by Dick Francis
It seemed to me that what Donna urgently needed was some expert and continuous psychiatric care in a comfortable private nursing home, all of which she was probably not going to get.
“Come on out for a drink,” I said.
“But I can’t.” He was slightly trembling all the time, as if his foundations were in an earthquake.
“Donna will be all right with Sarah.”
“But she might try—”
“Sarah will look after her.”
“But I can’t face—”
“No,” I said. “We’ll buy a bottle.”
I bought some Scotch and two glasses from a philosophical publican just before closing time, and we sat in my car to drink in a quiet tree-lined street three miles from Peter’s home. Stars and streetlights between the shadowy leaves.
“What are we going to do?” he said despairingly.
“Time will pass.”
“We’ll never get over it. How can we? It’s bloody . . . impossible.” He choked on the last word and began to cry like a boy. An outrush of unbearable, pent-up, half-angry grief.
I took the wobbling glass out of his hand. Sat and waited and made vague sympathetic noises and wondered what to God I would have done if, as she said, it had been Sarah.
“And to happen now,” he said at length, fishing for a handkerchief to blow his nose, “of all times.”
“Er . . . oh?” I said.
He sniffed convulsively and wiped his cheeks. “Sorry about that.”
“Don’t be.”
He sighed. “You’re always so calm.”
“Nothing like this has happened to me.”
“I’m in a mess,” he said.
“Well . . . it’ll get better.”
“No, I mean, besides Donna. I didn’t know what to do . . . before . . . and now, after, I can’t even think.”
“What sort of mess? Financial?”
“No. Well, not exactly.” He paused uncertainly, needing a prompt.
“What then?”
I gave him his glass back. He looked at it vaguely, then drank most of the contents in one mouthful.
“You don’t mind if I burden you?” he said.
“Of course not.”
He was a couple of years younger than I, the same age as both Donna and Sarah; and all three of them, it had sometimes seemed to me, saw me not only as William’s older brother but as their own. At any rate it was as natural to me as to him that he should tell me his troubles.
He was middling tall and thin and had recently grown a lengthy moustache which had not given him the overpoweringly macho appearance he might have been aiming for. He still looked an ordinary inoffensive competent guy who went around selling his computer know-how to small businesses on weekdays and tinkered with his boat on Sundays.
He dabbed his eyes again and for several minutes took slow, deep, calming breaths.
“I got into something which I wish I hadn’t,” he said.
“What sort of thing?”
“It started more or less as a joke.” He finished the last inch of drink and I stretched across and poured him a refill. “There was this fellow. Our age, about. He’d come up from Newmarket, and we got talking in that pub you bought the whisky from. He said it would be great if you could get racing results from a computer. And we both laughed.”
There was a silence.
“Did he know you worked with computers?” I said.
“I’d told him. You know how one does.”
“So what happened next?”
“A week later I got a letter. From this fellow. Don’t know how he got my address. From the pub, I suppose. The barman knows where I live.” He took a gulp from his drink and was quiet for a while, and then went on, “The letter asked if I would like to help someone who was working out a computer program for handicapping horses. So I thought, why not? All handicaps for horse races are sorted out on computers, and the letter sounded quite official.”
“But it wasn’t?”
He shook his head. “A spot of private enterprise. But I still thought, why not? Anyone is entitled to work out his own program. There isn’t such thing as right in handicapping unless the horses pass the post in the exact order that the computer weighted them, which they never do.”
“You know a lot about it,” I said.
“I’ve learned, these past few weeks.” The thought brought no cheer. “I didn’t even notice I was neglecting Donna, but she says I’ve hardly spoken to her for ages.” His throat closed and he swallowed audibly. “Perhaps if I hadn’t been so occupied ...”
“Stop feeling guilty,” I said. “Go on with the handicapping.”
After a while he was able to.
“He gave me pages and pages of stuff. All handwritten in diabolical handwriting. He wanted it organized into programs that any fool could run on a computer.” He paused. “You do know about computers.”
“More about microchips than programming, which isn’t saying much.”
“The other way around from most people, though.”
“I guess so,” I said.
“Anyway, I did them. Quite a lot of them. It turned out they were all much the same sort of thing. They weren’t really very difficult, once I’d got the hang of what the notes all meant. It was understanding those which was the worst. So, anyway, I did the programs and got paid in cash.” He stopped and moved restlessly in his seat, glum and frowning.
“So what is wrong?” I asked.
“Well . . . I said it would be best if I ran the programs a few times on the computer he was going to use, because so many computers are different from each other, and although he’d told me the make of the computer he’d be using and I’d made allowances, you never can really tell you’ve got no bugs until you actually try things out on the actual type of machine. But he wouldn’t let me. I said he wasn’t being reasonable and he told me to mind my own business. So I just shugged him off and thought if he wanted to be so stupid it was his own affair. And then these other two men turned up.”
“What other two men?”
“I don’t know. They just sneered when I asked their names. They told me to hand over to them the programs I’d made on the horses. I said I already had. They said they were nothing to do with the person who’d paid for the job, but all the same I was to give them the programs.”
