by Dick Francis
“Go ahead.”
She phoned him at home because of the early hour and told him Harve’s version of the night’s events, checking each statement with me with her eyebrows. I nodded a few times. The gist was right; the omissions had been my own.
“Patrick,” she said to me, “wants to know what it was you walked in on.”
“When I find out, I’ll tell him.”
“He says to be careful.”
“Mm.”
Harve rapped on the window, pointing at his watch.
“Got to go,” Nina said. “ ’Bye, Patrick. ’Bye, Freddie. I’m on my way.”
I was sorry to see her depart. Except for Sandy and Lizzie, she was the only person around that I found I trusted. Suspicion was a nasty, unaccustomed companion.
Nigel drove out of the farmyard. From the cab Nina waved back to me as I watched from the window.
Reckoning that all good horse people by that time would be up and about, I phoned Jericho Rich’s daughter and told her that her transport was rolling and she should have her new horse with her by the next evening, soon after eight o’clock, if that would suit her.
“So soon? What service!” she exclaimed. “Did you send that groom—Dave, is it?—that my father suggested?”
“Not Dave, but someone as good.”
“Oh, well, great. Thank you.”
“A pleasure,” I said, meaning it. And that’s what it was: a pleasure to get a neat job done and more than satisfy customers.
Another more-than-satisfied customer at that moment drove into the farmyard in a jeep from which every comfort had been stripped by time and hard usage. Marigold English, again in basic clothes and woolly hat, jumped out of her vehicle almost before it had stopped rolling and looked about her for signs of life.
I went out to meet her.
“Morning, Marigold. How are you settling in?”
“Hello, Freddie. Feel as if I’ve lived here for centuries.” Her smile came and went. Her voice, as always, was geared to the deaf. “I’m on my way up to the Downs but I thought I’d just call in for a brief word. I phoned your house but some female said you were here.”
“My sister,” I said.
“Oh, yes? Well, look, what do you know about this John Tigwood and some sort of ancient horse retirement scheme? The fellow wants to rope me in. What do I do? Tell me frankly. No one can overhear you. Give!”
I gave it to her as frankly as seemed prudent. “He’s a dedicated sort of man who persuades a lot of people round here to give old horses good homes. Michael Watermead’s taking two of the new batch we brought to Pixhill yesterday. So is Benjy Usher, unless Dot puts her considerable foot down. There’s no harm in it, if you’ve got room and grass.”
“Would you say yes to him, then?”
“It’s a regular charity in Pixhill.” I thought for a moment and said, “Actually, one of this new lot is a horse I used to ride long ago. A great performer. A great buddy. Could you ask John Tigwood to let you have that particular horse? His name’s Peterman. If you’d feed him oats regularly to keep him healthy and warm, I’ll pay for them.”
“So there’s a soft heart inside there!” she teased me.
“Well . . . he won races for me.”
“OK, I’ll phone this Tigwood and offer the deal. Peterman, did you say?”
I nodded. “Don’t mention the oats.”
She gave me a slanted glance of friendly amusement. “One of these days your good deeds will find you out.”
She sped back to the jeep, revved up the engine and tore another millimeter off the tire treads. Out of where there might once have been a window she yelled as she rolled forward, “My secretary will contact yours about Doncaster.”
I shouted thanks which she probably didn’t hear above the whine of ancient gears. I thought she would be good for Pixhill and hoped she would prosper.
Various drivers came to work and went into the canteen. Harve’s account of my nocturnal experiences had them all coming outdoors again, gaping, carrying coffee mugs and inspecting me as if I were somehow unreal.
One of the drivers was the Watermead family’s favorite. Lewis, the whiz with the rabbits, supposedly nursing his woes in bed.
“What happened to the flu?” I asked him.
He sniffed and with a hoarse throat said, “Reckon it’s just a cold after all. No temperature, see?” He coughed and sneezed, spraying infections regardless.
“It’s better you don’t scatter your germs anyway,” I said. “We’ve too many sick drivers as it is. Take another day off.”
“Straight up?”
“Come back on Friday, work Saturday too.”
“OK,” he wheezed nonchalantly. “I’ll sit and watch Cheltenham. Thanks.”
Phil, obliging, phlegmatic, unobservant, incurious and unimaginatively reliable, said to me, “Is it true your house got trashed?”
“ ’Fraid so.”
“And that Jag?”
“Yeah.”
“I’d kill the bugger,” he said.
“Just give me the chance.”
The others nodded, understanding the feeling. No one, in their collective ethos, no one messed with their belongings without reprisals.
“I suppose,” I said, “that none of you came past the farmyard after eleven last night?”
No one had, it seemed.
Lewis said, “Didn’t you see who had a go at you?”
“Didn’t even hear anyone. Ask around, will you?”
They said they would, dubious and willing.
Many of the drivers looked superficially alike, I thought, surveying the group. All under forty, none of them fat. Mostly dark-haired, all with good eyesight, none very short or over six feet: the physique that went best with the job. In character . . . different matter.
