by Dick Francis
“Doesn’t Donna know this Norwood?” I asked, ignoring the bitter little thrust.
“No, she doesn’t. She’s still in shock. It’s all too much.”
Fogs could be dangerous, I thought. There might be all manner of traps waiting, unseen.
“What did the police actually say?” I said.
“Nothing much. Only that they were inquiring into a death, and wanted any help Peter could give.”
“Peter!”
“Yes, Peter. They didn’t know he was dead. They weren’t the same as the ones who came before. I think they said they were from Suffolk. What does it matter?” She sounded impatient. “They’d found Peter’s name and address on a pad beside a telephone. This Norwood’s telephone. They said that in a murder investigation they had to follow even the smallest lead.”
“Murder!”
“That’s what they said.”
I frowned and asked, “When was he killed?”
“How do I know? Sometime last week. Thursday. Friday. I can’t remember. They were talking to Donna, really, not to me. I kept telling them she wasn’t fit, but they wouldn’t listen. They wouldn’t see for ages that the poor darling is too dazed to care about a total stranger, however he died. And to crown it all, when they did finally realize, they said they might come back when she was better.”
After a pause I said, “When’s the inquest?”
“How on earth should I know?”
“I mean . . . on Peter.”
“Oh.” She sounded disconcerted. “On Friday. We don’t have to go. Peter’s father is giving evidence of identity. He won’t speak to Donna. He somehow thinks it was her fault that Peter was careless with the boat. He’s been perfectly beastly.”
“Mm,” I said noncommittally.
“A man from the insurance company came here, asking if Peter had ever had problems with leaking gas lines and wanting to know if he always started the engine without checking for petrol vapor.”
Peter hadn’t been careless, I thought. I remembered that he’d been pretty careful on the canals, opening up the engine compartment every morning to let any trapped vapor escape. And that had been diesel, not petrol: less inflammable altogether.
“Donna said she didn’t know. The engine was Peter’s affair. She was always in the cabin unpacking food and so on while he was getting ready to start up. And anyway,” Sarah said, “why all this fuss about vapor? It isn’t as if there was any actual petrol sloshing about. They say there wasn’t.”
“It’s the vapor that explodes,” I said. “Liquid petrol won’t ignite unless it’s mixed with air.”
“Are you serious?”
“Absolutely.”
“Oh.”
There was a pause, a silence, some dying-fall goodbyes. Not with a bang, I thought, but with a yawn.
On Tuesday Ted Pitts said he hadn’t yet had a chance to buy the tapes for the copies and on Wednesday I sweet-talked a colleague into taking my games duty for the afternoon and straight after my last class set off to Norwich. Not to see my wife, but to visit the firm where Peter had worked.
It turned out to be a three-room, two-men-and-a-girl affair tucked away in a suite of offices in a building on an industrial estate: one modest component among about twenty others listed on the directory-board in the lobby, Mason Miles Associates, Computer Consultants rubbing elbows with Direct Access Distribution Services and Sea Magic, Decorative Shell Importers.
Mason Miles and his Associates showed no signs of overwork, but neither was there any of the gloom which hangs about a business on the brink. The inactivity, one felt, was normal.
The girl sat at a desk reading a magazine. The younger man fiddled with a small computer’s innards and hummed in the manner of Ted Pitts. The older man, beyond a wide-open door labeled “Mason Miles,” lolled in a comfortable chair with an arm-stretching expanse of newspaper. All three looked up without speed about five seconds after I’d walked through their outer, unguarded defenses.
“Hallo,” the girl said. “Are you for the job?”
“Which job?”
“You’re not, then. Not Robinson, D. F.?”
“Afraid not.”
“He’s late. Dare say he’s not coming.” She shrugged. “Happens all the time.”
“Would that be Peter Keithly’s job?” I asked.
The young man’s attention went back to his eviscerated machine.
“Sure is,” said the girl. “If you’re not for his job, er . . . how can we help you?”
I explained that my wife, who was staying in Peter’s house, was under the impression that someone from the firm had visited Peter’s widow, asking for some tapes he had been working on.
