Secret Asset

17

Liz had phoned Peggy Kinsolving from Belfast shortly after seeing O’Phelan, and by eight-thirty the following morning Peggy was on the coach from Victoria heading towards Oxford.

Today she was happily following a paper trail—her forte, though she was delighted that Liz wanted her present at some of the interviews. Peggy was learning a lot from Liz.

She was impressed by how Liz calibrated her approach to her subjects. Some were pressed like juice oranges, some were coaxed, others positively encouraged. Even those who began by behaving like clams, found thirty or forty minutes later that they had been opened.

But today, Peggy was concentrating on something altogether different. After Liz’s phone call, she had made a start on Liam O’Phelan, and had unearthed the bare facts. As the bus passed High Wycombe and moved towards the Chilterns escarpment, she mentally reviewed what she’d discovered.

He was born in 1964 in Liverpool to an Irish mother, and an English father who left the family when Liam was ten years old. Liam and his mother moved back to Ireland, to Sandycove, a suburb of Dublin. He had won a scholarship to University College Dublin, where he did well—a starred First in History and the De Valera Prize (whatever that was, thought Peggy, making a mental note to find out).

His doctoral dissertation, Parnell and the English Establishment, had been published by Oxford University Press. Awarded a Junior Research Fellowship at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, he had resigned after two years to take up a permanent position at the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. He was unmarried.

That was the skeleton; now Peggy hoped Oxford would put meat on the bones. The coach swooshed down Headington Hill, then slowed as traffic backed up by the Plain before crossing Magdalen Bridge and stopping across from Queen’s Lane where Peggy got off. It was a hazy day, with a thin filter of cloud, but warm, and after crossing the High Street, Peggy stopped and took off her raincoat. She would have liked a coffee, but she had a huge task to get through and she wanted to get back to London that evening.

Her reader’s card was still valid, so she went straight to the New Bodleian, a square monstrosity of yellow stone, built in the thirties on the corner next to Blackwell’s bookshop.

By one o’clock she had gone through the five-year tranche of the Oxford Gazette, Oxford Today and the Oxford Magazine, looking for any reference to O’Phelan, but her trained eye had found none.

So much for the official publications. She knew that often it was the nooks and crannies of the ephemeral that held the most interesting finds. So she had requested archive issues of Cherwell, the student newspaper, which appeared every two weeks in term time and was about as unofficial as you could get. It didn’t take her long. At one-forty she saw, on the penultimate page of the 4 April 1991, issue, a listing headed “Lectures.” These were extracurricular talks, from the grand (Antonia Fraser talking about Mary Queen of Scots in the Sheldonian) to the not so grand (“Punk Music and Me: A Personal History” in the New College JCR).

And halfway down was a sub-heading for a weekly series of talks, given in the Old Fire Station, labelled “Fighting Talk.” Four pounds per head, wine and beer available afterwards, all welcome. Three forthcoming talks were listed: “The Miners’ Struggle” by a Labour MP; “Sexuality and Sexism” by a former editor of Spare Rib; “To Be Announced” by Liam O’Phelan, lecturer at St. Antony’s and author.

Great title, thought Peggy sourly, the small elation at finding O’Phelan’s name at last evaporating in the face of “To Be Announced.” It probably wasn’t important anyway. Given his CV, he had doubtless talked about Parnell. But it irked her nonetheless; she didn’t like gaps, especially in her own research.

She explained her problem to the assistant, a helpful woman in glasses and black T-shirt who looked about Peggy’s age. “You say you’ve checked Cherwell. What about the Gazette?”

“There’s nothing there.”

“And the Oxford Magazine?”

“No luck, either.”

The young woman shrugged her shoulders. “I’m afraid I don’t know what to suggest. You see, if it wasn’t an official lecture then I can’t think of anywhere else you can look. They might have put up a poster, but we don’t collect them.”

Peggy thanked the woman and got up to leave. “Of course there’s always Daily Doings,” the woman said as an afterthought. “But it’s not really a publication. I doubt anyone keeps back issues—at least not that far back.”

Peggy remembered it: an enormous single-page broadsheet that appeared every day, listing everything from rooms to let to bicycles for sale. Concerts, gigs, poetry readings—all were given space in the three feet of type. “Are they still on Warnborough Road?”

“I think so. That weird house.”

It was five minutes to two. Peggy stood outside the library, wondering whether to take a break for lunch in the King’s Arms or set out on a long, possibly pointless walk to North Oxford.

Duty, or, to be strictly accurate, Liz won out. She remembered the telephone call from Belfast: “We must find out more about O’Phelan. Anything will help,” Liz had said. That word “anything” rang in her ears, and twenty minutes later, perspiring from the spring sunshine and a fast-paced walk up Woodstock Road, Peggy was entering the basement door of a tall Victorian house of yellow and orange brick.

She stepped into a large low-ceilinged room in the middle of which were two pine kitchen tables, covered with a jumble of papers, used coffee cups and odd items of cutlery. A laser printer against a side wall was churning out pages, which splashed onto the floor, unsupervised.

“Hello?” said Peggy tentatively, then when no one replied, she called out again more vigorously.

After a moment, a door opened and a young man appeared, so tall that his head almost brushed the ceiling. Taking one look at Peggy, he said in an American accent, “Don’t worry, you’ve got lots of time. The deadline’s not till five.”

