Twice Shy

CHAPTER 1

I told the boys to stay quiet while I went to fetch my gun.

It usually worked. For the five minutes that it took me to get to the locker in the common-room and to return to the classroom, thirty fourteen-year-old semi-repressed hooligans could be counted on to be held in a state of fragile good behaviour, restrained only by the promise of a lesson they'd actually looked forward to. Physics in general they took to be unacceptably hard mental labour, but what happened when a gun spat out a bullet… that was interesting.

Jenkins delayed me for a moment in the common-room: Jenkins with his sour expression and bad-tempered moustache, telling me I could teach momentum more clearly with chalk on a blackboard, and that an actual firearm was on my part simply self-indulgent dramatics.

'No doubt you're right,' I said blandly, edging round him.

He gave me his usual look of frustrated spite. He hated my policy of always agreeing with him, which was, of course, why I did it.

'Excuse me,' I said, retreating, 'Four A are waiting.'

Four A, however, weren't waiting in the hoped-for state of gently simmering excitement. They were, instead, in collective giggles fast approaching mild hysteria.

'Look,' I said flatly, sensing the atmosphere with one foot through the door, 'steady down, or you'll copy notes…'

This direst of threats had no result. The giggles couldn't be stifled. The eyes of the class darted between me and my gun and the blackboard, which was still out of my sight behind the open door, and upon every young face there was the most gleeful anticipation.

'OK,' I said, closing the door, 'so what have you writ-'

I stopped.

They hadn't written anything.

One of the boys stood there, in front of the blackboard, straight and still: Paul Arcady, the wit of the class. He stood straight and still because, balanced on his head, there was an apple.

The giggles all around me exploded into laughter, and I couldn't myself keep a straight face.

'Can you shoot it off, sir?'

The voices rose above a general hubbub.

'William Tell could, sir.'

'Shall we call an ambulance, sir, just in case?'

'How long will it take a bullet to get through Paul's skull, sir?'

'Very funny,' I said repressively, but indeed it was very funny, and they knew it. But if I laughed too much I'd lose control of them, and control of such a volatile mass was always precarious.

'Very clever, Paul,' I said. 'Go and sit down.'

He was satisfied. He'd produced his effect perfectly. He took the apple off his head with a natural elegance and returned in good order to his place, accepting as his due the admiring jokes and the envious catcalls.

'Right then,' I said, planting myself firmly where he had stood, 'by the end of this lesson you'll all know how long it would take for a bullet travelling at a certain speed to cross a certain distance…'

The gun I had taken to the lesson had been a simple air-gun, but I told them also how a rifle worked, and why in each case a bullet or a pellet came out fast. I let them handle the smooth metal: the first time many of them had seen an actual gun, even an air-gun, at close quarters. I explained how bullets were made, and how they differed from the pellets I had with me. How loading mechanisms worked. How the grooves inside a rifle barrel rotated the bullet, to send it out spinning. I told them about air friction, and heat.

They listened with concentration and asked the questions they always did.

'Can you tell us how a bomb works, sir?'

'One day,' I said.

'A nuclear bomb?'

'One day.'

'A hydrogen… cobalt… neutron bomb?'

'One day.'

They never asked how radio waves crossed the ether, which was to me a greater mystery. They asked about destruction, not creation; about power, not symmetry. The seed of violence born in every male child looked out of every face, and I knew how they were thinking, because I'd been there myself. Why else had I spent countless hours at their age practising with a. 22 cadet rifle on a range, improving my skill until I could hit a target the size of a thumbnail at fifty yards, nine times out of ten. A strange, pointless, sublimated skill, which I never intended to use on any living creature, but had never since lost.

'Is it true, sir,' one of them said,'that you won an Olympic medal for rifle shooting?'

'No, it isn't.'

'What, then, sir?'

'I want you all to consider the speed of a bullet compared to the speed of other objects you are all familiar with. Now, do you think that you could be flying along in an aeroplane, and look out of the window, and see a bullet keeping pace with you, appearing to be standing still just outside the window?'

The lesson wound on. They would remember it all their lives, because of the gun. Without the gun, whatever Jenkins might think, it would have faded into the general dust they shook from their shoes every afternoon at four o'clock. Teaching, it often seemed to me, was as much a matter of image-jerking as of imparting actual information. The facts dressed up in jokes were the ones they got right in exams.

I liked teaching. Specifically I liked teaching physics, a subject I suppose I embraced with passion and joy, knowing full well that most people shied away in horror. Physics was only the science of the unseen world, as geography was of the seen. Physics was the science of all the tremendously powerful invisibilities – of magnetism, electricity, gravity, light, sound, cosmic rays… Physics was the science of the mysteries of the universe. How could anyone think it dull?

I had been for three years head of the physics department of the East Middlesex Comprehensive, with four masters and two technicians within my domain. My future, from my present age of thirty-three, looked like a possible deputy head-mastership, most likely with a move involved, and even perhaps a headship, though if I hadn't achieved that by forty I could forget it. Headmasters got younger every year; mostly, cynics suggested, because the younger the man they appointed, the more the authorities could boss him about.

I was, all in all, contented with my job and hopeful of my prospects. It was only at home that things weren't so good.

Four A learned about momentum and Arcady ate his apple when he thought I wasn't looking. My peripheral vision after ten years of teaching was, however, so acute that at times they thought I could literally see out of the back of my head. It did no harm: it made control easier.

'Don't drop the core on the floor, Paul,' I said mildly. It was one thing to let him eat the apple – he'd deserved it – but quite another to let him think I hadn't seen. Keeping a grip on the monsters was a perpetual psychological game, but also priority number one. I'd seen stronger men than myself reduced to nervous breakdowns by the hunting-pack instincts of children.

When the end-of-lesson bell rang, they did me the ultimate courtesy of letting me finish what I was saying before erupting into the going-home stampede. It was, after all, the last lesson on Friday – and God be thanked for weekends.

I made my way slowly round the four physics laboratories and the two equipment rooms, checking that everything was in order. The two technicians, Louisa and David, were dismantling and putting away all apparatus not needed on Monday, picking Five E's efforts at radio-circuitry to pieces and returning the batteries, clips, bases and transistors to the countless racks and drawers in the equipment rooms.

'Shooting anyone special?' Louisa said, eyeing the gun which I was carrying with me.

'Didn't want to leave it unattended.'

'Is it loaded?' Her voice sounded almost hopeful. By late Friday, she was always in the state in which one never asked her for an extra favour: not, that is, unless one was willing to endure a weepy ten minutes of 'you don't realise how much this job entails', which, on most occasions, I wasn't. Louisa's tantrums, I reckoned, were based on her belief that life had cheated her, finding her at forty as a sort of store-keeper (efficient, meticulous and helpful) but not a Great Scientist. 'If I'd gone to college…' she would say, leaving the strong impression that if she had, Einstein would have been relegated. I dealt with Louisa by retreating at the warning signs of trouble, which was maybe weak, but I had to live with her professionally, and bouts of sullenness made her slow.

'My list for Monday!' I said, handing it to her.

She glanced disparagingly down it. 'Martin has ordered the oscilloscopes for third period.'

The school's shortage of oscilloscopes was a constant source of friction.

'See what you can manage,' I said.

'Can you make do with only two?'

I said I supposed so, smiled, hoped it would keep fine for her gardening, and left for home.

I drove slowly with the leaden feeling of resignation clamping down, as it always did on the return journey. Between Sarah and me there was no joy left; no springing love. Eight years of marriage, and nothing to feel but a growing boredom.

We had been unable to have children. Sarah had hoped for them, longed for them, pined for them. We'd been to every conceivable specialist and Sarah had had countless injections and pills and two operations. My own disappointment was bearable, though none the less deep. Hers had proved intractable and finally disabling in that she had gone into a state of permanent depression from which it seemed nothing could rescue her.

We'd been told by encouraging therapists that many childless marriages were highly successful, husband and wife forging exceptionally strong bonds through their misfortune, but with us it had worked in reverse. Where once there had been passion there was now politeness; where plans and laughter, now a grinding hopelessness; where tears and heartbreak, silence.

I hadn't been enough for her, without babies. I'd been forced to face the fact that to her motherhood mattered most, that marriage had been but the pathway, that many a man would have done. I wondered unhappily from time to time how soon she would have divorced me had it been I who had proved infertile: and it was profitless also to guess that we would have been contented enough for ever if she herself had been fulfilled.

I dare say it was a marriage like many another. We never quarrelled. Seldom argued. Neither of us any longer cared enough for that; and as a total, prolonged way of life it was infinitely dispiriting.

It was a homecoming like thousands of others. I parked outside the closed garage doors and let myself into the house with arms full of air-gun and exercise books. Sarah, home as usual from her part-time job as a dentist's receptionist, sat on the sofa in the sitting-room reading a magazine.

'Hullo,'I said.

'Hullo. Good day?'

'Not bad.'

She hadn't looked up from her pages. I hadn't kissed her. Perhaps for both of us it was better than total loneliness, but not much.

'There's ham for supper,' she said. 'And coleslaw. That all right?'

'Fine.'

She went on reading; a slim fair-haired girl, still arrestingly pretty but now with a settled resentful expression. I was used to it, but in flashes suffered unbearable nostalgia for the laughing eagerness of the early days. I wondered sometimes if she noticed that the fun had gone out of me, too, although I could sometimes feel it still bubbling along inside, deeply buried.

On that particular evening I made an effort (as I did more and more rarely) to jog us out of our dimness.

'Look, let's just dump everything and go out to dinner. Maybe to Florestan's, where there's dancing.'

She didn't look up. 'Don't be silly.'

'Let's just go.'

'I don't want to.' A pause. I'd rather watch television.' She turned a page, and added with indifference, 'And we can't afford Florestan's prices.'

'We could, if you'd enjoy it.'

'No, I wouldn't.'

'Well,' I sighed, 'I'll make a start on the books, then.'

She nodded faintly. 'Supper at seven.'

'All right.'

I turned to go.

'There's a letter for you from William,' she said with boredom in her voice. 'I put it upstairs.'

'Oh? Well, thanks.'

She went on reading, and I took my stuff up to the third and smallest of our three bedrooms, which I used as a sort of study-cum-office. The estate agent who had shown us the house had brightly described the room as 'just right for the nursery', and had nearly lost himself the sale. I'd annexed the place for myself and made it as masculine as possible, but I was aware that for Sarah the spirit of unborn children still hovered there. She rarely went in. It was slightly unusual that she should have put the letter from my brother on my desk.

It said:

Dear Jonathan,

Please can I have thirty pounds? It's for going to the farm at half-term. I wrote to Mrs Porter, and she'll have me. She says her rates have gone up because of inflation. It can't be for what I eat, as she mostly gives me bread and honey. (No complaints.) Also actually I need some money for riding, in case they won't let me earn any more rides at the stables by mucking out, they were a bit funny about it last time, something to do with the law and exploiting juveniles, I ask you. Roll on sixteen. Anyway, if you could make it fifty quid it would be fine. If I can earn my riding, I'll send the extra twenty back, because if you don't want your heavy dough lifted at this high-class nick you have to have it embedded in concrete. Half term is a week on Friday, early this term, so could you send it pronto?

Did you notice that Clinker did win the Wrap-Up 'chase at Stratford? If you don't want me to be a jockey, how about a tipster?

Hope you are well. And Sarah.

William.

P.S. Can you come for sports day, or for Blah-Blah day? I've got a prize for two plus two, you'll be astounded to hear.

Blah-Blah day was Speech Day, at which the school prizes were handed out. I'd missed every one of William's for one reason or another. I would go this time, I thought. Even William might sometimes feel lonely with no one close to him ever to see him collect his prizes, which he did with some monotony.

William went to public school thanks to a rich godfather who had left him a lot of money on trust 'for his education and vocational training, and good luck to the little brat'. William's trustees regularly paid his fees to the school and maintenance for clothes and etceteras to me, and I passed on cash to William as required. It was an arrangement which worked excellently on many counts, not least that it meant that William didn't have to live with Sarah and me. Her husband's noisy and independent-minded brother was not the child she wanted.

William spent his holidays on farms, and Sarah occasionally said that it was most unfair that William should have more money than I had and that William had been spoiled rotten from the day my mother had discovered she was pregnant again at the age of forty-six. Sarah and William, whenever they met, behaved mostly with wary restraint and only occasionally with direct truth. William had learned very quickly not to tease her, which was his natural inclination, and she had accepted that doling out sarcastic criticism invited a cutting response. They circled each other, in consequence, like exactly matched opponents unwilling to declare open war.

For as long as he could remember William had been irresistibly attracted to horses and had long affirmed his intention to be a jockey, of which Sarah strongly and I mildly disapproved. Security, William said, was a dirty word. There were better things in life than a safe job. Sarah and I, I suppose, were happier with pattern and order and achievement. William increasingly as he grew through thirteen, fourteen, and now fifteen, seemed to hunger for air and speed and uncertainty. It was typical of him that he proposed to spend the week's mid-term break in riding horses instead of working for the eight 'O' Level exams he was due to take immediately afterwards.

I left his letter on my desk to remind myself to send him a cheque and unlocked the cupboard where I kept my guns.

The air-gun that I'd taken to school was little more than a toy and needed no licence or secure storage, but I also owned two Mauser 7.62s, an Enfield No. 4 7.62 and two Anschtz. 22s around which all sorts of regulations bristled, and also an old Lee Enfield. 303 dating back from my early days which was still as lethal as ever if one could raise the ammunition for it. The little I had, I hoarded, mostly out of nostalgia. There were no more. 303 rounds being made, thanks to the army switching to 7.62 mm in the sixties.

I put the air-gun back in its rack, checked that everything was as it should be, and locked the doors on the familiar smell of oil.

The telephone bell rang downstairs and Sarah answered it. I looked at the pile of exercise books which would all have to be read and corrected and handed out to the boys again on Monday, and wondered why I didn't have a fixed-hours job that one didn't have to take home. It wasn't only for the pupils that homework was a drag.

I could hear Sarah's telephone-answering voice, loud and bright.

'Oh. Hallo, Peter. How nice…'

There was a long pause while Peter talked, and then from Sarah a rising wail.

'Oh, no! Oh, my God! Oh, no, Peter…' Horror, disbelief, great distress. A quality, anyway, which took me straight downstairs.

Sarah was sitting stiffly upright on the sofa, holding the telephone at the end of its long cord. 'Oh no,' she was saying wildly. 'It can't be true. It just can't.'

She stard at me unseeingly, neck stretched upwards, listening with even her eyes.

'Well, of course… of course we will… Oh, Peter, yes, of course… Yes, straight away. Yes… yes… we'll be there…' She glanced at her watch. 'Nine o'clock. Perhaps a bit later. Will that do?… All right then… and Peter, give her my love…'

She clattered the receiver down with shaking hands.

'We'll have to go,' she said. 'Peter and Donna-'

'Not tonight,' I protested. 'Whatever it is, not tonight. I'm damned tired and I've got all those books…'

'Yes, at once, we must go at once.'

'It's a hundred miles.'

'I don't care how far it is. We must go now. Now!'

She stood up and practically ran towards the stairs. 'Pack a suitcase,' she said. 'Come on.'

I followed her more slowly, half exasperated, half moved by her urgency. 'Sarah, hold on a minute, what exactly has happened to Peter and Donna?'

She stopped four stairs up, and looked down at me over the bannister. She was already crying, her whole face screwed into agonised disorder.

'Donna.' The words were indistinct. 'Donna…'

'Has she had an accident?'

'No… not…'

'What, then?'

The question served only to increase the tears. 'She… needs… me.'

'You go, then.' I said, feeling relieved at the solution. 'I can manage without the car for a few days. Until Tuesday anyway. Monday I can do by bus.'

'No. Peter wants you, too. He begged me… both of us.'

'Why?' I said, but she was already running again up the stairs, and wouldn't answer.

I won't like it, I thought abruptly. Whatever had happened she knew that I wouldn't like it and that my instincts would all be on the side of non-involvement. I followed her upwards with reluctance and found her already gathering clothes and toothpaste onto the bed.

'Donna has parents, hasn't she?' I said. 'And Peter, too? So if something terrible's happened, why in God's name do they need us?

'They're our friends.' She was rushing about, crying and gulping and dropping things. It was much, much more than ordinary sympathy for any ill that might have befallen Donna: there was a quality of extravagance that both disturbed and antagonised.

'It's beyond the bounds of friendship,'I said,'to go charging off to Norfolk hungry and tired and not knowing why. And I'm not going.'

Sarah didn't seem to hear. The haphazard packing went ahead without pause and the tears developed into a low continuous grizzle.

Where once we had had many friends, we now had just Donna and Peter, notwithstanding that they no longer lived five miles away and played squash on Tuesdays. All our other friends from before and after marriage had either dropped away or coupled and bred; and it was only Donna and Peter who, like us, had produced no children. Only Donna and Peter, who never talked nursery, whose company Sarah could bear.

She and Donna had once been long-time flat-mates. Peter and I, meeting for the first time as their subsequent husbands, had got on together amicably enough for the friendship to survive the Norfolk removal, though it was by now more a matter of birthday cards and telephone calls than of frequent house-to-house visits. We had spent a boating holiday together once on the canals. 'We'll do it again next year,' we'd all said: but we didn't.

'Is Donna ill?' I asked.

'No…'

'I'm not going,' I said.

The keening grizzle stopped. Sarah looked a mess, standing there with vague reddened eyes and a clumsily folded nightdress. She stared down at the pale green froth that she wore against the chill of separate beds and the disastrous news finally burst out of her.

'She was arrested,' she said.

'Donna… arrested?' I was astounded. Donna was mouselike. Organised. Gentle. Apologetic. Anything but likely to be in trouble with the police.

'She's home now,' Sarah said. 'She's… Peter says she's… well… suicidal. He says he can't cope with it.' Her voice was rising. 'He says he needs us… now… this minute. He doesn't know what to do. He says we're the only people who can help.'

She was crying again. Whatever it was, was too much.

'What,' I said slowly, 'has Donna done?'

'She went out shopping,' Sarah said, trying at last to speak clearly. 'And she stole… She stole…'

Well, for heaven's sake,' I said, 'I know it's bloody for them but thousands of people shoplift. So why all this excessive drama?'

'You don't listen,' Sarah shouted. 'Why don't you listen?

'I-'

'She stole a baby.'

CHAPTER 2

We went to Norwich.

Sarah had been right. I didn't like the reason for our journey. I felt a severe aversion to being dragged into a highly-charged emotional situation where nothing constructive could possibly be done. My feelings of friendship towards Peter and Donna were nowhere near strong enough. For Peter, perhaps. For Donna, definitely not.

All the same, when I thought of the tremendous forces working on that poor girl to impel her to such an action it occurred to me that perhaps the unseen universe didn't stop at the sort of electromagnetics that I taught. Every living cell, after all, generated electric charges: especially brain cells. If I put baby-snatching on a par with an electric storm, I could be happier with it.

Sarah sat silently beside me for most of the way, recovering, re-adjusting, preparing. She said only once what must have been in both of our minds.

'It could have been me.'

'No,' I said.

'You don't know… what it's like.'

There was no answer. Short of having been born female and barren, there was no way of knowing. I had been told about five hundred times over the years in various tones from anguish to spite that I didn't know what it was like, and there was no more answer now than there had been the first time.

The long lingering May evening made the driving easier than usual, although going northwards out of London in the Friday night exodus was always a beast of a journey.

