Twice Shy Read online

  “And are you not . . . an achiever?”

  She made a small regretful movement with hands and head. “I wish I were. I am averagely intelligent, but that’s all. It gets you nowhere. It doesn’t save you from rage. I apologize for my reaction in the garden.”

  “But don’t,” I said. “Theft’s an assault. Of course you’d be angry.”

  She relaxed to the extent of sitting back into the sofa, where the cushions barely deflated under her weight.

  “I will tell you as much as I can of what has happened. If it saves you from chasing Moses across the Red Sea, so much the better.”

  To know what not to do . . .

  I grinned at her.

  She twitched her lips and said, “What do you know about racing?”

  “Not a great deal.”

  “Liam did. My husband. Liam lived for the horses all his life. In Ireland, of course, when we were children. Then here. Newmarket, Epsom, Cheltenham, that’s where we’ve lived. Then back here to Newmarket. Always the horses.”

  “Were they his job?” I asked.

  “In a way. He was a gambler.” She looked at me calmly. “I mean a professional gambler. He lived on his winnings. I still live on what’s left.”

  “I thought it wasn’t possible,” I said.

  “To beat the odds?” The words sounded wrong for her appearance. It was true, I thought, what she’d said about categories. Old women weren’t expected to talk gambling; but this one did. “In the old days it was perfectly possible to make a good living. Dozens did it. You worked on a profit expectation of ten percent on turnover, and if you had any judgment at all, you achieved it. Then they introduced the Betting Tax. It took a slice off all the winnings, reduced the profit margin to almost nil, killed off all the old pros in no time. Your ten percent was all going into the Revenue, do you see?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Liam had always made more than ten percent. He took a pride in it. He reckoned he could win one race out of three. That means that every third bet, on average, would win. That’s a very high percentage, day after day, year after year. And he did beat the tax. He tried new ways, added new factors. With his statistics, he said, you could always win in the long run. None of the bookies would take his bets.”

  “Er . . . what?” I said.

  “Didn’t you know?” She sounded surprised. “Bookmakers won’t take bets from people who repeatedly win.”

  “But I thought that’s what they were in business for. I mean, to take people’s bets.”

  “To take bets from ordinary mug punters, yes,” she said. “The sort who may win occasionally but never do in the end. But if you have an account with almost any bookie and you keep winning, he’ll close your account.”

  “Good grief,” I said weakly.

  “At the races,” she said, “all the bookies knew Liam. If they didn’t know him to talk to, they knew him by sight. They’d only let him bet in cash at starting price, and then as soon as he’d got his money on they’d tic-tac it around the ring and they’d all reduce the price of that horse to ridiculously small odds, making the starting price very low, so that he wouldn’t win much himself, and so that the other racegoers would be put off backing that horse, and stake their money on something else.”

  There was a longish pause while I sorted out and digested what she’d said.

  “And what,” I said, “about the pari-mutuel?”

  “The pari-mutuel is unpredictable. Liam didn’t like that. Also the pari-mutuel in general pays worse odds than the bookies. No, Liam liked betting with the bookies. It was a sort of war. Liam always won, though most times the bookies didn’t know it.”

  “Er,” I said, “how do you mean?”

  She sighed. “It was a lot of work. We had a gardener. A friend, really. He lived here in the house. Down that passage where we came in just now, those were his rooms. He used to like driving around the country, so he’d take Liam’s cash and drive off to some town or other and put it all on in the local betting shops, bit by bit, and if the horse won, which it usually did, he’d go around and collect, and come home. He and Liam would count it all out. So much for Dan—that was our friend—and so much for the working funds, and the rest for us. No more tax to pay, of course. No income tax. We went on for years like that. Years. We all got on so well together, you see.”

  She fell silent, looking into the gentle past with the incongruously wild eyes.

  “And Liam died?” I said.

