the boat out and take us all to the Craw's Nest.'
Enster means just two things to my daughter: the harbour and the ice-cream shop. We were hardly unloaded when she began demanding to be taken to both. My Dad has always been a sucker for a smile, and pretty soon she was heading off in her push chair with her grandparents in charge and Jay going along with them, because Susie wanted to rest up for the evening and I wanted some space to carry on thinking.
We went up to our room and hung in the wardrobe the fancy gear we'd be wearing on the following evening: a voluminous white evening gown, and a white tux and black trousers. Still buoyed by her victory over the hated Natalie, Susie was determined to put on a show at the dinner, so she had brought her best jewellery, which isn't bad at all, and worth more than all our fancy cars put together.
It's so valuable, in fact, that as she undressed and slipped under the duvet, I took it, in its red leather box, downstairs to put it in my Dad's safe. Like most dental or medical practitioners, he keeps one, and always has. It's a big thing, bolted to the floor although it weighs a ton, and it sits in the corner of his surgery, hidden beneath a table which always has a white cloth over it.
I've known the combination since I was a boy, so I threw back the cover and dialled it: at the last click, the door swung open, and I reached in to deposit Susie's valuables.
I actually didn't see it in the shadows, but my hand brushed against it, a flat object with a plastic feel. I fumbled around until I had a grip of it, then drew it out: a Shoei laptop computer, looking top of the range and pretty new. There was a modem port in the rear, and a cable dangled from it.
I stared at it, bewildered. What the hell was my self-confessed computer hater of a father doing with a seriously fast laptop in his safe?
And then I remembered Joe Donn, and his missing top of the range Shoei.
Was this it, and if it was, then again, what was it doing in my Dad's safe? Had Joe given it to him as a present? No, any time they'd met I'd been there too. And anyway, why would he? Well if not, had…?
'Just hold on there, Blackstone,' I said aloud, and realised that my heart was pounding. 'Get your imagination in check.'
All the same, I picked up the phone, pulled Ewan Maltbie's number from directory enquiries and called him. Happily he was not an early finisher on a Friday. 'Mr. Maltbie,' I began, when his secretary connected us. 'Remember Joe's computer?'
'I do indeed,' he replied at once. 'I meant to tell you; sorry I haven't got round to it. A letter arrived yesterday, redirected from the house to my office. It was from the Shoei Computer Company and it said that the laptop which he had returned to the company under warranty had been repaired and would be returned by Parcel Force, within the next few days. It said that the fault had been in the CD rewriter, and that the recordable disks which he had sent with it were perfectly all right. We only checked the supplier and local dealer. It never occurred to us or the police that Joe might have returned it directly to the maker. Oh yes,' he added. 'There was a letter from Laing, the jeweller. The carriage clock and the Piaget watch have been with them being serviced.'
I felt a mixture of relief and guilt. 'Did you tell Fallon?' I asked.
'Yes. He was annoyed at first, but then happy that his people were off the hook.'
'Me too. Cheers.'
I hung up and looked at the Shoei. So it wasn't Joe's. So that meant almost certainly that Joe's death had indeed been an accident, untimely for him, and for Jack Gantry, with Plan B in mind. So was it my Dad's after all?
I flipped it open, took a look at the keyboard layout and pressed what looked like the 'on' key, in the far right corner. It was powerful, all right: it booted up nearly as quickly as my desktop at home.
Before long, the screen displayed an array of icons; some of them were shortcuts to the standard word processing and spreadsheet software that you get with every machine, but others I didn't recognise.
I looked at one. The tag under it was 'Chesty'. I clicked on it, and gasped in astonishment. The screen was filled with the image of a blonde: but this was not your average pin-up. This woman had the biggest breasts I had ever seen.
I closed it and selected another. This had no file name, only an asterisk. I opened it, and saw another blonde, although there was clear evidence that her hair colouring was not natural. There was nothing spectacular about this one's bosom. What made her different was the fact that she was on all fours, side-on to the camera, and was being penetrated from the rear by a large black man. If he had as much inside her as was still showing outside, he was a very large man indeed.
I closed it quickly and flicked through some others. Those with names were not engaged in any field sports, but some of them looked so young that I felt as if ice, not blood, was running through my veins. Those with asterisks were the action shots; some were stills, others were movies, but none were what you called routine porn.
'The old bastard's been downloading,' I whispered to myself.
I opened his programme folders and searched through them. Again, most were standard, but there was one called 'Neptune' that caught my eye. I tried to open it, only to discover that it was not a routine programme, but a link to a website. I took the modem cable, disconnected the surgery phone and plugged it into the jack point, then found an icon marked 'Free internet with Shoei'. I double-clicked; an indicator told me that I was dialling, that my password was being checked, and finally that I was online. Then it vanished, and the Shoei home page appeared.
I selected 'favourites'. A list of web addresses appeared, and none of them looked like Amazon.com. The Neptune icon was among them, and I hit it. The first web page cleared and another appeared. It showed the old sea-king, trident in hand, only the three prongs on its end looked unsubtly different from the norm. He seemed to be winking too.
Below him, there was a line of asterisks, and I knew it was for a password. I thought about it; if this was my naive old Dad, what would he do? I keyed in 'osbert' and got it right first time.
A door opened and Neptune's trident waved me through; a banner appeared across the screen: ' Welcome to the Sea of Pleasure, member Mac'
Below it there was an index, a veritable shopping list of kinks, from A for Anal to Z for Zoological. I left that alone and looked at two lines at the foot of the screen. One read 'Interactive', but I left that and clicked on 'Mac's private room'. I was asked for another password. Taking a logical approach, I keyed in 'ellen', and it let me in.
I'm not going to describe in detail the contents of my father's private chamber in King Neptune's Sea of Pleasure. It featured all the usual sexual gymnastics, with a few animal assistants thrown in, and it was without doubt one of the saddest, seediest things I've ever seen in my life. But it all clicked into place when I opened one folder and saw a couple having fairly brutal sex. They were unmasked in this clip, where before they had been wearing various disguises. Like the fake blonde and the fit black man, they were side-on to the camera so that the viewer, sorry, voyeur, could see everything that was going on, and in.
However, they were both looking sideways at the lens, with expressions of a level of rapture that just had to be fake. Beyond any shadow of a doubt, the images were those of the late Andrea and Walter Neiporte.
I looked into 'Interactive' after that, and I will regret doing that to my dying day. All I will tell you is that my father had somehow managed to operate the free digital camera that comes with every Shoei, and had been able to upload head and shoulder images of himself. These had been digitally grafted on to someone else's… Walter Neiporte's, I guessed, and when I compared the 'interactive' chest hair, and other, more private features, I saw that I was right… so that he appeared to be a participant in a sexual orgy.
'You stupid old man,' I shouted out loud. I killed the image and turned off the laptop without bothering to log off from the Shoei home page then walked steadily across to the surgery sink and threw up.
I had rinsed out my mouth and was wiping my face when my father came into the room. He stared at the open computer, still connected to the phone line, and his face contorted with rage in a way that I could never have imagined. It filled me with a horror greater than had anything I'd seen on his computer. 'What have you done?' he hissed, seeming to scream and whisper at the same time.
Try to imagine that you've known someone all your life, and loved them as much as you could ever love anyone in the world, in a special way that was unique unto them. Then imagine that their secret soul, the one that we all possess, is laid open to you, and you see that it is weak and corrupt, that the idol you worshipped has feet not merely of clay, for who hasn't, but of vile slime. Try to imagine how you'd feel.
You can? Well that's how I felt when I saw the other side of my father. He came towards me, looking far