At the far, far end of it lay the neat new box-like house with its big featureless net-curtained windows and its tidy oblong of grass. One bright house in a street of others much the same. One proud statement that Peter had reached a certain salary-level and still aspired to future improvement. A place and a way of life that I understood and saw no harm in: where William would suffocate.

The turmoil behind the uninformative net curtains was much as expected in some ways and much worse in others.

The usually meticulously tidy interior was in much disarray, with unwashed cups and mugs making wet rings on every surface and clothes and papers scattered around. The trail, I came to realise, left by the in-and-out tramp of officialdom over the past two days.

Peter greeted us with gaunt eyes and the hushed voice of a death in the family; and probably for him and Donna what had happened was literally hurting them worse than a death. Donna herself sat in a silent huddle at one end of the big green sofa in their sitting-room and made no attempt to respond to Sarah when she rushed to her side and put her arms round her in almost a frenzy of affection.

Peter said helplessly, 'She won't talk… or eat.'

'Or go to the bathroom?'

'What?'

Sarah looked up at me with furious reproach, but I said mildly, 'If she goes off to the bathroom when she feels the need, it's surely a good sign. It's such a normal act.'

'Well, yes,' Peter said limply. 'She does.'

'Good, then.'

Sarah clearly thought that this was another prime example of what she called my general heartlessness, but I had meant only to reassure. I asked Peter what exactly had taken place, and as he wouldn't tell me in front of Donna herself we removed to the kitchen.

In there, too, the police and medics and court officials and social workers had made the coffee and left the dishes. Peter seemed not to see the mess that in past times would have set both him and Donna busily wiping up. We sat at the table with the last remnants of daytime fading to dusk, and in that gentle light he slowly unlocked the horrors.

It was on the previous morning, he said, that Donna had taken the baby from its pram and driven off with it in her car. She had driven seventy odd miles north-east to the coast, and had at some point abandoned the car with the baby inside it, and had walked off along the beach.

The car and the baby had been traced and found within hours, and Donna herself had been discovered sitting on the sand in pouring rain, speechless and stunned.

The police had arrested her, taken her to the station for a night in the cells, and paraded her before a magistrate in the morning. The bench had called for psychiatric reports, set a date for a hearing a week ahead and, despite protests from the baby's mother, set Donna free. Everyone had assured Peter she would only be put on probation, but he still shuddered from their appalling future of ignominy via the press and the neighbourhood.

After a pause, and thinking of Donna's trancelike state, I said, 'You told Sarah she was suicidal.'

He nodded miserably. 'This afternoon I wanted to warm her. To put her to bed. I ran the bath for her.' It was a while before he could go on. It seemed that the suicide attempt had been in deadly earnest: he had stopped her on the instant before she plunged herself and her switched-on hair-drier into the water. 'And she still had all her clothes on,' he said.

It seemed to me that what Donna urgently needed was some expert and continuous psychiatric care in a comfortable private nursing-home, all of which she was probably not going to get.

'Come on out for a drink,' I said.

'But I can't.' He was slightly trembling all the time, as if his foundations were in an earthquake.

'Donna will be all right with Sarah.'

'But she might try…'

'Sarah will look after her.'

'But I can't face…'

'No,' I said. 'We'll buy a bottle.'

I bought some Scotch and two glasses from a philosophical publican just before closing time, and we sat in my car to drink in a quiet tree-lined street three miles from Peter's home. Stars and street lights between the shadowy leaves.

'What are we going to do?' he said despairingly.

'Time will pass.'

'We'll never get over it. How can we? It's bloody… impossible.' He choked on the last word and began to cry like a boy. An outrush of unbearable, pent-up, half-angry grief.

I took the wobbling glass out of his hand. Sat and waited and made vague sympathetic noises and wondered what to God I would have done if, like she said, it had been Sarah.

'And to happen now,' he said at length, fishing for a handkerchief to blow his nose, 'of all times.'

'Er… oh?'I said.

He sniffed convulsively and wiped his cheeks. 'Sorry about that.'

'Don't be.'

He sighed. 'You're always so calm.'

'Nothing like this has happened to me.'

'I'm in a mess,' he said.

'Well, it'll get better.'

'No, I mean, besides Donna. I didn't know what to do… before… and now, after, I can't even think.'

'What sort of mess? Financial?'

'No. Well, not exactly.' He paused uncertainly, needing a prompt.

'What then?'

I gave him his glass back. He looked at it vaguely, then drank most of the contents in one mouthful.

'You don't mind if I burden you?' he said.

'Of course not.'

He was a couple of years younger than I, the same age as both Donna and Sarah; and all three of them, it had sometimes seemed to me, saw me not only as William's elder brother but as their own. At any rate it was as natural to me as to Peter that he should tell me his troubles.

He was middling tall and thin and had recently grown a lengthy moustache which had not given him the overpoweringly macho appearance he might have been aiming for. He still looked an ordinary inoffensive competent guy who went around selling his computer know-how to small businesses on weekdays and tinkered with his boat on Sundays.

He dabbed his eyes again and for several minutes took slow deep calming breaths.

'I got into something which I wish I hadn't,' he said.

'What sort of thing?'

'It started more or less as a joke.' He finished the last inch of drink and I stretched across and poured him a refill. 'There was this fellow. Our age, about. He'd come up from Newmarket, and we got talking in that pub you bought the whisky from. He said it would be great if you could get racing results from a computer. And we both laughed.'

There was a silence.

'Did he know you worked with computers?' I said.

'I'd told him. You know how one does.'

'So what happened next?'

'A week later I got a letter. From this fellow. Don't know how he got my address. From the pub, I suppose. The barman knows where I live.' He took a gulp from his drink and was quiet for a while, and then went on, 'The letter asked if I would like to help someone who was working out a computer program for handicapping horses. So I thought, why not? All handicaps for horse races are sorted out on computers, and the letter sounded quite official.'

'But it wasn't?'

He shook his head. 'A spot of private enterprise. But I still thought, why not? Anyone is entitled to work out his own program. There isn't such thing as right in handicapping unless the horses pass the post in the exact order that the computer weighted them, which they never do.'

'You know a lot about it,' I said.

'I've learnt, these past few weeks.' The thought brought no cheer. 'I didn't even notice I was neglecting Donna, but she says I've hardly spoken to her for ages.' His throat closed and he swallowed audibly. 'Perhaps if I hadn't been so occupied…'

'Stop feeling guilty,' I said. 'Go on about the handicapping.'

After a while he was able to.

'He gave me pages and pages of stuff. Dozens of them. All handwritten in diabolical handwriting. He wanted it organised into programs that any fool could run on a computer.' He paused. 'You do know about computers.'

'More about microchips than programming, which isn't saying much.'

'The other way round from most people, though.'

'I guess so,' I said.

'Anyway, I did them. Quite a lot of them. It turned out they were all much the same sort of thing. They weren't really very difficult, once I'd got the hang of what the notes all meant. It was understanding those which was the worst. So, anyway, I did the programs and got paid in cash.' He stopped and moved restlessly in his seat, glum and frowning.

'So what is wrong?' I asked.

'Well, I said it would be best if I ran the programs a few times on the computer he was going to use, because so many computers are different from each other, and although he'd told me the make of computer he'd be using and I'd made allowances, you never can really tell you've got no bugs until you actually try things out on the actual type of machine. But he wouldn't let me. I said he wasn't being reasonable and he told me to mind my own business. So I just shrugged him off and thought if he wanted to be so stupid it was his own affair. And then these other two men turned up.'

'What other two men?'

'I don't know. They just sneered when I asked their names. They told me to hand over to them the programs I'd made on the horses. I said I had done. They said they were nothing to do with the person who'd paid for the job, but all the same I was to give them the programs.'

'And did you?'

'Well, yes – in a way.'

'But, Peter-' I said.

He interrupted, 'Yes, I know, but they were so bloody frightening. They came the day before yesterday – it seems years ago – in the evening. Donna had gone out for a walk. It was still light. About eight o'clock, I should think. She often goes for walks…'He trailed off again and I gave his glass a nudge with the bottle. 'What?' he said. 'Oh no, no more, thanks. Anyway, they came, and they were so arrogant, and they said I'd regret it if I didn't give them the programs. They said Donna was a pretty little missis, wasn't she, and they were sure I'd like her to stay that way.' He swallowed. 'I'd never have believed… I mean, that sort of thing doesn't happen…'

It appeared, however, that it had.

'Well,' he said, rallying, 'what I gave them was all that I had in the house, but it was really only first drafts, so to speak. Pretty rough. I'd written three or four trial programs out in long-hand, like I often do. I know a lot of people work on typewriters or even straight onto a computer, but I get on better with pencil and rubber, so what I gave them looked all right, especially if you didn't know the first thing about programming, which I should think they didn't, but not much of it would run as it stood. And I hadn't put the file names on anyway, or any REMS or anything, so even if they de-bugged the programs they wouldn't know what they referred to.'

Disentangling the facts from the jargon, it appeared that what he had done had been to deliver to possibly dangerous men a load of garbage, knowing full well what he was doing.

'I see,' I said slowly, 'what you meant by a mess.'

'I'd decided to take Donna away for a few days, just to be safe. I was going to tell her as a nice surprise when I got home from work yesterday, and then the police turned up in my office, and said she'd taken… taken… Oh Christ, how could she?'

I screwed the cap onto the bottle and I looked at my watch. 'It's getting on for midnight,' I said. 'We'd better go back.'

'I suppose so.'

I paused with my hand on the ignition key. 'Didn't you tell the police about your two unpleasant visitors?' I said.

'No, I didn't. I mean, how could I? They've been in and out of the house, and a policewoman too, but it was all about Donna. They wouldn't have listened, and anyway…'

'Anyway what?'

He shrugged uncomfortably. 'I got paid in cash. Quite a lot. I'm not going to declare it for tax. If I told the police… well, I'd more or less have to.'

'It might be better,' I said.

He shook his head. 'It would cost me a lot to tell the police, and what would I gain? They'd make a note of what I said and wait until Donna got bashed in the face before they did anything. I mean, they can't go around guarding everyone who's been vaguely threatened night and day, can they? And as for guarding Donna- well, they weren't very nice to her, you know. Really rotten, most of them were. They made cups of tea for each other and spoke over her head as if she was a lump of wood. You'd think she'd poked the baby's eyes out, the way they treated her.'

It didn't seem unreasonable to me that official sympathy had been mostly on the side of the baby's frantic mother, but I didn't say so.

'Perhaps it would be best, then,' I said, 'if you did take Donna away for a bit, straight after the hearing. Can you get leave?'

He nodded.

'But what she really needs is proper psychiatric care. Even a spell in a mental hospital.'

'No,' he said.

'They have a high success rate with mental illness nowadays. Modern drugs, and hormones, and all that.'

'But she's not-' He stopped.

The old taboos died hard. 'The brain is part of the body,' I said. 'It's not separate. And it goes wrong sometimes, just like anything else. Like the liver. Or the kidneys. You wouldn't hesitate if it was her kidneys.'

He shook his head, however, and I didn't press it. Everyone had to decide things for themselves. I started the car and wheeled us back to the house, and Peter said as we turned into the short concrete driveway that Donna was unusually happy on their boat, and he would take her away on that.

The weekend dragged on. I tried surreptitiously now and then to mark the inexorable exercise books, but the telephone rang more or less continuously and, as answering it seemed to be the domestic chore I was best fitted for, I slid into a routine of chat. Relatives, friends, press, officials, busybodies, cranks and stinkers, I talked with the lot.

Sarah cared for Donna with extreme tenderness and devotion and was rewarded with wan smiles at first and, gradually, low-toned speech. After that came hysterical tears, a brushing of hair, a tentative meal, a change of clothes, and a growth of invalid behaviour.

When Peter talked to Donna it was in a miserable mixture of love, guilt and reproach, and he found many an opportunity of escaping into the garden. On Sunday morning he went off in his car at pub-opening time and returned late for lunch, and on Sunday afternoon I said with private relief that I would now have to go back home ready for school on Monday.

I'm staying here,' Sarah said. 'Donna needs me. I'll ring my boss and explain. He owes me a week's leave anyway.'

Donna gave her the by now ultra-dependent smile she had developed over the past two days, and Peter nodded with eager agreement.

'OK,' I said slowly, 'but take care.'

'What of?'Sarah said.

I glanced at Peter, who was agitatedly shaking his head. All the same, it seemed sensible to take simple precautions.

'Don't let Donna go out alone,' I said.

Donna blushed furiously and Sarah was instantly angry, and I said helplessly, 'I didn't mean… I meant keep her safe… from people who might want to be spiteful to her.'

Sarah saw the sense in that and calmed down, and a short while later I was ready to leave.

I said goodbye to them in the house because there seemed to be always people in the street staring at the windows with avid eyes, and right at the last minute Peter thrust into my hand three cassettes for playing in the car if I should get bored on the way home. I glanced at them briefly: The King and I, Oklahoma, and West Side Story. Hardly the latest rave, but I thanked him anyway, kissed Sarah for appearances, kissed Donna ditto, and with a regrettable lightening of spirits took myself off.

It was on the last third of the way home, when I tried Oklahoma for company, that I found that what Peter had given me wasn't music at all, but quite something else.

Instead of 'Oh What a Beautiful Morning', I got a loud vibrating scratchy whine interspersed with brief bits of one-note plain whine. Shrugging, I wound the tape forward a bit, and tried again.

Same thing.

I ejected the tape, turned it over, and tried again. Same thing. Tried The King and I and West Side Story. All the same.

I knew that sort of noise from way back. One couldn't forget it, once one knew. The scratchy whine was made by two tones alternating very fast so that the ear could scarcely distinguish the upper from the lower. The plain whine indicated simply an interval with nothing happening. On Oklahoma, fairly typically, the stretches of two-tone were lasting anywhere from ten seconds to three minutes.

I was listening to the noise a computer produced when its programs were recorded onto ordinary cassette tape.

Cassettes were convenient and widely used, especially with smaller computers. One could store a whole host of different programs on casette tapes, and simply pick out whichever was needed, and use it: but the cassettes were still, all the same, just ordinary cassettes, and if one played the tape straightforwardly in the normal way on a cassette player, as I had done, one heard the vibrating whine.

Peter had given me three sixty-minute tapes of computer programs: and it wasn't so very difficult to guess what those programs would be about.

I wondered why he had given them to me in such an indirect way. I wondered, in fact, why he had given them to me at all. With a mental shrug I shovelled the tapes and their misleading boxes onto the glove shelf and switched on the radio instead.

School on Monday was a holiday after the green-house emotions in Norfolk, and Louisa-the-technician's problems seemed moths' wings beside Donna's.

On Monday evening, while I was watching my own choice on the television and eating cornflakes and cream with my feet on the coffee table, Peter telephoned.

'How's Donna?' I said.

'I don't know where she'd be without Sarah.'

'And you?'

'Oh, pretty fair. Look, Jonathan, did you play any of those tapes?' His voice sounded tentative and half apologetic.

'A bit of all of them,' I said.

'Oh. Well, I expect you'll know what they are?'

'Your horse-handicapping programs?'

'Yes… er… Will you keep them for me for now?' He gave me no chance to answer and rushed on, 'You see, we're hoping to go off to the boat straight after the hearing on Friday. Well, we do have to believe Donna will get probation, even the nastiest of those officials said it would be so in such a case, but obviously she'll be terribly upset with having to go to court and everything and so we'll go away as soon as we can, and I didn't like the thought of leaving those cassettes lying around in the office, which they were, so I went over to fetch them yesterday morning, so I could give them to you. I mean, I didn't really think it out. I could have put them in the bank, or anywhere. I suppose what I really wanted was to get those tapes right out of my life so that if those two brutes carne back asking for the programs I'd be able to say I hadn't got them and that they'd have to get them from the person I made them for.'

It occurred to me not for the first time that for a computer programmer Peter was no great shakes as a logical thinker, but maybe the circumstances were jamming the circuits.

'Have you heard from those men again?' I asked.

'No, thank God.'

'They probably haven't found out yet.'

'Thanks very much,' he said bitterly.

'I'll keep the tapes safe,' I said. 'As long as you like.'

'Probably nothing else will happen. After all, I haven't done anything illegal. Or even faintly wrong.'

The 'if-we-don't-look-at-the-monster-he'll-go-away' syndrome, I thought. But maybe he was right.

'Why didn't you tell me what you were giving me?' I enquired. 'Why The King and I dressing, and all that?'

'What?' His voice sounded almost puzzled, and then cleared to understanding, 'Oh, it was just that when I got home from the office, you were all sitting down to lunch, and I didn't get a single chance to catch you away from the girls, and I didn't want to have to start explaining in front of them, so I just shoved them into those cases to give to you.'

The faintest twitch of unease crossed my mind, but I smothered it. Peter's world since Donna took the baby had hardly been one of general common sense and normal behaviour. He had acted pretty well, all in all, for someome hammered from all directions at once, and over the weekend I had felt an increase of respect for him, quite apart from liking.

'If you want to play those programs,' he said, 'you'll need a Grantley computer.'

'I don't suppose…' I began.

'They might amuse William. He's mad on racing, isn't he?'

'Yes, he is.'

'I spent so much time on them. I'd really like to know how they work out in practice. I mean, from someone who knows horses.'

'All right,' I said. But Grantley computers weren't scattered freely round the landscape and William had his exams ahead, and the prospect of actually using the programs seemed a long way off.

'I wish you were still here,' he said. 'All the telephone calls, they're really getting me down. And did you have any of those poisonous abusive beastly voices spitting out hate against Donna, when you were answering?'

'Yes, several.'

'But they've never even met her.'

'They're unbalanced. Just don't listen.'

'What did you say to them?'

'I told them to take their problems to a doctor.'

There was a slightly uncomfortable pause, then he said explosively, 'I wish to God Donna had gone to a doctor.' A gulp. 'I didn't even know… I mean, I knew she'd wanted children, but I thought, well, we couldn't have them, so that was that. I never dreamed… I mean, she's always so quiet and wouldn't hurt a fly. She never showed any signs… We're pretty fond of each other, you know. Or at least I thought…'

'Peter, stop it.'

'Yes…'A pause.'Of course, you're right. But it's difficult to think of anything else.'

We talked a bit more, but only covering the same old ground, and we disconnected with me feeling that somehow I could have done more for him than I had.

Two evenings later, he went down to the river to work on his two-berth cabin cruiser, filling its tanks with water and fuel, installing new cooking-gas cylinders and checking that everything was in working order for his trip with Donna.

He had been telling me earlier that he was afraid the ship's battery was wearing out and that if he didn't get a new one they would run it down flat with their lights at night and in the morning find themselves unable to start the engine. It had happened once before, he said.

He wanted to check that the battery still had enough life in it.

It had.

When he raised the first spark, the rear half of the boat exploded.

CHAPTER 3

Sarah told me.

Sarah on the telephone with the stark over-controlled voice of exhaustion.

'They think it was gas, or petrol vapour. They don't know yet.'

'Peter

'He's dead,' she said. There were people around. They saw him moving… with his clothes on fire. He went over the side into the water… but when they got him out…' A sudden silence, then, slowly, 'We weren't there. Thank God Donna and I weren't there.'

I felt shaky and slightly sick. 'Do you want me to come?' I said.

'No. What time is it?'

'Eleven.'I had undressed, in fact, to go to bed.

'Donna's asleep. Knock-out drops.'

'And how… how is she?'

'Christ, how would you expect?' Sarah seldom spoke in that way: a true measure of the general awfulness. 'And Friday,' she said, 'the day after tomorrow, she's due in court.'