  “Dan died. Eighteen months ago, just before Christmas. He was ill for only a month. It was so quick.” A pause. “And Liam and I, we didn’t realize until after . . . we didn’t know how much we depended on Dan, until he wasn’t there. He was so strong. He could lift things . . . and the garden . . . Liam was eighty-six, you see, and I’m eighty-eight, but Dan was younger, not over seventy. He was a blacksmith from Wexford, way back. Full of jokes, too. We missed him so much.”

  The golden glow of sunlight outside had faded from the peonies, the great vibrant colors fading to grays in the approaching dusk. I listened to the young voice of the old woman telling the darker parts of her life, clearing the fog from my own.

  “We thought we’d have to find someone else to put the bets on,” she said. “But who could we trust? Some of the time last year Liam tried to do it himself, going around betting shops in places like Ipswich and Colchester, places where they wouldn’t know him, but he was too old, he got dreadfully exhausted. He had to stop it, it was too much. We had quite a bit saved, you see, and we decided we’d have to live on that. And then this year a man we’d heard of, but never met, came to see us, and he offered to buy Liam’s methods. He said to Liam to write down how he won so consistently, and he would buy what he’d written.”

  “And those notes,” I said, enlightened, “were what Chris Norwood stole?”

  “Not exactly,” she said, sighing. “You see there was no need for Liam to write down his method. He’d written it down years ago. All based on statistics. Quite complicated. He used to update it when necessary. And of course, add new races. After so many years, he could bet with a thirty-three-percent chance of success in nearly a thousand particular races every year.”

  She coughed suddenly, her white thin face vibrating with the muscular spasm. A fragile hand stretched out to the glass on the table, and she took a few tiny sips of yellowish liquid.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said contritely. “Making you talk.”

  She shook her head mutely, taking more sips, then put down the glass carefully and said, “It’s great to talk. I’m glad you’re here, to give me the opportunity. I have so few people to talk to. Some days I don’t talk at all. I do miss Liam, you know. We chattered all the time. He was a terrible man to live with. Obsessive, do you see? When he had something in his mind he’d go on and on and on with it. All these sea pictures, it drove me mad when he kept buying them, but now he’s gone, well, they seem to bring him close again, and I won’t move them, not now.”

  “It wasn’t so very long ago, was it, that he died?” I said.

  “On March first,” she said. She paused, but there were no tears, no welling distress. “Only a few days after Mr. Gilbert came. Liam was sitting there”—she pointed to one of the blue armchairs, the only one that showed rubbed dark patches on the arms and a shadow on its high back—“and I went to make us some tea. Just a cup. We were thirsty. And when I came back he was asleep.” She paused again. “I thought he was asleep.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She shook her head. “It was the best way to go. I’m glad for him. We’d both loathed the thought of dying in a hospital stuck full of tubes. If I’m lucky and if I can manage it, I’ll die here too, like that, one of these days. I’ll be glad to. It is comforting, do you see?”

  I did see, in a way, though I had never before thought of death as a welcome guest to be patiently awaited, hoping that he would come quietly when one was asleep.

  “If you’d like a drink,” she sai
d in exactly the same matter-of-fact tone, “there’s a bottle and some glasses in the cupboard.”

  “I have to drive home . . .”

  She didn’t press it. She said, “Do you want to hear about Mr. Gilbert? Mr. Harry Gilbert?”

  “Yes, please. If I’m not tiring you.”

  “I told you. Talking’s a pleasure.” She considered, her head to one side, the white hair standing like a fluffy halo around the small wrinkled face. “He owns bingo halls,” she said; and there was for the first time in her voice the faintest hint of contempt.

  “You don’t approve of bingo?”

  “It’s a mug’s game.” She shrugged. “No skill in it.”

  “But a lot of people enjoy it.”

  “And pay for it. Like mug punters. The wins keep them hooked but they lose in the end.”

  The same the world over, I thought with amusement: the professional’s dim view of the amateur. There was nothing amateur, however, about Mr. Gilbert.

  “Bingo made him rich,” the old woman said. “He came here one day to see Liam, just drove up one day in a Rolls and said he was buying a chain of betting shops. He wanted to buy Liam’s system so he’d always be six jumps ahead of the mugs.”

