by Dick Francis
His laugh floated after me as I hurried down the passage toward the coin-box telephone in the main entrance hall. I rang up Newmarket police station (via information) and asked for whoever was in charge of the investigation into the murder of Chris Norwood.
That would be Detective Chief Superintendent Irestone, I was told. He wasn’t in. Would I care to talk to Detective Sergeant Smith? I said I supposed so, and after a few clicks and silences a comfortable Suffolk voice asked me what he could do for me.
I had mentally rehearsed what to say, but it was still difficult to begin. I said tentatively, “I might know a bit about why Chris Norwood was murdered and I might know perhaps roughly who did it, but I also might easily be wrong, it’s just that—”
“Name, sir?” he said, interrupting. “Address? Can you be reached there, sir? At what time can you be reached there, sir? Detective Chief Superintendent Irestone will get in touch with you, sir. Thank you for calling.”
I put the receiver down not knowing whether he had paid extra-fast attention to what I’d said, or whether he had merely given the stock reply handed out to every crackpot who rang up with his or her pet theory. In either case it left me with just enough time to catch the last of the hamburgers in the school canteen and to get back to class on the dot.
At four I was held up by Louise’s latest grudge (apparatus left out all over the benches—Martin would never do that) and I was fearful as I raced along the corridors the boys were not allowed to run in, and slid down the stairs with both hands on the bannisters and my feet touching only about every sixth tread, a trick I had learned in my far-back youth, that Ted Pitts’s colleague would have tired of waiting, and gone home.
To my relief, he hadn’t. He was sitting in front of the familiar screen shooting down little random targets with the zest of a seven-year-old.
“What’s that?” I said, pointing at the game.
“Starstrike. Want a go?”
“Is it yours?”
“Something Ted made up to amuse and teach the kids.”
“Is it in BASIC?” I asked.
“Sure. BASIC, graphics and special characters.”
“Can you list it?”
“Bound to be able to. He’d never stuff it into ROM if he wanted to teach from it.”
“What exactly,” I said frustratedly, “is ROM?”
“Read only memory. If a program is in ROM you can only run it, you can’t list it.”
He typed LIST, and Ted’s game scrolled up the screen to seemingly endless flickering rows.
“There you are,” Ted’s colleague said.
I looked at part of the last section of the program, which was now at rest on the screen:410 RESET (RX, RY): RX = RX—RA : RY : RY—8
420 IF RY > 2 SET (RX, RY) : GOTO 200
430 IF ABS (1 * 8—RX) > 4 THEN 150
460 FOR Q = 1 TO 6: PRINT @ 64 + 4 * V, “* * * *”;
A right load of gibberish to me, though poetry to Ted Pitts.
To his colleague I said, “I came down here to ask you to record something—anything—on these cassettes.” I produced them. “Just so they have computer noise on them, and a readable program. They’re for, er, demonstration.”
He didn’t query it.
I said, “Do you think Ted would mind me using his game?”
He shrugged. “I shouldn’t think so. Two or three of the boys have got tapes of it. It’s not secret.”
He took the cassettes out of my hands and said, “Once on each tape?”
“Er, no. Several times on each side.”
His eyes widened. “What on earth for?”
“Um.” I thought in circles. “To demonstrate searching through file names.”
“Oh. All right.” He looked at his watch. “I’d leave you to do it, but Jenkins goes mad if one of the department doesn’t check the computer’s switched off and put the door key in the common room. I can’t stay long anyway, you know.”
He put the first of the tapes obligingly into the recorder, however, typed CSAVE “A”, and pressed “ENTER.” When the screen announced READY, he typed CSAVE “B”, and after that CSAVE “C”, and so on until the first side of the tape was full of repeats of Starstrike.
“This is taking ages,” he muttered.
“Could you do one side of each tape, then?” I asked.
“OK.”
He filled one side of the second tape and approximately half of a side on the third before his growing restiveness overcame him.
“Look, Jonathan, that’s enough. It’s taken nearer an hour than ten minutes.”