'They'll be kind to her.'

'There's already been one call, just now, with some beastly woman telling me it served her right.'

'I'd better come,' I said.

'You can't. There's school. No, don't worry. I can cope. The doctor at least said he'd keep Donna heavily sedated for several days.'

'Let me know, then, if I can help.'

'Yes,' she said. 'Goodnight, now. I'm going to bed. There's a lot to do tomorrow. Goodnight.'

I lay long awake in bed and thought of Peter and the unfairness of death: and in the morning I went to school and found him flicking in and out of my mind all day.

Driving home I saw that his cassettes were still lying in a jumble on the glove shelf. Once parked in the garage, I put the tapes back into their boxes, slipped them in my jacket pocket, and carried my usual burden of books indoors.

The telephone rang almost at once, but it was not Sarah, which was my first thought, but William.

'Did you send my cheque?' he said.

'Hell, I forgot.' I told him why, and he allowed that forgetting in such circs could be overlooked.

'I'll write it straight away, and send it direct to the farm.'

'OK. Look, I'm sorry about Peter. He seemed a nice guy, that time we met.'

'Yes.' I told William about the computer tapes, and about Peter wanting his opinion on them.

'Bit late now.'

'But you still might find them interesting.'

'Yeah,' he said without much enthusiasm. 'Probably some nutty betting system. There's a computer here somewhere in the maths department. I'll ask what sort it is. And look, how would it grab you if I didn't go to university?'

'Badly.'

'Yeah. I was afraid so. Anyway, work on it, big brother. There's been a lot of guff going on this term about choosing a career, but I reckon it's the career that chooses you. I'm going to be a jockey. I can't help it.'

We said goodbyes and I put the receiver down thinking that it wasn't much good fighting to dissuade someone who at fifteen already felt that a vocation had him by the scruff of the neck.

He was slim and light: past puberty but still physically a boy, with the growth into man's stature just ahead. Perhaps nature, I thought hopefully, would take him to my height of six feet and break his heart.

Sarah rang almost immediately afterwards, speaking crisply with her dentist's-assistant voice. The shock had gone, and the exhaustion. She spoke to me with edgy bossiness, a left-over, I guessed, from a very demanding day.

'It seems that Peter should have been more careful,' she said. 'Everyone who owns a boat with an inboard engine is repeatedly told not to start up until they are sure that no gas or petrol or petrol vapour has accumulated in the bilge. Boats blow up every year. He must have known. You wouldn't think he would be so stupid.'

I said mildly, 'He had a great deal else on his mind.'

'I suppose he had, but all the same everyone says…'

If you could blame a man for his own death, I thought, it diminished the chore of sympathy. 'It was his own fault…' I could hear the sharp voice of my aunt over the death of her neighbour… 'He shouldn't have gone out with that cold.'

'The insurance company,' I said to Sarah, 'may be trying to wriggle out of paying all they might.'

'What?'

'Putting the blame onto the victim is a well-known ploy.'

'But he should have been more careful.'

'Oh sure. But for Donna's sake, I wouldn't go around saying so.'

There was a silence which came across as resentful. Then she said, 'Donna wanted me to tell you… She'd rather you didn't come here this weekend. She says she could bear things better if she's alone with me.'

'And you agree?'

'Well, yes, frankly, I do.'

'OK, then.'

'You don't mind?' She sounded surprised.

'No. I'm sure she's right. She relies on you.' And too much, I thought. 'Is she still drugged?'

'Sedated.' The word was a reproof.

'Sedated, then.'

'Yes, of course.'

'And for the court hearing tomorrow?' I asked.

'Tranquillisers,' Sarah said decisively. 'Sleeping pills after.'

'Good luck with it.'

'Yes,' she said.

She disconnected almost brusquely, leaving me with the easement of having been let off an unpleasant task. Once upon a time, I supposed, we would have clung together to help Donna. At the beginning our reactions would have been truer, less complicated, less distorted by our own depressions. I mourned for the dead days, but undoubtedly I was pleased not to be going to spend the weekend with my wife.

On the Friday I went to school still with the computer tapes in my jacket pocket and, feeling that I owed it to Peter at least to try to play them, sought out one of the maths masters in the common-room. Ted Pitts, short-sighted, clear-headed, bi-lingual in English and algebra.

'That computer you've got tucked away somewhere in a cubby hole in the maths department,' I said, 'it's your especial baby, isn't it?'

'We all use it. We teach the kids.'

'But it's you who plays it like Beethoven while the rest are still at chopsticks?'

He enjoyed the compliment in his quiet way. 'Maybe,' he said.

'Could you tell me what make it is?' I asked.

'Sure. It's a Harris.'

'I suppose,' I said unhopefully, 'that you couldn't run a tape on it that was recorded on a Grantley?'

'It depends,' he said. He-was earnest and thoughtful, twenty-six, short on humour, but full of good intentions and ideals of fair play. He suffered greatly under the sourly detestable Jenkins who was head of the maths department and extracted from his assistants the reverential attitude he never got from me.

'The Harris has no language built into it,' Ted said. 'You can feed it any computer language, Fortran, Cobol, Algol, Z-80, Basic, you name it, the Harris will take it. Then you can run any programs written in those languages. But the Grantley is a smaller affair which comes all ready pre-programmed with its own form of Basic. If you had a Grantley Basic language tape, you could feed it into our Harris's memory, and then you could run Grantley Basic programs.' He paused. 'Er, is that clear?'

'Sort of.' I reflected. 'How difficult would it be to get a Grantley Basic language tape?'

'Don't know. Best to write to the firm direct. They might send you one. And they might not.'

'Why might they not?'

He shrugged. 'They might say you'd have to buy one of their computers.'

'For heaven's sake,' I said.

'Yeah. Well, see, these computer firms are very awkward. All the smaller personal computers use Basic, because it's the easiest language and also one of the best. But the firms making them all build in their own variations, so that if you record your programs from their machines, you can't run them on anyone else's. That keeps you faithful to them in the future, because if you change to another make, all your tapes will be useless.'

'What a bore,' I said.

He nodded. 'Profits getting the better of common sense.'

'Like all those infuriatingly incompatible video-recorders.'

'Exactly. But you'd think the computer firms would have more sense. They may hang on to their own customers by force, but they're sure as Hades not going to persuade anyone else to switch.'

'Thanks anyway,' I said.

'You're welcome.' He hesitated. 'Do you actually have a tape that you want to use?'

'Yes.' I fished in my pocket and produced Oklahoma. This one and two others. Don't be misled by the packaging, it's got computer noise all right on the tape.'

'Were they recorded by an expert or an amateur?'

'An expert. Does it make any difference?'

'Sometimes.'

I explained about Peter making the tapes for a client who had a Grantley, and I added that the customer wouldn't let Peter try out the programs on the machine they were designed to run on.

'Oh, really?' Ted Pitts seemed happy with the news. 'In that case, if he was a conscientious and careful chap, it's just possible that he recorded the machine language itself on the first of the tapes. TOMs can be very touchy. He might have thought it would be safer.'

'You've lost me,' I said. 'What are TOMs?'

'Computers.' He grinned. 'Stands for Totally Obedient Moron.'

'You've made a joke,' I said disbelievingly.

'Not mine, though.'

'So why should it be safer?'

He looked at me reproachfully, 'I thought you knew more about computers than you appear to.'

'It's ten years at least since I knew more. I've forgotten and they've changed.'

'It would be safer,' he said patiently, 'because if the client rang up and complained that the program wouldn't run, your friend could tell them how to stuff into their computer a brand-new version of its own language, and then your friend's programs would run from that. Mind you,' he added judiciously, 'you'd use up an awful lot of computer space putting the language in. You might not have much room for the actual programs.'

He looked at my expression, and sighed.

'OK,' he said. 'Suppose a Grantley has a 32K store, which is a pretty normal size. That means it has about forty-nine thousand store-slots, of which probably the first seventeen thousand are used in providing the right circuits to function as Basic. That would leave you about thirty-two thousand store-slots for punching in your programs. Right?'

I nodded. 'I'll take it on trust.'

'But then if you feed in the language all over again it would take another seventeen thousand store-slots, which would leave you with under fifteen thousand store-slots to work with. And as you need one store-slot for every letter you type, and one for every number, and one for every space, and comma, and bracket, you wouldn't be able to do a great deal before all the store-slots were used and the whole thing was full up. And at that point the computer would stop working.' He smiled. 'So many people think computers are bottomless pits. They're more like bean bags. Once they're full you have to empty the beans out before you can start to fill them again.'

'Is that what you teach the kids?'

He looked slightly confused. 'Er… yes. Same words. One gets into a rut.'

The bell rang for afternoon registration and he stretched out his hand for the tape. 'I could try that,' he said, 'if you like.'

'Yes. If it isn't an awful bother.'

He shook his head encouragingly, and I gave him The King and I and West Side Story for good measure.

'Can't promise it will be today,' he said. 'I've got classes all afternoon and Jenkins wants to see me at four.' He grimaced. 'Jenkins. Why can't we call him Ralph and be done with it?'

'There's no hurry,' I said, 'with the tapes.'

Donna got her probation.

Sarah reported, again sounding tired, that even the baby's mother had quietened down because of Peter being killed, and Donna had gently wept in court, and even some of the policemen had been fatherly.

'How is she?' I said.

'Miserable. It's just hitting her, I think, that Peter's really gone.' Her voice sounded sisterly, motherly, protective.

'No more suicide?' I asked.

'I don't think so, but the poor darling is so vulnerable. So easily hurt. She says its like living without skin.'

'Have you enough money?' I said.

'That's just like you!' she exclaimed. 'Always so damned practical.'

'But…'

'I've got my bank card.'

I hadn't wanted to wallow too long in Donna's emotions and it had irritated her. We both knew it. We knew each other too well.

'Don't let her wear you out,' I said.

Her voice came back, still sharp, 'I'm perfectly all right. There's no question of wearing me out. I'm staying here for a week or two longer at least. Until after the inquest and the funeral. And after that, if Donna needs me. I've told my boss, and he understands.'

I wondered fleetingly whether I might not become too fond of living alone if she were away a whole month. I said, 'I'd like to be there at the funeral.'

'Yes. Well, I'll let you know.'

I got a tart and untender goodnight: but then my own to her hadn't been loving. We wouldn't be able to go on, I thought, if ever the politeness crumbled.

The building had long been uninhabited, and we were only a short step from demolition.

On Saturday I put the Mausers and the Enfield No. 4 in the car and drove to Bisley and let off a lot of bullets over the Surrey ranges.

During the past few months, my visits there had become less constant, partly of course because there was no delight during the winter in pressing one's stomach to the cold earth, but mostly because my intense love of the sport seemed to be waning.

I had been a member of the British rifle team for several years but now never wore any of the badges to prove it. I kept quiet in the bar after shooting and listened to others analyse their performances and spill the excitement out of their systems. I didn't like talking of my own scores, present or past.

A few years back, I had taken the sideways jump of entering for the Olympics, which was a competition for individuals and quite different from my normal pursuits. Even the guns were different (at that time all small bore) and all the distances the same (300 metres). It was a world dominated by the Swiss, but I had shot luckily and well in the event and had finished high for a Briton in the placings, and it had been marvellous. The day of a lifetime; but it had faded into memory, grown fuzzy with time passing.

In the British team, which competed mostly against the old Commonwealth countries and often won, one shot 7.62 mm guns at varying distances – 300, 500, 600, 900 and 1,000 yards. I had always taken immense delight in accuracy, in judging wind velocity and air temperature and getting the climatic variables exactly right. But now, both internally and externally, the point of such skill was fading.

The smooth elegant Mausers that I cherished were already within sight of being obsolete. Only long-distance assassins, these days, seemed to need totally accurate rifles, and they used telescopic sights, which were banned and anathema to target shooters. Modern armies tended to spray out bullets regardless. None of the army rifles shot absolutely straight and in addition, every advance in effective killing-power was a loss to aesthetics. The present standard issue self-loading rifle, with its gas-powered feed of twenty bullets per magazine and its capability of continuous fire, was already a knobby untidy affair with half of it made of plastic for lightness. On the horizon was a rifle without a stock, unambiguously designed to be shot from waist level if necessary with no real pretence at precise aim: a rifle with infra-red sights for night use, all angular protuberances. And beyond cordite and lead, what? Neutron missiles fired from ground launchers which would halt an invading tank army literally in its tracks. A new sort of battery which would make hand-held ray guns possible.

The marksman's special skill was drifting towards sport, as archery had, as swordplay had, as throwing the javelin and the hammer had; the commonplace weapon of one age becoming the Olympic medal of the next.

I didn't shoot very well on that particular afternoon and found little appetite afterwards 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 had built my own design of carrying case. About four feet long and externally looking like an ordinary extra-large suitcase, it was internally lined with aluminium and divided into padded shock-absorbing compartments. It held everything I needed for competitions, not only three rifles but all the other paraphernalia; score-book, ear-defenders, telescope, rifle sling, shooting glove, rifle oil, cleaning rod, batman jag, roll of flannelette patches, cleaning brush, wool mop for oiling the barrel, ammunition, thick jersey for warmth, two thin olive-green protective boiler suits 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 through 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 aeroplanes did I strictly conform to regulations, and then it was bonded and sealed and hedged about with red tape galore; and perhaps also 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 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 practised and fit: conditions that until very recently I'd been happy to fulfil. 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 lock 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 realise 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 towards me with the long silencer attached to the automatic and because I certainly respected the blowing-away power of hand guns, 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 towards the open door of the sitting-room and jerked his head towards 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 weird sort of 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 nose, the narrow jaw, the black-brown eyes. The sort of face which went fat with age, grew a moustache and became a godfather.

That last thought shot through my brain from nowhere and seemed as nonsensical as a 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… 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 mementos 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 round 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 neighbourhood, 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 realise 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 downwards, 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 somebody 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 shot 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 rose bush 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 programmed onto those cassettes?

CHAPTER 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 enquiries.'

'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, grey-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 re-allocate the job to someone else.'

It all sounded a great deal more civilised 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 those three loose cassettes, out of their boxes, stacked between the gin and the Cinzano in the drinks cupboard. Am I boring you?'

She sounded over-polite and as if boring had been her intention, but I simply answered fervently, 'No, you're not. Please do go on.'

The shrug travelled 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 then 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 side-room that with its dim cream walls and scratchily polished floor had an air of being everyone'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.'

I could believe it. He was a hiker, an ex-youth-hosteller, an embracer of earnest discomforts. He perched on the edge of the hard wooden chair and applied his own computer-like brain to the one on the tables.

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 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 towards the end of the first side he sat bolt upright and said, 'Well, now.'

'It's on there?'

'Can't tell yet. But there's something filed under "Z". Might just try that.' He flicked a few more switches and sat back beaming. 'Now all we do is wait a few minutes while that…' he pointed at the large upright box… 'soaks up whatever is on the tape under "Z", and if it should happen to be Grantley Basic, we'll be in business.'

'Why does "Z" give you hope?'

'Instinct. Might be a hundred per cent wrong. But it's a much longer recording than anything else I've found so far on the tapes, and it feels the right length. Four and a quarter minutes. I've fed BASIC into the Harris thousands of times.'

His instinct proved reliable. The word READY suddenly appeared on the screen, white and bright and promising. Ted sighed heavily with satisfaction and nodded three times.

'Sensible fellow, your friend,' he said. 'So now we can see what you've got.'

When he ran Oklahoma again, the file names came up clearly beside the flashing asterisk at the top right of the screen, and although some of them were mysterious to me, some of them were definitely not.

DONCA EDINB EPSOM FOLKE FONTW GOODW HAMIL HAYDK. HEREF HEXHM

'Names of towns,' I said. Towns with racecourses.'

Ted nodded. 'Which would you like to try?'

'Epsom.'

'OK.' he said. He rewound the tape with agile fingers and typed CLOAD 'EPSOM' on the keyboard. 'This puts the program filed under EPSOM into the computer, but you know that, of course, I keep forgetting.'

The encouraging word READY appeared again, and Ted said, 'Which do you want to do, List it or Run it?' 'Run,' I said.

He nodded and typed RUN on the keyboard, and in bright little letters the screen enquired WHICH RACE AT EPSOM? TYPE NAME OF RACE AND PRESS 'ENTER'. 'My God,' I said. 'Let's try the Derby.'

'Stands to reason,' Ted said, and typed DERBY. The screen promptly responded with TYPE NAME OF HORSE AND PRESS 'ENTER'.

Ted typed JONATHAN DERRY and again pressed the double-sized key on the keyboard marked 'Enter', and the screen obliged with:

EPSOM: THE DERBY HORSE: JONATHAN DERRY.

TO ALL QUESTIONS ANSWER YES OR NO AND PRESS 'ENTER'. A couple of inches lower down there was a question:

HAS HORSE WON A RACE?

Ted typed YES and pressed 'Enter'. The first three lines remained, but the question was replaced with another.

HAS HORSE WON THIS YEAR?

Ted typed NO. The screen responded:

HAS HORSE WON ON COURSE?

Ted typed NO. The screen responded:

HAS HORSE RUN ON COURSE?

Ted typed YES.

There were questions about the horse's sire, its dam, its jockey, its trainer, the number of days since its last run, and its earnings in prize money; and one final question:

IS HORSE QUOTED ANTE-POST AT 25-1 OR LESS?

Ted typed YES, and the screen said merely,

ANY MORE HORSES?

Ted typed YES again, and we found ourselves back at

TYPE NAME OF HORSE AND PRESS 'ENTER'.

'That's not handicapping,' I said.

'Is that what it's supposed to be?' Ted shook his head. 'More like statistical probabilities, I should have thought. Let's go through it again and answer NO to ANY MORE HORSES?'

He typed TED PITTS for the horse's name and varied the answers, and immediately after his final NO we were presented with a cleared screen and a new display.

HORSE'S NAME WIN FACTOR

JONATHAN DERRY 27

TED PITTS 12

'You've no chance,' I said. 'You might as well stay in the stable.' He looked a bit startled, and then laughed. 'Yes. That's what it is. A guide to gamblers.'

He typed LIST instead of RUN, and immediately the bones of the program appeared, but scrolling upwards too fast to read, like flight-information changes at airports. Ted merely hummed a little and typed LIST 10-140, and after some essential flickering the screen presented the goods.

LIST 10-140

10 PRINT "WHICH RACE AT EPSOM? TYPE NAME OF RACE AND PRESS'ENTER'"

20 INPUT A$

30 IF A$ = " DERBY " THEN 330

40 IF A$ = "OAKS" THEN 340

50 IF A$ = "CORONATION CUP" THEN 350

60 IF A$ = "BLUE RIBAND STAKES" THEN

The list went down to the bottom of the screen in this fashion, and Ted gave it one appraising look and said, 'Dead simple.'

The dollar sign, I seemed to remember, meant that the Input had to be in the form of letters. Input A, without the dollar sign, would have asked for numbers.

Ted seemed perfectly happy. He typed LIST 300-380 and got another set of instructions.

At 330 the program read: LET A = 10: B = 8: C = 6: D = 2: D1 = 2 Lines 332, 334, and 336 looked similar, with numbers being ascribed to letters.

'That's the weighting,' Ted said. 'The value given to each answer. Ten points for the first question, which was… um… has the horse won a race. And so on. I see that 10 points are given also for the last question, which was about… er… ante-post odds, wasn't it?'

I nodded.

'There you are, then,' he said. 'I dare say there's a different weighting for every race. There might of course be different questions for every race. Ho hum. Want to see?'

