Twice Shy Read online

  We each drove our own cars. I felt I’d used up my welcome in the caravan and although Jane said I could stay if I liked I could see I was no longer a blessing from heaven. The new paycheck would be in the bank. There would be more than bread this week, and I would have to think of somewhere else.

  Ted stretched up in the last minutes before we left and plucked the six cassettes from the high shelf. “I could do these at lunchtime today,” he said. “If you like.”

  “That would be great,” I said. “Then you can keep one set and the others will be Mrs. O’Rorke’s.”

  “But don’t you want some yourself?”

  “Maybe later I could get copies of yours . . . but I can’t see me chasing around betting shops for the rest of my life.”

  He laughed. “Nor me. Though I wouldn’t have minded a flutter . . .” A sort of longing gleamed in his eyes again and was quickly extinguished. “Ah, well,” he said, “forward to the fray.” He kissed Jane and the little girls, and off we went.

  During the midmorning break I yet again tried to reach Chief Superintendent Irestone, this time from the pay telephone in the common room. Even with the new number I got no joy. Chief Superintendent Irestone wasn’t available at that time.

  “This is boring,” I said. “I was told he would be.”

  “He was called away, sir. Will you leave a message?”

  I felt like leaving a couple of round oaths. I said, “Tell him Jonathan Derry called.”

  “Very good, sir. Your message timed at ten thirty-three.”

  To hell with it, I thought.

  I had taken about five paces down the room in the direction of the coffee machine when the telephone rang behind me. It was the time of day when masters’ wives tended to ring up to get their dear ones to run errands on their way home, and the nearest to the bell answered its summons as a matter of course. My wife, at least, I thought, wouldn’t be calling, but someone shouted, “Jonathan, it’s for you.”

  Surprised, I retraced my steps and picked up the receiver.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Jonathan,” Sarah said. “Where have you been? Where in God’s name have you been?”

  She sounded hysterical. Her voice was high, vibrating with tension, strung tighter than I’d ever heard before. Near snapping point. Frightening.

  “What’s happened?” I asked. I was aware that my voice sounded too calm, but I couldn’t help it. It always seemed to come out that way when there was a jumbled turmoil going on inside.

  “Oh, my Christ!” She still had time to be exasperated with me: but no time to say more.

  After the shortest of pauses another voice spoke, and this time every hair of my body rose in protest.

  “Now you listen to me, creep.”

  Angelo Gilbert.

  “You listen to me,” he said. “Your little lady wifey’s sitting here snug as you like. We tied her to a chair so’s not to hurt her.” He sniggered. “Her friend, too, the wet little bird. Now you listen, mug, because you’re going to do just what I tell you. Are you listening?”

  “Yes,” I said. I was in fact listening with all my might and with one hand clamped over my other ear because of the chatter and coffee cups all around me. It was macabre. It also seemed to have divorced me from any feeling in my feet.

  “That was your last runaround, that was,” Angelo said, “sending us those fake tapes. This time you’ll give us the real ones, get it?”

  “Yes,” I said mildly.

  “You wouldn’t like to get your little wifey back with her face all smashed up, would you?”

  “No.”

  “All you got to do is give us the tapes.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “And no bloody runaround.” He seemed disappointed that I’d shown so little reaction to his dramatics but even in that dire moment it seemed second nature to use on him the techniques I’d unconsciously developed in the years of teaching: to deflate the defiance, to be bored by the superego, to kill off the triumphant cruelty by an appearance of indifference.

  It worked on the kids, it worked a treat on Jenkins, and it had already worked twice on Angelo. He should have learned by now, I thought, that I didn’t rise to sneers or arrogance: not visibly anyway. He was too full of himself to believe that someone might not show the fear he felt the urge to induce. He might not be ultra-bright, but he was incalculably dangerous.

  He held the receiver to Sarah’s mouth, and against her I had fewer defenses.

  “Jonathan . . .” It was half anger, half fright: high and vehement. “They came yesterday. Yesterday. Donna and I have been tied up here all night. Where have you damned well been?”

