watch.
I answered the door to be met by a big smile and a waft of expensive aftershave. I always find that strange on someone who obviously doesn't own a razor. The lower half of Sam's face is covered by a straggly anarchist's beard. He sauntered in, the only way you can walk when you're wearing cowboy boots, in a pair of black Wranglers and a bike jacket. “Hi,” he said, dumping his battered AGV helmet on a chair and shaking a box of computer disks at me. “Lead me to your computer.”
“Hi Sam, I've put it on the desk. Help yourself.” I offered coffee and went to see to the machine, which was down to the last nutty dregs in the bottom of the pot. I like coffee that way, but it's the sort of thing other people tend to tip into plant pots when they think I'm not looking. That can be a real pain when you consider I don't have any pot plants.
I gave up and flicked on the kettle. When I came back Sam had opened up the lap-top and was pondering the message on the screen. He'd put on a pair of wire-rimmed glasses for close work and his long eyelashes brushed against the lenses. Most women would kill for them.
“We need a password. I don't suppose we know anything about the guy who owned this, do we?” he asked. I shook my head. I wasn't about to tell Sam that the only thing I knew about the previous owner was that he was a weirdo. “Pity. People usually use something obvious like their date of birth, or their dog's name as a password.”
“Fido?” I suggested.
Sam rolled his eyes. “In this case, it has to be something with seven letters,” he said.
“How about if you spell it, P-h-i-d-e-a-u?” I got a dark look. The kettle clicked off and I retreated to pour water on the instant coffee.
“I've tried a few obvious ones, like ‘let-me-in’, but I think we'll try a more lateral approach,” Sam said when I returned. He linked his hands together and cracked his fingers out straight in front of him. It made me wince.
He picked out a disk, switched the machine off and slid it into the drive slot before switching back on again, holding down a number of keys as he did so. The lap-top whirred and hummed again, then presented him with an “A” and a flashing block at the top left hand corner of the screen.
“Way to go,” I said, impressed.
“Thank you for your adoration, but we're not there yet,” Sam said, darting me a quick grin over his shoulder. “That's just logged me on to the floppy disk drive.” His hands flew over the keys with the sureness of a touch-typist. He had long slender fingers, spoilt only by the fact that he bit his nails. “I have a little program here that will keep bombarding it with seven-letter words until we hit the right one. All I have to do now is let it get to work.”
He leant back in his chair, looking smug and reaching for his coffee cup. We talked about something and nothing while his program ran, making the little computer buzz and hum to itself. Sam might have sounded confident, but I noticed he kept one eye on the screen all the time.
“Thanks for taking so much trouble over this,” I said.
He waved a negligent hand. “No sweat. Besides, this is kiddies' stuff, really.”
“I'm sorry if the challenge isn't up to your usual standard. What do you normally do for laughs – hack your way into the Bank of England?” I said in a sarky voice.
He grinned in such a way that I realised he probably did.
“So, where did you get it, this password program?” I asked.
“All my own work,” he admitted modestly.
“You ought to market it.”
He snorted into his cup as he took another slug of coffee. “Yeah, and the profits might just pay enough to keep me one step ahead of the serious fraud squad. Think about it, Charlie, if you need to get into a password- protected computer without the password, you're not exactly on the level, now are you?”
I raised my eyebrows, but was saved from having to think of a reply by the computer itself, which had stopped making noises and was displaying a single seven-letter word on the screen.
“Ah-ha, here we are. Bacchus,” Sam read. “Bacchus? Mean anything to you?”
I trawled through my mental vocabulary and shook my head. “Not a thing.”
“OK, pick a new seven-letter word and I'll over-write it.”
“Pervert,” I said immediately, almost without thinking. He raised his eyebrows, but typed it in anyway. “OK, now let's see just what he's got on here that he didn't want us to see. Hmm, that's odd.”
“What?” I asked.
“There's nothing here to protect,” Sam said. “Of course, he could just have been trying to make life awkward for your pal.”
“What are all those?” There seemed to be a list of files available.
“They're just the system files, the ones that tell this lump of plastic that it's a computer to start off with,” he explained. “I meant there are no actual data files on here. He must have wiped them all off before he handed the machine over.”
“That's a pity,” I said. It could either mean that the guy was perfectly legit, and just didn't want Terry reading his private correspondence, or it could mean that he didn't want anyone to be able to prove the machine had originally belonged to someone else – the New Adelphi Club, for instance.
“Of course,” Sam said slowly, “It just so happens that I can probably retrieve whatever it is that
“Go on,” I said.
“I've got a utilities program that can un-delete files. I can even retrieve data off floppy disks that have been re-formatted.”
This didn't mean too much to me, but it was obviously an impressive feat. I looked impressed. I was about to thank him for his trouble, but it was clear he loved the challenge of this sort of thing, so I just said, “I just hope when you've done all this there's something interesting on the damn machine to read.”
He drained his coffee cup and stood up. “If you're not busy I'll nip round tomorrow after work and we'll see what we can come up with,” he suggested with studied casualness.
“I'm teaching tomorrow evening, and I've got an interview for a new job sometime this week,” I improvised quickly, “but Wednesday would be OK.” I didn't like the light that had come on in his eyes and I really didn't want the guy getting ideas about me. I like Sam, don't get me wrong, but I just didn't want to lose him as a friend by having to turn him down on a more intimate level.
“What's the new job?” he asked now. “You starting another class up?”
I shook my head. “I broke a fight up at that new nightclub in Morecambe, the New Adelphi, and the boss offered me a job on the doors.”
Sam stared. “Don't take it,” he said bluntly.
I cast him a speaking look. One that said there's a line here, Sam, don't cross it.
He flushed. “Sorry, I know it's none of my business, but you'd be a fool to get into that game, Charlie. A few of the lads from the Uni are into it, and it's shit money for the amount of abuse you have to take. The cops never believe your story over a punter.”
I bridled a little at being called a fool. As far as I'm concerned Sam doesn't have the right to make judgements on what I do with my life. Things like that have a tendency to make me stubborn. And that's when the trouble starts. Sam must have known he was pushing his luck because he changed the subject and, soon after that, he left.
After he'd gone I dug out my old school dictionary and looked up Bacchus. It was only an abbreviated pocket version and it didn't list either Bacchus or Adelphi. Not much help there, then.
With a sigh I put the dictionary down and moved into the kitchen. I put together a rough and ready tea from the freezer. I really must remember to go shopping. I ate listening to the hi-fi and planned an unexciting evening involving a paperback novel and an early night.
***
It wasn't until the following day, when I was gathering clothes together for a darks' wash, and checking through the pockets, that I found Marc Quinn's business card. It was still in the back pocket of the jeans I'd been wearing to the New Adelphi Club.
On impulse, I tried both the numbers. The land line turned out to be the most expensive hotel in the area.
