Twice Shy Read online

  The house at number seventeen Pemberton Close proved to be inhabited not by Harry Gilbert but by a stockbroker and his chatty wife and four noisy children on roller skates, all of them out in the garden.

  “Harry Gilbert?” said the wife, holding a basket of dead roses. “He couldn’t manage the stairs with his illness. He built himself a bungalow full of ramps.”

  “Do you know where?”

  “Oh, sure. On the golf course. He used to play, poor man. Now he sits at a window and watches the foursomes go by on the fourteenth green. We often wave to him, when we’re playing.”

  “Does he have arthritis?” I asked.

  “Good Lord, no.” She made a grimace of sympathy. “Multiple sclerosis. He’s had it for years. We’ve seen him slowly get worse. We used to live four doors away, but we always liked this house. When he put it up for sale, we bought it.”

  “Could you tell me how to find him?”

  “Sure.” She gave me brisk and clear instructions. “You do know, don’t you, not to talk about his son?”

  “Son?” I said vaguely.

  “His only son is in prison for murder. So sad for the poor man. Don’t talk about it, it distresses him.”

  “Thanks for warning me,” I said.

  She nodded and smiled from a kind and unperceiving heart and went back to tidying her pretty garden. Surely goodness and mercy all thy days shall follow thee, I thought frivolously, and no monsters who won’t go away shall gobble thee up. I left the virtuous and went in search of the sinner, and found him, as she’d said, sitting in his wheelchair by a big bay window, watching the earnest putters out on the green.

  The wide double front doors of the large and still new-looking one-story building were opened to me by a man so like Angelo at first sight that I thought for a fearsome moment that he hadn’t after all gone to the races; but it was only the general shape and coloring that were the same, the olive skin, graying hair, unfriendly dark eyes, tendency to an all-over padding of fat.

  “Eddy,” a voice called. “Who is it? Come in here.”

  The voice was as deep and harsh as Angelo’s, the words themselves slightly slurred. I walked across the polished wood of the entrance hall and then across the lush drawing room with its panoramic view, and not until I was six feet away from Harry Gilbert did I stop and say I was William Derry.

  Vibrations could almost be felt. Eddy, behind me, audibly hissed, the air leaving his lungs. The much older version of Angelo’s face which looked up from the wheelchair went stiff with strong but unreadable emotions, guessed at as anger and indignation, but possibly not. He had thinning gray hair, a gray moustache, a big body in a formal gray suit with a waistcoat. Only in the lax hands was the illness visible, and only when he moved them; from his polished shoes to the neat parting across his scalp it seemed to me that he was denying his weakness, presenting an outwardly uncrumbled façade so as to announce to the world that authority still lived within.

  “You’re not welcome in my house,” he said.

  “If your son would stop threatening me, I wouldn’t be here.”

  “He says you have tricked us like your brother.”

  “No.”

  “The betting system doesn’t work.”

  “It worked for Liam O’Rorke,” I said. “Liam O’Rorke was quiet, clever, careful and a statistician. Is Angelo any of those things?”

  He gave me a cold stare. “A system should work for everyone alike.”

  “A horse doesn’t run alike for every jockey,” I said.

  “There’s no similarity.”

  “Engines run sweetly for some drivers and break down for others. Heavyhandedness is always destructive. Angelo is trampling all over that system. No wonder it isn’t producing results.”

  “The system is wrong,” he said stubbornly.

  “It may,” I said slowly, “be slightly out of date.” Yet for Ted Pitts it was purring along still; but then Ted Pitts too was quiet, clever, a statistician.

  It seemed that I had made the first impression upon Harry Gilbert. He said with a faint note of doubt, “It should not have changed with the years. Why should it?”

  “I don’t know. Why shouldn’t it? There may be new factors that Liam O’Rorke couldn’t take into account because in his time they didn’t exist.”

  A depressed sort of grimness settled over him.

