by Dick Francis
I drove home, where the computer whiz soon joined me. He stood with his legs apart in the center of my devastated sitting room, the hand combing through the hair nonstop.
“Yes,” I said to his stunned silence. “It took a bit of strength and a lot of pleasure.”
“Pleasure?” He thought it over. “I guess so.”
He put the wreck of the old computer onto one of the few free areas of carpet and installed the new version in its place, attaching it to its phone line to the computer in Isobel’s room. Although I would still maintain my pencil charts, it was reassuring to see the screen come alive again with the active link to the office.
“I guarantee that this new disk is clean,” the expert said.
“And I’m selling you a disk you can use to check that it stays that way.” He showed me how to “scan” the disk. “If you find any virus on there, please phone me at once.”
“I certainly will.” I watched his busy fingers and asked a few questions. “If someone fed the Michelangelo virus into the office computer, would it also infect the computer here?”
“Yes, it would, as soon as you called the office programs onto your screen. And the other way round. If someone fed the virus into here, the office would catch it. It would then spread to all the computers on the same network.”
“Like Rose’s?”
“Is Rose the other secretary? Yes, sure, into hers in a flash.”
“And . . . um . . . if we make backup floppy disks, would the virus be in those, too?”
He said earnestly, “If you do have any backups, let me check them before you use them.”
“Yes.”
“But your girls said they hadn’t made any for ages.”
“I know.” I paused. “Did Michael Watermead’s secretary make backups?”
He hesitated. “Don’t know if I should tell you.”
“Professional etiquette?”
“Sort of.”
“She’ll tell Isobel anyway.”
“Then . . . er . . . yes, she did, and the backup floppy she’s been using lately has Michelangelo on it. I’m having to clean up their whole act.”
“Will you save their records?”
“Every chance.”
He finished the installation and gave me a cheerful pitying look. “You need lessons,” he said. “You need to know about write-protect and boot-up floppy disks, for a start. I could teach you, if you like, though you’re pretty old.”
“How long have you been in computers?” I asked.
“From before I could hold a pen.”
The way I could ride, I thought.
“I’ll come for lessons,” I said.
“Really? Great, then. Really great.”
After he’d gone I managed to stay awake to watch all the racing at Cheltenham and had the bittersweet satisfaction of seeing a horse I’d schooled and taught his business win the Gold Cup.
I should have been riding him. I might have been . . . Well, it had to be enough to remember the first of his triumphs, a scramble of a two-mile hurdle. Enough to remember his first steeplechase, a high-class novice race that he’d won by outjumping the opposition, though nearly giving it away by floundering all over the place in the last hundred yards. I’d ridden him eight times in all into first place past the winning post, and now here he was, nine years old and a star, charging up the Cheltenham hill as straight as a die with all the panache and courage a jockey could hope for.
Goddammit . . .
I shook off the sickening self-pitying regrets. I should have got over it by this time, I told myself. A decent period of mourning was reasonable, but three years along the road I should have stopped looking back. I supposed rather uneasily that I wouldn’t be free of nostalgia until the last of the horses I’d ridden was heading towards Centaur Care. Not even then, if many like Peterman turned up on my doorstep.
The minute I switched off the set the telephone rang and I listened to Lizzie’s voice sounding surprised.
“Hello! I thought I’d get your answering machine. I thought you’d be at Cheltenham.”
“I didn’t go.”
“So it seems. Why not? Is your head all right?”
“Nothing to worry about. I keep wanting to go to sleep.”
“Thoroughly natural. Listen to nature.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Thanks for lending me Aziz. What a fascinating young man.”
“Is he?”
“Too bright for his job, I’d say.”
“Why do you think so? I need bright drivers.”
“Most drivers can’t discuss the periodic table of elements, let alone in French.”
I laughed.
“Just think about it. Anyway,” she said, “I’ve a report on your tubes.”
It took me a few seconds to work out which tubes she meant, typical of the sluggish state of my brain.
“Tubes,” I said. “Oh, great.”
“They each contained 10 cc’s of viral transport medium.”
“Of what?”
“To be precise about the ingredients, the tubes contained bovine albumin, glutamic acid, sucrose and an antibiotic called Gentamicin, all in sterile water at a balanced pH of 7.3.”
“Er . . .” I said, reaching for a pencil. “Spell all that slowly.”
She laughed and did so.
“But what’s it for?” I asked.
“For transporting a virus, as I said.”
“But what virus?” My mind thought irrationally of Michelangelo, which was nonsense. Michelangelo needed a different sort of tube.
“Any virus,” Lizzie said. “Viruses are highly mysterious and barely visible even under an electron microscope. One can usually only see their results. You can also detect the antibodies the invaded organism develops to defend it self.”
“But . . .” I paused to organize a few scattering thoughts. “Was there any virus in the tubes?”
“It’s impossible to say. It looks likely, considering that the tubes were carefully sealed and were being carried in the dark in a vacuum flask—and incidentally, the vacuum flask would have been necessary to maintain the tubes in a chilled environment, say 4°C, not a hot one—but you’ve had those tubes for days, haven’t you?”
“They were being carried in one of my horse vans a week ago today.”
