by Dick Francis
I didn’t shoot very well on that particular afternoon and found little appetite afterward for the camaraderie in the clubhouse. The image of Peter stumbling over the side of his boat on fire and dying made too many things seem irrelevant.
I was pledged to shoot in the Queen’s Prize in July and in a competition in Canada in August, and I reflected driving home that if I didn’t put in a little more practice I would disgrace myself. The trips overseas came up at fairly regular intervals, and because of the difficulties involved in transporting guns from one country to another I had designed my own carrying case. About four feet long and externally looking like an ordinary extra-large suitcase, it was internally lined with aluminum and divided into padded shock-absorbing compartments. It held everything I needed for competitions, not only three rifles but all the other paraphernalia, such as scorebook, ear-defenders, telescope, cleaning things, ammunition, thick jersey for warmth, and a supporting canvas and leather jacket. Unlike many people. I usually carried the guns fully assembled and ready to go, legacy of having missed my turn once because of traffic hold-ups, a firearm still in pieces and fingers trembling with haste. I was not actually supposed to leave them with the bolt in place, but I often did. Only when the special gun suitcase went onto airplanes did I strictly conform to regulations, and then it was bonded and sealed and hedged about with red tape galore; and also, perhaps because it didn’t look like what it was, I’d never lost it.
Sarah, who had been enthusiastic at the beginning and had gone with me often to Bisley, had in time got tired of the bang bang bang, as most wives did. She had tired also of my spending so much time and money and had been only partly mollified by the Olympic Games. All the jobs I applied for, she had pointed out crossly, let us live south of London, convenient for the ranges. “But if I could ski,” I’d said, “it would be silly to move to the tropics.”
She had a point, though. Shooting wasn’t cheap, and I wouldn’t have been able to do as much as I did without support from indirect sponsors. The sponsors expected in return that I would not only go to the international competitions, but go to them practiced and fit: conditions that until very recently I’d been happy to fulfill. I was getting old, I thought. I would be thirty-four in three months.
I drove home without haste and let myself into the quiet house, which was no longer vibrant with silent tensions. Dumped my case on the coffee table in the sitting room with no one to suggest I take it straight upstairs. Unclipped the locks and thought of the pleasant change of being able to go through the cleaning and oiling routine in front of the television without tight-lipped disapproval. Decided to postpone the clean-up until I’d chosen what to have for supper and poured out a reviving Scotch.
Chose a frozen pizza. Poured the Scotch.
The front doorbell rang at that point and I went to answer it. Two men, olive-skinned, dark-haired, stood on the doorstep: and one of them held a pistol.
I looked at it with a sort of delayed reaction, not registering at once, because I’d been looking at peaceful firearms all day. It took me at least a whole second to realize that this one was pointing at my midriff in a thoroughly unfriendly fashion. A Walther .22, I thought: as if it mattered.
My mouth, I dare say, opened and shut. It wasn’t what one expected in a moderately crime-free suburb.
“Back,” he said.
“What do you want?”
“Get inside.” He prodded toward me with the long silencer attached to the automatic and because I certainly respected the blowing-away power of handguns I did as he said. He and his friend advanced through the front door and closed it behind them.
“Raise your hands,” said the gunman.
I did so.
He glanced toward the open door of the sitting room and jerked his head toward it.
“Go in there.”
I went slowly and stopped, and turned, and said again, “What do you want?”
“Wait,” he said. He glanced at his companion and jerked his head again, this time at the windows. The companion switched on the lights and then went across and closed the curtains. It was not yet dark outside. A shaft of evening sunshine pierced through where the curtains met.
I thought: why aren’t I desperately afraid. They looked so purposeful, so intent. Yet I still thought they had made some sort of weird mistake and might depart if nicely spoken to.
They seemed younger than myself, though it was difficult to be sure. Italian, perhaps; from the South. They had the long straight noses, the narrow jaws, the black-brown eyes. The sort of faces which went fat with age and grew moustaches and became godfathers.
That last thought shot through my brain from nowhere and seemed as nonsensical as the pistol.
“What do you want?” I said again.
“Three computer tapes.”
My mouth no doubt went again through the fish routine. I listened to the utterly English sloppy accent and thought that it couldn’t have less matched the body it came from.
“What . . . computer tapes?” I said, putting on bewilderment.
“Stop messing. We know you’ve got them. Your wife said so.”
Jesus, I thought. The bewilderment this time needed no acting.
He jerked the gun a fraction. “Get them,” he said. His eyes were cold. His manner showed he despised me.
I said with a suddenly dry mouth, “I can’t think why my wife said . . . why she thought—”
“Stop wasting time,” he said sharply.
“But—”
“The King and I, and West Side Story,” he said impatiently, “and Okla-fucking-homa.”
“I haven’t got them.”