  I said, “And if Angelo has been hurrying through the programs, skipping some of the questions or answering them inaccurately, the scores will come out wrong. He’s had some of the answers right. You won a lot at York, so I’m told. And you’d have won more on the St. Leger if Angelo hadn’t scared the bookmakers with his boastful-ness.”

  “I don’t understand you.” The slur in his speech, the faint distortion of all his words was, I realized, the effect of his illness. Articulation might be damaged but the chill awareness in his eyes said quite clearly that his intelligence wasn’t.

  “Angelo told all the bookmakers at York that he would henceforth fleece them continually, because it was he who possessed Liam O’Rorke’s infallible system.”

  Harry Gilbert closed his eyes. His face remained unmoved.

  Eddy said belligerently, “What’s wrong with that? You have to show people who’s boss.”

  “Eddy,” Harry Gilbert said, “you don’t know anything about anything and you never will.” He slowly opened his eyes. “It makes a difference,” he said.

  “They gave him evens on the St. Leger winner. The proper price was five to one.”

  Harry Gilbert would never thank me: not if I gave him lifesaving advice, not if I helped him win a fortune, not if I kept his precious son out of jail. He knew, all the same, what I was saying. Too much of a realist, too old a businessman, not to. Angelo in too many ways was a fool, and it made him more dangerous, not less.

  “What do you expect me to do?” he said.

  “I expect you to tell your son that if he attacks me again, or any of my friends or any of my property, he’ll be back behind bars so fast he won’t know what hit him. I expect you to make him work the betting system carefully and quietly, so that he wins. I expect you to warn him that the system guarantees only one win in three, not a winner every single time. Making the system work is a matter of strict application and careful persistence, not of flamboyance and anger.”

  He stared at me expressionlessly.

  “Angelo’s character,” I said, “is as far different from Liam O’Rorke’s as it’s possible to get. I expect you to make Angelo aware of that fact.”

  They were all expectations, I saw, that were unlikely to be achieved. Harry Gilbert’s physical weakness, though he disguised it, was progressive, and his imperfect control of Angelo would probably only last for exactly as long as Angelo needed financing.

  A tremor shook his body, but no emotion showed in his face. He said with, however, a sort of throttled fury, “All our problems are your brother’s fault.”

  The uselessness of my visit swamped me. Harry Gilbert was after all only an old man blindly clinging like his son to an old obsession. Harry Gilbert was not any longer a man of reason, even if he had ever been.

  I tried all the same, once more. I said, “If you had paid Mrs. O’Rorke all those years ago, if you had bought Liam’s system from her, as you had agreed, you would legally have owned it and could have profited from it ever since. It was because you refused to pay Mrs. O’Rorke that my brother saw to it that you didn’t get the system.”

  “She was too old,” he said coldly.

  I stared at him. “Are you implying that her age was a reason for not paying her?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “If I stole your car from you,” I said, “would you consider me justified on the grounds that you were too ill to drive it?”

  “You prattle,” he said. “You are nothing.”

  “Mug,” Eddy said, nodding.

  Harry Gilbert said wearily, “Eddy, you are good at pushing wheelchairs and cooking meals. On all oth
er subjects, shut up.”

  Eddy gave him a look which was half-defiant, half-scared, and I saw that he too was dependent on Harry for his food and shelter, that it couldn’t be all that easy out in the big cynical world for murderers’ assistants to earn a cushy living, that looking after Harry wasn’t a job to be lightly lost.

  To Harry Gilbert I said, “Why don’t you do what you once intended? Why don’t you buy Angelo a betting shop and let the system win for him there?”

  I got another stretch of silent unmoving stare. Then he said, “Business is a talent. I have it. It is, however, uncommon.”

  I nodded. It was all the answer he would bring himself to make. Certainly he wouldn’t admit to me of all people that he thought Angelo would bankrupt any sensible business in a matter of weeks.

  “Keep your son away from me,” I said. “I’ve done more for you in getting you that system than you deserve. You’ve no rights to it. You’ve no right to demand that it make you a fortune in five minutes. You’ve no right to blame me if it doesn’t. You keep your son away from me. I can play as rough as he does. For your own sake, and for his, you keep him off me.”

