Twice Shy

by Dick Francis

  “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 sixteenths 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 one pocket, the cases in another—and only after he’d played them had I married them all together. Sandwiching electromagnetic 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 forever. 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 this 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 that 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.”

  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 overprotective and more normal, and when Donna found she was no longer indulged and pampered every waking moment, 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 eyes and seemed to speak only when it was essential, but I slowly realized 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 toward 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 the 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 could 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 feeding. 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 diaper was 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 backseat 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 anytime 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 pummeling at the hands of the Derrys.

  “Do you realize,” 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.”

  INTERVAL

  Letter from Vince Akkerton to Jonathan Derry:Angel Kitchens

  Newmarket

  July 12th

  Dear Mr. Derry:

  You remember you were asking about Chris Norwood, that day back in May? I don’t know if you’re still interested in those computer tapes you were talking about, but they’ve turned up here at the Kitchens. We were clearing out the room we change from outdoor clothes in, prior to its being repainted, you see, and there was this bag there that everyone said didn’t belong to them. So I looked in it, and there were a lot of old papers of writing and three cassettes. I thought I’d give them a run on my cassette player, because they didn’t have any labels on saying what was on them, but all that came out was a screeching noise. Well, a mate of mine who heard it said don’t throw them away, because I was going to, that’s computer noise, he said. So I took the tapes in to Janet to see what she could make of them, but she said the firm has got rid of their old computer, it wasn’t big enough for all it was having to do, and they’ve now got a company computer or something with disc drives, she says, and it doesn’t use cassettes.

  So, anyway, I remembered about you all of a sudden, and I found I’d still got your address, so I thought I’d ask you if you thought this was what you were talking about. I threw the pages of writing into the rubbish, and that’s that, they’re gone, but if you want these tapes, you send me a tenner for my trouble and you can have them.

  Yours truly,

  Vince Akkerton

  Letter from the executors of Mrs. Maureen O’Rorke to Jonathan Derry:September 1st

  Dear Sir:

  We are returning the note you wrote to Mrs. O’Rorke, together with your enclosure of three cassettes.

  Unfortunately Mrs. O’Rorke had died peacefully in her sleep at home three days before your gift was posted. In our opinion, therefore, the contents of the package should be regarded as belonging to yourself, and we herewith return them.

  We are,

  Yours faithfully,

  Jones, Pearce and Block,

  Solicitors

  Letter from Harry Gilbert to Marty Goldman, Ltd., Turf Accountants:October 15th

  Dear Marty,

  In view of what has happened, I’m asking you to release me from the transfer that we had agreed. I haven’t the heart, old friend, to build any more kingdoms. With Angelo jailed for life there’s no point in me buying all your betting shops. You knew, of course, that they were for him—for him to manage, anyway.

  I know you had some other offers, so I hope you won’t be coming after me for compensation.

  Your old friend,

  Harry

  Letter from the University of Eastern California selection board to Jonathan Derry:London

  October 20th

  Dear Mr. Derry:

  Subsequent to your interview in London last week, we have pleasure in offering you a three-year teaching post in the Department of Physics. Your salary for the first year will be Scale B (attached) to be reviewed thereafter. One full semester’s notice to be given in writing on either side.

  We understand that you will be free to take up the post on January 1st next, and we await your confirmation that you accept this offer.

  Further details and instructions will be sent to you upon receipt of your acceptance.

  Welcome to the university!

  Lance K. Barowska, D.Sc.

  Director of Selections, Science Faculty

  University of Eastern California

  Excerpt from a private letter from the Governor of Albany Prison, Parkhurst, Isle of Wight, to his friend the Governor of Wakefield Prison, Yorkshire. ........................Well, Frank, we’re letting Angelo Gilbert out on parole this week, and I wish between you and me that I felt better about it. I’d like to have advised against it, but he’s served fourteen years and there’s been a lot of pressure from the Reformers group on the Home Sec to release him. It’s not that Gilbert’s actively violent or even hostile, but he’s been trying hard to get this parole so for the last two years there’s been no breath of trouble.

  But as you know with some of them they’re never stable, however meek they look, and I’ve a feeling Gilbert’s like that. You remember, when you had him about five years ago, you felt just the same. It isn’t in the cards, I suppose, to keep him locked up for life, but I just hope to God he doesn’t go straight out and shoot the first person who crosses him.

  See you soon, Frank.

  Donald

  PART TWO

  WILLIAM

  12

  I put my hand on Cassie’s breast, and she said, “No, William. No.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Because it’s never good for me, twice, so soon. You know that.”

  “Come on,” I said.

  “No.”

  “You’re lazy,” I said.

  “And you’re greedy.” She picked my hand off and gave it back to me.

  I replaced it. “At least let me hold you,” I said.

  “No.” She threw my hand off again. “With you, one thing leads to another. I’m going to get some orange juice and run the bath, and if you’re not careful you’ll be late.”

  I rolled onto my back and watched her walk about the bedroom, a tall thin girl with too few curves and very long feet.
Seen like that in all her angular nakedness she still had the self-possessed quality which had first attracted me: a natural apartness, a lack of cling. Her self-doubts, if any, were well hidden, even from me. She went downstairs and came back carrying two glasses of juice.

  “William,” she said. “Stop staring.”

  “I like to.”

  She walked to the bathroom to turn on the taps and came back brushing her teeth.

  “It’s seven o’clock,” she said.

  “So I’ve noticed.”

  “You’ll lose that cushy job of yours if you’re not out on the gallops in ten minutes.”

  “Twenty will do.”

  I rose up, however, and pinched the bath first, drinking the orange juice as I went. Count your blessings, I said to myself, soaping. Count Cassandra Morris, a better girl than I’d ever had before; seven months bedded, growing more essential every day. Count the sort of job that no one could expect to be given at twenty-nine. Count enough money, for once, to buy a car that wasn’t everyone’s cast-off held together by rust and luck.

  The old ache to be a jockey was pretty well dead, but I supposed there would always be regret. It wasn’t as if I’d never ridden in races; I had, from sixteen to twenty, first as an amateur, then a professional, during which time I’d won eighty-four steeplechases, twenty-three hurdle races, and wretchedly cursed my unstoppably lengthening body. At six foot one I’d broken my leg in a racing fall, been imprisoned in traction for three months, and grown two more inches in bed.

  It had been practically the end. There had been very tall jump jockeys in the past, but I’d progessively found that even if I starved to the point of weakness I couldn’t keep my weight reliably below eleven stone. Trainers began saying I was too tall, too heavy, sorry lad, and employing someone else. So at twenty I’d got myself a job as an assistant trainer, and at twenty-three I’d worked for a bloodstock agent, and at twenty-six on a stud farm, which kept me off the racecourse too much. At twenty-seven I’d been employed in a sort of hospital for sick racehorses which went out of business because too many owners preferred to shoot their liabilities, and after that there had been a spell of selling horse feed, and then a few months in the office of a bloodstock auctioneer, which had paid well but bored me to death; and each time between jobs I’d spent the proceeds of the last one in wandering around the world, drifting homeward when the cash ran out and casting around for a new berth.