by the door when it swung inward. Plan B meant simply running—and I was wearing running shoes.
The knob turned
again and rattled, but nothing else happened. Whoever was outside had presumably been either keyless or reassured: in either case it played havoc with my breathing.
Oddly, the pumping adrenaline brought me my computer answer, which was, if I couldn’t bring the contents of a floppy disk to the screen, I could transfer it whole to another computer, one that would give me all the time I needed to crack the password, or to get help from people who could.
Alongside the unconnected electric cable there had been a telephone cable, also unattached. I snapped it into the telephone socket on the computer, thereby connecting Mrs. Dove’s modem to the world-wide Internet.
It needed a false start or two while I desperately tried to remember half-learned techniques, but finally I was rewarded by the screen prompting: “Enter telephone number.”
I tapped in my own home number in the apartment in Pont Square, and pressed Enter, and the screen announced nonchalantly “Dialing in progress,” then “Call accepted,” then “Transfer,” and finally “Transfer complete.”
Whatever was on the first guarded “Quint” disk was now in my own computer in London. I transferred the other two “Quint” floppies in the same way, and then the disk from box-file number 1, and for good measure another from box 3, identified as “Tilepit.”
There was no way that I knew of transferring the Betacam tapes. Regretfully I left them alone. I looked through the paper pages in the “Quint” box and made a photocopy of one page—a list of unusual racecourses—folding it and hiding it within the zipped pocket of my belt.
Finally I disconnected the electric and telephone cables again, closed the computer compartment, checked that the box files and Betacam tapes were as they should be, relocked the white cupboard, then unlocked and gently opened the door to the passage.
Silence.
Breathing out with relief, I relocked Mrs. Dove’s door and walked along through the row of cabby-hole offices and came to the first setback: the fire door leading to brown-overalls territory was not merely locked but had a red light shining above it.
Shining red lights often meant alarm systems switched on with depressingly loud sirens ready to screech.
I’d been too long in Mrs. Dove’s office. I retreated towards her door again and went down the fire stairs beside the elevator, emerging into the ground-floor entrance hall with its glass doors to the parking area beyond.
One step into the lobby proved to be one step too far. Something hit my head rather hard, and one of the beefy bodyguards in blue flung a sort of strap around my body and effectively pinned my upper arms to my sides.
I plunged about a bit and got another crack on the head, which left me unable to help myself and barely able to think. I was aware of being in the elevator, but wasn’t quite sure how I’d got there. I was aware of having my ankles strapped together and of being dragged ignominiously over some carpet and dropped in a chair.
Regulation Scandinavian chair with wooden arms, like all the others.
“Tie him up,” a voice said, and a third strap tightened across my chest, so that when the temporary mist cleared I woke to a state of near physical immobility and a mind full of curses.
The voice belonged to Owen Yorkshire. He said, “Right. Good. Well done. Leave the wrench on the desk. Go back downstairs and don’t let anyone up here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Wait,” Yorkshire commanded, sounding uncertain. “Are you sure you’ve got the right man?”
“Yes, sir. He’s wearing the identity badge we issued to him yesterday. He was supposed to return it when he left, but he didn’t.”
“All right. Thanks. Off you go.”
The door closed behind the bodyguards and Owen Yorkshire plucked the identity badge from my overalls, read the name and flung it down on his desk.
We were in his fifth-floor office. The chair I sat in was surrounded by carpet. Marooned on a desert island, feeling dim and stupid.
The man-to-man, all-pals-together act was in abeyance. The Owen Yorkshire confronting me was very angry, disbelieving and, I would have said, frightened.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded, bellowing.
His voice echoed and reverberated in the quiet room. His big body loomed over me, his big head close to mine. All his features, I thought, were slightly oversized: big nose, big eyes, wide forehead, large flat cheeks, square jaw, big mouth. The collar-length black wavy hair with its gray-touched wings seemed to vibrate with vigor. I would have put his age at forty; maybe a year or two younger.
“Answer,” he yelled. “What are you doing here?”
I didn’t reply. He snatched up from his desk a heavy fifteen-inch-long silvery wrench and made as if to hit my head with it. If that was what his boys-in-blue had used on me, and I gathered it was, then connecting it again with my skull was unlikely to produce any answer at all. The same thought seemed to occur to him, because he threw the wrench down disgustedly onto the desk again, where it bounced slightly under its own weight.