'If you've the time,' I said.

'Oh sure. I've always got time for TOMs. Love 'em, you know.'

He went on typing LIST followed by various numbers and came up with such gems as:

IF N$ = "NO" THEN GOTO 560: X = X + B

INPUT N$: AB = AB + 1

IF N$ = "NO" THEN GOTO 560: X = X + M

T = T + G2

GOSUB 4000

'What does all that mean?' I asked.

'Um… well. It's much easier to write a program than to read and understand someone else's. Programs are frantically individual. You can get the same results by all sorts of different routes. I mean, if you're going from London to Bristol you go down the M4 and it's called M4 all the way, but on a computer you can call the road anything you like, at any point on the journey, and you might know that at different moments L2, say, or RQ3 or B7(2) equalled M4, but no one else would.'

'Is that also what you teach the kids?'

'Er, yes. Sorry, it's a habit.' He glanced at the screen. 'I'd guess that those top lines are to do with skipping some questions if previous answers make them unnecessary. Jumping to later bits of program. If I printed the whole thing out onto paper I could work out their exact meaning.'

I shook my head. 'Don't trouble. Let's try a different racecourse.'

'Sure.'

He rewound the tape to the beginning and typed CLOAD 'DONCA', and when the screen said READY, typed RUN.

Immediately we were asked WHICH RACE AT DONCASTER? TYPE NAME OF RACE AND PRESS 'ENTER'.

'OK.' Ted said, pressing switches. 'What about further down the tape? Say, GOODW?'

We got WHICH RACE AT GOODWOOD? TYPE NAME OF RACE AND PRESS 'ENTER'.

'I don't know any races at Goodwood,' I said.

Ted said, 'That's easy,' and typed LIST 10-140. When the few seconds of flickering had stopped, we had:

LIST 10-40

10 PRINT "WHICH RACE AT GOODWOOD? TYPE NAME OF RACE AND PRESS 'ENTER'"

20 INPUT A$

30 IF A$ = "GOODWOOD STAKES" THEN 330

40 IF A$ = "GOODWOOD CUP" THEN

There were fifteen races listed altogether.

'What happens if you type in the name of a race there's no program for?' I asked.

'Let's see,' he said. He typed RUN, and we were back to WHICH RACE AT GOODWOOD? He typed DERBY, and the screen informed us THERE IS NO INFORMATION FOR THIS RACE.

'Neat and simple,' Ted said.

We sampled all the sides of the three tapes, but the programs were all similar. WHICH RACE AT REDCAR? WHICH RACE AT ASCOT? WHICH RACE AT NEWMARKET?

There were programs for about fifty racecourses, with varying numbers of races listed at each. Several lists contained not actual titles of races but general categories like STRAIGHT 7 FURLONGS FOR 3 YR OLDS AND UPWARDS, or THREE MILE WEIGHT-FOR-AGE STEEPLECHASE: and it was not until quite late that I realised with amusement that none of the races were handicaps. There were no questions at all about how many lengths a horse had won by, while carrying such and such a weight.

All in all, there was provision for scoring for any number of horses in each of more than eight hundred named races, and in an unknown quantity of unnamed races. Each race had its own set of weightings and very often its own set of questions. It had been a quite monumental task.

'It must have taken him days,' Ted said.

'Weeks, I think. He had to do it in his spare time.'

'They're not complicated programs, of course,' Ted said. 'Nothing really needing an expert. It's more organisation than anything else. Still, he hasn't wasted much space. Amateurs write very long programs. Experts get to the same nitty-gritty in a third of the time. It's just practice.'

'We'd better make a note of which side of which tape contains the Grantley Basic,' I said.

Ted nodded. 'It's at an end. After York. Filed under 'Z'. He checked that he had the right tape, and wrote on its label in pencil.

For no particular reason I picked up the other two tapes and briefly looked at the words I had half-noticed before: the few words Peter had pencilled onto one of the labels.

'Programs compiled for C. Norwood.'

Ted, glancing over, said, 'That's the first side you're looking at. Ascot and so on.' He paused. 'We might just as well number the sides properly, one to six. Get them in order.'

Order, to him as to me, was a habit. When he'd finished the numbering he put the cassettes back in their gaudy boxes and handed them over. I thanked him most profoundly for his patience and took him out for a couple of beers; then over his pint he said, 'Will you be trying them out?'

'Trying what out?'

'Those races, of course. It's the Derby next month, some time. If you like we could work out the scores for all the Derby horses, and see if the program comes up with the winner. I'd actually quite like to do it. Wouldn't you?'

'I wouldn't begin to know the answers to all those questions.'

'No.' He sighed. 'Pity. The info must be somewhere, but unearthing it might be a bore.'

'I'll ask my brother,' I said, explaining about William. 'He sometimes mentions form books. I'd guess the answers would be in those.'

Ted seemed pleased with the idea, and I didn't immediately ask him which he was keener to do, to test the accuracy of the programs or to make a profit. He told me, however.

He said tentatively, 'Would you mind very much… I mean… would you mind if I took a copy of those tapes?'

I looked at him in faint surprise and he smiled awkwardly.

'The fact is, Jonathan, I could do with a boost to the economy. I mean, if those tapes actually come up with the goods, why not use them?' He squirmed a little on his seat, and when I didn't rush to answer he went on, 'You know how bloody small our salaries are. It's no fun with three kids to feed, and their clothes, their shoes cost a bomb, and the little devils grow out of them before you've paid for them, practically. I'm never under my limit on my credit cards. Never.'

'Have another beer,' I said.

'It's better for you,' he said gloomily, accepting the offer. 'You've no children. It isn't so hard for you to manage on a pittance. And you earn more anyway, with being a head of department.'

I said thoughtfully, 'I don't see why you shouldn't make copies, if you want to.'

'Jonathan!' He was clearly delighted.

'But I wouldn't use them,' I said, 'without finding out if they're any good. You might lose a packet.'

'I'll be careful,' he said, but his eyes gleamed behind his black-rimmed spectacles and I wondered uneasily if I were seeing the birth of a compulsion. There was always a slight touch of the fanatic about Ted. 'Can you ask your brother where I can get a form book?' he said.

'Well

He scanned my face. 'You're regretting saying I could copy them. Do you want them for yourself, now, is that it?'

'No. I just thought… gambling's like drugs. You can get addicted and go down the drain.'

'But all I want-' He stopped and shrugged. He looked disappointed but nothing more.

I sighed and said, 'OK. But for God's sake be sensible.'

'I will,' he said fervently. He looked at me expectantly and I took the tapes out of my pocket and gave them back to him.

'Take good care of them,' I said.

'With my life.'

'Not that far.' I thought briefly of gun-toting visitors and of much I didn't understand, and I added slowly, 'While you're about it, make copies for me too.'

He was puzzled. 'But you'll have the originals.'

I shook my head. 'They'll belong to someone else. I'll have to give them back. But I don't see why, if copies are possible, I shouldn't also keep what I return.'

'Copies are dead easy,' he said. 'Also they're prudent. All you do is load the program into the computer, from the cassette, like we did, then change to a fresh cassette and load the program back from the computer onto the new tape. You can make dozens of copies, if you like. Any time I've written a program I especially don't want to lose, I record it onto several different tapes. That way, if one tape gets lost or some idiot re-records on top of what you've done, you've always got a back-up.'

'I'll buy some tapes, then,' I said.

He shook his head. 'You give me the money, and I'll get them.

Ordinary tapes are OK if you're pushed, but special digital cassettes made for computer work are better.'

I gave him some money, and he said he would make the copies the following day, either at lunch time or after school. 'And get the form book,' he reminded me, 'won't you?'

'Yes,' I said; and later, from home, I telephoned the farm and spoke to William.

'How's it going?'

'What would you say if I tried for a racing stable in the summer?'

'I'd say stick to farms,' I said.

'Yeah. But the hunters are all out at grass in July and August, and this riding school here's cracking up, they've sold off the best horses, there's nothing much to ride, and there's weeds and muck everywhere. Mr Askwith's taken to drink. He comes roaring out in the mornings clutching the hard stuff and swearing at the girls. There are only two of them left now, trying to look after fourteen ponies. It's a mess.'

'It sounds it.'

'I've been reduced to doing some revision for those grotty exams.'

'Things must be bad,' I said.

'Thanks for the cheque.'

'Sorry it was late. Listen, I've a friend who wants a racing form book. How would he get one?'

William, it transpired, knew of about six different types of form book. Which did my friend want?

One which told him a horse's past history, how long since it had last raced and whether its ante-post odds were less than 25 to 1. Also its sire's and dam's and jockey's and trainer's history, and how much it had won in prize money. For starters.

'Good grief,' said my brother. 'You want a combination of the form book and The Sporting Life.'

'Yes, but which form book.'

'The form book,' he said. 'Raceform and Chaseform. Chaseform's the jumpers. Does he want jumpers as well?'

'I think so.'

'Tell him to write to Turf Newspapers, then. The form book comes in sections; a new updated section every week. Best on earth. I covet it increasingly, but it costs a bomb. Do you think the trustees would consider it vocational training?' He spoke, however, without much hope.

I thought of Ted Pitts's financial state and enquired for something cheaper.

'Hum,' said William judiciously. 'He could try the weekly Sporting Record, I suppose.' A thought struck him. 'This wouldn't be anything to do with your friend Peter and his betting system, would it? You said he was dead.'

'Same system, different friend.'

'There isn't a system born,' William said,'that really works.'

'You'd know, of course,' I said dryly.

'I do read.'

We talked a little more and said goodbye in good humour, and I found myself regretting, after I'd put down the receiver, that I hadn't asked him if he'd like to spend the week with me rather than on the farm. But I didn't suppose he would have done. He'd have found even the drunken Mr Askwith more congenial than the decorum of Twickenham.

Sarah telephoned an hour later, sounding strained and abrupt.

'Do you know anyone called Chris Norwood?' she said.

'No, I don't think so.' The instant I'd said it I remembered Peter's handwriting on the cassette. 'Program compiled for C. Norwood'. I opened my mouth to tell her, but she forestalled me.

'Peter knew him. The police have been here again, asking questions.'

'But what-' I began in puzzlement.

'I don't know what it's all about, if that's what you're going to ask. But someone called Chris Norwood has been shot.'

CHAPTER 5

Ignorance seemed to surround me like a fog.

'I thought Peter might have mentioned him to you,' Sarah said.

'You always talked with him more than to Donna and me.'

'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 enquiring 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 the 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 realise, 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 vapour.'

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 vapour 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 vapour? It isn't as if there was any actual petrol sloshing about. They say there wasn't.'

'It's the vapour 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 morning school 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 over-work 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 labelled 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 defences.

'Hullo,' 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 Keithley'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 the 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 grey-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 traveller after a wearisome journey. 'Perhaps. What he did in his spare time was his own affair.'

'And do you have a grey-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 Keithley purporting to come from here, it is disturbing.'

I looked at his totally undisturbed demeanour 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 RT of modification to PET.' 'Pick up floppy discs for LMP.' 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 GF'. 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 back 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 south 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 tarmac 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 outhouses 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-storey 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 enquiry 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-storey grey stone building past the freezer sheds.'

I went out to the car park, wandered around and asked again.

'Where them carrots is being unloaded.'

Them carrots were entering a two-storey grey stone building by the sack-load on a fork-lift truck, the driver of which mutely pointed me to a less cavernous entrance round 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 swing 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 swing-door swung behind us.

'I was directed here,' I said mildly.

'What do you want?'

With less confidence than before I enquired 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 swing 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 colourful than its name, and at six-fifteen he appeared, dressed now in grey 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 lorry drivers. The driver would let the sacks fall off the lorry 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 worldly-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 indispensible 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 humour 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 sending her gaga.' He shook his head. ' Next street to me, all this happened.'

'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 rose bush. On Saturday they had been still 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 labours. 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 favour. 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 sticky 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 odd 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 re-shuffle round 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 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 towards my hand, and I took it back with gratitude. 'Teachers,' he said, pushing open the pub door. 'Downtrodden underpaid lot of bastards. Never reckoned much to school myself.' He brushed away my attempt at thanks and headed back to the beer.

CHAPTER 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, I 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 fete:

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 onto 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-coloured jersey, narrow navy blue trousers, and pink and green checked bedroom slippers.

'Round the back,' she said. She looked me up and down, but apparently saw nothing to doubt. 'This way.'

She led me round the house along a path whose flat sunken paving stones merged at the edges with the weedy overgrowth of what might once have been flowerbeds. 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. Round 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 swathes 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 calmly. '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-grey 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 organise 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 a 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 were 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 saviour of the very old.'

'And are you not… an achiever?'

She made a small regretful movement with hands and head. 'I wish I were. I am averagely intelligent, but that's all. It gets you nowhere. It doesn't save you from rage. I apologise for my reaction in the garden.'

'But don't,' I said. 'Theft's an assault. Of course you'd be angry.'

She relaxed to the extent of sitting back into the sofa, where the cushions barely deflated under her weight.

'I will tell you as much as I can of what has happened. If it saves you from chasing Moses across the Red Sea, so much the better,'

To know what not to do…

I grinned at her.

She twitched her lips and said, 'What do you know about racing?'

'Not a great deal.'

'Liam did. My husband. Liam lived for the horses all his life. In Ireland, of course, when we were children. Then here. Newmarket,

Epsom, Cheltenham, that's where we've lived. Then back here to Newmarket. Always the horses.'

'Were they his job?'I asked.

'In a way. He was a gambler.' She looked at me calmly. 'I mean a professional gambler. He lived on his winnings. I still live on what's left.'

'I thought it wasn't possible,' I said.

'To beat the odds?' The words sounded wrong for her appearance. It was true, I thought, what she'd said about categories. Old women weren't expected to talk gambling; but this one did. 'In the old days it was perfectly possible to make a good living. Dozens did it. You worked on a profit expectation of ten per cent on turnover, and if you had any judgement at all, you achieved it. Then they introduced the Betting Tax. It took a slice off all the winnings, reduced the profit margin to almost nil, killed off all the old pros in no time. Your ten per cent was all going into the Revenue, do you see?'

'Yes,' I said.

'Liam had always made more than ten per cent. He took a pride in it. He reckoned he could win one race out of three. That means that every third bet, on average, would win. That's a very high percentage, day after day, year after year. And he did beat the tax. He tried new ways, added new factors. With his statistics, he said, you could always win in the long run. None of the bookies would take his bets.'

'Er, what?' I said.

'Didn't you know?' She sounded surprised. 'Bookmakers won't take bets from people who repeatedly win.'

'But I thought that's what they were in business for. I mean, to take people's bets.'

'To take bets from ordinary mug punters, yes,' she said. 'The sort who may win occasionally but never do in the end. But if you have an account with almost any bookie and you keep winning, he'll close your account.'

'Good grief,' I said weakly.

'At the races,' she said, 'all the bookies knew Liam. If they didn't know him to talk to, they knew him by sight. They'd only let him bet in cash at starting price, and then as soon as he'd got his money on they'd tic-tac it round the ring and they'd all reduce the price of that horse to ridiculously small odds, making the starting price very low, so that he wouldn't win much himself, and so that the other racegoers would be put off backing that horse, and stake their money on something else.'

There was a longish pause while I sorted out and digested what she'd said.

'And what,' I said, 'about the Tote?'

'The Tote is unpredictable. Liam didn't like that. Also the Tote in general pays worse odds than the bookies. No, Liam liked betting with the bookies. It was a sort of war. Liam always won, though most times the bookies didn't know it.'

'Er,' I said, 'how do you mean?'

She sighed. 'It was a lot of work. We had a gardener. A friend, really. He lived here in the house. Down that passage where we came in just now, those were his rooms. He used to like driving round the country, so he'd take Liam's cash and drive off to some town or other, and put it all on in the local betting shops, bit by bit, and if the horse won, which it usually did, he'd go round and collect, and come home. He and Liam would count it all out. So much for Dan – that was our friend – and so much for the working funds, and the rest for us. No more tax to pay, of course. No income tax. We went on for years like that. Years. We all got on so well together, you see.'

She fell silent, looking into the gentle past with those incongruously wild eyes.

'And Liam died?' I said.

'Dan died. Eighteen months ago, just before Christmas. He was ill for only a month. It was so quick.' A pause. 'And Liam and I, we didn't realise until after- We didn't know how much we depended on Dan, until he wasn't there. He was so strong. He could lift things… and the garden… Liam was eighty-six, you see, and I'm eighty-eight, but Dan was younger, not over seventy. He was a blacksmith from Wexford, way back. Full of jokes, too. We missed him so much.'

The golden glow of sunlight outside had faded from the peonies, the great vibrant colours fading to greys in the approaching dusk. I listened to the young voice of the old woman telling the darker parts of her life, clearing the fog from my own.

'We thought we'd have to find someone else to put the bets on,' she said. 'But who could we trust? Some of the time last year Liam tried to do it himself, going round betting shops in places like Ipswich and Colchester, places where they wouldn't know him, but he was too old, he got dreadfully exhausted. He had to stop it, it was too much.

We had quite a bit saved, you see, and we decided we'd have to live on that. And then this year a man we'd heard of, but never met, came to see us, and he offered to buy Liam's methods. He said to Liam to write down how he won so consistently, and he would buy what he'd written.'

'And those notes,' I said, enlightened, 'were what Chris Norwood stole?'

'Not exactly,' she said, sighing. 'You see there was no need for Liam to write down his method. He'd written it down years ago. All based on statistics. Quite complicated. He used to update it when necessary. And, of course, add new races. After so many years, he could bet with a thirty-three per cent chance of success in nearly a thousand particular races every year.'

She coughed suddenly, her white thin face vibrating with the muscular spasm. A fragile hand stretched out to the glass on the table, and she took a few tiny sips of yellowish liquid,

'I'm so sorry,' I said contritely. 'Making you talk.'

She shook her head mutely, taking more sips, then put down the glass carefully and said, 'It's great to talk. I'm glad you're here, to give me the opportunity. I have so few people to talk to. Some days I don't talk at all. I do miss Liam, you know. We chattered all the time. He was a terrible man to live with. Obsessive, do you see? When he had something in his mind he'd go on and on and on with it. All these sea pictures, it drove me mad when he kept buying them, but now he's gone, well, they seem to bring him close again, and I won't move them, not now.'

'It wasn't so very long ago, was it, that he died?' I said.

'On March 1st,' she said. She paused, but there were no tears, no welling distress. 'Only a few days after Mr Gilbert came. Liam was sitting there…' She pointed to one of the blue armchairs, the only one which showed rubbed dark patches on the arms and a shadow on its high back.'… and I went to make us some tea. Just a cup. We were thirsty. And when I came back he was asleep.' She paused again. 'I thought he was asleep.'

'I'm sorry,' I said.

She shook her head. 'It was the best way to go. I'm glad for him. We'd both loathed the thought of dying in hospital stuck full of tubes. If I'm lucky and if I can manage it I'll die here too, like that, one of these days. I'll be glad to. It is comforting, do you see?'

I did see, in a way, though I had never before thought of death as a welcome guest to be patiently awaited, hoping that he would come quietly when one was asleep.

'If you'd like a drink,' she said in exactly the same matter-of-fact tone, 'there's a bottle and some glasses in the cupboard.'

'I have to drive home…'

She didn't press it. She said, 'Do you want to hear about Mr Gilbert? Mr Harry Gilbert?'

'Yes, please. If I'm not tiring you.'