Peggy explained she didn’t want to place an ad, then told him what she was looking for.

“Hmm,” he said, “how far back are you looking? If it was last fall there’s a chance I could find a copy somewhere around here.”

Peggy swallowed. “Actually, it was fifteen years ago.”

The American laughed out loud. “Sorry,” he said, waving an arm at the clutter. “No chance. Space, space everywhere and not a drop to use. We only have two rooms,” he added.

“I see,” said Peggy, regretting her decision not to have lunch. “I don’t suppose you have a digital copy.”

He shook his head reflexively, but suddenly stopped, and his mouth opened, in a pantomime of revelation. “Hang on a minute. The guy who started this place loved computers. He told me he’d bought his first machine in 1979. It was probably the first word processor at the University.”

“Did he keep the disks from then?”

“That’s just it. He did. They’re next door. Come and see.”

In the next room, which was smaller and even more crowded, he dug around in the bottom of a cupboard and then brought out a big taped-up cardboard box. He cut it open with a Stanley knife to reveal a jumble of disks and reels of magnetic tape.

Peggy looked at the collection sceptically.

“It’s all labelled quite carefully. Wonderful the way they did things then,” said the American as he looked at some of the disks. “Here,” he said, holding one up. “This is 1990.” He fumbled some more. “And ’91 and… ’92.”

“That’s brilliant,” said Peggy, astonished by her stroke of luck.

“There’s just one problem,” he said, putting the disks back in the cardboard box, and pushing it against the wall.

“What’s that?” asked Peggy.

“You wouldn’t be able to read any of them. They’re all incompatible with today’s machines. Sorry.”

Her heart sank, but then she thought of “Technical Ted” Poyser, the counter-terrorist branch’s specialist on all matters electronic back at Thames House. “Listen,” said Peggy, “could I borrow one of them anyway? I’ve got a friend who’s a real computer whiz. He’s got lots of old machines. He might be able to help me.”

The American had not expected this. “Well, it’s not really my property to lend,” he said hesitantly.

“Please,” pleaded Peggy, wondering what Liz would do in this situation. “Please,” repeated Peggy. “You said yourself no one can read them. If they’re no good to anyone sitting there, couldn’t I just borrow one? I promise I’ll bring it back.” She could see he was wavering, so she said, “I’ll leave a deposit if that helps.”

He thought about this for a moment, then made up his mind. “Nah,” he said, and Peggy could not mask her disappointment. Until he added, “It’s cool. You don’t have to leave a deposit.”

By five o’clock Peggy was on the third floor of Thames House, consulting “Technical Ted” Poyser.

Ted’s office was more of a cubbyhole, a windowless space, than an office, though even “space” was an exaggeration. The walls were piled high with hardware devices, wires draped everywhere, and in the middle of it all was Ted, crouched on a stool like a spider in a very complicated web.

Ted had long black dyed hair and wore a gold earring, and as Peggy peered at him through the flickering light from the screens in front of him, his features came and went disconcertingly. A faint aroma of tobacco hung around the cubbyhole. Ted had smoked until Thames House became a no-smoking zone, and rather than join other addicts in the dreadful airless hole set aside for smoking, he had given up. Now his ashtray overflowed with boiled sweet wrappers. But somehow the nicotine aroma had never entirely left him.

Ted looked at Peggy without enthusiasm until he saw the disk she held in her hand. “What have we here?” he asked. “A blast from the past?”

Instinctively she tightened her grip on her find. “Can you read it?” she asked, as if that were a condition of its release.

“Let me see,” he said, extending an arm.

Peggy handed him the disk. He examined it, admiringly, with full attention. Eventually he murmured, “Why don’t you get yourself a cup of tea from the canteen? I’m going to be a minute.”

When she came back a quarter of an hour later there was no sign of the disk. Ted was seated in front of a terminal which seemed to be attached to half a dozen different CPUs on a table. “Where on earth did you find this?” he asked. “You’ve brought me a virtual history of personal computing.”

“It’s a long story. But I’m hoping there’s something on it I’m looking for. It should be lots of listings.”

“There may be,” said Ted, “but I think there are printer codes as well. What you’ve got here is a disk from a North Star computer, circa 1980. It had 64K of RAM.”

Ted looked at his terminal, which was filled with tight columns of alphanumerics. “The files on the disk are written in a word-processing program called PeachText, and the disk itself is five-and-a-quarter inch, single-sided, single density. It’s 360K, which is the rough equivalent of fifty thousand words. Not bad for the early eighties.”

Spare me the details, thought Peggy, get to the point. Ted seemed to sense her impatience, for he turned in his swivel chair and said with maddening deliberation, “I doubt there is a single machine in the UK today which can read this disk normally.” He made a face, then said in a high-pitched voice, “‘It’s digital so it will last forever.’ Utter bollocks. Formats change twice a decade, at least. Two decades and you’re lost.”

“Really,” she said edgily. She was happy to share Ted’s delight with the disk, but she wanted to know what was on it. And fast.

“I suppose you want to know if I can actually read the bloody thing.”

“Yes,” she said emphatically.

He smiled, showing surprisingly healthy-looking teeth. “The short answer is, no, I can’t.” When Peggy’s face fell he pointed a commanding finger at her. “But I will.”