Lewis had joined the force two years ago with ringlets. When the other drivers called him “girlie,” he’d grown a slab of mustache and thrown his fists about to silence sarcastic tongues. He’d then produced a blond bimbo in scarlet stilettos and again thrown his fists about to silence wolf whistles. During the last past summer he’d cut the hair and shaved off the mustache and the bimbo had brought forth a son over which both parents drooled. Lewis couldn’t wait, he often said, to play football with his infant. The complete instant father, transformed.
“Don’t sneeze on the baby,” I told him, and alarmed, he said, “No way.”
Dave creaked in through the gates on his rusty bicycle, cheeky and cheery and as irresponsible as ever. His grin and his freckles gave an impression of eternal youth, the Peter Pan syndrome. Dave’s wife mothered him along with their two daughters, putting up large-heartedly with his pub-haunting habits and his betting on greyhounds.
Aziz arrived also, dark eyes and white teeth a-flashing. Harve detailed the day’s jobs, checking with a list, making sure each driver knew exactly where to go, which horses to collect and when they had to arrive.
I left them all telling Dave and Aziz of my night’s adventures, hearing mistakes creeping into the retelling but not bothering to interrupt and put them right.
“Portsmouth Docks,” Phil was erroneously saying, with Dave understandingly nodding. Although we never used Southampton for horses we did occasionally ship them by ferry from Portsmouth to Le Havre. The drivers all knew Portsmouth Docks, even though I preferred to send horses by the Dover-Calais route, because the sea crossing was shorter. Many horses suffered from seasickness on long crossings, made all the worse through being unable to vomit. A horse had died once of seasickness in one of my vans, which made me especially aware of the danger.
“Portsmouth Docks.” The drivers were all nodding. Portsmouth, just along the coast from Southampton, sounded more familiar. “Bulldozed his Jaguar . . .” “Broke all the glass in the house . . .”
Down the boozer, as Jogger would have said, they’d have me dropped over the side of the Portsmouth-Le Havre ferry by nightfall, with my car through the window in the sitting room.
; Isobel and Rose arrived and complained again about the defunct state of the computer. I thought of the even more defunct state of the terminal in my sitting room and with an effort remembered that this was the day appointed for the man to fix it. Isobel and Rose took the shrouds off the superseded mechanical typewriters and looked pathetically martyred.
I phoned the central agency that kept my credit card numbers and asked them to get busy putting a stop on my accounts, and I got through to the insurance company who said they would send a form. Would they be sending a man, I asked, or, of course, a woman, who would verify the write-off of the Jaguar and so much else of my property? They said a copy of the police report would be enough.
After that I sat and listened to my head aching while Harve finished getting the day’s work organized. Aziz came into the office with his double ration of vitality and asked if there were any personal errands he could run for me. I considered it thoughtful of him, particularly as his manner was casual and, as far as I could see, not self-serving.
“Harve says there isn’t a driving job for me today,” he said. “He said to ask if you wanted me to do maintenance, as you’ve lost your mechanic. He said two of the vans need oil changes.”
“It would be helpful.” I picked up the tool storeroom keys out of the desk and handed them to him. “You’ll find all you need in there. Get a checklist from Isobel and return it to her when you’ve filled it in and signed it.”
“Right.”
“And, Aziz . . .” My aching head came up with a therapeutic idea. “Would you mind driving my Fourtrak to Heathrow, to take my sister to catch the shuttle to Edinburgh?”
“Be glad to,” he said willingly.
“Eleven o’clock at my house.”
“On the dot,” he agreed.
With Aziz driving Lewis’s van along to the barn for its oil change and with the others thinning out as they left on the day’s missions, I drove home to say goodbyes to Lizzie and beg her forgiveness for sending her with Aziz.
“You’re more concussed than you want to say,” she accused me. “You should be in bed, resting.”
“Oh, sure.”
She shook her head in older-sisterly disapproval and rubbed her hand down my back in the gesture she’d always used to show affection for two little brothers who’d thought kissing was sissy.
“Look after yourself,” she said.
“Mm. You too.”
The phone rang: Isobel’s agitated voice. “The computer man’s here,” she said. “He says someone’s killed off our machine with a virus.”
8
The computer man, perhaps twenty, with long light brown hair through which he ran his fingers in artistic affectation every few seconds, had given up trying to resuscitate our hardware by the time I got back to the office.
“What virus?” I asked, coming to a halt by Isobel’s desk and feeling overly beleaguered. We had flu, we had aliens, we had bodies, we had vandals, we had concussion. A virus in the computer could take the camel to its knees.
“All our records,” Isobel mourned.
“And our accounts,” chimed Rose.
“It’s prudent to make backups,” the computer man told them mock-sorrowfully, his young face more honestly full of scorn. “Always make backups, ladies.”
“Which virus?” I asked again.
He shrugged, including me in his stupidity rating.
“Maybe Michelangelo . . . Michelangelo activates on March 6 and there’s still a lot of it about.”
“Enlarge,” I said.
“Surely you know?”
“If I knew, I’ve forgotten.”
He spelled it out as to an illiterate. “March 6 is Michelangelo’s birthday. If you have the virus lying doggo in your computer and you switch on your computer on March 6, the virus activates.”