“That’s what I thought. Well, viruses will only survive outside a living organism for a very short time. Viral transport medium is used for taking virally infected matter from a sufferer to a laboratory for testing, and for infecting another organism for research purposes, but viruses don’t live long in the medium or on culture plates.”
“How long?”
“It would depend. The conflicting views here in the university say for as little as five hours or for as many as forty-eight. After that, any virus would be inactive.”
“But, Lizzie . . .”
“Yes, what?”
“I mean . . . I don’t really understand.”
“You’re hardly alone,” she said. “There are about six hundred known viruses, probably there are at least double that number, and they are all unidentifiable by sight. They’re particles of DNA or RNA surrounded by a coating of protein. They are cylindrical or polyhedral in shape, but you can’t tell what they do by looking at them. They’re not like bacteria, where the organisms are recognizable individually by their appearance. Most viruses look the same. They live by invading living tissue and reproducing in animal cells—for animal, read also human. Flu, colds, polio, smallpox, measles, rabies, AIDS, dozens of things. Everyone knows their effects. No one knows how they evolved. Some, like flu, are constantly changing.”
In silence I thought about what she’d told me until in the end she said, “Freddie? Are you still there?”
“Yes,” I said. “Do you mean,” I asked slowly, “that you could take some flu virus from someone and transport it for miles and infect someone else, without the people even meeting?”
“Sure, you could. Bu
t why would you?”
“Malice?” I suggested.
“Freddie!”
“You could, couldn’t you?”
“As far as I gather, you’d have to have a large inoculum in a small amount of medium, the pathogenicity of the virus would have to be high and the receptor would have to be highly susceptible.”
“Is that straight Professor Quipp?”
She said tartly, “Since you ask, yes.”
“Lizzie,” I said apologetically, “it’s just that I need it in plain English.”
“Oh. Well, in that case, what it means is that you’d have to have a very active virus and as much of it as possible in relation to the amount of medium, and the person receiving it would have to be likely to catch the infection. It wouldn’t be any good trying to infect someone with the present strain of flu if they’d been inoculated against it. You couldn’t give polio to anyone who’d taken the Salk vaccine, or give smallpox or measles to protected people. There’s no proven vaccine yet against AIDS, and AIDS is terrifying because it may be that it changes, like flu, though that’s not established so far.”
“If it was flu virus in the tubes,” I asked, thinking, “would you inject it?”
“No, you wouldn’t. Flu is spread through respiratory droplets or saliva. You’d have to squirt the medium up someone’s nose. That might do it.”
“Or sprinkle it on their cornflakes?”
“Not really reliable. A respiratory virus would have to go into the respiratory tract, not the stomach. From the nose or lungs it could invade the whole system, but it might not have any effect if you injected it into a muscle or straight into the bloodstream.” She paused. “You do have gruesome thoughts.”
“It’s been a gruesome week.”
She agreed with the assessment. “Is my dear little helicopter still exactly where I left it?”
“Yes. What do you want me to do with it?”
“My partners suggest putting it on a low-loader and bringing it home.”
“Do you think it can be salvaged?” I probably sounded surprised, but there were bits of it, she said, that looked unharmed. The tail rotor, for example, and the main rotor’s linkage, the most expensive part of the works. A helicopter could be rebuilt. It would have to stay as it was, though, she said, until after the aircraft crash inspector had been to see it and made a report. Even ground accidents, it seemed, had to go through the mill.
“Talking of viruses,” I said, “we’ve had a doozy in the computer.”
“A what?”
“A killer. No vaccine given in time, alas.”
“What exactly are you talking about?”
I told her.
“Inconvenient,” she said. “Let me know if you need anything else.”
“I will. Incidentally, Aziz said you were a nice lady.”
“So I should hope.”
I laughed with affection and disconnected and from my bedroom window watched a zippy small car drive onto my tarmac and stop with a shocked jolt within first sight of the Jaguar-Robinson embrace.
My visitor, as I was delighted to see as she stood up in the open air to stare at the wreckage, was Maudie Watermead: blond, slight, forever legs in blue denim.
I opened my window and yelled down to her.
“Hi,” she shouted back. “Can I come in?”
“I’ll be right down.”
I leaped down the stairs and opened the door for her.
I said, kissing her cheek, “I don’t suppose you’ve come to hop into bed?”
“Not a chance.”
“Come in for a drink, then.”
She took the less dramatic invitation for granted and followed me into the house. The state of the sitting room opened her mouth.
“Wow,” she said breathlessly. “All of Pixhill’s heard about this, but I never . . . I mean . . .”
“The thoroughness,” I said dryly, “is impressive.”
“Oh, Freddie!” She sounded truly sympathetic and gave me a hug. Too chaste, however. “And your super car . . .” She bent down and picked up one of the chopped photographs, sharp pieces of glass falling in a cascade from an old soaring flight over The Chair fence in the Grand National. “How can you bear it?”
“Without tears,” I said.
She gave me a swift sideways glance. “You’re as tough as ever.”
What was tough, I wondered. Unfeeling? Yet I felt.
“I was talking to the computer boy,” Maudie said. “He described all this. He said if anyone had done this to him, he’d have taken an ax to him himself.”
