'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, desperately wanting her to.
'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 spiky 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 realised 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 any more. She sounded very upset. Saturday morning, last week.'
'And that was all she said, that she wasn't coming any more?'
'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 towards the peonies, where the greys 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 round 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 mug's 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 unstyled 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 per cent.'
It took me about five seconds to agree. She gave me 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 front door to let me out, and I shook her thistledown, hand and drove away.
The Red Sea parted for Moses, and he walked across.
CHAPTER 7
On Thursday I trundled blearily round school, ineffective from lack of the sleep I'd forfeited in favour of correcting the Upper V's 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 Maths 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 realising 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