  I turned away from him without waiting for any sort of answer, and walked hurriedly out of the room and across the hall.

  Footsteps pattered after me on the polished wood.

  Eddy.

  I didn’t look around. He caught up with me as I opened the front doors and stepped outside, and he put his hand on my arm to make me pause. He looked back guiltily over his shoulder to where his uncle sat mutely by his splendid window, knowing the old man wouldn’t approve of what he was doing. Then as he saw Harry was looking out again steadfastly to the golf course he turned on me a nasty self-satisfied smirk.

  “Mug,” he said, speaking with prudent quietness, “Angelo won’t like you coming here.”

  “Too bad.” I shook his hand off my sleeve. He sneered back in a poisonous mixture of slyness and malice and triumph, and half-whispered his final enjoyable words.

  “Angelo’s bought a pistol,” he said.

  18

  “Why are you so thoughtful?” Cassie asked.

  “Uneasy.”

  We were sitting as so often at a table in Bananas’ dining room with him moving about light-footedly in his sneakers seeming never to hurry yet keeping everyone fed. The plants grew with shining healthy leaves in the opulent gloom of his designedly intimate lighting, glasses and silverware gleaming in candlelight and mold spreading slowly in the dark.

  “It’s not like you,” Cassie said.

  I smiled at her thin suntanned uncomplicated face and said that I didn’t want above all things a return visit from Angelo.

  “Do you really think he’d come?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We’d never get any more corn dollies,” she said. “It’s too late now for decent straw.”

  Her arm in its plaster lay awkwardly on the table. I touched the bunched fingertips peeping out. “Would you consider leaving me for a while?” I asked.

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “Suppose I said I was tired of you?”

  “You’re not.”

  “Are you so sure?”

  “Positive,” she said contentedly. “And anyway, for how long?”

  I drank some wine. For how long was an absolute puzzle. “Until I get Angelo stabilized,” I said. “And don’t ask me how long, because I don’t know. But the first thing to do, I think, is persuade Luke we need a computer right here in Britain.”

  “Would that be difficult?”

  “It might be. He has one in California; he might say he didn’t need two.”

  “What do you want it for—the betting system?”

  I nodded. “I think,” I said, “that I’ll try to rent one. Or some time on one. I want to find out what the winners should be according to O’Rorke, and what Angelo’s doing wrong. And if I can put him right, perhaps that will keep him quiet.”

  “You’d have thought just giving him the tapes would be enough.”

  “Yes, you would.”

  “He’s like a thistle,” she said. “You’re sure you’ve got rid of him and he grows right back.”

  Thistles, I thought, didn’t go out to buy guns.

  Bananas reverently bore his eponymous soufflé to the people at the next table, the airy peaks shining light and luscious and pale brown. The old cow, whose skill had produced it, must have stopped working to rule: Bananas Frisby had been off the menu for the last month.

  “I bet he’s bought her the pony,” Cassie said, “and paid for the riding lessons.”

  Bananas himself, joining us later for coffee, gloomily admitted it. “She took an hour to shred carrots. Did them by hand. Ten seconds in the processor. She said processors were dangerous machinery and she’d have to negotiate a new rate for all jobs with machinery.”

  Bananas’ new beard had grown curly, which was unforeseen in view of the lank straight locks farther up but seemed to me to be in accord with the doubleness of his nature.

  “Historically,” he said, “it’s seldom a good idea to appease a tyrant.”

  “The old cow?”

  “No. Angelo Gilbert.”

  “What do you suggest, then?” I asked. “Full-scale war?”

  “You have to be sure you’ll win. Historically, full-scale war’s a toss-up.”

  “The old cow might leave,” Cassie said, smiling.

  Bananas nodded. “Tyrants always want more next time. I dare say next year she’ll turn to motor racing.”

  “I suppose you don’t know anyone who has a computer you can feed any language into?” I said.