“Mm. But you have to ax the right person and he didn’t sign his name.” Something flickered deep in my brain. Something about signing names. Flickered and vanished. “What will you drink?” I asked. “There’s champagne in the fridge.”
“If you really feel like it,” she said doubtfully.
“Why not?”
So we went into the kitchen and sat at the table there and drank from my best glasses, all unshattered inside a kitchen cupboard.
“Michael was furious about our computer. That young genius who’s fixed it for us told us we hadn’t had the virus lurking inside there for more than a month. Betsy, our secretary, started using new floppy disks as backup disks a month ago. The virus was on those, but it wasn’t on the backup disks she’d used earlier. So the wizard says we didn’t have the virus then.”
I thought about it. “So Betsy hadn’t used the old backup disks recently?”
“No. No need. I mean, you only use backups if the computer itself goes haywire, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“The wizard says there are hundreds of these wretched viruses about. Michael’s on the point of returning to parchment and quill pens.”
“Can’t blame him.”
“Betsy says your Isobel’s told her they didn’t make backups, even, in your office.”
“One lives and learns.”
“But what will you do?”
“Oh,” I said, “start on the parchment and quills, I suppose. I mean, all the records and figures in the computer are still around on paper. Rose kept paper copies of the bills she sent out. We’ve all the invoices for supplies coming in. The drivers’ logbooks still exist.”
“Yes, but what a mammoth task.”
“Infuriating,” I agreed.
“Why aren’t you snarling and gnashing your teeth?”
“Doesn’t do any good.”
She sighed. “You’re amazing, Freddie, you really are.”
“But I don’t get what I want.”
She knew what I meant. She almost blushed, then said, “No, you don’t,” much too firmly, and drank her champagne. “I came to see if I could help you in any way,” she went on, and before I could say anything added quickly, “and not in that way, don’t be a fool.”
“Pity.”
“Michael said to ask you to lunch on Sunday.”
“Tell Michael yes, thank you.”
Tell Michael, Sandy had said, that his daughter, Tessa, had criminal potential. I looked at Maudie’s high cheekbones, at her fair eyebrows, her delicious mouth; looked at her good sense and generous spirit. How could one warn such a mother or such a father to look out for trouble in their daughter? Maybe a critical aunt could have managed it, but I certainly could not.
I had no right to do it and no inclination, and moreover I wouldn’t be believed and would lose a welcome friendship. I might privately suspect that Sandy was on target, but that was what the thought would remain: private. I could, on the other hand, alert Maudie to less nebulous dangers.
I said tentatively, “Have you come across one of my drivers called Nigel?”
The fair eyebrows rose. “We nearly always have Lewis.” “Yes. But . . . um . . . Nigel’s a sexy hunk, my secretaries say, and . . . um . . .”
“Get on with it,” Maudie urged.
“I just thought . . . you might not want him seeing too much of Tessa.”
“Tessa! Oh, God. I
thought it was Lewis she was keen on. She’s always whispering with Lewis.”
“The pub landlord mentioned to me that Nigel was buying Cokes there for Tessa and Ed one evening. I’m sure there’s absolutely nothing to worry about, but perhaps you should know.”
“Stupid kids!” She seemed basically unworried. “Coca-Cola in a pub!” She laughed. “In my young days it was ‘my needle or yours’ that had parents hopping.”
I refilled her glass. She frowned, not at the champagne, but at a sudden memory, and thoughtfully said, “You sent that Nigel to us last week to take Jericho Rich’s damned horses off to Newmarket, didn’t you?”
“Yes. Friday. But I won’t allocate him to your work anymore.”
“Betsy told me . . . He came too early, or something, and Tessa climbed into his cab and said she wanted to go with him, but Michael saw her and said she wasn’t to go.”
That version of what had happened sounded much more likely than the one I’d heard from Isobel, that Nigel had virtuously said he wouldn’t take her because of my ban on hitchhikers.
Maudie said, “Michael told me he couldn’t imagine why she wanted to go with Jericho’s horses when she said she detested the man, but if it was Nigel she wanted to go with, it makes more sense. Do you really think we might have a problem there?”
“He’s unmarried and has powerful pheromones, I’m told.”
“What a way of putting it.” She was amused. “I’ll keep an eye on things. And thanks.”
“I don’t like to tell tales.”
“Tessa can be a bit of a handful, sometimes.” She looked mildly rueful but forgiving. “Seventeen’s a rebellious age, I suppose.”
“Did you rebel?” I asked.
“No, actually. I don’t think so. Did you?”
“I was too busy riding.”
“And here you still are, in your father’s house.” She mocked me gently. “You never even left home.”
“Home is wherever I am,” I said.
“Wow. How’s that for utter security!”
“You wouldn’t care to leave Michael, I suppose?”
“And four children? And an integrated life? And I’m older than you anyway.”
The thing that made the game most worth playing, I thought, was the certainty that I wouldn’t win it. She finished her drink happily, my desire for her as pleasurable an intoxication as the bubbles. Casual consummation would have spoiled the future and she was too nice to allow it. She put down her glass and stood up, smiling.
