by Dick Francis
“What did exactly happen?”
He showed no reluctance to tell. More like relish.
“She found Chris dead in his room when she went in to clean it. See, she thought he’d have gone to work; she always went out before him in the mornings. Anyway, there he was. Lot of blood, so I’ve heard. You don’t know what’s true and what isn’t, but they say he had bullets in his feet. Bled to death.”
Christ Almighty . . .
“Couldn’t walk, you see,” Akkerton said. “No telephone. Back bedroom. No one saw him.”
With a dry mouth I asked, “What about . . . his belongings?”
“Dunno, really. Nothing stolen, that I’ve heard of. Seems there were just a few things broken. And his stereo was shot up proper, same as him.”
What do I do, I thought. Do I go to the police investigating Chris Norwood and tell them I was visited by two men who threatened to shoot my television and my ankles? Yes, I thought, this time I probably do.
“When ...” My voice sounded hoarse. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Which day did it happen?”
“Last week. He didn’t show up Friday morning, and it was bloody inconvenient as we were handling turnips that day and it was his job to chop the tops and roots off and feed them into the washer.”
I felt dazed. Chris Norwood had been dead by Friday morning. It had been Saturday afternoon when I’d flung my visitors’ Walther out into the rosebush. On Saturday they had still been looking for the tapes, which meant . . . dear God . . . that they hadn’t got them from Chris Norwood. They’d shot him, and left him, and they still hadn’t got the tapes. He would have given them to them if he’d had them: to stop them shooting him; to save his life. The tapes weren’t worth one’s life: they truly weren’t. I remembered the insouciance with which I faced that pistol and was, in retrospect, terrified.
Vince Akkerton showed signs of feeling it was time he was paid for his labors. I mentally tossed between what I could afford and what he might expect and decided to try him with the least possible. Before I could offer it, however, two girls came into the bar and prepared to sit at the next table. One of them, seeing Akkerton, changed course abruptly and fetched up at his side.
“Hullo, Vince,” she said. “Do us a favor. Stand us a rum and Coke and I’ll pay you tomorrow.”
“I’ve heard that before,” he said indulgently. “But this friend of mine’s buying.”
Poorer by two rum and Cokes, another full pint and a further half (for me), I sat and listened to Akkerton explaining that the girls worked in the Angel Kitchens office.
Carol and Janet. Young, medium bright, full of chatter and chirpiness, expecting from minute to minute the arrival of their boyfriends.
Carol’s opinion of Chris Norwood was straightforwardly indignant. “We all worked out it had to be him dipping into our handbags, but we couldn’t prove it, see? We were just going to set a trap for him when he got killed, and I suppose I should feel sorry for him, but I don’t. He couldn’t keep his hands off anything. I mean, not anything. He’d take your last sandwich when you weren’t looking and laugh at you while he ate it.”
“He didn’t see anything wrong in pinching things,” Janet said.
“Here,” Akkerton said, leaning forward for emphasis, “young Janet here, she works the computer. You ask her about those tapes.”
Janet’s response was a raised-eyebrow thoughtfulness.
“I didn’t know he had any actual tapes,” she said. “But of course he was always around. It was his job, you know, collecting the day-sheets from all the departments and bringing them to me. He’d always hang around a bit, especially the last few weeks, asking how the computer worked, you know? I showed him how it came up with all the quantities, how much salt, you know, and things like that, had to be shifted to each department, and how all the orders went through, mixed container loads to Bournemouth or Birmingham, you know. The whole firm would collapse, you know, without the computer.”
“What make is it?” I said.
“What make?” They all thought it an odd question, but I’d have gambled on the answer.
“A Grantley,” Janet said.
I smiled at her as inoffensively as I knew how and asked her if she would have let Chris Norwood run his tapes through her Grantley if he’d asked her nicely, and after some guilty hesitation and a couple of downward blushes into her rum and Coke, said she might have done, you know, at one time, before they discovered, you know, that it was Chris who was stealing their cash.
“We should have guessed it ages ago,” Carol said, “but then the things he took, like our sandwiches and such, and things out of the office, staples, envelopes, rolls of tape, well we saw him take those, we were used to it.”
“Didn’t anyone ever complain?” I said.
Not officially, the girls said. What was the use? The firm never sacked people for nicking things; if they did, there would be a strike.
“Except that time, do you remember, Janet?” Carol said. “When that poor old lady turned up, wittering on about Chris stealing things from her house. She complained, all right. She came back three times, making a fuss.”
“Oh, sure,” Janet nodded. “But it turned out it was only some old bits of paper she was on about, you know, nothing like money or valuables, and anyway Chris said she was losing her marbles, and had thrown them away, most like, and it all blew over, you know.”
I said, “What was the old lady’s name?”
The girls looked at each other and shook their heads. It was weeks ago, they said.
Akkerton said he hadn’t known of that, he’d never heard about the old lady, not down with his Veg.
The girls’ boyfriends arrived at that moment and there was a general reshuffle around the tables. I said I would have to be going, and by one of those unspoken messages Akkerton indicated that I should see him outside.
“O’Rorke,” said Carol suddenly.
“What?”