'I told you. Talking's a pleasure.' She considered, her head to one side, the white hair standing like a fluffy halo round the small wrinkled face. 'He owns bingo halls,' she said, and there was for the first time in her voice the faintest hint of contempt.

'You don't approve of bingo?'

'It's a mug's game.' She shrugged. 'No skill in it.'

'But a lot of people enjoy it.'

'And pay for it. Like mug punters. The wins keep them hooked but they lose in the end.'

The same the world over, I thought with amusement: the professional's dim view of the amateur. There was nothing amateur, however, about Mr Gilbert.

'Bingo made him rich,' the old woman said. 'He came here one day to see Liam, just drove up one day in a Rolls and said he was buying a chain of betting shops. He wanted to buy Liam's system so he'd always be six jumps ahead of the mugs.'

I said curiously, 'Do you always think of a gambler as a mug?'

'Mr Gilbert does. He's a cold man. Liam said it depends what they want. If they want excitement, OK, they're mugs but they're getting their money's worth. If they want profit and they still bet on instinct, they're just mugs.'

She coughed again, and sipped again, and after a while gave me the faint smile, and continued.

'Mr Gilbert offered Liam a lot of money. Enough for us to invest and live on comfortably for the rest of our days. So Liam agreed. It was wisest. They argued a bit about the price, of course. They spent almost a week ringing each other up with offers. But in the end it was settled.' She paused. 'Then before Mr Gilbert paid the money, and before Liam gave him all the papers, Liam died. Mr Gilbert telephoned me to say he was sorry, but did the bargain still stand, and I said yes it did. It certainly did. I was very pleased to be going to be without money anxieties, do you see?'

I nodded.

'And then,' she said, and this time with anger,'that hateful Chris Norwood stole the papers out of Liam's office… Stole all his life's work.' Her body shook. It was the fact of what had been stolen which infuriated her, I perceived, more than the fortune lost. 'We'd both been glad to have him come here, to carry coal and logs and clean the windows, and then I'd begun to wonder if he'd been in my handbag, but I'm always pretty vague about how much I have there… and then Liam died.' She stopped, fighting against agitation, pressing a thin hand to her narrow chest, squeezing shut those wide-staring eyes.

'Don't go on,' I said, desperately wanting her to.

'Yes, yes,' she said, opening her eyes again. 'Mr Gilbert came to collect the papers. He brought the money all in cash. He showed it to me, in a briefcase. Packets of notes. He said to spend it, not invest it. That way there would be no fuss with tax. He said he would give me more if I ever needed it, but there was enough, you know, for years and years, living as I do… And then we went along to Liam's office, and the papers weren't there. Nowhere. Vanished. I'd put them all ready, you see, the day before, in a big folder. There were so many of them. Sheets and sheets, all in Liam's spiky writing. He never learned to type. Always wrote by hand. And the only person who'd been in there besides Mrs Urquart was Chris Norwood. The only person.'

'Who,' I said, 'is Mrs Urquart?'

'What? Oh, Mrs Urquart comes to clean for me. Or she did. Three days a week. She can't come now, she says. She's in trouble with the welfare people, poor thing.'

Akkerton's voice in the pub floated back: '… she never told the welfare she was earning…'

I said 'Was it in Mrs Urquart's house that Chris Norwood lodged?'

'Yes, that's right.' She frowned. 'How did you know?'

'Something someone said.' I sorted through what I had first said to her to explain my visit and belatedly realised that I'd taken for granted she'd known something which I now saw that perhaps she didn't.

'Chris Norwood…' I said slowly.

'I'd like to strangle him.'

'Didn't your Mrs Urquart tell you… what had happened?'

'She rang in a great fuss. Said she wasn't coming any more. She sounded very upset. Saturday morning, last week.'

'And that was all she said, that she wasn't coming any more?'

'We hadn't been very good friends lately, not with Chris Norwood stealing Liam's papers. I didn't want to quarrel with her. I needed her, for the cleaning. But since that hateful man stole from us, she was very defensive, almost rude. But she needed the money, just like I needed her, and she knew I'd never give her away.'

I looked out towards the peonies, where the greys were darkening to night, and debated whether or not to tell her what had befallen Chris Norwood. Decided against, because hearing of the murder of someone one knew, even someone one disliked, could be incalculably shattering. To thrust an old lady living alone in a big house into a state of shock and fear couldn't do any possible good.

'Do you read newspapers?' I said.

She raised her eyebrows over the oddness of the question but answered simply enough. 'Not often. The print's too small. I've good eyes, but I like big-print books.' She indicated the fat red-and-white volume on her table. 'I read nothing else, now.' She looked vaguely round the dusk-filled room. 'Even the racing pages. I've stopped reading those. I just watch the results on television.'

'Just the results? Not the races?'

'Liam said watching the races was the mug's way of betting. Watch the results, he said, and add them to statistical probabilities. I do watch the races, but the results are more of a habit.'

She stretched out a stick-thin arm and switched on the table-light beside her, shutting the peonies instantly into blackness and banishing the far corners of the room into deep shadow. On herself the instant effect was to enhance her physical degeneration, putting skin-folds cruelly back where the dusk had softened them, anchoring the ageless mind into the old, old body.

I looked at the thin, wizened yellow face, at the huge eyes that might once have been beautiful, at the white unstyled hair of Liam O'Rorke's widow, and I suggested that maybe, if I gave her the computer tapes, she could still sell the knowledge that was on them to her friend Mr Gilbert.

'It did cross my mind,' she said, nodding, 'when you said you had them. I don't really understand what they are, though. I don't know anything about computers.'

She'd been married to one, in a way. I said, 'They are just cassettes – like for a cassette player.'

She thought for a while, looking down at her hands. Then she said, 'If I pay you a commission, will you do the deal for me? I'm not so good at dealing as Liam, do you see? And I don't think I have the strength to haggle.'

'But wouldn't Mr Gilbert pay the agreed price?'

She shook her head doubtfully. 'I don't know. That deal was struck three months ago, and now it isn't the papers themselves I'm selling, but something else. I don't know. I think he might twist me into corners. But you know about these tapes, or whatever they are. You could talk to him better than me.' She smiled faintly. 'A proper commission, young man. Ten per cent.'

It took me about five seconds to agree. She gave me Harry Gilbert's address and telephone number, and said she would leave it all to me. I could come back and tell her when it was done. I could bring her all the money, she said, and she would pay me my share, and everything would be fine.

'You trust me?' I said.

'If you steal from me, I'll be no worse off than I am at present.'

She came with me to the lilac-shrouded front door to let me out, and I shook her thistledown, hand and drove away.

The Red Sea parted for Moses, and he walked across.

CHAPTER 7

On Thursday I trundled blearily round school, ineffective from lack of the sleep I'd forfeited in favour of correcting the Upper V's exercise books. They too, like William, had decisive exams ahead. One of the most boring things about myself, I'd discovered, was this sense of commitment to the kids.

Ted Pitts didn't turn up. Jenkins, when directly asked, said scratchily that Pitts had laryngitis, which was disgraceful as it put the whole Maths department's timetable out of order.

'When will he be back?'

Jenkins gave me a sour sneer, not for any particular reason but because it was an ingrained mannerism.

'His wife telephoned,' he said. 'Pitts has lost his voice. When he regains it, doubtless he will return.'

'Could you give me his number.'

'He isn't on the telephone,' Jenkins said repressively. 'He says he can't afford it.'

'His address, then?'

'You should ask in the office.' Jenkins said. 'I can't be expected to remember where my assistant masters live.'

The school secretary was not in his office when I went to look for him during morning break, and I spent the last two periods before lunch (Five C, magnetism; Four D, electrical power) fully realising that if I didn't send computer tapes to Cambridge on that very day they would not arrive by Saturday: and if no computer tapes arrived at Cambridge main post office by Saturday I could expect another and much nastier visit from the man behind the Walther.

At lunchtime, food came low on the priorities. Instead I first went out of school along to the nearest row of shops and bought three blank sixty-minute cassettes. They weren't of the quality beloved by Ted Pitts, but for my purpose they were fine. Then I sought out one of Ted Pitts's colleagues and begged a little help with the computer.

'Well,' he said hesitantly. 'OK, if it's only for ten minutes. Straight after school. And don't tell Jenkins, will you?'

'Never.'

His laugh floated after me as I hurried down the passage towards the coin-box telephone in the main entrance hall. I rang up Newmarket police station (via Directory Enquiries) 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/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(r) 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 favours 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 fourth forms 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 not 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 labelled and light-flashing police car, but in a fast four-door saloon. 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 grey, unwavering light brown eyes and a sceptical mouth. Not a man, I thought, to save 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 grey 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: '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 Identikit 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 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 awhile?'

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, round 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.

He 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 peddlar 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 coloured 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 him 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.

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 his 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 towards 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 have done better to let me shake the goods out of her the minute her old man died. You've no clue, 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.

'How did this creep get here?' he demanded.

Gilbert either ignored the peacockery or indulged it. 'Mrs O'Rorke sent him,' he said.

Neither of them thought to ask the very awkward question of how I knew Mrs O'Rorke. I'd have given few chances for my health if they'd worked it through. I reckoned that this was one exceptional occasion when ignorance was emphatically the safest path, and that in prudence I should be wholly ignorant of the life and death of Chris Norwood.

'How come he still has the tapes to sell,' Angelo said cunningly, 'if he's already sent them to me?'

Gilbert's eyes narrowed and his neck stiffened, and I saw that his unprepossessing exterior was misleading: that it was indeed a tough bull Angelo was challenging, one who still ruled his territory.

'Well?'he said to me.

Angelo waited with calculation and triumph growing in his eyes and throughout his face like an intoxication, the scarifying lack of inhibition ballooning as fast as before. It was his utter recklessness, I thought, which was to be feared above all.

'I sent a copy,' I said. I pointed to the package in his hand. 'Those are copies.'

'Copies?' It stopped Angelo for a moment. Then he said suspiciously, 'Why did you send copies?'

'The originals belonged to Mrs O'Rorke. They weren't mine to give you. But I certainly didn't want you and your friend coming back again waving your gun all over the place, so I did send some tapes. I had no idea I would ever see you again. I just wanted to be rid of you. I had no idea you were Mr Gilbert's son.'

'Gun?' Gilbert said sharply. 'Gun?'

'His pistol.'

'Angelo-' There was no mistaking the anger in the father's voice. 'I've forbidden you – forbidden you, do you hear, to carry that gun. I sent you to ask for those tapes. To ask. To buy.'

'Threats are cheaper,' Angelo said. 'And I'm not a child. The days when I took your orders are over.'

They faced each other in unleashed antagonism.

'That pistol is for protection,' Gilbert said intensely. 'And it is mine. You are not to threaten people with it. You are not to take it out of this house. You still depend on me for a living, and while you work for me and live in this house you'll do what I say. You'll leave that gun strictly alone.'

God in Heaven, I thought: he doesn't know about Chris Norwood.

'You taught me to shoot,' Angelo said defiantly.

'But as a sport,' Gilbert said, and didn't understand that sport for his son was a living target.

I interrupted the filial battle and said to Gilbert, 'You've got the tapes. Will you pay Mrs O'Rorke?'

'Don't be bloody stupid,' Angelo said.

I ignored him. To his father I said, 'You were generous before. Be generous now.'

I didn't expect him to be. I wanted only to distract him, to keep his mind on something trivial, not to let him think.

'Don't listen to him,' Angelo said. 'He's only a mug.'

Gilbert's face mirrored his son's words. He looked me up and down with the same inner conviction of superiority, the belief that everyone was a mug except himself.

If Gilbert felt like that, I thought, it was easy to see why Angelo did. Parental example. I would often at school know the father by the behaviour of the son.

I shrugged. I looked defeated. I let them get on with their ill-will. I wanted above all to get out of that house before they started putting bits of knowledge together and came up with a picture of me as a real towering threat to Angelo's liberty. I didn't know if Gilbert would stop his son- or could stop him- if Angelo wanted me dead: and there was a lot of leafy Welwyn Garden City lying quietly in the back garden.

'Mrs O'Rorke's expecting me,' I said, 'to know how I got on.'

'Tell her nothing doing,' Angelo said.

Gilbert nodded.

I edged past Angelo to the door, looking suitably meek under his scathing sneer.

'Well,' I said weakly, 'I'll be going.'

I walked jerkily through the hall, past the attendant golf clubs and out of the open front door, taking with me a last view of Gilbert locking psychological horns with the menace that would one day overthrow him.

I was sweating. I wiped the palms of my hands on my trousers, fumbled open the car door, put a faintly trembling hand on the ignition key and started the engine.

If they hadn't been so busy fighting each other…

As I turned out of the drive into the cul-de-sac itself I had a glimpse of the two of them coming out onto the step to stare after me, and my mouth was uncomfortably dry until I was sure Angelo hadn't leapt into his car to give chase

I had never felt my heart flutter that way before. I had never, I supposed, felt real fear. I couldn't get it to subside. I felt shaky, restless, short of breath, slightly sick.

Reaction, no doubt.

CHAPTER 8

Somewhere between Welwyn and Twickenham, I pulled into a parking space to work out where to go.

I could go home, collect my guns, and drive to Bisley. I looked down at my hands. On present form, I'd miss the target by a yard. No point in wasting money on the ammunition.

It should take a fair while for the Gilberts to discover that they had 'Starstrike' instead of racing programs, but not as long as that to work out that while I had the original tapes, they had no exclusive control of Liam's system. I needed somewhere they wouldn't find me when they came looking. Pity, I thought, that Sarah and I had so few friends.

I walked across the road to a public telephone box and telephoned to William's farm.

'Well, of course, Jonathan,' Mrs Porter said. 'Of course, I'd have you. But William's gone. He got fed up with no horses to ride here and he packed up and went off to Lambourn this morning. He'd a friend there, he said, and he's going straight back to school from there tomorrow evening.'

'Was he all right?'

'So much energy!' she said. 'But he won't eat a thing. Says he wants to keep his weight down, to be a jockey.'

I sighed. 'Thanks anyway.'

'It's a pleasure to have him,' she said. 'He makes me laugh.'

I rang off and counted the small stack of coins I had left, and public-spiritedly spent them on the Newmarket police.

'Chief Superintendent Irestone isn't here, sir,' they said. 'Do you want to leave a message?'

I hesitated, but in the end all I said was, 'Tell him Jonathan Derry called. I have a name for him. I'll get in touch with him later.'

'Very good, sir.'

I got back into the car, consulted a slip of paper in my wallet and drove to Northolt to visit Ted Pitts, knowing that quite likely he wouldn't be pleased to see me. When I had finally tracked down the school secretary, he had parted with the requested information reluctantly, saying that the masters' addresses were sacrosanct to save them from over-zealous parents. Ted Pitts, he said, had particularly made him promise not to divulge.

'But I'm not a parent.'

'Well, no.'

I'd had to persuade, but I got it. And one could see, I thought, why Ted wanted to guard his privacy, because where he lived, I found, was in a mobile home on a caravan site. Neat enough, but not calculated to impress some of the social-climbers in the P.T. A.

Ted's wife, who opened the door to my knock, looked surprised but not unwelcoming. She was as earnest as Ted, small, bright-eyed, an occasional visitor to school football matches, where Ted tore up and down the pitches refereeing. I sought for a name and thought 'Jane', but wasn't sure. I smiled hopefully instead.

'How's Ted?' I said.

'Much better. His voice is coming back.' She opened the door wider. 'He'd like to see you, I'm sure, so do come in.' She gestured to the inside of the caravan, where I couldn't yet see, and said – 'It's a bit of a mess. We didn't expect visitors.'

'If you'd rather I didn't-'

'No. Ted will want you.'

I stepped up into the van and saw what she meant. In every direction spread an untidy jumble of books and newspapers and clothes and toys, all the normal clutter of a large family but condensed into a very small space.

Ted was in the minuscule sitting-room with his three little girls, sitting on a sofa and watching while they played on the floor. When he saw me he jumped to his feet in astonishment and opened his mouth, but all that came out was a squeaky croak.

'Don't talk,' I said. 'I just came to see how you are.' Any thoughts I had about cadging a bed from him had vanished. It seemed silly, indeed, to mention it.

'I'm better.' The words were recognisable, but half a whisper, and he gestured for me to sit down. His wife offered coffee and I accepted. The children squabbled and he kicked them gently with his toe.

'Jane will take them out soon,' he said huskily.

'I'm being a nuisance.'

He shook his head vigorously. 'Glad you came.' He pointed to a ledge running high along one wall and said, 'I bought your new tapes. They're up there, with your cassettes, out of reach. The children climb so. Haven't done the copying yet, though. Sorry.' He rubbed his throat as if massage would help, and made a face of frustration.

'Don't talk,' I said again, and passed on William's information about form books. He seemed pleased enough but also subdued, as if the knowledge no longer interested.

Jane returned with one mug of coffee and offered sugar. I shook my head and took a sip of the liquid which looked dark brown but tasted weak.

I said, more to make conversation than anything else, 'I don't suppose either of you know where I could put up for a night or two? Somewhere not too expensive. I mean, not a hotel.' I smiled lop-sidedly. 'I've spent so much on petrol and other things this week that I'm a bit short.'

'End of the month,' Ted said, nodding. 'Always the same.'

'But your house!' Jane said. Ted says you've got a house.'

'Er… um… er… I haven't been getting on too well with Sarah.' The convenient half-truth arrived just in time and they made small sad noises in sympathetic comprehension. Ted, all the same, shook his head, sorry not to be able to help.

'Don't know of anywhere,' he said.

Jane, standing straight, tucking her elbows into her sides and clasping her hands tightly together said, 'You could stay here. On the sofa.'

Ted looked extremely surprised but his wife very tensely said, 'Would you pay us?'

'Jane!' Ted said despairingly: but I nodded.

'In advance?' she said rigidly, and I agreed again. I gave her two of the notes I'd got from the bank a day earlier and asked if it was enough. She said yes, looking flushed, and bundled the three children out of the room, out of the caravan, and down towards the road. Ted, hopelessly awkward and embarrassed, stuttered a wheezy apology.

'We've had a bad month… they've put the land rent up here… and I had to pay for new tyres, and for the car licence. I must have the car and it's falling to bits – and I'm overdrawn…'

'Do stop, Ted,' I said. 'I know all about being broke. Not starving broke. Just penniless.'

He smiled weakly. 'I suppose we've never had the bailiffs… but this week we've been living on bread mostly. Are you sure you don't mind?'

'Positive.'

So I stayed with the Pitts. Watched television, built bright brick towers for the children, ate the egg supper my money had bought, took Ted for a pint.

The talking couldn't have done his throat much good, but between the froth and the dregs I learned a good deal about the Pitts. He'd met Jane one summer in a youth hostel in the Lake District, and they'd married while he was still at college because the oldest of the little girls was imminent. They were happy, he said, but they'd never been able to save a deposit for a house. Lucky to have a mobile home. Hire purchase, of course. During the holidays, he looked after the children while Jane took temporary secretarial jobs. Better for the family income. Better for Jane. He still went hiking on his own, though, one week every year. Backpacking. Sleeping in a tent, in hilly country; Scotland or Wales. He gave me a shy look through the black-framed glasses. 'It sorts me out. Keeps me sane.' It wasn't everyone, I thought, who was his own psychotherapist.

When we got back, the caravan was tidy and the children asleep. One had to be quiet, Ted said, going in: they woke easily. The girls all slept, it appeared, in the larger of the two bedrooms, with their parents in the smaller. There was a pillow, a car travelling rug and a clean sheet awaiting me, and although the sofa was a bit short for comfort it was envelopingly soft.