“You’re a pal.”
“Don’t you worry, I’ll hit you one of these days for my games duty.”
I picked up the cassettes and nodded agreement. Getting someone else to do games duty wasn’t only the accepted way of wangling Wednesday afternoons off, it was also the coin in which favors were paid for.
“Thanks a lot,” I said.
“Any time.”
He began putting the computer to bed and I took the cassettes out to my car to pack them in a padded envelope and send them to Cambridge, with each filled side marked “Play this side first.”
Since there was a Parents’ Evening that day, I went for a pork pie with some beer in a pub, corrected books in the common room, and from eight to ten, along with nearly the whole complement of staff (as these occasions involved a three-line whip) reassured the parents of all the fourteen-year-olds that their little horrors were doing splendidly. The parents of Paul apple-on-the-head Arcady asked if he would make a research scientist. “His wit and style will take him far,” I said noncommittally, and they said, “He enjoys your lessons,” which was a nice change from the next parent I talked to, who announced belligerently, “My lad’s wasting his time in your class.”
Placate, agree, suggest, smile: above all, show concern. I supposed those evenings were a Good Thing, but after a long day’s teaching they were exhausting. I drove home intending to flop straight into bed, but when I opened the front door I found the telephone on the boil.
“Where have you been?” Sarah said, sounding cross.
“Parents’ meeting.”
“I’ve been ringing and ringing. Yesterday too.”
“Sorry.”
With annoyance unmollified she said, “Did you remember to water my house plants?”
Hell, I thought. “No, I didn’t.”
“It’s so careless.”
“Yes. Well, I’m sorry.”
“Do them now. Don’t leave it.”
I said dutifully, “How’s Donna?”
“Depressed.” The single word was curt and dismissive. “Try not to forget,” she said acidly, “the croton in the spare bedroom.”
I put the receiver down, thinking that I positively didn’t want her back. It was an uncomfortable, miserable thought. I’d loved her once so much. I’d have died for her, literally. I thought purposefully for the first time about divorce and in the thinking found neither regret nor guilt, but relief.
At eight in the morning when I was juggling coffee and toast the telephone rang again, and this time it was the police. A London accent, very polite.
“You rang with a theory, sir, about Christopher Norwood.”
“It’s not exactly a theory. It’s . . . at the least . . . a coincidence.” I had had time to cut my words down to essentials. I said, “Christopher Norwood commissioned a friend of mine, Peter Keithly, to write some computer programs. Peter Keithly did them and recorded them on cassette tapes, which he gave to me. Last Saturday two men came to my house, pointed a gun at me, and demanded the tapes. They threatened to shoot my television set and my ankles if I didn’t hand them over. Are you, er, interested?”
There was a silence, then the same voice said, “Wait a moment, sir.”
I drank some coffee and waited, and finally a different voice spoke in my ear, a bass voice, slower, less stilted, asking me to repeat what I’d said to the inspector.
“Mm,” he said, when
I’d finished. “I think I’d better see you. How are you placed?”
School, he agreed, was unavoidable. He would come to my house in Twickenham at four-thirty.
He was there before me, sitting not in a labeled and light-flashing police car, but in a fast four-door sedan. When I’d braked outside the garage he was already on his feet, and I found myself appraising a stocky man with a craggy young-old face, black hair dusting gray, unwavering light brown eyes and a skeptical mouth. Not a man, I thought, to save his time for fools.
“Mr. Derry?”
“Yes.”
“Detective Chief Superintendent Irestone.” He briefly produced a flip-over wallet and showed me his certification. “And Detective Inspector Robson.” He indicated a second man emerging from the car, dressed casually like himself in gray trousers and sports jacket. “Can we go inside, sir?”
“Of course.” I led the way in. “Would you like coffee, or tea?”
They shook their heads and Irestone plunged straight into the matter in hand. It appeared that what I’d told them so far did indeed interest them intensely. They welcomed, it seemed, my account of what I’d learned on my trek via Angel Kitchens to Mrs. O’Rorke. Irestone asked many questions, including how I persuaded the gunmen to go away empty-handed.