“And did you?”
“Well, yes . . . in a way.”
“But Peter—” I said.
He interrupted, “Yes, I know, but they were so bloody frightening. They came the day before yesterday—it seems years ago—in the evening. Donna had gone out for a walk. It was still light. About eight o’clock, I should think. She often goes for walks ...” He trailed off again and I gave his glass a nudge with the bottle. “What?” he said. “Oh no, no more, thanks. Anyway, they came, and they were so arrogant, and they said I’d regret it if I didn’t give them the programs. They said Donna was a pretty little missis, wasn’t she, and they were sure I’d like her to stay that way.” He swallowed. “I’d never have believed . . . I mean, that sort of thing doesn’t happen.”
It appeared, however, that it had.
“Well,” he said, rallying. “What I gave them was all that I had in the house, but it was really only first drafts, so to speak. Pretty rough. I’d written three or four trial programs out in longhand, like I often do. I know a lot of people work on typewriters or even straight onto a computer, but I get on better with pencil and eraser, so what I gave them looked all right, especially if you didn’t know the first thing about programing, which I should think they didn’t, but not much of it would run as it stood. And I hadn’t put the file names on anyway, or any REMs or anything, so even if they debugged the programs they wouldn’t know what they referred to.”
Disentangling the facts from the jargon; what he had done had been to deliver to possibly dangerous men a load of garbage, knowing full well what he was doing.
“I see,” I said slowly, “what you meant by a mess.
”
“I’d decided to take Donna away for a few days, just to be safe. I was going to tell her as a nice surprise when I got home from work yesterday . . . and then the police turned up in my office, and said she’d taken . . . taken . . . Oh Christ, how could she?”
I screwed the cap onto the bottle and I looked at my watch. “It’s getting on for midnight,” I said. “We’d better go back.”
“I suppose so.”
I paused with my hand on the ignition key. “Didn’t you tell the police about your two unpleasant visitors?” I said.
“No, I didn’t. I mean, how could I? They’ve been in and out of the house, and a policewoman too, but it was all about Donna. They wouldn’t have listened . . . and anyway . . .”
“Anyway what?”
He shrugged uncomfortably. “I got paid in cash. Quite a lot. I’m not going to declare it for tax. If I told the police—well, I’d more or less have to.”
“It might be better,” I said.
He shook his head. “It would cost me a lot to tell the police, and what would I gain? They’d make a note of what I said and wait until Donna got bashed in the face before they did anything. I mean, they can’t go around guarding everyone who’s been vaguely threatened night and day, can they? And as for guarding Donna . . . well, they weren’t very nice to her, you know. Really rotten, most of them were. They made cups of tea for each other and spoke over her head as if she was a lump of wood. You’d think she’d poked the baby’s eyes out, the way they treated her.”
It didn’t seem unreasonable to me that official sympathy had been mostly on the side of the baby’s frantic mother, but I kept the thought to myself.
“Perhaps it would be best, then,” I said, “if you did take Donna away for a bit, straight after the hearing. Can you get leave?”
He nodded.
“But what she really needs is proper psychiatric care. Even a spell in a mental hospital.”
“No,” he said.
“I’m not so sure you’re right. They have a high success rate with mental illness nowadays. Modern drugs, and hormones, and all that.”
“But she’s not—” He stopped.
The old taboos died hard. “The brain is part of the body,” I said. “It’s not separate. And it goes wrong sometimes, just like anything else. Like the liver. Or the kidneys. You wouldn’t hesitate if it was her kidneys.”
He shook his head, though, and I didn’t press it. Everyone had to decide things for themselves. I started the car and wheeled us back to the house, and Peter said as we turned into the short concrete driveway that Donna was usually happy on their boat, and he would take her away on that.
The weekend dragged on. I tried surreptitiously now and then to mark the inexorable exercise books, but the telephone rang more or less continuously, and as answering it seemed to be the domestic chore I was best fitted for, I slid into a routine of chat. Relatives, friends, press, officials, busybodies, cranks and stinkers, I talked with the lot.
Sarah cared for Donna with extreme tenderness and devotion and was rewarded with, at first, wan smiles and, gradually, low-toned speech. After that came hysterical tears, a brushing of hair, a tentative meal, a change of clothes, and a growth of invalid behavior.
When Peter talked to Donna it was in a miserable mixture of love, guilt and reproach, and he found many an opportunity of escaping into the garden. On Sunday morning he went off in his car at pub-opening time and returned late for lunch, and on Sunday afternoon I said with private relief that I would now have to go back home ready for school on Monday.
“I’m staying here,” Sarah said. “Donna needs me. I’ll ring my boss and explain. He owes me a week’s leave anyway.”
Donna gave her the by now ultra-dependent smile she had developed over the past two days, and Peter nodded with eager agreement.
“OK,” I said slowly. “But take care.”
“What of?” Sarah said.
I glanced at Peter, who was agitatedly shaking his head. All the same, it seemed sensible to take simple precautions.