It was only on the point of sleep, far too late to bother, that I remembered that I hadn't called back to talk to Irestone. Oh well, I thought, yawning, tomorrow would do.

In the morning I did call from a telephone box near the public park where Ted and I took the children to play on the swings and seesaw.

Irestone, as usual, wasn't in. Wasn't he ever in, I asked. A repressive voice told me the Chief Superintendent was off-duty at present, and would I please leave a message. I perversely said that no, I wouldn't, I wanted to speak to the Chief Superintendent personally. If I would leave a number, they said, he would in due course call me. Impasse, I thought: Ted Pitts had no telephone.

'If I call you at nine tomorrow morning,' I said, 'will Chief Superintendent Irestone be there? If I call at ten? At eleven? At midday?'

I was told to wait and could hear vague conversations going on in the background, and going on for so long that I had to feed more coins into the box, which scarcely improved my patience. Finally, however, the stolid voice returned. 'Detective Chief Superintendent Irestone will be in the Incident Room tomorrow morning from ten o'clock onwards. You may call him at the following number.'

'Wait a minute.' I unclipped my pen and dug out the scrap of paper which held Ted's address. 'OK.'

He gave me the number, and I thanked him fairly coolly, and that was that.

Ted was pushing his tiniest girl carefully round on a sort of turntable, holding her close to him and laughing with her. I wished quite surprisingly fiercely that I could have had a child like that, that I could have taken her to a sunny park on Sunday mornings, and hugged her little body and watched her grow. Sarah, I thought. Sarah- this is the way you've ached, perhaps; and for the baby to cuddle, and the young woman to see married. This is the loss. This, that Ted Pitts has. I watched his delight in the child and I envied him with all my heart.

We sat on a bench a bit later while the girls played in a sandpit, and for something to say I asked him why he'd lost his first intense interest in the racing form-books.

He shrugged, looking at his children, and said in the husky voice which was slowly returning to normal, 'You can see how it is. I can't risk the money. I can't afford to buy the form books. I couldn't even afford to buy a set of tapes for myself this week, to copy the programs onto. I bought some for you with the money you gave me, but I just didn't have enough… I told you, we've been down to counting pennies for food, and although next month's pay will be in the bank tomorrow I still haven't paid the electricity.'

'It's the Derby soon,' I said.

He nodded morosely. 'Don't think I haven't thought of it. I look at those tapes sitting up on that shelf, and I think, shall I or shan't I? But I've had to decide not to. I can't risk it. How could I possibly explain to Jane if I lost? We need every pound, you know. You can see we do.'

It was ironic, I thought. On the one hand there was Angelo Gilbert, who was prepared to kill to get those tapes, and on the other, Ted Pitts, who had them and set them lower than a dust-up with his wife.

'The programs belong to an old woman called O'Rorke,' I said. 'Mrs Maureen O'Rorke. I went to see her this week.'

Ted showed only minor signs of interest.

'She said a few things I thought you'd find amusing.'

'What things?'Ted said.

I told him about the bookmakers closing the accounts of regular winners, and about the system the O'Rorkes had used with their gardener, Dan, going round betting shops to put their money on anonymously.

'Great heavens,' Ted said. 'What a palaver.' He shook his head. 'No, Jonathan, it's best to forget it.'

'Mrs O'Rorke said her husband could bet with an overall certainty of winning once every three times. How does that strike you statistically?'

He smiled. 'I'd need a hundred per cent certainty to bet on the Derby.'

One of the children threw sand in the eyes of another and he got up in a hurry to scold, to comfort, to dig around earnestly with the corner of his handkerchief.

'By the way,' I said, when order was restored, 'I took some copies of your game "Starstrike", I hope you don't mind.'

'You're welcome,' he said. 'Did you play it? You have to type in F or S at the first question mark. I haven't written the instructions out yet, but I'll let you have them when I do. The kids,' he looked pleased and a touch smug, 'say it's neat.'

'Is it your best?'

'My best?' He smiled a fraction and shrugged, and said, 'I teach from it. I had to write it so that the kids could understand the program and how it worked. Sure, I could write a far more sophisticated one, but what would be the point?'

A pragmatist, Ted Pitts, not a dreamer. We collected the children together, with Ted brushing them down and emptying sand from their shoes, and drove back to the caravan to home-made hamburgers for lunch.

In the afternoon under Ted's commiserating eyes I corrected the load of exercise books which I happened not to have carried into my house on Friday night. Five B had Irestone to thank for that. And on Monday morning with Ted's voice in good enough shape, he thought, to quell the monsters in the third form, we both went back to school.

We each drove our own cars. I felt I'd used up my welcome in the caravan and although Jane said I could stay if I liked I could see I was no longer a blessing from heaven. The new pay cheque would be in the bank. There would be more than bread this week, and I would have to think of somewhere else.

Ted stretched up in the last minutes before we left and plucked the six cassettes from the high shelf. 'I could do these at lunchtime today,' he said, 'if you like.'

'That would be great,' I said. 'Then you can keep one set and the others will be Mrs O'Rorke's.'

'But don't you want some yourself?'

'Maybe later I could get copies of yours, but I can't see me chasing round betting shops for the rest of my life.'

He laughed. 'Nor me. Though I wouldn't have minded a flutter…' A sort of longing gleamed in his eyes again, and was quickly extinguished. 'Ah well,' he said, 'forward to the fray.' He kissed Jane and the little girls, and off we went.

During the mid-morning break I yet again tried to reach Chief Superintendent Irestone, this time from the coin box in the common-room. Even with the new number, I got no joy. Chief Superintendent Irestone wasn't available at that time.

'This is boring,' I said. 'I was told he would be.'

'He was called away, sir. Will you leave a message?'

I felt like leaving a couple of round oaths. I said, 'Tell him Jonathan Derry called.'

'Very good, sir. Your message time at ten thirty-three.'

To hell with it, I thought.

I had taken about five paces down the room in the direction of the coffee machine when the telephone bell rang behind me. It was the time of day when masters' wives tended to ring up to get their dear ones to run errands on their way home, and the nearest to the bell answered its summons as a matter of course. My wife, at least, I thought, wouldn't be calling, but someone shouted, 'Jonathan, it's for you.'

Surprised, I retraced my steps and picked up the receiver.

'Hullo,' I said.

''Jonathan,' Sarah said. 'Where have you been? Where in God's name have you been?'

She sounded hysterical. Her voice was high, vibrating with tension, strung tighter than I'd ever heard before. Near snapping point. Frightening.

'What's happened?' I asked. I was aware that my voice sounded too calm, but I couldn't help it. It always seemed to come out that way when there was a jumbled turmoil going on inside.

'Oh my Christ!' She still had time to be exasperated with me, but no time to say more.

After the shortest of pauses another voice spoke, and this time every hair of my body rose in protest.

'Now you listen to me, creep…'

Angelo Gilbert.

'You listen to me,' he said. 'Your little lady wifey's sitting here snug as you like. We tied her to a chair so's not to hurt her.' He sniggered. 'Her friend too, the wet little bird. Now you listen, mug, because you're going to do just what I tell you. Are you listening?'

'Yes,' I said. I was in fact listening with all my might and with one hand clamped over my other ear because of the chatter and coffee cups all around me. It was macabre. It also seemed to have divorced me from any feeling in my feet.

'That was your last runaround, that was,' Angelo said, 'sending us those duff tapes. This time you'll give us the real ones, get it?'

'Yes,' I said mildly.

'You wouldn't like to get your little wifey back with her face all smashed up, would you?'

'No.'

'All you got to do is give us the tapes.'

'All right,' I said.

'And no bloody runaround.' He seemed disappointed that I'd shown so little reaction to his dramatics but even in that dire moment it seemed second nature to use on him the techniques I'd unconsciously developed in the years of teaching: to deflate the defiance, to be bored by the super-ego, to kill off the triumphant cruelty by an appearance of indifference.

It worked on the kids, it worked a treat on Jenkins, and it had already worked twice on Angelo. He should have learned by now, I thought, that I didn't rise to sneers or arrogance: not visibly anyway. He was too full of himself to believe that someone might now show the fear he felt the urge to induce. He might not be ultra-bright, but he was incalculably dangerous.

He held the receiver to Sarah's mouth, and against her I had fewer defences.

'Jonathan…' It was half anger, half fright: high and vehement. 'They came yesterday. Yesterday. Donna and I have been tied up here all night. Where have you damned well been?

'Are you in Donna's house?' I said anxiously.

'What? Yes, of course. Of course, we are. Don't ask such damn silly questions.'

Angelo took the phone back again. 'Now you listen, mug. Listen good. This time there's to be no messing. This time we want the real McCoy, and I'm telling you, it's your last chance.'

I didn't answer.

'Are you there?' he said sharply.

'Sure,' I said.

'Take the tapes to my father's house in Welwyn. Have you got that?'

'Yes. But I haven't got the tapes.'

'Then get them.' His voice was nearly a screech. 'Do you hear?' he demanded. 'Get them.'

'It'll take some time,' I said.

'You haven't got time, creep.'

I took a deep breath. He wasn't safe. He wasn't reasonable. He wasn't a schoolchild. I simply couldn't play him too far.

'I can get the tapes today,' I said. 'I'll take them to your father when I get them. It might be late.'

'Sooner,' he said.

'I can't. It's impossible.'

I didn't know exactly why I wanted to delay. It was an instinct. To work things out; not to rush in. This time the Egyptians would have more sense.

'When you get there,' he said, seeming to accept it, 'my father will test the tapes. On a computer. A Grantley computer. Get it, mug? My father bought a Grantley computer, because that's the sort of computer those tapes were written for. So no funny tricks like last time. He'll try the tapes, see? And they'd better be good.'

'All right,' I said again.

'When my father is satisfied,' he said, 'he'll ring me here. Then I'll leave your little wifey and the wet chick tied up here, and you can come and rescue them like a right little Galahad. Got it?'

'Yes,' I said.

'Don't you forget, creep, any funny stuff and your little wifey will keep the plastic surgery business in work for years. Starting with her nice white teeth, creep.'

He apparently again held the receiver for Sarah because it was her voice which came next. Still angry, still frightened, still high.

'For God's sake, get those tapes.'

'Yes I will,' I said. 'Has Angelo got his pistol?'

'Yes. Jonathan, do as he says. Please do as he says. Don't fool about.' It was an order just as much as a prayer.

'The tapes,' I said with an attempt at reassurance, 'are not worth a tooth. Keep him calm if you can. Tell him I'll do what he says. Tell him I've promised you.'

She didn't answer. It was Angelo who said, 'That's all, creep. That's enough. You get those tapes. Right?'

'All right,' I said, and the line abruptly went dead.

I felt pretty dead myself.

The common-room had emptied and I was already going to be late for the Lower VI. I picked up the necessary books mechanically and propelled myself on unfelt feet along the passages to the laboratories.

Get the tapes…

I couldn't get them until I could find Ted Pitts, which would probably not be until lunch time at twelve fifteen. I had an hour and a half until then in which to decide what to do.

The Lower VI were studying radioactivity. I told them to continue the set of experiments with alpha particles that they had started last week and I sat on my high stool by the blackboard from where I often taught, and watched the Geiger counters counting with my mind on Angelo Gilbert.

Options, I thought.

I could yet once again ring the police. I could say an unstable man is holding my wife hostage at gunpoint. I could say I thought it was he who had killed Christopher Norwood. If I did, they might go chasing out to the Keithly house and try to make Angelo surrender and then Sarah could be a hostage not for three little cassettes, but for Angelo's personal liberty. An escalation not to be thought of.

No police.

What, then?

Give Harry Gilbert the tapes. Trust that Angelo would leave Sarah and Donna undamaged. Do, in fact, precisely what I'd been told, and believe that Angelo wouldn't wait for me to walk into Donna's house and then leave three dead bodies behind when he walked out of it.

It wasn't logically likely, but it was possible.

It would have been better if I could have thought of a good valid logical reason for the murder of Chris Norwood. He hadn't given Angelo the finished computer programs because if he had there would have been no need for Angelo to come to me. I had speculated, not for the first time, on exactly what had happened to Liam O'Rorke's original notes, and what had happened to the tapes Peter told me he had sent to the person who had commissioned them. To C. Norwood, Angel Kitchens, Newmarket.

To Chris Norwood, comprehensive thief. Cocky little bastard, Akkerton had said. Vegetable chef Akkerton, feeding his paunch in the pub.

I supposed that Chris Norwood, when first faced with Angelo, had simply said that Peter Keithly was writing the programs and had all the notes, and that Angelo should get them from him. Angelo had then gone threateningly to Peter, who had been frightened into giving him programs which he knew were incomplete. By the time the Gilberts discovered they were useless, Peter was dead. Back Angelo must have gone to Chris Norwood, this time waving a gun. And again Chris Norwood must have said Peter Keithly had the programs on tapes. That if he was dead, they were in his house. He would have told him that, I thought, after Angelo had shot up the stereo. He would have begun to be really frightened: but he would have still wanted to keep the programs if he could, because he knew they were a meal ticket for life.

Chris Norwood, I guessed, had twice not given Angelo what he wanted; and Chris Norwood was dead.

I also had fooled and obstructed Angelo twice, and I couldn't be sure that I wasn't alive because I'd had a handy rifle. Without his father there to restrain him, Angelo could still be as volatile as the petrol vapour that had killed Peter, even if he thought he finally had his hands on the treasure he'd been chasing for so long.

Some of the Lower VI were getting their nuclei into knots. Automatically I descended from the heights of the stool and reminded them that cloud chambers didn't cloud if one neglected to add dry ice.

No more runarounds, Angelo had said.

Well…

What tools did I have, I thought. What skills that I could use?

I could shoot.

I couldn't on the other hand shoot Angelo. Not while he had a Walther to Sarah's head. Not without landing myself in jail for manslaughter at the least.

Shooting Angelo was out.

I had the knowledge that Physics had given me. I could construct a radio, a television, a thermostat, a digital clock, a satellite tracker and, given the proper components, a laser beam, a linear accelerator and an atomic bomb. I couldn't exactly make an atomic bomb before lunch.

The two boys who were using the alpha-particle-scattering analogue were arguing over the apparatus, which consisted of one large magnet bombarded by a host of small ones. One boy insisted that the power of permanent magnets decayed with time and the other said it was rubbish, permanent meant permanent.

'Who's right, sir?' they asked.

'Permanence is relative,' I said. 'Not absolute.'

There was a flash of impermanent electrical activity at that moment in my brain. The useful knowledge was to hand.

God bless all boys, I thought.

CHAPTER 9

Ted Pitts hunched over the Harris all through lunchtime, making and testing the copies on the new tapes.

'There you are,' he said finally, rubbing his neck. 'As far as I can see they're perfect.'

'Which set do you want?' I said.

He peered at me earnestly through the black frames. 'Don't you mind?'

'Choose which you like,' I said. 'I'll take the others.'

He hesitated, but decided on the originals. 'If you're sure?'

'Certain,' I said. 'But give me the original boxes, Oklahoma and so on. It might be better if I hand them over in the right wrappings.'

I slid the copies into the gaudy boxes, thanked Ted, returned to the common-room, and told my four long-suffering lieutenants that I had developed a stupefying sick shivery headache and would they please take my afternoon classes between them. There were groans, but it was a service we regularly did for each other when it was unavoidable. I was going home, I said. With luck, I would be back in the morning.

Before I left I made a detour to the prep room where Louisa was counting out springs and weights for the 2nd form that afternoon. I told her about the headache and got scant sympathy, which was fair. While she took the load of batteries through into one of the laboratories to distribute them along the benches I opened one of her tidy cupboards and helped myself to three small objects, hiding them smartly in my pocket.

'What are you looking for?' Louisa asked, coming back and seeing me in front of the still open doors.

'Nothing particular,' I said vaguely. 'I don't really know.'

'Get home to bed,' she said sighing, casting herself for martyrdom. 'I'll cope with the extra work.'

My absence meant in reality less work for her, not more, but there was nothing to be gained by pointing it out. I thanked her profusely to keep her in a good mood for the others, and went out to the car to drive home.

No need to worry about Angelo being there: he was in the Keithlys' house a hundred miles away in Norfolk.

Everything felt unreal. I thought of the two girls, tied to the chairs, uncomfortable, scared, exhausted. Don't fool about, Sarah had said. Do what Angelo says.

Somewhere in one of the sideboard drawers we had a photograph album, thrust out of sight since we had lost the desire to record our joyless life. I dug it out and turned the pages, looking for the picture I had taken once of Peter, Donna and Sarah standing out on the pavement in front of Peter's house. The sun had been shining, I found. All three were smiling, looking happy. A pang to see Peter's face, no moustache, looking so pleased with himself and young. Nothing special about that photograph: just people, a house, a street. Reassuring to me, however, at that moment.

I went upstairs to my own small room, unlocked the gun cupboard and took out one of the Mauser 7.62s and also one of the Olympic-type rifles, the Anschtz. 22. Packed them both into the special suitcase along with some ammunition of both sizes. Carried the case down to the car and locked it into the boot.

Reflected and went upstairs to fetch a large brown bathtowel from the linen cupboard. Locked that also into the boot.

Locked the house.

After that I sat in the car for three or four minutes thinking things out, with the result that I went back into the house yet again, this time for a tube of extra-strength glue.

All I didn't have enough of, I thought, was time.

I started the engine and set off not to Welwyn, but to Norwich.

Propelled by demons, I did the trip in a shorter time than usual, but it was still four-thirty when I reached the city outskirts. Six hours since Angelo had telephoned. Six long hours for his hostages.

I drew up beside a telephone box in a shopping parade not far from Donna's house and dialled her number. Praying, I think, that Angelo would answer: that all would be at least no worse than it had been in the morning.

'Hullo,' he said. Eagerly, I thought. Expecting his father.

'It's Jonathan Derry,' I said. 'I've got the tapes.'

'Let me talk to my father.'

'I'm not at your father's house. I haven't gone there yet. It's taken me all day to get the tapes.'

'Now you listen, creep…' He was roughly, nastily angry. 'I warned you…'

'It's taken me all day, but I've got them,' I interrupted insistently. 'I've got the tapes. I've got the tapes.'

'All right,' he said tautly. 'Now take them to my father. Take them there, do you hear?'

'Yes,' I said. 'I'll go there straightaway, but it'll take me some time. It's a long way.'

Angelo muttered under his breath and then said, 'How long? Where are you? We've been waiting all fucking night and all fucking day.'

'I'm near Bristol.'

'Where?' It was a yell of fury.

'It'll take me four hours,' I said,'to reach your father.'

There was a brief silence. Then Sarah's voice, tired beyond tears, numb with too much fright.

'Where are you?' she said.

'Near Bristol.'

'Oh my God.' She sounded no longer angry, but hopeless. 'We can't stand much more of this…'

The receiver was taken away from her in mid-sentence, and Angelo came back on the line.

'Get going, creep,' he said; and disconnected.

Breathing space, I thought. Four hours before Angelo expected the message from his father. Instead of pressure mounting inexorably, dangerously, in that house, there would at worst, I hoped, be a bearable irritation, and at best a sort of de-fusing of suspense. They wouldn't for another four hours be strung up with a minute-to-minute expectation.

Before getting back into the car I opened the boot, took the telescope and the two rifles out of their non-jolt beds in the suitcase and wrapped them more vulnerably in the brown towel. Put them into the car on the brown upholstery of the back seat. Put the boxes of bullets beside them, also hidden by towel. Looked then at my fingers. No tremors. Not like in my heart.