The girl looked blank. Mason Miles gave me a lengthy frown from a distance. The young man dropped a screwdriver and muttered under his breath.
The girl said, “None of us has been to Peter’s house. Not even before the troubles.”
Mason Miles cleared his throat and raised his voice. “What tapes are you talking about? You’d better come in here.”
He put down the newspaper and stood up reluctantly, as if the effort was too much for a weekday afternoon. He was not in the least like Sarah’s description of a plump, gray-haired, ordinary middle-aged man. There was a crinkly red thatch over a long white face, a lengthy stubborn-looking upper lip and cheekbones of Scandinavian intensity; the whole extra-tall body being, as far as I could judge, still under forty.
“Don’t let me disturb you,” I said without irony.
“You are not.”
“Would anyone else from your firm,” I asked, “have gone to Peter’s house, asking on your behalf for the tapes he was working on?”
“What tapes were those?”
“Cassettes with programs for evaluating racehorses.”
“He was working on no such project.”
“But in his spare time?” I suggested.
Mason Miles shrugged and sat down again with the relief of a traveler after a wearisome journey. “Perhaps. What he did in his spare time was his own affair.”
“And do you have a gray-haired, middle-aged man on your staff?”
He gave me a considering stare and then said merely, “We employ no such person. If such a person has visited Mrs. Keithly purporting to come from here, it is disturbing.”
I looked at his totally undisturbed demeanor and agreed.
“Peter was writing the programs for someone called Chris Norwood,” I said. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of him?” I made it a question but without much hope, and he shook his head and suggested I ask his Associates in the outer office. The Associates also showed nil reactions to the name of Chris Norwood, but the young man paused from his juggling of microchips long enough to say that he had put everything Peter had left concerning his work in a shoe box in a cupboard, and he supposed it would do no harm if I wanted to look.
I found the box, took it out, and began to sift through the handwritten scraps of notes which it contained. Nearly all of them concerned his work and took the form of mysterious memos to himself. “Remember to tell R.T. of modification to PET.” “Pick up floppy discs for L.M.P.” “Tell ISCO about L’s software package.” “The bug in R’s program must be a syntax error in the subroutine.” Much more of the same, and none of it of any use.
There was a sudden noise and flurry at the outer door, and a wild-eyed, breathless, heavily flushed youth appeared, along with a suitcase, a hold-all, an overcoat and a tennis racket.
“Sorry,” he panted. “The train was late.”
“Robinson?” the girl said calmly. “D. F.?”
“What? Oh. Yes. Is the job still open?”
I looked down at another note, the writing as neat as all the others: “Borrow Grantley BASIC tape from G. F.” Turned the piece of paper over. On the back he’d written “C. Norwood, Angel Kitchens, Newmarket.”
I persevered to the bottom of the box, but there was nothing else that I understood. I put all the scrappy notes bac
k again and thanked the Associates for their trouble. They hardly listened. The attention of the whole firm was intently fixed on D. F. Robinson, who was wilting under their probing questions. Miles, who had beckoned them all into the inner office, was saying, “How would you handle a client who made persistently stupid mistakes but blamed you for not explaining his system thoroughly?”
I sketched a farewell which nobody noticed, and left.
Newmarket lay fifty miles to the southwest of Norwich, and I drove there through the sunny afternoon thinking that the fog lay about me as thick as ever. Radar, perhaps, would be useful. Or a gale. Or some good clarifying information. Press on, I thought: press on.
Angel Kitchens, as listed in the telephone directory in the post office, were to be found in Angel Lane, to which various natives directed me with accuracy varying from vague to absent, and which proved to be a dead-end pavement tributary to the east of the town, far from the mainstream of High Street.
The Kitchens were just what they said: the kitchens of a mass food-production business, making frozen gourmet dinners in single-portion foil pans for the upper end of the market. “Posh nosh” one of my route directors had said; “fancy muck,” said another. “You can buy that stuff in the town, but give me a hamburger any day” from another, and “real tasty” from the last. They’d all known the product, if not the location.