  I said curiously, “Do you always think of a gambler as a mug?”

  “Mr. Gilbert does. He’s a cold man. Liam said it depends on what they want. If they wanted excitement, OK. They’re mugs but they’re getting their money’s worth. If they want profit and they still bet on instinct, they’re just mugs.”

  She coughed again, and sipped again, and after a while gave me the faint smile, and continued.

  “Mr. Gilbert offered Liam a lot of money. Enough for us to invest and live on comfortably for the rest of our days. So Liam agreed. It was wisest. They argued a bit about the price, of course. They spent almost a week ringing each other up with offers. But in the end it was settled.” She paused. “Then before Mr. Gilbert paid the money, and before Liam gave him all the papers, Liam died. Mr. Gilbert telephoned me to say he was sorry, but did the bargain still stand, and I said yes it did. It certainly did. I was very pleased to be going to be without money anxieties, do you see?”

  I nodded.

  “And then,” she said, and this time with anger, “that hateful Chris Norwood stole the papers out of Liam’s office—stole all his life’s work.” Her body shook. It was the fact of what had been stolen which infuriated her, I perceived, more than the fortune lost. “We’d both been glad to have him come here, to carry coal and logs and clean the windows, and then I’d begun to wonder if he’d been in my handbag, but I’m always pretty vague about how much I have there . . . and then Liam died.” She stopped, fighting against agitation, pressing a thin hand to her narrow chest, squeezing shut those wide-staring eyes.

  “Don’t go on,” I said, wanting her to desperately.

  “Yes, yes,” she said, opening her eyes again. “Mr. Gilbert came to collect the papers. He brought the money all in cash. He showed it to me, in a briefcase. Packets of notes. He said to spend it, not invest it. That way there would be no fuss with tax. He said he would give me more if I ever needed it . . . but there was enough, you know, for years and years, living as I do. And then we went along to Liam’s office, and the papers weren’t there. Nowhere. Vanished. I’d put them all ready, you see, the day before, in a big folder. There were so many of them. Sheets and sheets, all in Liam’s spikey writing. He never learned to type. Always wrote by hand. And the only person who’d been in there besides Mrs. Urquart was Chris Norwood. The only person.”

  “Who,” I said, “is Mrs. Urquart?”

  “What? Oh, Mrs. Urquart comes to clean for me. Or she did. Three days a week. She can’t come now, she says. She’s in trouble with the welfare people, poor thing.”

  Akkerton’s voice in the pub floated back: “. . . she never told the welfare she was earning ...”

  I said, “Was it in Mrs. Urquart’s house that Chris Norwood lodged?”

  “Yes, that’s right.” She frowned. “How did you know?”

  “Something someone said.” I sorted through what I had first said to her to explain my visit and belatedly realized that I’d taken for granted she’d known something which I now saw that perhaps she didn’t.

  “Chris Norwood . . .” I said slowly.

  “I’d like to strangle him.”

  “Didn’t your Mrs. Urquart tell you . . . what had happened?”

  “She rang in a great fuss. Said she wasn’t coming anymore. She sounded very upset. Saturday morning, last week.”

  “And that was all she said, that she wasn’t coming anymore?”

  “We hadn’t been very good friends lately, not with Chris Norwood stealing Liam’s papers. I didn’t want to quarrel with her. I needed her, for the cleaning. But since that hateful man stole from us, she was very defensive, almost rude. But she needed the money, just like I needed her, and she knew I’d never give her away.”

  I looked out toward the peonies, where the grays were darkening to night, and debated whether or not to tell her what had befallen Chris Norwood. Decided against, because hearing of the murder of someone one knew, even someone one disliked, could be incalculably shattering. To thrust an old lady living alone in a big house into a state of shock and fear couldn’t do any possible good.

  “Do you read newspapers?” I said.