I drove round into the road where the Keithly house stood and stopped at the kerb just out of sight of the net-curtained window. I could see the roof, part of a wall, most of the front garden – and Angelo's car in the driveway.

There weren't many people in the street. The children would be home from school, indoors having tea. The husbands wouldn't be back yet from work: there was more space than cars outside the houses. A peaceful suburban scene. Residential street, middle-income prosperous, not long built. An uncluttered street with no big trees and no forests of electricity and telegraph poles: new-laid cables tended to run underground for most of their journey, emerging only occasionally into the daylight. In the photograph of Peter's house, there had been one telegraph pole nearby with wires distributing from it to the individual houses all around, but not much else. No obstructions. Neat flat asphalt pavements, white kerbstones, tar-and-chipping roadway. A few neat little hedges bordering some of the gardens. A lot of neat green rectangular patches of repressed grass. Acres of net curtains ready to twitch. I-can-see-out-but-you-can't-see-in.

The first essential for pin-point rifle shooting was to know how far one was from the target. On ranges the distances were fixed, and always the same. I was accustomed to precisely three, four, and five hundred yards. To nine hundred and a thousand yards, both of them further than half a mile. The distance affected one's angle of aim: the longer the distance, the further above the target one had to aim in order to hit it.

Olympic shooting was all done at three hundred metres, but from different body positions: standing, kneeling and lying prone. In Olympic shooting also one was allowed ten sighters in each position – ten chances of adjusting one's sights before one came to the forty rounds which counted for scoring.

In that street in Norwich I was not going to get ten sighters. I could afford barely one,

No regular lines of telegraph poles meant no convenient help with measuring the distance. The front gardens, though, I reckoned, should all be of more or less the same width because all the houses were identical, so as inconspicuously and casually as possible I slipped out of the car and paced slowly along the street, going away from Peter's house.

Fourteen paces per garden. I did some mental arithmetic and came up with three hundred yards meaning twenty-two houses.

I counted carefully. There were only twelve houses between me and my target – say one hundred and seventy yards. The shorter distance would be to my advantage. I could reckon in general to hit a target within one minute of a degree of arc: or in other words to hit a circular target of about one inch wide at a hundred yards, two inches wide at two hundred, three inches wide at three hundred, and so on to a ten-inch dinner plate at a thousand.

My target on that evening was roughly rectangular and about four inches by six, which meant that I mustn't be further away from it than four hundred yards. The main problem was that from where I stood, even if I used the telescope, I couldn't see it.

An old man came out of the house against whose kerbstone I was parked and asked if I wanted anything.

'Er, no,' I said. 'Waiting for someone. Stretching my legs.'

'My son wants to park there,' he said, pointing to where my car was. 'He'll be home soon.'

I looked at the stubborn old face and knew that if I didn't move he would be staring at me through the curtains, watching whatever I did. I nodded and smiled, got into the car, reversed into his next-door driveway, and left the street by the way I'd come.

All right, I thought, driving around. I have to come into the street from the opposite end. I have to park where I can see the target. I do not, if possible, park outside anyone's house fully exposed to one of those blank-looking one-way viewing screens. I do not park where Angelo can see me. I count the houses carefully to get the distance right; and above all I don't take much time.

It's a cliche in movies that when an assassin looks through the telescopic sight, steadies the crossed lines on the target and squeezes the trigger, the victim drops dead. Quite often the assassin will perform this feat while standing up, and nearly always it will be with his first shot: all of which makes serious marksmen laugh, or wince, or both. The only film I ever saw that got it right was The Day of the Jackal, where the gunman went into a forest to pace out his distance, to strap his rifle to a tree for steadiness, to adjust his sights and take two or three trial shots at a head-sized melon before transferring it all to the place of execution. Even then, there was no allowance for wind – but one can't have everything.

I drove into the top end of Peter's road, with which I was less familiar, and between two of the houses came across the wide entrance gates to the old estate upon which the new estate had been built. The double gates themselves, wrought iron, ajar, led to a narrow road that disappeared into parkland, and they were set not flush with the roadway or even with the fronts of the houses, but slightly further back. Between the gates and the road there was an area of moderately well-kept gravel and a badly weathered notice board announcing that all the callers to the Paranormal Research Institute should drive in and follow the arrows to Reception.

I turned without hesitation onto the gravel area and stopped the car. It was ideal. From there, even with the naked eye, I had a clear view of the target. A slightly sideways view certainly, but good enough.

I got out of the car and counted the houses which stretched uniformly along the street: the Keithlys' was the fourteenth on the opposite side of the road and my target was one house nearer.

The road curved slightly to my right. There was a slight breeze from the left. I made the assessments almost automatically and eased myself into the back of the car.

I had gone through long patches of indecision over which rifle to use. The 7.62 bullets were far more destructive, but if I missed the target altogether with the first shot, I could do terrible damage to things or people I couldn't see. People half a mile away, or more. The. 22 was much lighter: still potentially deadly if I missed the target, but not for such a long distance.

In a car I obviously couldn't lie flat on my stomach, the way I normally fired the Mauser. I could kneel, and I was more used to kneeling with the. 22. But when I knelt in the car I wouldn't have to support the rifle's weight… I could rest it on the door and shoot through the open window.

For better or worse I chose the Mauser. The stopping power was so much greater, and if I was going to do the job, it was best done properly. Also I could see the target clearly and it was near enough to make hitting it with the second shot a certainty. It was the first shot that worried.

A picture of Paul Arcady rose in my mind. 'Could you shoot the apple off his head, sir?' What I was doing was much the same. One slight mistake could have unthinkable results.

Committed, I wound down the rear window and then fitted the sleek three-inch round of ammunition into the Mauser's breech. I took a look at the target through the telescope, steadying that too on the window ledge, and what leapt to my eye was a bright, clear, slightly oblique close-up of a flat shallow box, fixed high up and to one side on the telegraph pole: grey, basically rectangular, fringed with wires leading off to all the nearby houses.

The junction box.

I was sorry for all the people who were going to be without telephones for the rest of that day, but not too sorry to put them out of order.

I lowered the telescope, folded the brown towel, and laid it over the door frame to make a non-slip surface. Wedged myself between the front and rear seats as firmly as possible, and rested the barrel of the Mauser on the towel.

I thought I would probably have to hit the junction box two or three times to be sure. 7.62 mm bullets tended to go straight through things, doing most of the damage on the way out. If I'd cared to risk shooting the junction box through the pole one accurate bullet would have blown it apart, but I would have to have been directly behind it, and I couldn't get there unobserved.

I set the sights to what I thought I would need for that distance, lowered my body into an angle that felt right, corrected a fraction for the breeze, and squeezed the trigger. Hit the pole, I prayed. High or low, hit the pole. The bullet might indeed go through it, but with the worst of its impetus spent.

7.62 calibre rifles make a terrific noise. Out in the street it must have cracked like a bull whip. In the car it deafened me like in the old days before ear-defenders.

I reloaded. Looked through the telescope. Saw the bullet hole, round and neat, right at the top of the grey junction box casing.

Allelujah, I thought gratefully, and breathed deeply from relief.

Lowered the sight a fraction, keeping my body position unchanged. Shot again. Reloaded. Shot again. Looked through the telescope.

The second and third holes overlapped, lower down than the first, and, maybe because I wasn't shooting at it directly face-on but from a little to one side, the whole casing seemed to have split.

It would have to do. It was all too noisy.

I put the guns and telescopes on the floor with the towel over them and scrambled through onto the front seat.

Started the engine, reversed slowly onto the road and drove away at a normal pace, seeing in the rear-view mirror a couple of inhabitants come out inquiringly into the street. The net curtains must all have been twitching, but no one shouted after me, no one pointed and said 'That's the man.'

And Angelo – what would he think? And Sarah – who knew the sound of a rifle better than church bells? I hoped to God she'd keep quiet.

Going out of Norwich I stopped for petrol and used the telephone there to ring Donna's number.

Nothing.

A faint humming noise, like wind in the wires.

I blew out a lungful of air and wondered with a smile what the repair men would say when they climbed the pole on the morrow. Unprintable, most like.

There were perhaps ways of interfering with incoming calls by technical juggling, by ringing a number, waiting for it to be answered, saying nothing, waiting for the receiver to be put down, and then not replacing one's own receiver, leaving the line open and making it impossible for the number to ring again. I might have trusted that method for a short while, but not for hours: and with some exchanges it didn't work.

Further along the road I again stopped, this time to tidy and reorganise the car. I returned the Mauser and the telescope to their beds in the suitcase in the boot, along with the 7.62 mm ammunition; then broke all my own and everyone else's rules and loaded a live. 22 round into the breech of the Anschtz.

I laid the towel on the back seat and rolled the Olympic rifle in it lengthways, and then stowed it flat on the floor behind the front seats. The towel blended well enough with the brown carpet, and I reckoned that if I didn't accelerate or brake or corner too fast, the gun should travel without moving.

Next I put four extra bullets into my right-hand pocket, because the Anschtz had no magazine and each round had to be loaded separately. After so many years of practice I could discharge the spent casing and load a new bullet within the space of two seconds, and even faster if I held the fresh bullet in my right palm. The two rifles were physically the same size, and I'd have taken the Mauser with its available magazine if it hadn't been for its horrific power in a domestic setting. The. 22 would kill, but not the people in the next house.

After that I juggled around a bit with the cassettes and their boxes and the glue and the bits I'd pinched from school, and finally drove on again, this time to Welwyn.

Harry Gilbert was expecting me. From the way he came bustling out of his house the moment I turned into his driveway he had been expecting me for a long time and had grown thoroughly tired of it.

'Where have you been? he said. 'Did you bring the tapes?'

He had come close to me as I emerged from the car, thrusting his chin forward belligerently, sure of his power over a man at a disadvantage.

'I thought you didn't approve of Angelo threatening people with your pistol,' I said.

Something flickered in a muscle in his face.

'There are times when only threats will do,' he said. 'Give me the tapes.'

I took the three tapes out of my pocket and showed them to him; the three tapes themselves, out of their boxes.

I said, 'Now ring Angelo and tell him to untie my wife.' ' Gilbert shook his head. 'I try the tapes first. Then I ring Angelo. And Angelo leaves your wife tied up until you yourself go to release her. That is the arrangement. It's simple. Come into the house.'

We went again into his functional office, which this time had an addition in the shape of a Grantley computer sitting on his desk.

'The tapes.' He held his hand out for them, and I gave them to him. He slotted the first one into the recorder which stood beside the computer and began to fumble around with the computer's typewriter-like keys in a most disorganised fashion.

'How long have you had that computer?' I said.

'Shut up.'

He typed RUN, and not surprisingly nothing happened, as he hadn't fed the program in from the cassette. I watched him pick up the instruction book and begin leafing through it, and if there had been all the time in the world I would have let him stew in it longer. But every minute I wasted meant one more dragging minute for Donna and Sarah, so I said, 'You'd better take lessons.'

'Shut up.' He gave me a distinctly bull-like glare and typed RUN again.

'I want Angelo out of that house,' I said,'so I'll show you how to run the tapes. Otherwise we'll be here all night.'

He would have given much not to allow me the advantage, but he should have done his homework first.

I ejected the tape to see which side we'd got, then re-inserted it and typed CLOAD "EPSOM". The asterisks began to blink at the top right hand corner as the computer searched the tape, but at length it found "EPSOM", loaded the Epsom program, and announced READY.

'Now type RUN and press "Enter",' I said.

Gilbert did so, and immediately the screen said: WHICH RACE AT EPSOM? TYPE NAME OF RACE AND PRESS 'ENTER'.

Gilbert typed DERBY, and the screen told him to type the name of the horse. He typed in "ANGELO", and made the same sort of fictional replies Ted Pitts and I had done. Angelo's win factor was 46, which must have been maximum. It also said quite a lot about Gilbert's estimate of his son.

'How do you get Ascot?' he said.

I ejected the tape and inserted the first side of all. Typed CLOAD " ASCOT ", pressed 'Enter', and waited for READY.

'Type RUN, press "Enter",' I said.

He did so, and at once got WHICH RACE AT ASCOT? TYPE NAME OF RACE AND PRESS 'ENTER'.

He typed GOLD CUP and looked enthralled by the ensuing questions, and I thought that he'd played with it long enough.

'Telephone Angelo,' I said. 'You must surely be satisfied that this time you've got the real thing.'

'Wait,' he said heavily. 'I'll try all the tapes. I don't trust you. Angelo was insistent that I don't trust you.'

I shrugged. 'Test what you like.'

He tried one or two programs on each of the sides, finally realising that CLOAD plus the first five letters of the racecourse required, inserted between inverted commas, would unlock the goodies.

'All right,' I said at length. 'Now ring Angelo. You can run the programs all you like when I've gone.'

He could find no further reason for putting it off. With a stare to which his own natural arrogance was fast returning he picked up one of the telephones, consulted a note pad beside it, and dialled the number.

Not surprisingly he didn't get through. He dialled again. Then, impatiently, again. Then, muttering under his breath he tried one of the other telephones with ditto nil results.

'What is it?' I said.

'The number doesn't ring.'

'You must be dialling it wrong,' I said. 'I've got it here.'

I fished into my jacket pocket for my diary and made a show of fluttering through the leaves. Came to the number. Read it out.

'That's what I dialled,' Gilbert said.

'It can't be. Try again.' I'd never thought of myself as an actor but I found it quite easy to pretend.

Gilbert dialled again, frowning, and I thought it time to be agitated and anxious.

'You must get through,' I said. 'I've worried and rushed all day to get those tapes here, and now you must ring Angelo, he must leave my wife.'

In experience of command he had tough years of advantage, but then I too was accustomed to having to control wily opponents, and when I took a step towards him it was clear to both of us that physically I was taller and fitter and quite decisively stronger.

He said hastily, 'I'll try the operator,' and I fidgetted and fumed around him in simulated anxiety while the operator tried without success and reported the number out of order.

'But it can't be,' I yelled. 'You've got to ring Angelo.'

Harry Gilbert simply stared at me, knowing that it was impossible.

I cut the decibels a shade but looked as furious as I could, and said, 'We'll have to go there.'

'But Angelo said…'

'I don't give a damn what Angelo said,' I said forcefully. 'He won't leave that house until he knows you've got the tapes, and now it seems you can't tell him you have. So we'll bloody well have to go there and tell him. And I'm absolutely fed up with all this buggering about.'

'You can go,' Gilbert said. I'm not coming.'

'Yes you are. I'm not walking up to that house alone with Angelo inside it with that pistol. He said I was to give the tapes to you, and that's what I've done, and you've got to come with me to tell him so. And I promise you,' I said threateningly, warming to the part, 'that I'll take you with me one way or another. Knocked out or tied up or just sitting quietly in the front seat beside me. Because you're the only one Angelo will listen to.' I snatched up the cassettes lying beside the computer. 'If you want these tapes back you'll come with me.'

He agreed to come. He hadn't much choice. I pulled the cases for the tapes out of my pocket and showed him the labels, Oklahoma, The King and I, West Side Story. Then I ejected the cassette which was still in the recorder and put all three of the tapes into their cases. 'And we'll take these,' I said,'to prove to Angelo that you have them.'

He agreed to that also. He came out with me to my car, slamming his own front door behind him, and sat in the front passenger seat.

'I'll hold the tapes,' he said.

I put them, however, on the glove shelf out of his immediate reach and told him he could have them once we got to Norwich.

It was a strange journey.

He was a far more powerful man than I would normally have thought of opposing, yet I was discovering that I had probably always thought of myself as being weaker than I was. For the whole of my life I had gone in awe of headmasters; as a pupil, as a student, as a teacher. Even when I'd disagreed or despised or rebelled, I'd never tried actively to defeat. One could easily be chucked out of school and out of college and out of the better jobs in physics.

Harry Gilbert couldn't chuck me out of anything, and perhaps that was the difference. I could face his belief in his own superiority and not be intimidated by it. I could use my wits and my muscles to get him to do what I wanted. It was heady stuff. Have to be careful, I reflected, not to develop delusions of grandeur of my own.

Angelo, I thought suddenly, feels just as I do. Feels the spreading of the wings of internal power. Feels he can do more than he realised. Sees his world isn't as constricting as he thought. Angelo too was emerging into a new conception of ability… but in him there were no brakes.

'There is someone there with Angelo,' I said. 'My wife said "they".' I spoke neutrally, without aggression.

Gilbert sat heavily silent.

'When Angelo came to my house,' I said,'there was another man with him. Very like Angelo in looks. Did what Angelo told him.'

After a pause Gilbert shrugged and said, 'Eddy. Angelo's cousin. Their mothers were twins.'

'Italian?' I said.

Another pause. Then, 'We are all Italian by descent.'

'But born in England?'

'Yes. Why do you ask?'

I sighed. 'Just to pass the journey.'

He grunted, but gradually a good deal of his resentment of my behaviour subsided. I had no idea whether or not he considered it justified.

Anxiety on my part didn't need to be acted. I found myself drumming my fingers on the steering wheel when stopped by red lights and cursing long lorries which delayed my passing. By the time we got to Norwich, it would be over the four hours I'd warned Angelo to expect, and of all things that I didn't want, it was Angelo ballooning into premature rage.

'Will you pay Mrs O'Rorke anything for these tapes?' I said.

A pause. 'No.'

'Not even without Angelo knowing?'

He gave me a fierce sideways glare. 'Angelo does what I tell him. Whether I pay or don't pay Mrs O'Rorke is nothing to do with him.'

If he believed all that, I thought, he was deluding himself. Or perhaps he still wanted to believe what had so far been true. Perhaps he truly didn't see that his days of domination over Angelo were ticking away fast.

Just let them last, I thought, for another two hours.

CHAPTER 10

The long lingering evening was slowly dying by the time we reached Norwich, though it wouldn't be totally dark for another hour. I drove into the Keithlys' road from the direction that would place Gilbert nearest to the house when I pulled up at the kerb: Angelo had seen my car at his father's house as I had seen his, and the sight of it would alarm him.

'Please get out of the car as soon as I stop,' I said to Gilbert. 'So that Angelo can see you.'

He grunted, but when I pulled up he opened the door as I'd suggested, and gave any watchers from behind the curtains a full view of his lumbering exit from the front seat.

'Wait,' I said, standing up on my own side and talking to him across the top of the car. 'Take the tapes.' I reached across the top of the car and gave them to him. 'Hold them up,' I said,'so that Angelo can see them.'

'You give too many orders.'

'I don't trust your son any more than he trusts me.'

He gave me a bullish stare of fully revived confidence, but he did in fact turn and lift the tapes, showing them to the house.

Behind his back I leant down and picked up the towel-wrapped rifle, holding it longways with the stock to my chest and the flap of my jacket falling over it.

Angelo opened the front door, shielding himself half behind it.

'Go in,' I said to Gilbert. 'This street is full of people watching through the curtains.'

He gave an automatically alarmed look at being spied on and began to walk towards his son. I slid round the car fast and walked close behind him, almost stepping on his heels.

'Explain,' I said urgently.

His head lifted ominously, but he said loudly to Angelo, 'Your telephone's out of order.'

''What?' Angelo exclaimed, opening the door a fraction wider. 'It can't be.'

Gilbert said impatiently, 'It is. Don't be a fool. Why else would I come all this way?'

Angelo turned away from the door and strode into the sitting-room, which was where the telephone was located. I heard him pick up the receiver and rattle the cradle, and slam the instrument down again.

