At eight in the morning when I was juggling coffee and toast the telephone rang again, and this time it was the police. A London accent, very polite.
'You rang with a theory, sir, about Christopher Norwood.'
'It's not exactly a theory. It's… at the least… a coincidence.' I had had time to cut my words down to essentials. I said, 'Christopher Norwood commissioned a friend of mine, Peter Keithly, to write some computer programs. Peter Keithly did them, and recorded them on cassette tapes which he gave to me. Last Saturday, two men came to my house, pointed a gun at me, and demanded the tapes. They threatened to shoot my television set and my ankles if I didn't hand them over. Are you, er, interested?'
There was a silence, then the same voice said, 'Wait a moment, sir.' I drank some coffee and waited, and finally a different voice spoke in my ear, a bass voice, slower, less stilted, asking me to repeat what I'd said to the inspector.
'Mm,' he said, when I'd finished. 'I think I'd better see you. How are you placed?'
School, he agreed, was unavoidable. He would come to my house in Twickenham at four-thirty.
He was there before me, sitting not in a labelled and light-flashing police car, but in a fast four-door saloon. When I'd braked outside the garage he was already on his feet, and I found myself appraising a stocky man with a craggy young-old face, black hair dusting grey, unwavering light brown eyes and a sceptical mouth. Not a man, I thought, to save time for fools.
'Mr Derry?'
'Yes.'
'Detective Chief Superintendent Irestone.' He briefly produced a flip-over wallet and showed me his certification. 'And Detective Inspector Robson.' He indicated a second man emerging from the car, dressed casually like himself in grey trousers and sports jacket. 'Can we go inside, sir?'
'Of course.' I led the way in. 'Would you like coffee – or tea?'
They shook their heads and Irestone plunged straight into the matter in hand. It appeared that what I'd told them so far did indeed interest them intensely. They welcomed, it seemed, my account of what I'd learned on my trek via Angel Kitchens to Mrs O'Rorke. Irestone asked many questions, including how I persuaded the gunmen to go away empty-handed.
I said easily, 'I didn't have the tapes here, because I'd lent them to a friend. I said I'd get them back and post them to them and luckily they agreed to that.'
His eyebrows rose, but he made no comment. It must have seemed to him merely that I'd been fortunate.
'And you'd no idea who they were?' he said.
'None at all.'
'I don't suppose you know what sort of pistol it was?'
He spoke without expectation, and it was an instant before I answered: 'I think… a Walther. 22. I've seen one before.'
He said intently, 'How certain are you?'
'Pretty certain.'
He reflected. 'We'd like you to go to your local station to see if you can put together Identikit pictures.'
'Of course, I will,' I said, 'but you might be able to see these men themselves, if you're lucky.'
'How do you mean?'
'I did send them some tapes, but not until yesterday. They were going to pick them up from Cambridge main post office, and I should think there's a chance they'll be there tomorrow.'
That's helpful.' He sounded unexcited, but wrote it all down. 'Anything else?'
'They aren't the tapes they wanted. I still haven't got those back. I sent them some other tapes with a computer game on.'
He pursed his lips. 'That wasn't very wise.'
'But the real ones morally belong to Mrs O'Rorke. And those gunmen won't come stampeding back here while they think they've got the goods.'
'And how long before they find out?'
'I don't know. But if they're the same two people who threatened Peter, it might be a while. He said they didn't seem to know much about computers.'
Irestone thought aloud. 'Peter Keithly told you that two men visited him on the Wednesday evening, is that right?' I nodded. 'Christopher Norwood was killed last Friday morning. Eight and a half days later.' He rubbed his chin. 'It might be unwise to suppose it will take them another eight and a half days to discover what you've done.'
'I could always swear those were the tapes Peter Keithly gave me.'
'And I don't think,' he said flatly, 'that this time they'd believe you.' He paused. 'The inquest on Peter Keithly was being held today, wasn't it?'
I nodded.
'We consulted with the Norwich police. There's no room to doubt your friend's death was an accident. I dare say you've wondered?'
'Yes, I have.'
'You don't need to. The insurance inspector's report says the explosion was typical. There were no arson devices. No dynamite or plastics. Just absence of mind and rotten bad luck.'
I looked at the floor.
'Your gunmen didn't do it,' he said.
I thought that maybe he was trying to defuse any hatred I might be brewing, so that my testimony might be more impartial, but in fact what he was giving me was a kind of comfort, and I was grateful.
'If Peter hadn't died,' I said, looking up, 'they might have gone back to him when they found what they'd got from him was useless.'
'Exactly,' Irestone said dryly. 'Do you have friends you could stay with for awhile?'
On Saturday morning, impelled, I fear, by Mrs O'Rorke's ten-percent promise, I drove to Welwyn Garden City to offer her tapes to Mr Harry Gilbert.
Not that I exactly had the tapes with me as they were still locked up with Ted Pitts's laryngitis, but at least I had the knowledge of their existence and contents, and that should be enough, I hoped, for openers.
From Twickenham to Welwyn was twenty miles in a direct line but far more in practice and tedious besides, round the North Circular Road and narrow shopping streets. In contrast, the architects' dream city, when I got there, was green and orderly, and I found the Gilbert residence in an opulent cul-de-sac. Bingo, it seemed, had kept poverty a long long way from his doorstep, which was reproduction Georgian, flanked with two pillars and surrounded by a regular regiment of windows. A house of red, white and sparkle on a carpet of green. I pressed the shiny brass doorbell thinking it would be a bore if the inhabitants of this bijou mansion were out.
Mr Gilbert, however, was in.
Just.
He opened his front door to my ring and said whatever I wanted I would have to come back later, as he was just off to play golf. Clubs and a cart for transporting them stood just inside the door, and Mr Gilbert's heavy frame was clad appropriately in check trousers, open-necked shirt and blazer.
'It's about Liam O'Rorke's betting system,' I said.
'What?' he said sharply.
'Mrs O'Rorke asked me to come. She says she might be able to sell it to you after all.'
He looked at his watch; a man of about fifty, in appearance unimpressive, more like a minor official than a peddlar of pinchbeck dreams.
'Come in,' he said. 'This way.'
His voice was no-nonsense middle-of-the-road, nearer the bingo hall than Eton. He led me into an unexpectedly functional room furnished with a desk, typewriter, wall maps with coloured drawing pins dotted over them, two swivel chairs, one tray of drinks and five telephones.
'Fifteen minutes,' he said. 'So come to the point.' He made no move to sit down or offer me a seat, but he was not so much rude as indifferent. I saw what Mrs O'Rorke had meant about him being a cold man. He didn't try to clothe the bones of his thoughts with social top-dressing. He'd have made a lousy schoolmaster, I thought.