  “Are you in Donna’s house?” I said anxiously.

  “What? Yes, of course. Of course we are. Don’t ask such damn silly questions.”

  Angelo took the phone back again. “Now you listen, mug. Listen good. This time there’s to be no messing. This time we want the real McCoy, and I’m telling you, it’s your last chance.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Are you there?” he said sharply.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Take the tapes to my father’s house in Welwyn. Have you got that?”

  “Yes. But I haven’t got the tapes.”

  “Then get them.” His voice was nearly a screech. “Do you hear?” he demanded. “Get them.”

  “It’ll take some time,” I said.

  “You haven’t got time, creep.”

  I took a deep breath. He wasn’t safe. He wasn’t reasonable. He wasn’t a schoolchild. I simply couldn’t play him too far.

  “I can get the tapes today,” I said. “I’ll take them to your father when I get them. It might be late.”

  “Sooner,” he said.

  “I can’t. It’s impossible.”

  I didn’t know exactly why I wanted to delay. It was an instinct. To work things out; not to rush in. This time the Egyptians would have more sense.

  “When you get there,” he said, seeming to accept it, “my father will test the tapes. On a computer. A Grantley computer. Get it, mug? My father bought a Grantley computer, because that’s the sort of computer those tapes were written for. So no funny tricks like last time. He’ll try the tapes, see? And they’d better be good.”

  “All right,” I said again.

  “When my father is satisfied,” he said, “he’ll ring me here. Then I’ll leave your little wifey and the wet chick tied up here, and you can come and rescue them like a right little Galahad. Got it?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Don’t you forget, creep, any funny stuff and your little wifey will keep the plastic surgery business in work for years. Starting with her nice white teeth, creep.”

  He apparently again held the receiver for Sarah because it was her voice which came next. Still angry, still frightened, still high.

  “For God’s sake, get those tapes.”

  “Yes, I will,” I said. “Has Angelo got his pistol?”

  “Yes. Jonathan, do as he says. Please do as he says. Don’t fool about.” It was an order just as much as a prayer.

  “The tapes,” I said with an attempt at reassurance, “are not worth a tooth. Keep him calm if you can. Tell him I’ll do what he says. Tell him I’ve promised you.”

  She didn’t answer. It was Angelo who said, “That’s all, creep. That’s enough. You get those tapes. Right?”

  “All right,” I said. And the line abruptly went dead.

  I felt pretty dead myself.

  The common room had emptied and I was already going to be late for class. I picked up the necessary books mechanically and propelled myself on unfelt feet along the passages to the laboratories.

  Get the tapes . . .

  I couldn’t get them until I could find Ted Pitts, which would probably not be until lunchtime at twelve-fifteen. I had an hour and a half until then in which to decide what to do.

  The senior boys were studying radioactivity. I told them to continue
the set of experiments with alpha particles that they had started last week and I sat on my high stool by the blackboard, from where I often taught, and watched the Geiger counters, with my mind on Angelo Gilbert.

  Options, I thought.

  I could yet once again ring the police. I could say an unstable man is holding my wife hostage at gunpoint. I could say I thought it was he who had killed Christopher Norwood. If I did, they might go chasing out to the Keithly house and try to make Angelo surrender. And then Sarah could be a hostage not for three little cassettes, but for Angelo’s personal liberty. An escalation not to be thought of.

  No police.

  What, then?

  Give Harry Gilbert the tapes. Trust that Angelo would leave Sarah and Donna undamaged. Do, in fact, precisely what I’d been told: and believe that Angelo wouldn’t wait for me to walk into Donna’s house and then leave three dead bodies behind when he walked out of it.

  It wasn’t logically likely, but it was possible.

  It would have been better if I could have thought of a good valid logical reason for the murder of Chris Norwood. He hadn’t given Angelo the finished computer programs because if he had there would have been no need for Angelo to come to me. I speculated, not for the first time, on exactly what had happened to Liam O’Rorke’s original notes, and what had happened to the tapes Peter told me he had sent to the person who had commissioned them. To C. Norwood, Angel Kitchens, Newmarket.