'But he brought the tapes,' Gilbert said, walking to the sitting-room door and showing the bright cases. 'I tried them. All of them. This time they're the real thing.'

'Come in here, you, creep,' Angelo called.

I propped the wrapped rifle, barrel downwards to the carpet, against the small chest of drawers which stood within arm's reach of the sitting room door, and showed myself in the doorway.

The sitting-room furniture was all pushed awry. Sarah and Donna sat back-to-back in the centre of the room, with their wrists and ankles strapped to the arms and legs of two of the chairs from the dining room. To one side stood Angelo, holding the Walther, with, beyond the two girls, his look-alike, Eddy. There were glasses and plates sprinkled about, and the smell of long hours of cigarette smoke.

Sarah was facing me.

We looked at each other with a curious lack of emotion, I noticing almost distantly the dark smudges under her eyes, the exhausted sag of her body, the strain and pain round her mouth.

She said nothing. No doubt she considered I was showing too little concern and was too calm as usual: the message on her face wasn't love and relief but relief and disgust.

'Go home,' I said wearily to Angelo. 'You've got what you wanted.'

I prayed for him to go. To be satisfied, to be sensible, to be ruled by his father, to be approximately normal.

Harry Gilbert began to turn from his son back towards me, saying, That's it, then, Angelo. We'd best be off.'

'No,' Angelo said.

Gilbert stopped. 'What did you say?' he said.

'I said, no,' Angelo said. 'This creep's going to pay for all the trouble he's put me to. You come here, creep.'

Gilbert said, 'No, Angelo.' He gestured to the girls. 'This is enough.'

Angelo pointed his pistol with its bulbous silencer straight at Donna's head. 'This one,' he said viciously, 'has been screaming at me for hours that they'll report me to the police, the stupid little bitch.'

'They won't,' I said quickly.

'Dead right they won't.'

Even to Gilbert his meaning was clear. Gilbert made movements of extreme disapproval and active fear and said, 'Put down the gun. Angelo, put it down.' His voice thundered with parental command and from long long habit Angelo began to obey. Even in the same second he visibly reversed his instinct; and I knew that for me it was then or never.

I stretched out my right arm, thrust my hand down into the towel and grasped the stock of the rifle. Swung the towel off the barrel and in the same fluid movement stood in the doorway with the barrel pointing straight at Angelo and the safety catch unlocking with a click.

'Drop it,' I said.

They were all utterly astounded but perhaps Angelo most of all because I'd twice played the same trick on him. The three men stood there as if frozen, and I didn't look at Sarah, not directly.

'Drop the pistol,' I said. He was still pointing it towards Donna.

He couldn't bear to drop it. Not to lose that much face.

'I'll shoot you,' I said.

Even then he hesitated. I swung the barrel to the ceiling and squeezed the trigger. The noise crashed in the small room. Pieces of plaster fell from the ceiling. The sharp smell of cordite prevailed over stale cigarette, and all the mouths were open, like fish. The rifle was pointing back at his heart with the next round in the breech almost before he'd moved an inch, and he looked at it with dazed disbelief.

'Drop the pistol,' I said. 'Drop it.'

He was still undecided. I'll have to hit him, I thought despairingly. I don't want to. Why won't he drop the bloody thing, there's nothing he can gain.

The air seemed to be still ringing with the aftermath of explosion, but it was into silence that Sarah spoke.

With a sort of sullen ferocity, which seemed as much directed at me as at Angelo, she said loudly, 'He shot in the Olympic Games.'

Angelo's eyes developed doubt.

'Drop the pistol,' I said quietly, 'or I'll shoot your hand.'

Angelo dropped it.

His face was full of fury and hate and I thought him capable of flinging himself upon me regardless of consequences. I looked at him stolidly, showing no triumph, showing nothing to inflame.

'You've got the tapes,' I said. 'Get in the car, all three of you, and get out of my life. I'm sick of your faces.' I stepped back a pace into the hall and nodded with my head towards the front door.

'Just get out,' I said. 'One at a time. Angelo first.'

He came towards me with his dark eyes like pits in the olive face, the light too dim now to give them wicked life. I stood back a few steps further and followed his progress to the front door, as in my own house, with the black barrel.

'I'll get you,'he said.

I didn't answer.

He pulled open the door with the force of rage and stepped outside.

'Now you,' I said to Harry Gilbert.

He was almost as angry as his son, but perhaps it was fanciful of me to guess that there was also some recognition that I'd been able to stop Angelo where he couldn't, and that that had been a good thing.

He followed Angelo out onto the driveway and I saw them both opening the doors of Angelo's car.

'Now you,' I said to Eddy. 'You pick up Angelo's gun. Pick it up by the silencer. Do you know how to unload it?'

Eddy the carbon-copy nodded miserably.

'Do it, then,' I said. 'Very very carefully.'

He looked at the rifle and at Angelo getting into the car, and shook the bullets out of the clip, letting them drop on the carpet.

'Right,' I said. 'Take the pistol with you.' I gestured with the rifle barrel and jerked my head towards the open front door, and of the three of them it was Eddy who left with the least reluctance and the most speed.

From inside the hall I watched Angelo start the engine, slam the gears into reverse and make a rough exit into the road. Once there he deliberately side-swiped my car, damaging his own rear wing in the process, and accelerated down the street as if to prove his superior manhood.

With a feeling of terrible tension I closed the front door and went into the sitting-room. Crossed to Sarah, looked at the rubber straps which fastened her wrists and unbuckled them. Unbuckled those round her ankles. Then those round Donna.

Donna started crying. Sarah shoved herself stiffly off the chair and collapsed onto the softer contours of the sofa.

'Do you realise how long we've been sitting there?' she demanded bitterly. 'And before you damned well ask, yes, they did untie us now and then for us to go to the bathroom.'

'And to eat?'

'I hate you,' she said.

'I really wanted to know.'

'Yes, to eat. Twice. He made me cook.'

Donna said between sobs, 'It's been awful. Awful. You've no idea.'

'They didn't…?' I began anxiously.

'No they didn't,' Sarah said flatly. 'They just sneered.'

'Hateful,' Donna said. 'Called us mugs.' She hobbled across the carpet and lowered herself gingerly into an armchair. 'I hurt all over.' Tears trickled down her cheeks. I thought of Angelo's description of 'wet chick' and stifled it quickly.

'Look,' I said, 'I know you don't feel like it, but I'd be much happier if you'd stuff a few things into a suitcase and we all left this house.'

Donna helplessly shook her head, and Sarah said 'Why?' with mutiny.

'Angelo hated having to go. You saw him. Suppose he comes back? When he thinks we're off guard… he might.'

The idea alarmed them as much as me and also angered Sarah. 'Why did you give them the pistol?' she demanded. 'That was stupid. You're such a fool.'

'Are you coming?'

'You can't expect us…' Donna wailed.

I said to Sarah, 'I have to make a phone call. I can't do it from here.' I indicated the dead telephone. 'I'm going away in the car to do it. Do you want to come, or not?'

Sarah took stock of that rapidly and said that yes, they were coming, and despite Donna's protests she drove her stiffly upstairs. They came down a few minutes later carrying a hold-all each, and I noticed that Sarah had put on some lipstick. I smiled at her with some of the old pleasure in seeing her resurfacing briefly, and she looked both surprised and confused.

'Come on, then,' I said, and took the hold-alls from them to put in the boot. 'Best be off.' I fetched the rifle, once again wrapped loosely in towel to confuse the neighbours, and stowed it in the suitcase. Checked that Donna had brought the door keys: shut the front door; drove away.

'Where are we going?' Sarah said.

'Where would you like?'

'What about money?'

'Credit cards,' I said.

We drove a short way in a silence broken only by Donna's occasional sniffs and sobs, going along now with lights on everywhere and the long soft evening turning to full dark.

I pulled up beside a telephone box and put through a reversed charge call to the Suffolk police.

'Is Detective Chief Superintendent Irestone there?' I said. Hopeless question, but had to be asked.

'Your name, sir?'

'Jonathan Derry.'

'One moment.'

I waited through the usual mutterings and clicks, and then a voice that was still not Irestone's said, 'Mr Derry, Chief Superintendent Irestone left instructions that if you telephoned again, your message was to be taken down in full and passed on to him directly. Chief Superintendent Irestone asked me to say that owing to… er… a hitch in communications he was not aware that you had tried to reach him so often, not until this afternoon. I am Detective Inspector Robson. I came to your house with the Chief Superintendent, if you remember.'

'Yes,' I said. A man nearing forty, fair-headed, reddish skin.

'If you tell me why you rang, sir?'

'You'll take notes?'

'Yes, sir. And a recording.'

'Right. Well – the man who came to my house with a pistol is called Angelo Gilbert. His father is Harry Gilbert, who runs bingo halls all over Essex and north-east London. The man who came with Angelo is his cousin Eddy – don't know his last name. He does what Angelo tells him.'

I paused and Inspector Robson said, 'Is that the lot, sir?'

'No, it isn't. At this moment all three of them are travelling from Norwich in Angelo's car.' I told him the make, the colour, the number, and that it had a bashed-in nearside rear wing. 'They are probably going to Harry Gilbert's house in Welwyn Garden City. I think Angelo also lives there, but perhaps not Eddy.' I gave him the address. 'They should arrive there in about an hour and a quarter to an hour and a half. In the car there is a Walther. 22 pistol with a silencer. There may or may not be bullets in it. It may or may not be the pistol which Angelo waved at me, but it looks identical. It might be the pistol which killed Christopher Norwood.'

'That's very useful, sir,' Robson said,

'There's one more thing…'

'Yes?'

'I don't think Harry Gilbert knows anything at all about Chris Norwood's death. I mean, I don't think he even knows he's dead. If you go to arrest Angelo, Harry Gilbert won't know why.'

'Thank you, sir.'

That's all,' I said.

'Er,' he said,'the Chief Superintendent will be in touch with you.'

'All right, but-' I hesitated.

'Yes, sir?'

'I'd be glad to know…'

'Just a minute, sir,' he interrupted, and kept me hanging on through some lengthy unintelligible background talk. 'Sorry, sir, you were saying?'

'You remember I sent Angelo some computer tapes with games on?'

'Yes, I do. We went to Cambridge main post office and alerted the man whose job it was to hand out letters-to-be-called-for, but unfortunately he went for his tea-break without mentioning it to anyone, and during that short period your package was collected. A girl clerk handed it over. We didn't find out until it was too late, It was… infuriating.'

'Mm,' I said. 'Well, Angelo came back with more threats, demanding the real tapes, and I've just given them to him. Only…'

'Only what, sir?'

'Only they won't be able to run them on their computer. I think when they get home they might try those tapes straight away, and when they find they don't work they might… well they might set out to look for me. I mean-'

'I know exactly what you mean,' he said dryly.

'So, er, I'd be glad to know if you plan to do anything about Angelo this evening. And if you think there's enough to hold him on.'

'Instructions have already gone off,' he said. 'He'll be picked up tonight as soon as he reaches the house in Welwyn. We have some fingerprints to match… and some girls who saw two men arrive at Norwood 's. So don't worry, once we've got him, we won't let him go.'

'Could I ring up to find out?'

'Yes.' He gave me a new number. 'Call there. I'll leave a message. You'll get it straight away.'

'Thank you,' I said gratefully,'very much.'

'Mr Derry?'

'Yes?'

'What's wrong with the tapes this time?'

'Oh, I stuck magnets into the cases.'

He laughed. 'I'll see you later, perhaps,' he said. 'And thanks. Thanks a lot.'

I put the receiver down smiling, thinking of the three powerful Magnadur magnets distorting the programs on the tapes. The permanent magnets which were black and flat; two inches long, three-quarters of an inch wide, three-sixteeenths of an inch thick. I'd stuck one into the inside of each case, flat on the bottom, black as the plastic, looking like part of the case itself. I'd taken the tapes and the cases separately to Harry Gilbert's- the tapes in the one pocket, the cases in another- and only after he'd played them had I married them all together. Sandwiching electro-magnetic recording tapes between such magnets was like wiping a blackboard roughly with a wet sponge: there would be traces of what had been recorded there, but not enough to make sense.

It might take Angelo all the way home to see what I'd done, because the magnets did look as if they belonged there.

Or it might not.

I drove wearily in the direction of home. I seemed to have been driving for ever. It had been a very long day. Extraordinary to think it was only that morning that I'd set out from Ted Pitts's.

Both of the girls went to sleep as the miles unrolled, the deep sleep of release and exhaustion. I wondered briefly what would become of us in the future, but mostly I just thought about driving and keeping my own eyelids apart.

We stayed in a motel on the outskirts of London and slept as if dead. The alarm call I'd asked for dragged me from limbo at seven in the morning and, yawning like a great white shark, I got through to the number Inspector Robson had given me.

'Jonathan Derry,' I said. 'Am I too early?'

It was a girl's voice which answered, fresh and unofficial. 'No, it's not too early,' she said. 'John Robson asked me to tell you that Angelo Gilbert and his cousin Eddy are in custody.'

'Thank you very much.'

'Any time.'

I put the receiver down with a steadily lightening heart and shook Sarah awake in the next bed.

'Sorry,' I said, 'but I've got to be in school by nine o'clock.'

CHAPTER 11

There was a period when Sarah went back to work and Donna drooped around our house trying to come to terms with the devastation of her life. Sarah's manner to her grew gradually less over-protective and more normal, and when Donna found she was no longer indulged and pampered every waking minute she developed a pout in place of the invalid smile, and went home. Home to sell her house, to collect Peter's insurance money, and to persuade her Probation Officer to take Sarah's psychological place.

On the surface, things between myself and Sarah continued much as before: the politeness, the lack of emotional contact, the daily meetings of strangers. She seldom met my eye and seemed only to speak when it was essential, but I slowly realised that the deeply embittered set of her mouth, which had been so noticeable before the day we set off to Norwich, had more or less gone. She looked softer and more as she had once been and although it didn't seem to have altered her manner towards me it was less depressing to look at.

In my inner self a lot had changed. I seemed to have stepped out of a cage. I did everything with more confidence and more satisfaction. I shot better. I taught with zest. I even found the wretched exercise books less of a drag. I felt that one day soon I would stretch the spreading wings, and fly.

One night as we lay in the dark, each in our frostily separate cocoon, I said to Sarah, 'Are you awake?'

'Yes.'

'You know that at the end of term I'm going to Canada with the rifle team?'

'Yes.'

'I'm not coming back with them.'

'Why not?'

'I'm going to the United States. Probably for the rest of the school holidays.'

'Whatever for?'

'To see it. Perhaps to live there, eventually.'

She was silent for a while: and what she said in the end seemed only obliquely to have anything to do with my plans.

'Donna talked to me a lot, you know. She told me all about the day she stole that baby.'

'Did she?' I said noncommittally.

'Yes. She said that when she saw it lying there in its pram, she had an overpowering urge to pick it up and cuddle it. So she did. She just did. Then when she had it in her arms she felt as if it belonged to her, as if it was hers. So she carried it to her car, which was just there, a few steps away. She put the baby on the front seat beside her and drove off. She didn't know where she was going. She said it was a sort of dream, in which she had at last had the baby she'd pined for for so long.'

She stopped. I thought of Ted Pitts's little girls and the protective curve of his body as he held his smallest one close. I would have wept for Sarah, for Donna, for every unwillingly barren parent.

'She drove for a long way,' Sarah said. 'She got to the sea and stopped there. She took the baby into the back of the car and it was perfect. She was in utter bliss. It was still like a dream. And then the baby woke up.' She paused. 'I suppose it was hungry. Time for its next feed. Anyway it began to cry, and it wouldn't stop. It cried and cried and cried. She said that it cried for an hour. The noise started driving her mad. She put her hand over its mouth, and it cried harder. She tried to hug its face into her shoulder so that it would stop, but it didn't. And then she found that its nappies were dirty, and the brown stuff had oozed down the baby's leg and was on her dress.'

Another long pause, then Sarah's voice, 'She said she didn't know babies were like that. Screaming and smelly. She'd thought of them as sweet and smiling at her all the time. She began to hate that baby, not love it. She said she sort of threw it down onto the back seat in a rage, and then she got out of the car and just left it. Walked away. She said she could hear the baby crying all the way down the beach.'

This time the silence was much longer.

'Are you still awake?' Sarah said.

'Yes.'

'I'm reconciled now to not having a child. I grieve… but it can't be helped.' She paused and then said, 'I've learned a lot about myself these past weeks, because of Donna.'

And I, I thought, because of Angelo.

After another long while she said, 'Are you still awake?'

'Yes.'

'I don't really understand, you know, all that happened. I mean, I know that that hateful Angelo has been arrested for murder, of course I do, and that you have been seeing the police, but you've never told me exactly what it was all about.'

'You seriously want to know?'

'Of course I do, otherwise I wouldn't ask.' The familiar note of impatience rang out clearly. She must have heard it herself, because she immediately said more moderately, 'I'd like you to tell me. I really would.'

'All right,' I said, and I told her pretty well everything, starting from the day that Chris Norwood set it all going by stealing Liam O'Rorke's notes. I told her events in their chronological order, not in the jumbled way I learned of them, so that a clear pattern emerged of Angelo's journeyings in search of the tapes.

When I'd finished, she said slowly, 'You knew all through that day when he had us tied up that he was a murderer.'

'Mm.'

'My God.' She paused. 'Didn't you think he might kill us? Donna and me?'

'I thought he might. I thought he might do it any time after he knew his father had the tapes. I thought he might kill all three of us, if he felt like it. I couldn't tell… but couldn't risk it.'

A long silence. Then she said, 'I think, looking back, that he did mean to. Things he said…' She paused. 'I was glad to see you.'

'And angry.'

'Yes, angry. You'd been so long… and Angelo was so bloody frightening.'

'I know.'

'I heard the rifle shots. I was in the kitchen cooking.'

'I was afraid you might tell Angelo you heard them.'

'I only spoke to him when I absolutely had to. I loathed him. He was so arrogant.'

'You shook him,' I said,'telling him I'd shot in the Games. It was the clincher.'

'I just wanted to… to kick him in the ego.'

I smiled in the darkness. Angelo's ego had taken quite a pummelling at the hands of the Derrys.

'Do you realise,' I said, 'that we haven't talked like this for months?'

'Such a lot has happened. And I feel… different.'

Nothing like a murderer, I thought, for changing one's view of the world. He'd done a good job for both of us.

'Do you want to come, then,' I said, 'to America?'

To America. To go on together. To try a bit longer. I didn't really know which I wanted: to clear out, cut loose, divorce, start again, remarry, have children, or to make what one might of the old dead love, to pour commitment into the shaky foundations, to rebuild them solid.

It was Sarah, I thought, who would have to decide.

'Do you want us to stay together?' I asked.

'You've thought of divorce?'

'Haven't you?'

'Yes.' I heard her sigh. 'Often, lately.'

'It's pretty final, being divorced,' I said.

'What then?'

'Wait a bit,' I said slowly. 'See how we go. See what we both really want. Keep on talking.'

'All right,' she said. 'That'll do.'

Letter from Vince Akkerton to Jonathan Derry.

Letter from the executors of Mrs Maureen O'Rorke to Jonathan Derry.

Letter from the University of Eastern California selection board to Jonathan Derry.

Letter from Harry Gilbert to Marty Goldman Ltd, Turf Accountants.

Excerpt from a private letter from the Governor of Albany Prison, Parkhurst, Isle of Wight to his friend the Governor of Wakefield Prison, Yorkshire.