  She raised her eyebrows over the oddness of the question but answered simply enough. “Not often. The print’s too small. I’ve good eyes, but I like big-print books.” She indicated the fat red-and-white volume on her table. “I read nothing else, now.” She looked vaguely around the dusk-filled room. “Even the racing pages. I’ve stopped reading those. I just watch the results on television.”

  “Just the results? Not the races?”

  “Liam said watching the races was the mugs’ way of betting. Watch the results, he said, and add them to statistical probabilities. I do watch the races, but the results are more of a habit.”

  She stretched out a stick-thin arm and switched on the table light beside her, shutting the peonies instantly into blackness and banishing the far corners of the room into deep shadow. On herself the instant effect was to enhance her physical degeneration, putting skin-folds cruelly back where the dusk had softened them, anchoring the ageless mind into the old, old body.

  I looked at the thin, wizened yellow face, at the huge eyes that might once have been beautiful, at the white un-styled hair of Liam O’Rorke’s widow, and I suggested that maybe, if I gave her the computer tapes, she could still sell the knowledge that was on them to her friend Mr. Gilbert.

  “It did cross my mind,” she said, nodding, “when you said you had them. I don’t really understand what they are, though. I don’t know anything about computers.”

  She’d been married to one, in a way. I said, “They are just cassettes—like for a cassette player.”

  She thought for a while, looking down at her hands. Then she said, “If I pay you a commission, will you do the deal for me? I’m not so good at dealing as Liam, do you see? And I don’t think I have the strength to haggle.”

  “But wouldn’t Mr. Gilbert pay the agreed price?”

  She shook her head doubtfully. “I don’t know. That deal was struck three months ago, and now it isn’t the papers themselves I’m selling, but something else. I don’t know. I think he might twist me into corners. But you know about these tapes, or whatever they are. You could talk to him better than me.” She smiled faintly. “A proper commission, young man. Ten percent.”

  It took me about five seconds to agree. She gave me Mr. Harry Gilbert’s address and telephone number and said she would leave it all to me. I could come back and tell her when it was done. I could bring her all the money, she said, and she would pay me my share, and everything would be fine.

  “You trust me?” I said.

  “If you steal from me, I’ll be no worse off than I am at present.”

  She came with me to the lilac-shrouded fro
nt door to let me out, and I shook her thistledown hand, and drove away.

  The Red Sea parted for Moses, and he walked across.

  7

  On Thursday I trundled blearily around school, ineffective from lack of the sleep I’d forfeited in favor of correcting the elder boys’ exercise books. They too, like William, had decisive exams ahead. One of the most boring things about myself, I’d discovered, was this sense of commitment to the kids.

  Ted Pitts didn’t turn up. Jenkins, when directly asked, said scratchily that Pitts had laryngitis, which was disgraceful as it put the whole math department’s timetable out of order.

  “When will he be back?”

  Jenkins gave me a sour sneer, not for any particular reason but because it was an ingrained mannerism.

  “His wife telephoned,” he said. “Pitts has lost his voice. When he regains it, doubtless he will return.”

  “Could you give me his number?”

  “He isn’t on the telephone,” Jenkins said repressively. “He says he can’t afford it.”

  “His address, then?”

  “You should ask in the office,” Jenkins said. “I can’t be expected to remember where my assistant masters live.”

  The school secretary was not in his office when I went to look for him during morning break, and I spent the last two periods before lunch (Five C, magnetism; Four D, electrical power) fully realizing that if I didn’t send computer tapes to Cambridge on that very day they would not arrive by Saturday: and if no computer tapes arrived at Cambridge main post office by Saturday I could expect another and much nastier visit from the man behind the Walther.

  At lunchtime food came low on the priorities. Instead I first went out of school along to the nearest row of shops and bought three blank sixty-minute cassettes. They weren’t of the quality beloved by Ted Pitts, but for my purpose they were fine. Then I sought out one of Ted Pitts’s colleagues and begged a little help with the computer.

  “Well,” he said hesitantly. “OK, if it’s only for ten minutes. Straight after school. And don’t tell Jenkins, will you?”

  “Never.”