The straps around my chest and ankles were the sort of fawn close-woven webbing often used around suitcases to prevent them from bursting open. There was no elasticity in them, no stretch. Several more lay on the desk.
I felt a ridiculous desire to chatter, a tendency I’d noticed in the past in mild concussions after racing falls, and sometimes on waking up from anesthetics. I’d learned how to suppress the garrulous impulse, but it was still an effort, and in this case, essential.
Owen Yorkshire was wearing man-to-man togs; that is to say, no jacket, a man-made-fiber shirt (almost white with vertical stripes made of interlocking beige-colored horseshoes), no tie, several buttons undone, unmissable view of manly hairy chest, gold chain and medallion.
I concentrated on the horseshoe stripes. If I could count the number of horseshoes from shoulder to waist I would not have any thoughts that might dribble out incautiously. The boss was talking. I blanked him out and counted horseshoes and managed to say nothing.
He went abruptly out of the room, leaving me sitting there looking foolish. When he returned he brought two people with him: they had been along in the reception area, it seemed, working out table placements for Monday’s lunch.
They were a woman and a man; Mrs. Dove and a stranger. Both exclaimed in surprise at the sight of my trussed self. I shrank into the chair and looked mostly at their waists.
“Do you know who this is?” Yorkshire demanded of them furiously.
The man shook his head, mystified. Mrs. Dove, frowning, said to me, “Weren’t you here yesterday? Something about a farmer?”
“This,” Yorkshire said with scorn, “is Sid Halley.”
The man’s face stiffened, his mouth forming an O.
“This, Verney,” Yorkshire went on with biting sarcasm, “is the feeble creature you’ve spent months thundering on about. This! And Ellis said he was dangerous! Just look at him! All those big guns to frighten a mouse.”
Verney Tilepit. I’d looked him up in Burke’s Peerage. Verney Tilepit, Third Baron, aged forty-two, a director of Topline Foods, proprietor—by inheritance—of The Pump.
Verney Tilepit’s grandfather, created a baron for devoted allegiance to the then prime minister, had been one of the old roistering, powerful opinion makers who’d had governments dancing to their tune. The first Verney Tilepit had put his shoulder to history and given it a shove. The third had surfaced after years of quiescence, primarily, it seemed, to discredit a minor investigator. Policy! His bewildered grandfather would have been speechless.
He was fairly tall, as India had said, and he had brown hair. The flicking glance I gave him took in also a large expanse of face with small features bunched in the middle: small nose, small mouth, small sandy mustache, small eyes behind large, light-framed glasses. Nothing about him seemed physically threatening. Perhaps I felt the same disappointment in my adversary as he plainly did about me.
“How do you know he’s Sid Halley?” Mrs. Dove asked.
Owen Yorkshire said d
isgustedly, “One of the TV crew knew him. He swore there was no mistake. He’d filmed him often. He knows him.”
Bugger, I thought.
Mrs. Dove pulled up the long left sleeve of my brown overalls, and looked at my left hand. “Yes. It must be Sid Halley. Not much of a champion now, is he?”
Owen Yorkshire picked up the telephone, pressed numbers, waited and forcefully spoke.
“Get over here quickly,” he said. “We have a crisis. Come to my new office.” He listened briefly. “No,” he said, “just get over here.” He slammed down the receiver and stared at me balefully. “What the sod are you doing here?”
The almost overwhelming urge to tell him got as far as my tongue and was over-ridden only by clamped-shut teeth. One could understand why people confessed. The itch to unburden outweighed the certainty of retribution.
“Answer,” yelled Yorkshire. He picked up the wrench again. “Answer, you little cuss.”
I did manage an answer of sorts.
I spoke to Verney Tilepit directly in a weak, mock-respectful tone. “I came to see you ... sir.”
“My lord,” Yorkshire told me. “Call him ‘my lord.’ ”
“My lord,” I said.
Tilepit said, “What for?” and “What made you think I would be here?”
“Someone told me you were a director of Topline Foods, my lord, so I came here to ask you to stop and I don’t know why I’ve been dragged up here and tied up like this.” The last twenty words just dribbled out. Be careful, I thought. Shut up.
“To stop what?” Tilepit demanded.
“To stop your paper telling lies about me.” Better.
Tilepit didn’t know how to answer such naïveté. Yorkshire properly considered it barely credible. He spoke to Mrs. Dove, who was dressed for Saturday morning, not in office black and white, but in bright red with gold buttons.
“Go down and make sure he hasn’t been in your office.”