“The old lady’s name,” she said. “I’ve remembered. It was Mrs. O’Rorke. She was Irish. Her husband had just died, and she’d been paying Chris to carry logs in for her fire, and things like that she couldn’t manage.”
“I don’t suppose you remember where she lived?”
“Does it matter? It was only a great fuss over nothing.”
“Still . . .”
She frowned slightly with obliging concentration, though most of her attention was on her boyfriend, who was tending to flirt with Janet.
“Stetchworth,” she exclaimed. “She complained about the taxi fare.” She gave me a quick glance. “To be honest, we were glad to be rid of her in the end. She was an awful old nuisance, but we couldn’t be too unkind because of her old man dying, and that.”
“Thanks very much,” I said.
“You’re welcome.” She moved away from me and sat herself decisively between her boyfriend and Janet, and Akkerton and I went outside to settle our business.
He looked philosophically at what I gave him, nodded and asked me to write my name and address on a piece of paper in case he thought of anything else to tell me. I tore a page out of my diary, wrote, and gave it to him thinking that our transaction was over, but when I’d shaken his hand, said goodbye and walked away from him, he called after me.
“Wait, lad.”
I turned back.
“Did you get your money’s worth?” he said.
More than I’d bargained for, I thought. I said, “Yes, I think so. Can’t really tell yet.”
He nodded, pursing his lips. Then with an uncharacteristically awkward gesture he held out half of the cash. “Here,” he said. “You take it. I saw into your wallet in the pub. You’re nearly cleaned out. Enough’s enough.” He thrust his gift toward my hand, and I took it back with gratitude. “Teachers,” he said, pushing open the pub door. “Downtrodden underpaid lot of bastards. Never reckoned to school myself.” He brushed away my attempt at thanks and headed back to the beer.
6
; By map and in spite of misdirections, I eventually found the O’Rorke house in Stetchworth. Turned into the driveway. Stopped the engine. Climbed out of the car, looking at what lay ahead.
A large, rambling, untidy structure; much wood, many gables, untrained creeper pushing tendrils onto the slated roof, and sash window frames long ago painted white. The garden in the soft evening light seemed a matter of grasses and shrubs growing wherever they liked; and a large bush of lilac, white and sweet-scented, almost obliterated the front door.
The bell may have rung somewhere deep inside in response to my finger on the button, but I couldn’t hear it. I rang again and tried a few taps on the inadequate knocker, and when the blank seconds mounted to minutes stepped back a few paces, looking up at the windows for signs of life.
I didn’t actually see the door open behind the lilac bush, but a sharp voice spoke to me from among the flowers.
“Are you Saint Anthony?” it said.
“Er, no.” I stepped back into the line of sight and found standing in the shadowy half-open doorway a short, white-haired old woman with yellowish skin and wild-looking eyes.
“About the fate?” she said.
“Whose fate?” I asked, bewildered.
“The church’s, of course.”
“Oh,” I said. “The fête.”
She looked at me as if I were totally stupid, which from her point of view, I no doubt was.
“If you cut the peonies tonight,” she said, “they’ll be dead by Saturday.”
Her voice was distinguishably Irish, but with the pure vowels of education, and her words were already a dismissal. She was holding on to the door with one hand and its frame with the other, and was on the point of irrevocably rejoining them.
“Please,” I said hastily, “show me the peonies . . . so that I’ll know which to pick . . . on Saturday.”
The half-begun movement was arrested. The old woman considered for a moment and then stepped out past the lilac into full view, revealing a waif-thin frame dressed in a rust-colored jersey, narrow navy-blue trousers, and pink-and-green-checked bedroom slippers.
“ ’Round the back,” she said. She looked me up and down, but saw nothing apparently to doubt. “This way.”
She led me around the house along a path whose flat sunken paving stones merged at the edges with the weedy overgrowth of what might once have been flower beds. Past a shoulder-high stack of sawn logs, contrastingly neat. Past a closed side door. Past a greenhouse filled with the straggly stalks of many dead geraniums. Past a wheelbarrow full of cinders, about whose purpose one could barely guess. Around an unexpected corner, through a too-small gap in a vigorously growing hedge, and finally into the riotous mess of the back garden.
“Peonies,” she said, pointing, though indeed there was no need. Around the ruin of a lawn huge swaths of the fat luxurious blowsy heads, pink, crimson, frilly white, raised themselves in every direction from a veritable ocean of glossy dark leaves, the sinking sun touching all with gold. Decay might lie in the future but the present was a triumphant shout in the face of death.
“They’re magnificent,” I said, slightly awed. “There must be thousands of them.”
The old woman looked around without interest. “They grow every year. Liam couldn’t have enough. You can take what you like.”
“Um.” I cleared my throat. “I’d better tell you I’m not from the church.”
She looked at me with the same sort of bewilderment as I’d recently bent on her. “What did you want to see the peonies for, then?”
“I wanted to talk to you. For you not to go inside and shut your door when you learned what I want to talk about.”
“Young man,” she said severely, “I’m not buying anything. I don’t give to charities. I don’t like politicians. What do you want?”
“I want to know,” I said slowly, “about the papers that Chris Norwood stole from you.”