“Then that’s too bad, buddy boy,” he said; and there was in an instant in him an extra dimension of menace. Before, he had been fooling along in second gear, believing no doubt that a gun was enough. But now I uncomfortably perceived that I was not dealing with someone reasonable and safe. If these were the two who had visited Peter, I understood what he had meant by frightening. There was a volatile quality, an absence of normal inhibition, a powerful impression of recklessness. The brakes-off syndrome which no legal deterrents deterred. I’d sensed it occasionally in boys I’d taught, but never before at such magnitude.
“You’ve got something you’ve no right to,” he said. “And you’ll give it to us.”
He moved the muzzle of the gun an inch or two sideways and squeezed the trigger. I heard the bullet zing past close to my ear. There was a crash of glass breaking behind me. One of Sarah’s mementoes of Venice, much cherished.
“That was a vase,” he said. “Your television’s next. After that, you. Ankles and such. Give you a limp for life. Those tapes aren’t worth it.”
He was right. The trouble was that I doubted if he would believe that I really hadn’t got them.
He began to swing the gun around to the television.
“OK,” I said.
He sneered slightly. “Get them then.”
With my capitulation he relaxed complacently, and so did his obedient and unspeaking assistant, who was standing a pace to his rear. I walked the few steps to the coffee table and lowered my hands from the raised position.
“They’re in the suitcase,” I said.
“Get them out.”
I lifted the lid of the suitcase a little and pulled out the jersey, dropping it on the floor.
“Hurry up,” he said.
He wasn’t in the least prepared to be faced with a rifle; not in that room, in that neighborhood, in the hands of the man he took me for.
It was with total disbelief that he looked at the long deadly shape and heard the double click as I worked the bolt. There was a chance he would realize that I’d never transport such a weapon with a bullet up the spout, but then if he took his own shooter around loaded, perhaps he wouldn’t.
“Drop the pistol,” I said. “You shoot me, I’ll shoot you both, and you’d better believe it. I’m a crack shot.” There was a time for boasting, perhaps; and that was it
.
He wavered. The assistant looked scared. The rifle was an ultra-scary weapon. The silencer slowly began to point downward, and the automatic thudded to the carpet. The anger could be felt.
“Kick it over here,” I said. “And gently.”
He gave the gun a furious shove with his foot. It wasn’t near enough for me to pick up, but too far for him also.
“Right,” I said. “Now you listen to me. I haven’t got those tapes. I’ve lent them to someone else, because I thought they were music. How the hell should I know they were computer tapes? If you want them back you’ll have to wait until I get them. The person I lent them to has gone away for the weekend and I’ve no way of finding out where. You can have them without all this melodrama, but you’ll have to wait. Give me an address, and I’ll send them to you. I frankly want to get shut of you. I don’t give a damn about those tapes or what you want them for. I just don’t want you bothering me . . . or my wife. Understood?”
“Yeah.”
“Where do you want them sent?”
His eyes narrowed.
“And it will cost you two quid,” I said. “For packing and postage.”
The mundane detail seemed to convince him. With a disgruntled gesture he took two pounds from his pocket and dropped them at his feet.
“Cambridge main post office,” he said. “To be collected.”
“Under what name?”
After a pause he said, “Derry.”
I nodded. “Right,” I said. A pity, though, that he’d given my own name. Anything else might have been informative. “You can get out, now.”
Both pairs of eyes looked down at the automatic now on the carpet.
“Wait in the road,” I said. “I’ll throw it to you through the window. And don’t come back.”
They edged to the door with an eye on the sleek steel barrel following them, and I went out after them into the hall. I got the benefit of two viciously frustrated expressions before they opened the front door and went out, closing it again behind them.
Back in the sitting room I put the rifle on the sofa and picked up the Walther to unclip it and empty its magazine into an ashtray. Then I unscrewed the silencer from the barrel, and opened the window.
The two men stood on the pavement, balefully staring across twenty feet of grass. I threw the pistol so that it landed in a rosebush not far from their feet. When the assistant had picked it out and scratched himself on the thorns I threw the silencer into the same place.
The gunman, finding he had no bullets, delivered a verbal parting shot.
“You send those tapes, or we’ll be back.”
“You’ll get them next week. And stay out of my life.”
I shut the window decisively and watched them walk away, every line of their bodies rigid with discomfiture.
What on earth, I wondered intensely, had Peter programed onto those cassettes?
4
“Who,” I said to Sarah, “asked you for computer tapes?”
“What?” She sounded vague; a hundred miles away, on this planet but in another world.
“Someone,” I said patiently, “must have asked you for some tapes.”
“Oh . . . you mean cassettes?”
“Yes, I do.” I tried to keep any grimness out of my voice, to sound merely conversational.
“But you can’t have got his letter already,” she said, puzzled. “He only came this morning.”
“Who was he?” I said.
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “I suppose he telephoned. He could have got our number from information.”
“Sarah . . .”
“Who was he? I’ve no idea. Someone to do with Peter’s work.”
“What sort of man?” I asked.
“What do you mean? Just a man. Middle-aged, gray-haired, a bit plump.” Sarah herself, like many naturally slim people, saw plumpness as a moral fault.
“Tell me what he said,” I pressed.