“Don’t let Donna go out alone,” I said.
Donna blushed furiously, and Sarah was instantly angry, and I said helplessly, “I didn’t mean—I meant keep her safe . . . from people who might want to be spiteful to her.”
Sarah saw the sense in that and calmed down, and a short while later I was ready to leave.
I said goodbye to them in the house because there seemed to be always people in the street staring at the windows with avid eyes, and right at the last minute Peter thrust into my hand three cassettes for playing in the car if I should get bored on the way home. I glanced at them briefly: The King and I, Oklahoma!, and West Side Story. Hardly the latest hits, but I thanked him anyway, kissed Sarah for appearances, kissed Donna ditto, and with a regrettable lightening of spirits took myself off.
It was on the last third of the way home, when I tried Oklahoma! for company, that I found that what Peter had given me wasn’t music at all, but quite something else.
Instead of “Oh What a Beautiful Mornin’,” I got a loud vibrating scratchy whine interspersed with brief bits of one-note plain whine. Shrugging, I wound the tape forward a bit, and tried again.
Same thing.
I ejected the tape, turned it over, and tried again. Same thing. Tried The King and I and West Side Story. All the same.
I knew that sort of noise from way back. One couldn’t forget it, once one knew. The scratchy whine was made by two tones alternating very fast so that the ear could scarcely distinguish the upper from the lower. The plain whine indicated simply an interval with nothing happening. On Oklahoma!, fairly typical, the stretches of two-tone lasted anywhere from ten seconds to three minutes.
I was listening to the noise a computer produced when its programs were recorded onto ordinary cassette tape.
Cassettes were convenient and widely used, especially with smaller computers. One could store a whole host of different programs on cassette tapes, and simply pick out whichever was needed, and use it: but the cassettes were still just ordinary cassettes, and if one played the tape straightforwardly in the normal way on a cassette player, as I had done, one heard the vibrating whine.
Peter had given me three sixty-minute tapes of computer programs: and it wasn’t so very difficult to guess what those programs would be about.
I wondered why he had given them to me in such an indirect way. I wondered, in fact, why he had given them to me at all. With a mental shrug I shoveled the tapes and their misleading boxes onto the dashboard and switched on the radio instead.
School on Monday was a holiday after the greenhouse emotions in Norfolk, and Louisa-the-technician’s problems seemed moths’ wings beside Donna’s.
On Monday evening, while I was watching my own choice on the television with my feet on the coffee table, and eating cornflakes and cream, Peter telephoned.
“How’s Donna?” I said.
“I don’t know where she’d be without Sarah.”
“And you?”
“Oh, pretty fair. Look, Jonathan, did you play any of those tapes?” His voice sounded tentative and half-apologetic.
“A bit of all of them,” I said.
“Oh. Well, I expect you’ll know what they are?”
“Your horse-handicapping programs?”
“Yes . . . er . . . will you keep them for me for now?” He gave me no chance to answer and rushed on. “You see, we’re hoping to go off to the boat straight after the hearing on Friday. Well, we do have to believe Donna will get probation, even the nastiest of those officials said it would be so in such a case, but obviously she’ll be terribly upset with having to go to court and everything and so we’ll go away as soon as we can . . . and I didn’t like the thought of leaving those cassettes lying around in the office, which they were, so I went over to fetch them yesterday morning, so I could give them to you. I mean, I didn’t really think it out. I could have put them in the bank, or anywhere. I suppose what I really wan
ted was to get those tapes right out of my life so that if those two brutes came back asking for the programs I’d be able to say I hadn’t got them and that they’d have to get them from the person I made them for.”
It occurred to me not for the first time that for a computer programer Peter was no great shakes as a logical thinker, but maybe the circumstances were jamming the circuits.
“Have you heard from those men again?” I asked.
“No, thank God.”
“They probably haven’t found out yet ...”
“Thanks very much,” he said bitterly.
“I’ll keep the tapes safe,” I said. “As long as you like.”
“Probably nothing else will happen. After all, I haven’t done anything illegal. Or even faintly wrong.”
It’s the “if-we-don’t-look-at-the-monster-he’ll-go-away” syndrome, I thought. But maybe he was right.
“Why didn’t you tell me what you were giving me?” I inquired. “Why The King and I dressing, and all that?”
“What?” His voice sounded almost puzzled, and then cleared to understanding. “Oh, it was just that when I got home from the office you were all sitting down to lunch, and I didn’t get a single chance to catch you away from the girls, and I didn’t want to have to start explaining in front of them—so I just shoved them into those cases to give to you.”
The faintest twitch of unease crossed my mind, but I smothered it. Peter’s world since Donna took the baby had hardly been one of general common sense and normal behavior. He had acted pretty well, all in all, for someone hammered from all directions at once, and over the weekend I had felt an increase of respect for him, quite apart from liking.
“If you want to play those programs,” he said, “you’ll need a Grantley computer.”
“I don’t suppose—” I began.
“They might amuse William. He’s mad on racing, isn’t he?”