At a guess the Kitchens had been developed from the back half and outbuildings of a defunct country mansion; they had that slightly haphazard air and were surrounded by mature trees and the remnants of a landscaped garden. I parked in the large but well-occupied expanse of concrete outside a new-looking white single-story construction marked “Office,” and pushed my way through its plate-glass double-door entrance.
Inside, in the open-plan expanse, the contrast to Mason Miles Associates was complete. Life was taken at a run, if not a stampede. The work in hand, it seemed, would overwhelm the inmates if they relaxed for a second.
My tentative inquiry for someone who had been a friend of Chris Norwood reaped me a violently unexpected reply.
“That creep? If he had any friends they’d be down in Veg Preparation, where he worked.”
“Er . . . Veg Preparation?”
“Two-story gray stone building past the freezer sheds.”
I went out to the parking lot, wandered around and asked again.
“Where them carrots is being unloaded.”
Them carrots were entering a two-story gray stone building by the sackload on a fork-lift truck, the driver of which mutely pointed me to a less cavernous entrance around a corner.
Through there one passed through a small lobby beside a large changing-room where rows of outdoor clothing hung on pegs. Next came a white-tiled scrub-up room smelling like a hospital, followed by a swinging door into a long narrow room lit blindingly by electricity and filled with gleaming stainless steel, noisily whirring machines and people dressed in white.
At the sight of me standing there in street clothes a large man wearing what looked like a cotton undervest over a swelling paunch advanced with waving arms and shooed me out.
“Cripes, mate, you’ll get me sacked,” he said, as the swinging door swung behind us.
“I was directed here,” I said mildly.
“What do you want?”
With less confidence than before, I inquired for any friend of Chris Norwood.
The shrewd eyes above the beer-stomach appraised me. The mouth pursed. The chef’s hat sat comfortably over strong dark eyebrows.
“He’s been murdered,” he said. “You from the press?”
I shook my head. “He knew a friend of mine, and he got both of us into a bit of trouble.”
“Sounds just like him.” He pulled a large white handkerchief out of his white trousers and wiped his nose. “What exactly do you want?”
“I think just to talk to someone who knew him. I want to know what he was like. Who he knew. Anything. I want to know why and how he got us into trouble.”
“I knew him,” he said. He paused, considering. “What’s it worth?”
I sighed. “I’m a schoolmaster. It’s worth what I can afford. And it depends what you know.”
“All right then,” he said judiciously. “I finish here at six. I’ll meet you in the Purple Dragon, right? Up the lane, turn left, quarter of a mile. You buy me a couple of pints and we’ll take it from there. OK?”
“Yes,” I said. “My name is Jonathan Derry.”
“Akkerton.” He gave a short nod, as if sealing a bargain. “Vince,” he added as an afterthought. He gave me a last unpromising inspection and barged back through the swinging doors. I heard the first of the words he sprayed into the long busy room: “You, Reg, you get back to work. I’ve only to take my eyes off you ...”
The door closed discreetly behind him.
I waited for him at a table in the Purple Dragon, a pub a good deal less colorful than its name, and at six-fifteen he appeared, dressed now in gray trousers and a blue-and-white shirt straining at its buttons. Elliptical views of hairy chest appeared when he sat down, which he did with a wheeze and a licking of lips. The first pint I bought him disappeared at a single draught, closely followed by half of the second.
“Thirsty work, chopping up veg,” he said.
“Do you do it by hand?” I was surprised and sounded it.
“Course not. Washed, peeled, chopped, all done by machines. But nothing hops into a machine by itself. Or out, come to that.”
“What . . . er . . . veg?” I said.
“Depends what they want. Today, mostly carrots, celery, onions, mushrooms. Regular every day, that lot. Needed for Burgundy Beef. Our best seller, Burgundy Beef. Chablis Chicken, Pork and Port, next best. You ever had any?”
“I don’t honestly know.”
