"Twice Shy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Francis Dick)

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?