  To Chris Norwood, comprehensive thief. Cocky little bastard, Akkerton had said. Vegetable chef Akkerton, feeding his paunch in the pub.

  I had supposed that Chris Norwood, when first faced with Angelo, had simply said that Peter Keithly was writing the programs and had all the notes, and that Angelo should get them from him. Angelo had then gone threateningly to Peter, who had been frightened into giving him programs which he knew were incomplete. By the time the Gilberts discovered they were useless, Peter was dead. Back must have gone Angelo to Chris Norwood, this time waving a gun. And again Chris Norwood must have said Peter Keithly had the programs on tapes. That if he was dead, they were in his house. He would have told him that, I thought, after Angelo had shot up the stereo. He would have begun to be really frightened: but he would have still have wanted to keep the programs if he could, because he knew they were a meal ticket for life.

  Chris Norwood, I guessed, had twice not given Angelo what he wanted; and Chris Norwood was dead.

  I also had fooled and obstructed Angelo twice; and I couldn’t be sure that I wasn’t alive because I’d had a handy rifle. Without his father there to restrain him, Angelo could still be as volatile as the petrol vapor that had killed Peter, even if he thought he finally had his hands on the treasure he’d been chasing for so long.

  Some of the boys were getting their nuclei into knots. Automatically I descended from the heights of the stool and reminded them that cloud chambers didn’t cloud if one neglected to add dry ice.

  No more runarounds, Angelo had said.

  Well . . .

  What tools did I have, I thought. What skills that I could use?

  I could shoot.

  I couldn’t, on the other hand, shoot Angelo. Not while he had a Walther to Sarah’s head. Not without landing myself in jail for manslaughter at the least.

  Shooting Angelo was out.

  I had the knowledge that physics had given me. I could construct a radio, a television, a thermostat, a digital clock, a satellite tracker and, given the proper components, a laser beam, a linear accelerator and an atomic bomb. I couldn’t exactly make an atomic bomb before lunch.

  The two boys who were using the alpha particle scattering analogue were arguing over the apparatus, which consisted of one large magnet bombarded by a host of small ones. One boy insisted that the power of permanent magnets decayed with time, and the other said that was rubbish; permanent meant permanent.

  “Who’s right, sir?” they asked.

  “Permanence is relative,” I said. “Not absolute.”

  There was a flash of impermanent electrical activity at that moment in my brain. The useful knowledge was at hand.

  God bless all boys, I thought.

  9

  Ted Pitts hunched over the Harris all through lunchtime, making and testing the copies on the new tapes.

  “There you are,” he said finally, rubbing his neck. “As far as I can see, they’re perfect.”

  “Which set do you want?”

  He peered at me earnestly through the black frames. “Don’t you mind?”

  “Choose which you like,” I said. “I’ll take the others.”

  He hesitated, but decided on the originals. “If you’re sure?”

  “Certain,” I said. “But give me the original boxes—Oklahoma and so on. It might be better if I hand them over in the right wrappings.”

  I slid the copies into the gaudy boxes, thanked Ted, returned to the common room, and told my four long-suffering lieutenants that I had developed a stupefying sick shivery headache and would they please take my afternoon classes between them. There were groans, but it was a service we regularly did for each other when it was unavoidable. I was going home, I said. With luck, I would be back in the morning.

  Before I left I made a detour to the prep room where Louisa was counting out springs and weights for the juniors’ class that afternoon. I told her about the headache and got scant sympathy, which was fair. While she took the load of batteries through into one of the laboratories to distribute them along the benches, I opened one of her tidy cupboards and helped myself to three small objects, hiding them smartly in my pocket.

  “What are you looking for?” Louisa asked, coming back and seeing me in front of the still-open doors.

  “Nothing particular,” I said vaguely. “I don’t really know.”