I said easily, “I didn’t have the tapes here, because I’d lent them to a friend. I said I’d get them back and post them to them and luckily they agreed to that.”
His eyebrows rose, but he made no comment. It must have seemed to him merely that I’d been fortunate.
“And you’d no idea who they were?” he said.
“None at all.”
“I don’t suppose you know what sort of pistol it was?”
He spoke without expectation, and it was an instant before I answered: but I said, “I think, a Walther .22. I’ve seen one before.”
He said intently, “How certain are you?”
“Pretty certain.”
He reflected. “We’d like you to go to your local station to see if you can put together Identi-kit pictures.”
“Of course I will,” I said, “but you might be able to see these men themselves, if you’re lucky.”
“How do you mean?”
“I did send them some tapes, but not until yesterday. They were going to pick them up from Cambridge main post office, and I should think there’s a chance they’ll be there tomorrow.”
“That’s helpful.” He sounded unexcited, but wrote it all down. “Anything else?”
“They aren’t the tapes they wanted. I still haven’t got those back. I sent them back some other tapes with a computer game on.”
He pursed his lips. “That wasn’t very wise.”
“But the real ones morally belong to Mrs. O’Rorke. And those gunmen won’t come stampeding back here while they think they’ve got the goods.”
“And how long before they find out?”
“I don’t know. But if they’re the same two people who threatened Peter, it might be a while. He said they didn’t seem to know much about computers.”
Irestone thought aloud. “Peter Keithly told you that two men visited him on the Wednesday evening, is that right?” I nodded. “Christopher Norwood was killed last Friday morning. Eight and a half days later.” He rubbed his chin. “It might be unwise to suppose it will take them another eight and a half days to discover what you’ve done.”
“I could always swear those were the tapes Peter Keithly gave me.”
“And I don’t think,” he said flatly, “that this time they’d believe you.” He paused. “The inquest on Peter Keithly was being held today, wasn’t it?”
I nodded.
“We consulted with the Norwich police. There’s no room to doubt your friend’s death was an accident. I dare say you’ve wondered?”
“Yes, I have.”
“You don’t need to. The insurance inspector’s report says the explosion was typical. There were no arson devices. No dynamite or plastics. Just absence of mind and rotten bad luck.”
I looked at the floor.
“Your gunmen didn’t do it,” he said.
I thought that maybe he was trying to defuse any hatred I might be brewing, so that my testimony might be more impartial, but in fact what he was giving me was a kind of comfort, and I was grateful.
“If Peter hadn’t died,” I said, looking up, “they might have gone back to him when they found what they’d got from him was useless.”
“Exactly,” Irestone said dryly. “Do you have friends you could stay with for a while?”
On Saturday morning, impelled, I fear, by Mrs. O’Rorke’s ten-percent promise, I drove to Welwyn Garden City to offer her tapes to Mr. Harry Gilbert.
Not that I exactly had the tapes with me, as they were still locked up with Ted Pitts’s laryngitis, but at least I had the knowledge of their existence and contents, and that should be enough, I hoped, for openers.
From Twickenham to Welwyn was twenty miles in a direct line but far more in practice and tedious besides around the North Circular Road and narrow shopping streets. In contrast, the architects’ dream city, when I got there, was green and orderly, and I found the Gilbert residence in an opulent cul-de-sac. Bingo, it seemed, had kept poverty a long, long way from his doorstep, which was reproduction Georgian, flanked with two pillars and surrounded by a regular regiment of windows. A house of red, white and sparkle on a carpet of green. I pressed the shiny brass doorbell, thinking it would be a bore if the inhabitants of this bijou mansion were out.
Mr. Gilbert, however, was in.
Just.
Mr. Gilbert opened his front door to my ring and said whatever I wanted I would have to come back later, as he was just off to play golf. Clubs and a cart for transporting them stood just inside the door, and Mr. Gilbert’s heavy frame was clad appropriately in check trousers, open-necked shirt and blazer.