Her mouth opened. The wild eyes raked my face like great watery searchlights. The thin body shook with powerful but unspecified emotion.
“Please don’t worry,” I said hastily. “I mean you no harm. There’s nothing at all to be afraid of.”
“I’m not afraid. I’m angry.”
“You did have some papers, didn’t you, that Chris Norwood took?”
“Liam’s papers. Yes.”
“And you went to Angel Kitchens to complain?”
“The police did nothing. Absolutely nothing. I went to Angel Kitchens to make that beastly man give them back. They said he wasn’t there. They were lying. I know they were.”
Her agitation was more than I was ready to feel guilty for. I said calmingly, “Please . . . could we just sit down?” I looked around for a garden bench but saw nothing suitable. “I don’t want to upset you. I might even help.”
“I don’t know you. It’s not safe.” She looked at me for a few more unnerving seconds with full beam and then turned and began to go back the way we had come. I followed reluctantly, aware that I’d been clumsy but still not knowing what else to have done. I had lost her, I thought. She would go in behind the lilac and shut me out.
Back through the hedge, past the cinders, past the cemetery in the greenhouse: but not past the closed side door. To my slightly surprised relief she stopped there and twisted the knob.
“This way,” she said, going in. “Come along. I think I’ll trust you. You look all right. I’ll take the risk.”
The house was dark inside and smelled of disuse. We seemed to be in a narrow passage, along which she drifted ahead of me, silent in her slippers, light as a sparrow.
“Old women living alone,” she said, “should never take men they don’t know into their houses.” As she was addressing the air in front of her, the admonishment seemed to be to herself. We continued along past various dark-painted closed doors, until the passage opened out into a central hall where such light as there was filtered through high-up windows of patterned stained glass.
“Edwardian,” she said, following my upward gaze. “This way.”
I followed her into a spacious room whose elaborate bay window looked out onto the glory in the garden. Indoors, more mutedly, there were deep-blue velvet curtains, good-looking large rugs over the silver-gray carpet, blue velvet sofas and armchairs . . . and dozens and dozens of seascapes crowding the walls. Floor to ceiling. Billowing sails. Four-masters. Storms and seagulls and salt spray.
“Liam’s,” she said briefly, seeing my head turn around them.
When Liam O’Rorke liked something, I thought fleetingly, he liked a lot of it.
“Sit down,” she said, pointing to an armchair. “Tell me who you are and why you’ve come here.” She moved to a sofa where, to judge from the book and glass on the small table adjacent, she had been sitting before I arrived, and perched her small weight on the edge as if ready for flight.
I explained about Peter’s link with Chris Norwood, saying that Chris Norwood had given what I thought might be her husband’s papers to Peter for him to organize into computer programs. I said that Peter had done the job and had recorded the programs on tape.
She brushed aside the difficult technicalities and came straight to the simple point. “Do you mean,” she demanded, “that your friend Peter has my papers?” The hope in her face was like a light.
“I’m afraid not. I don’t know where the papers are.”
“Ask your friend.”
“He’s been killed in an accident.”
“Oh.” She stared at me, intensely disappointed.
“But the tapes,” I said. “I do know where those are—or at least I know where copies of them are. If the knowledge that’s on them is yours, I could get them for you.”
She was a jumble of renewed hope and puzzlement. “It would be wonderful. But these tapes . . . wherever they are . . . didn’t you bring them with you?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t know you existed until an hour ago. It was a girl called Carol who told me about you. She works in the
office of Angel Kitchens.”
“Oh, yes.” Mrs. O’Rorke made a small movement of embarrassment. “I screeched at her. I was so angry. They wouldn’t tell me where to find Chris Norwood in all those buildings and sheds. I’d said I’d scratch his eyes out. I’ve an Irish temper, you know. I can’t always control it.”
I thought of the picture she must have presented to those girls and reckoned their description of her “making a fuss” had been charitable.
“The trouble is,” I said slowly, “that someone else is looking for those tapes.” I told her a watered-down version of the visit to my house of the gunmen, to which she listened with open-mouthed attention. “I don’t know who they are,” I said, “or where they come from. I began to think that so much ignorance might be dangerous. So I’ve been trying to find out what’s going on.”
“And if you know?”
“Then I’ll know what not to do. I mean, one can do such stupid things, with perhaps appalling consequences, just through not knowing some simple fact.”
She regarded me steadily with the first glimmer of a smile. “All you’re asking for, young man, is the secret that has eluded Homo sapiens from day one.”
I was startled not so much by the thought as by the words she phrased it in, and as if sensing my surprise she said with dryness, “One does not grow silly with age. If one was silly when young, one may be silly when old. If one was acute when young, why should acuteness wane?”
“I have done you,” I said slowly, “an injustice.”
“Everyone does,” she said indifferently. “I look in my mirror. I see an old face. Wrinkles. Yellow skin. As society is now constituted, to present this appearance is to be thrust into a category. Old woman, therefore silly, troublesome, can be pushed around.”
“No,” I said. “It’s not true.”
“Unless of course,” she added as if I hadn’t spoken, “one is an achiever. Achievement is the savior of the very old.”