  “Turkish? Indochinese? That sort of stuff?”

  “Yeah. Gibberish, double-speak, jargonese and gobbledegook.”

  “Try the sociologists.”

  I tried, however, Ted Pitts, early the following morning, and reached Jane instead.

  “Ted isn’t here,” she said. “I’m afraid he’s still in Switzerland. Can I help?”

  I explained I wanted to borrow a computer to run a check on the racing programs, and she said sadly that she couldn’t really lend me Ted’s, not without him being there; she knew he was working on a special program for his classes and if anyone touched the computer at present his work would be lost, and she couldn’t risk that.

  “No,” I agreed. Did she know of anyone else whose computer I could use?

  She thought it over. “There’s Ruth,” she said doubtfully. “Ruth Quigley.”

  “Who?”

  “She was a pupil of Ted’s. Actually he says there’s nothing he can teach her now, and when she comes here I can’t understand a word they say to each other; it’s like listening to creatures from outer space.”

  “Would she have a computer of her own?”

  “She’s got everything,” Jane said without envy. “Born rich. Only child. Only has to ask, and it’s hers. And on top of that she’s brainy. Doesn’t seem fair, does it?”

  “Beautiful as well?”

  “Oh.” She hesitated. “Not bad. I don’t really know. It’s not the sort of thing you notice about Ruth.”

  “Well, um, where could I find her?”

  “In Cambridge. That’s why I thought of her, because she lives over your way. She writes programs for teaching-machines. Would you like me to call her? When do you want to go?”

  I said “Today,” and half an hour later I’d had my answer and was on my way, seeking out a flat in a modern apartment house on the outskirts of the town.

  Ruth Quigley proved to be young: very early twenties, I guessed. I could see also what Jane meant about not noticing her looks, because the first, overpowering and lasting impression she gave was of the speed of her mind. There were light eyes, light brown extra-curly hair and a long slender neck, but mostly there was an impatient jerk of the head and a stumblingly rapid diction as if to her utter disgust her tongue couldn’t speak her thoughts fast enough.

  “Yes. Come in. Did you bring your t
apes?” She wasted no precious words on any other greeting. “This way. Old Grantley BASIC, Jane said. You’ve the language with you. Do you want to load it, or shall I?”

  “I’d be glad if—”

  “Hand them over, then. Which side?”

  “Er, first program on side 1.”

  “Right. Come along.”

  She moved with the same inborn rapidity, disappearing down a short passage and through a doorway before I’d even managed a step. She must always find, I thought, that the rest of the world went along intolerably in slow motion.

  The room into which I finally followed her must originally have been designed as a bedroom, which it now in no way resembled. There was a quiet, feltlike pale green floor covering, track-lighting with spotlights, a roller blind at the window, matt white walls . . . and long benches of machines more or less like Ted Pitts’s, only double.

  “Workroom,” Ruth Quigley said.

  “Er, yes.”

  It was cooler in there than out on the street. I identified a faint background hum as air-conditioning, and remarked on it.

  She nodded, not lifting her eyes from the already almost completed job of loading Grantley BASIC into a machine that would accept it. “Dust is like gravel to computers. Heat, damp, all makes them temperamental. They’re thoroughbreds, of course.”

  Racing programs . . . thoroughbred computers. Excellence won. Pains taken gave one the edge. I was beginning to think like her, I thought.

  “I’m wasting your time,” I said apologetically.

  “Glad to help. Always do anything for Jane and Ted. They know that. Did you bring the form books? You’ll need them. Simple programs, but facts must be right. Most teaching-machines, just the same. They bore me quite often. Multiple-choice questions. Then the child takes half an hour to get it right and I put in a bright remark like, ‘Well done, aren’t you clever.’ Nothing of the sort. Encouragement, they say, is all. What do you think?”

  “Are they gifted children?”

  She gave me a flashing glance. “All children are gifted. Some more so. They need the best teaching. They often don’t get it. Teachers are jealous, did you know?”