  “Get home to bed,” she said, sighing, casting herself for martyrdom. “I’ll cope with the extra work.”

  My absence meant in reality less work for her, not more, but there was nothing to be gained by pointing it out. I thanked her profusely to keep her in a good mood for the others, and went out to the car to drive home.

  No need to worry about Angelo’s being there: he was in the Keithlys’ house a hundred miles away in Norfolk.

  Everything felt unreal. I thought of the two girls, tied to the chairs, uncomfortable, scared, exhausted. Don’t fool about, Sarah had said. Do what Angelo says.

  Somewhere in one of the sideboard drawers we had a photograph album, thrust out of sight since we had lost the desire to record our joyless life. I dug it out and turned the pages, looking for the picture I had taken once of Peter, Donna and Sarah standing out on the pavement in front of Peter’s house. The sun had been shining, I found. All three were smiling, looking happy. A pang to see Peter’s face, no moustache, looking so pleased with himself and young. Nothing special about that photograph: just people, a house, a street. Reassuring to me, however, at that moment.

  I went upstairs to my own small room, unlocked the gun cabinet and took out one of the Mauser 7.62’s and also one of the Olympic-type rifles, the Anschütz .22. Packed them both into the special suitcase along with some ammunition of both sizes. Carried the case down to the car and locked it into the trunk.

  Reflected and went upstairs to fetch a large brown bath towel from the linen cupboard. Locked that also into the trunk.

  Locked the house.

  After that, I sat in the car for three or four minutes thinking things out, with the result that I went back into the house yet again, this time for a tube of extra-strength glue.

  All I didn’t have enough of, I thought, was time.

  I started the engine and set off, not to Welwyn, but to Norwich.

  Propelled by demons I did the trip in a shorter time than usual, but it was still four-thirty when I reached the city outskirts. Six hours since Angelo had telephoned. Six long hours for his hostages.

  I drew up beside a telephone booth in a shopping mall not far from Donna’s house and dialed her number. Pra
ying, I think, that Angelo would answer, that all would be at least no worse than it had been in the morning.

  “Hello,” he said. Eagerly, I thought. Expecting his father.

  “It’s Jonathan Derry,” I said. “I’ve got the tapes.”

  “Let me talk to my father.”

  “I’m not at your father’s house. I haven’t gone there yet. It’s taken me all day to get the tapes.”

  “Now you listen, creep.” He was roughly, nastily angry. “I warned you.”

  “It’s taken me all day, but I’ve got them,” I interrupted insistently. “I’ve got the tapes. I’ve got the tapes.”

  “All right,” he said tautly. “Now take them to my father. Take them there, do you hear?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ll go there straight away, but it’ll take me some time. It’s a long way.”

  Angelo muttered under his breath and then said, “How long? Where are you? We’ve been waiting all fucking night and all fucking day.”

  “I’m near Bristol.”

  “Where?” It was a yell of fury.

  “It’ll take me four hours,” I said, “to reach your father.”

  There was a brief silence. Then Sarah’s voice, tired beyond tears, numb with too much fright.

  “Where are you?” she said.

  “Near Bristol.”

  “Oh, my God.” She sounded no longer angry, but hopeless. “We can’t stand much more of this—”

  The receiver was taken away from her in midsentence, and Angelo came back on the line.

  “Get going, creep,” he said, and hung up.

  Breathing space, I thought. Four hours before Angelo expected the message from his father. Instead of pressure mounting inexorably, dangerously, in that house, there would at worst, I hoped, be a bearable irritation, and at best a sort of defusing of suspense. They wouldn’t for another four hours be strung up with a minute-to-minute expectation.

  Before getting back into the car I opened the trunk, took the telescope and the two rifles out of their nonjolt beds in the suitcase and wrapped them more vulnerably in the brown towel. Put them into the car on the brown upholstery of the backseat. Put the boxes of bullets beside them, also hidden by the towel. Looked then at my fingers. No tremors. Not like in my heart.