Dick Francis - Twice Shy

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?

'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…'