“Mm. Well, March 6 was last Sunday. No one switched on this computer on Sunday.”
Isobel’s large eyes opened wider. “That’s right.”
“Michelangelo is a boot-section virus,” the expert said, and to our blank-looking expressions long-sufferingly explained. “Just switching the machine on does the trick. Simply switching it on, waiting a minute or two, and switching off. Switching on is called booting-up. All the records on the hard disk are wiped out at once with Michelangelo and you get the message saying ‘Fatal disk error.’ That’s what’s happened to your machine. The records are gone. There’s no putting them back.”
Isobel stared at me, conscience-stricken, appalled and distressed. “You did tell us to make backup floppy disks. I know you did. You kept on telling us. I’m ever so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“You should have insisted,” Rose told me. “I mean you should have made us.”
“You don’t even seem worried,” Isobel said.
To the computer man I said, “Would the virus activate on backup floppy disks?”
“Pretty likely.”
“But we’ve got hardly any,” Isobel wailed.
We did, as it happened, have comprehensive backup disks containing everything the two secretaries had entered up to and including the previous Thursday. I knew they’d found the daily backup procedure a bit of a bore. I’d seen them leave it for days sometimes. I’d reminded both of them over and over to make copies and was aware they thought I nagged them unnecessarily. The computer seemed everlastingly reliable. In the end I’d taken to making daily backups myself on the terminal in my sitting room, storing the disks in my safe. If you want a thing done properly, as my mother had been accustomed to say, do it yourself.
At that exact moment, though the copies existed, they couldn’t be reached owing to the axed state of the safe’s combinations.
I could have reassured them all about our records and normally would have done. Suspicion stopped me. Suspicion about I didn’t know what. But it was altogether too much of a coincidence for me that the computer should crash at that particular time.
“You’re not alone,” the computer man said. “Doctors, law firms, all sorts of businesses, have had their records wiped out. One woman lost a whole book she was writing. And it costs nothing to make backups.”
“Oh dear.” Isobel was near tears.
“What exactly is a virus?” Rose inquired miserably.
“It’s a program that tells the computer to jumble up or wipe out everything stored in it.” He warmed to his subject. “There are at least three thousand viruses floating around. There’s Jerusalem II that activates every Friday the thirteenth, that’s a specially nasty one. It’s caused a lot of trouble, has that one.”
“But what’s the point?” I asked.
“Vandalism,” he said cheerfully. “Destruction and wrecking for its own sake.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “For instance, I could design a sweet little virus that would make all your accounts come out wrong. Nothing spectacular like Michelangelo, not a complete loss of everything, just enough to drive you mad. Just enough to make errors so that you’d be forever checking and adding and nothing would ever come out right.” He loved the idea, one could see. “Once you’ve written a program like that you have to spread it. I mean, one computer can catch the virus from another, that’s the beauty of it. All you need is a floppy disk with the virus in it. Feed the disk into any computer and transfer the data on the disk into the computer—which is done all the time—and bingo, the computer then has the virus inside it, lying in wait.”
“How do you stop it?” I asked.
“There are all sorts of expensive programs nowadays for detecting and neutralizing viruses. And a whole lot of people thinking up ways to invent viruses that can’t be got rid of. It’s a whole industry. Lovely. I mean, rotten.”
Viruses, I reflected, meant income to him.
“How do you find out if you have a virus?” I asked.
“The way to do it is to scan the info in any given computer. The disk I use to do that has more than two hundred of the commoner viruses on it. It will tell you if you’ve been infected by Michelangelo
or Jerusalem II. If you’d called me last week, I could have done it.”
“Last week we saw no need,” I said. “And . . . um . . . if this Michelangelo thing activates only on March 6, then obviously we didn’t have it in our computer last year on March 6.”
Our expert parted with more information. “Michelangelo was invented sometime after March 6 in 1991 and only works on IBM compatible machines like yours.”
“That’s no comfort,” I said.
“Er . . . no. Still, I can clean up these machines for you and give you a virus-free setup for the future. But you have to be careful what you feed into computers from the outside. Friends can lend you infected disks. And . . . do you have any other terminals?”
“There’s one in my house,” I said. “But someone’s vandalized it.”
The expert looked shocked. “You mean, a different virus?”
“No, I don’t. I mean an ax.”
The physical smashing of a computer pained him, one could see. Internal malignant illnesses were his stock-in-trade. Axes came into malicious damage, he said.
“Computer viruses are malicious damage, it seems to me,” I said.
“Yes, but it’s a game.”
“Not if you’ve lost your life’s work,” I pointed out.
“If you don’t make backups, you’re a nutter.”
I agreed with him entirely about backups, but I didn’t think viruses a game. I thought them as wicked as chemical warfare. I’d heard of a computer virus that had wiped out a whole geological survey with the result that wells for water weren’t drilled in time and more than a thousand people in a desert region died. The author of that particular virus had been reported to be delighted with its effectiveness. Too bad about the dead.
I said, “I suppose there’s no way of telling whether this virus of ours was introduced into our system on purpose or by accident?”
He stared at me earnestly, hand busy through the hair.
“It would be unfriendly to do it on purpose.”