He drank deeply with satisfaction. “It’s good food,” he said seriously, wiping his mouth. “All fresh ingredients. No mucking about. Pricey, mind you, but worth it.”
“You enjoy the job?” I asked.
He nodded. “Sure. Worked in kitchens all my life. Some of them, you could shake hands with the cockroaches. Big as rats. Here, so clean you’d see a fruit fly a mile off. I’ve been in Veg three months now. Did a year in Fish, but the smell hangs in your nostrils after a while.”
“Did Chris Norwood,” I said, “chop up veg?”
“When we were pushed. Otherwise he cleaned up, checked the input, and ran errands.” His voice was assured and positive: a man who had no need to guard his tongue.
“Er . . . checked the input?” I said.
“Counted the sacks of veg as they were delivered. If there were twenty sacks of onions on the day’s delivery note, his job to see twenty sacks arrived.” He inspected the contents of the pint glass. “Reckon it was madness giving him that job. Mind you, it’s not millionaire class, knocking off sacks of carrots and onions, but it seems he was supplying a whole string of bleeding village shops with the help of the truck drivers. The driver would let the sacks fall off the truck on the way here, see, and Chris Norwood would count twenty where there was only sixteen. They split the profits. It goes on everywhere, that sort of thing, in every kitchen I’ve ever worked in. Meat too. Sides of ruddy beef. Caviar. You name it, it’s been nicked. But Chris wasn’t just your usual opportunist. He didn’t know what to keep his hands off.”
“What didn’t he keep his hands off?” I asked.
Vince Akkerton polished off the liquid remains and put down his glass with suggestive loudness. Obediently I crossed to the bar for a refill, and once there had been a proper inspection of the new froth and a sampling of the first two inches, I heard what Chris Norwood had stolen.
“The girls in the office said he pinched their cash. They didn’t cotton on for ages. They thought it was one of the women there that they didn’t like. Chris was in and out all the time, taking in the day-sheets and chatting them up. He thought a lot of himself. Cocky bastard.”
I looked at the well-fleshed wo
rldly-wise face and thought of chief petty officers and ships’ engineers. The same easy assumption of command: the ability to size men up and put them to work. People like Vince Akkerton were the indispensable getters of things done.
“How old,” I said, “was Chris Norwood?”
“Thirtyish. Same as you. Difficult to say, exactly.” He drank. “What sort of trouble did he get you in?”
“A couple of bullies came to my house looking for something of his.”
Fog, I thought.
“What sort of thing?” said Akkerton.
“Computer tapes.”
If I’d spoken in Outer Mongolian it couldn’t have meant less to him. He covered his bewilderment with beer and in disappointment I drank some of my own.
“Course,” said Akkerton, rallying, “there’s a computer or some such over in the office. They use it for keeping track of how many tons of Burgundy Beef and so on they’ve got on order and in the freezers, stuff like that. Working out how many thousands of ducks they need. Lobsters. Even coriander seeds.” He paused and with the first glint of humor said, “Mind you, the results are always wrong, on account of activities on the side. There was a whole shipment of turkeys missing once. Computer error they said.” He grunted. “Chris Norwood with his carrots and onions, he was peanuts.”
“These were computer tapes to do with horseracing,” I said.
The dark eyebrows rose. “Now that makes more sense. Every bleeding thing in this town practically is to do with horseracing. I’ve heard they think the knacker’s yard has a direct line to our Burgundy Beef. It’s a libel.”
“Did Chris Norwood bet?”
“Everyone in the firm bets. Cripes, you couldn’t live in this town and not bet. It’s in the air. Catching, like the pox.”
I seemed to be getting nowhere at all and I didn’t know what else to ask. I cast around and came up with, “Where was Chris Norwood killed?”
“Where? In his room. He rented a room in a council house from a retired old widow who goes out cleaning in the mornings. See, she wasn’t supposed to take in lodgers, the council don’t allow it, and she never told the welfare, who’d been doling out free meals, that she was earning, so the fuss going on now is making her crazy.” He shook his head. “Next street to me, all this happened.”