“It’s about Liam O’Rorke’s betting system,” I said.
“What?” he said sharply.
“Mrs. O’Rorke asked me to come. She says she might be able to sell it to you after all.”
He looked at his watch; a man of about fifty, in appearance unimpressive, more like a minor official than a peddler of pinchbeck dreams.
“Come in,” he said. “This way.”
His voice was no-nonsense middle-of-the-road, nearer the bingo hall than Eton. He led me into an unexpectedly functional room furnished with a desk, typewriter, wall maps with colored drawing pins dotted over them, two swivel chairs, one tray of drinks and five telephones.
“Fifteen minutes,” he said. “So come to the point.” He made no move to sit down or offer me a seat, but he was not so much rude as indifferent. I saw what Mrs. O’Rorke had meant about his being a cold man. He didn’t try to clothe the bones of his thoughts with social top-dressing. He’d have made a lousy schoolmaster, I thought.
“Liam O’Rorke’s notes were stolen,” I began.
“I know that,” he said impatiently. “Have they turned up?”
“Not his notes, no. But computer programs made from them, yes.”
He frowned. “Mrs. O’Rorke has these programs?”
“No. I have. On her behalf. To offer to you.”
“And your name?”
I shrugged. “Jonathan Derry. You can check with her, if you like.” I gestured to the rank of telephones. “She’ll vouch for me.”
“Did you bring these . . . programs with you?”
“No,” I said. “I thought we should make a deal first.”
“Humph.”
Behind his impassive face a fierce amount of consideration seemed to be taking place, and at length I had a powerful feeling that he couldn’t make up his mind.
I said, “I wouldn’t expect you to buy them without a demonstration. But I assure you they’re the real thing.”
It produced no discernible effect. The interior debate continued: and it was resolved not by Gilbert or myself but by the arrival of someone else.
&n
bsp; A car door slammed outside and there were footsteps on the polished parquet in the hall. Gilbert’s head lifted to listen, and a voice outside the open door called, “Dad?”
“In here,” Gilbert said.
Gilbert’s son came in. Gilbert’s son, who had come to my house with a pistol.
I must have looked as frozen with shock as I felt: but then so did he. I glanced at his father, and it came to me too late that this was the man Sarah had described— middle-aged, ordinary, plump—who had gone to Peter’s house asking for the tapes. The one to whom she had said, “My husband’s got them.”
I seemed to have stopped breathing. It was as if life itself had been punched out of me. To know what not to do . . .
For all my instinct that ignorance was dangerous I had not learned enough. I hadn’t learned the simple fact that would have stopped me from walking into that house: that Mr. Bingo Gilbert had a marauding Italian-looking son.
It was never a good idea to pursue Moses across the Red Sea . . .
“My son Angelo,” Gilbert said.
Angelo made an instinctive movement with his right hand toward his left armpit as if reaching for his gun, but he wore a bloused suede jerkin over his jeans, and was unarmed. Thank the Lord, I thought, for small mercies.
In his left hand he carried the package I had sent to Cambridge. It had been opened, and he was holding it carefully upright to save the cassettes from falling out.
He recovered his voice faster than I did. His voice and his arrogance and his sneer.
“What’s this mug doing here?” he said.
“He came to sell me the computer tapes.”
Angelo laughed derisively. “I told you we’d get them for nothing. This mug sent them. I told you he would.” He lifted the package jeeringly. “I told you you were an old fool to offer that Irish witch any cash. You’d’ve done better to let me shake the goods out of her the minute her old man died. You’ve no clues, Dad. You should have cut me in months ago, not tell me when it’s already a mess.”
His manner, I thought, was advanced son-parent rebellion: the young bull attacking the old. And part of it, I suspected, was for my benefit. He was showing off. Proving that even if I’d got the better of him the last time we’d met, it was he, Angelo, who was the superior being.