“If you insist. He said he was so sorry about Peter. He said Peter had brought home a project he’d been working on for his firm, possibly in the form of handwritten notes, possibly in the form of cassettes. He said the firm would be grateful to have it all back, because they would have to reallocate the job to someone else.”
It all sounded a great deal more civilized than frighteners with waving guns.
“And then?” I prompted.
“Well, Donna said she didn’t know of anything Peter had in the house, though she did of course know he’d been working on something. Anyway, she looked in a lot of cupboards and drawers, and she found these three loose cassettes, out of their boxes, stacked between the gin and the Cinzano in the liquor cabinet. Am I boring you?”
She sounded overpolite and as if boring had been her intention, but I simply answered fervently, “No, you’re not. Please do go on.”
The shrug traveled almost visibly down the wire. “Donna gave them to the man. He was delighted until he looked at them closely. Then he said they were tapes of musicals and not what he wanted, and please would we look again.”
“And then either you or Donna remembered—”
“I did,” she affirmed. “We both saw Peter give them to you, but he must have got them mixed up. He gave you his firm’s cassettes by mistake.”
Peter’s firm . . .
“Did the man give you his name?” I said.
“Yes,” Sarah said. “He introduced himself when he arrived. But you know how it is. He mumbled it a bit and I’ve forgotten it. Why? Didn’t he tell you when he rang up?”
“No visiting card?”
“Don’t tell me,” she said with exasperation, “that you didn’t take his address. Wait a moment, I’ll ask Donna.”
She put the receiver down on the table and I could hear her calling Donna. I wondered why I hadn’t told her of the nature of my visitors and decided it was probably because she would try to argue me into going to the police. I certainly didn’t want to do that, because they were likely to take unkindly to my waving a rifle about in such a place. I couldn’t prove to them that it had been unloaded, and it did not come into the category of things a householder could reasonably use to defend his property. Bullets fired from a Mauser 7.62 didn’t at ten paces smash vases and embed themselves in the plaster, they seared straight through the wall itself and killed people outside walking their dogs.
Firearms certificates could be taken away faster than given.
“Jonathan?” Sarah said, coming back.
“Yes . . .”
She read out the full address of Peter’s firm in Norwich and added the telephone number.
“Is that all?” she said.
“Except . . . you’re both still all right?”
“I am, thank you. Donna’s very low. But I’m coping.”
We said our usual goodbyes: almost formal, without warmth, deadly polite.
Duty took me back to Bisley the following day: duty and restlessness and dreadful prospects on the box. I shot better and thought less about Peter, and when the light began to fade I went home and corrected the ever-recurring exercise books: and on Monday Ted Pitts said he hadn’t yet done anything about my computer tapes but that if I cared to stay on at four o’clock we could both go down to the computer room and see what there was to see.
When I joined him he was already busy in the small sideroom that with its dim cream walls and scratchily polished floor had an air of being everybody’s poor relation. A single light hung without a shade from the ceiling, and the two wooden chairs were regulation battered school issue. Two nondescript tables occupied most of the floor space; and upon them rested the uninspiring-looking machines which had cost a small fortune. I asked Ted mildly why he put up with such cramped, depressing quarters.
He looked at me vaguely, his mind on his task. “You know how it is. You have to teach boys individually on this baby to get good results. There aren’t enough classrooms. This is all that’s available. It’s not too bad. And anyway, I never notice.”
There were four separate pieces of equipment. A box like a small television set with a typewriter keyboard protruding forward from the lower edge of the screen. A cassette player. A large upright uninformative black box marked simply “Harris”; and something which looked at first sight like a typewriter, but which in fact had no keys. All four were linked together, and each to its own wall socket, by black electric cables.
Ted Pitts put Oklahoma! into the cassette player and typed CLOAD “BASIC” on the keyboard. CLOAD “BASIC” appeared in small white capital letters high up on the left of the television screen, and two asterisks appeared, one of them rapidly blinking on and off, up on the right. On the cassette player, the wheels of the tape reels quickly revolved.
“How much do you remember?” Ted said.
“About enough to know that you’re searching the tape for the language, and that CLOAD means load from the cassette.”
He nodded and pointed briefly to the large upright box. “The computer already has its own BASIC stored in there. I put it in at lunchtime. Now just let’s see ...” He hunched himself over the keyboard, pressing keys, stopping and starting the cassette player and punctuating his activity with grunts.
“Nothing useful,” he muttered, turning the tapes over and repeating the process. “Let’s try . . .” A fair time passed. He shook his head now and then, and said finally, “Give me those other two tapes. It must logically be at the beginning of one of the sides . . . unless of course he added it at the end simply because he had space left. Or perhaps he didn’t do it at all.”
“Won’t the programs run on your own version of BASIC?”
He shook his head. “I tried before you came. The only response you get is ERROR IN LINE 10. Which means that the two versions aren’t compatible.” He grunted again and tried West Side Story, and toward the end of the first side he sat bolt upright and said, “Well, now.”