AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"Search it again. Keep searching it. Who's here?"
"Er, well--"
"I haven't got all day."
"Detective Inspector Mason just left, with--"
"Good, I'm having him pulled off. I'll be upstairs if I'm needed, but I don't want any interruptions unless it's very important. Understood?"
"Er, who--"
"I don't see you searching the wastepaper basket."
"Er, right, sir. I'll--"
"I want it deep-searched. You understand?"
"Er--"
"Get cracking." Dirk swept on upstairs and into Richard's workroom.
The tape was lying exactly where Richard had told him it would be, on the long desk on which the six Macintoshes sat. Dirk was about to pocket it when his curiosity was caught by the image of Richard's sofa slowly twisting and turning on the big Macintosh screen, and he sat down at the keyboard.
He explored the program Richard had written for a short while, but quickly realised that in its present form it was less than self--explanatory and he learned little. He managed at last to get the sofa unstuck and move it back down the stairs, but he realised that he had had to turn part of the wall off in order to do it. With a grunt of irritation he gave up.
Another computer he looked at was displaying a steady sine wave. Around the edges of the screen were the small images of other waveforms which could be selected and added to the main one or used to modify it in other ways. He quickly discovered that this enabled you to build up very complex waveforms from simple ones and he played with this for a while. He added a simple sine wave to itself, which had the effect of doubling the height of the peaks and troughs of the wave. Then he slid one of the waves half a step back with respect to the other, and the peaks and troughs of one simply cancelled out the peaks and troughs of the other, leaving a completely flat line. Then he changed the frequency of one of the sine waves by a small extent.
The result of this was that at some positions along the combined waveform the two waves reinforced each other, and at others they cancelled each other out. Adding a third simple wave of yet another frequency resulted in a combined wave in which it was hard to see any pattern at all. The line danced up and down seemingly at random, staying quite low for some periods and then suddenly building into very large peaks and troughs as all three waves came briefly into phase with each other.
Dirk assumed that there must be amongst this array of equipment a means for translating the waveform dancing on the Macintosh screen into an actual musical tone and hunted among the menus available in the program. He found one menu item which invited him to transfer the wave sample into an Emu.
This puzzled him. He glanced around the room in search of a large flightless bird, but was unable to locate any such thing. He activated the process anyway, and then traced the cable which led from the back of the Macintosh, down behind the desk, along the floor, behind a cupboard, under a rug until it fetched up plugged into the back of a large grey keyboard called an Emulator II.
This, he assumed, was where his experimental waveform has just arrived. Tentatively he pushed a key.
The nasty farting noise that surged instantly out of the speakers was so loud that for a moment he didn't hear the words "Svlad Cjelli!" that were barked simultaneously from the doorway.
Richard sat in Dirk's office and threw tiny screwed-up balls of paper at the wastepaper bin which was already full of telephones. He broke pencils. He played major extracts from an old Ginger Baker solo on his knees.
In a word, he fretted.
He had been trying to write down on a piece of Dirk's notepaper all that he could remember of the events of the previous evening and, as far as he could pinpoint them, the times at which each had occurred. He was astonished at how difficult it was, and how feeble his conscious memory seemed to be in comparison with his unconscious memory, as Dirk had demonstrated it to him.
"Damn Dirk," he thought. He wanted to talk to Susan.
Dirk had told him he must not do so on any account as there would be a trace on the phone lines.
"Damn Dirk," he said suddenly, and sprang to his feet.
"Have you got any ten-pence pieces?" he said to the resolutely glum Janice.
Dirk turned.
Framed in the doorway stood a tall dark figure.
The tall dark figure appeared to be not at all happy with what it saw, to be rather cross about it, in fact. To be more than cross. It appeared to be a tall dark figure who could very easily yank the heads off half a dozen chickens and still be cross at the end of it.
It stepped forward into the light and revealed itself to be Sergeant Gilks of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary.
"Do you know," said Sergeant Gilks of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary, blinking with suppressed emotion, "that when I arrive back here to discover one police officer guarding a sofa with a saw and another dismembering an innocent wastepaper basket I have to ask myself certain questions? And I have to ask them with the disquieting sense that I am not going to like the answers when I find them.
"I then find myself mounting the stairs with a horrible premonition, Svlad Cjelli, a very horrible premonition indeed. A premonition, I might add, that I now find horribly justified. I suppose you can't shed any light on a horse discovered in a bathroom as well? That seemed to have an air of you about it."
"I cannot," said Dirk, "as yet. Though it interests me strangely."
"I should think it bloody did. It would have interested you strangely if you'd had to get the bloody thing down a bloody winding staircase at one o'clock in the morning as well. What the hell are you doing here?" said Sergeant Gilks, wearily.
"I am here," said Dirk, "in pursuit of justice."
"Well, I wouldn't mix with me then," said Gilks, "and I certainly wouldn't mix with the Met. What do you know of MacDuff and Way?"
"Of Way? Nothing beyond what is common knowledge. MacDuff I knew at Cambridge."
"Oh, you did, did you? Describe him."
"Tall. Tall and absurdly thin. And good-natured. A bit like a preying mantis that doesn't prey--a non-preying mantis if you like. A sort of pleasant genial mantis that's given up preying and taken up tennis instead."
"Hmm," said Gilks gruffly, turning away and looking about the room. Dirk pocketed the tape.
"Sounds like the same one," said Gilks.
"And of course," said Dirk, "completely incapable of murder."
"That's for us to decide."
"And of course a jury."
"Tchah! Juries!"
"Though, of course, it will not come to that, since the facts will speak for themselves long before it comes to a court of law for my client."
"Your bleeding client, eh? All right, Cjelli, where is he?"
> "I haven't the faintest idea."
"I'll bet you've got a billing address."
Dirk shrugged.
"Look, Cjelli, this is a perfectly normal, harmless murder enquiry, and I don't want you mucking it up. So consider yourself warned off as of now. If I see a single piece of evidence being levitated I'll hit you so hard you won't know if it's tomorrow or Thursday. Now get out, and give me that tape on the way." He held out his hand.
Dirk blinked, genuinely surprised. "What tape?"
Gilks sighed. "You're a clever man, Cjelli, I grant you that," he said, "but you make the same mistake a lot of clever people do of thinking everyone else is stupid. If I turn away it's for a reason, and the reason was to see what you picked up. I didn't need to see you pick it up, I just had to see what was missing afterwards. We are trained you know. We used to get half an hour Observation Training on Tuesday afternoons. Just as a break after four hours solid of Senseless Brutality."
Dirk hid his anger with himself behind a light smile. He fished in the pocket of his leather overcoat and handed over the tape.
"Play it," said Gilks, "let's see what you didn't want us to hear."
"It wasn't that I didn't want you to hear it," said Dirk, with a shrug. "I just wanted to hear it first." He went over to the shelf which carried Richard's hi-fi equipment and slipped the tape into the cassette player.
"So do you want to give me a little introduction?"
"It's a tape," said Dirk, "from Susan Way's telephone answering machine. Way apparently had this habit of leaving long..."
"Yeah, I know about that. And his secretary goes round picking up his prattlings in the morning, poor devil."
"Well, I believe there may be a message on the tape from Gordon Way's car last night."
"I see. OK. Play it."
With a gracious bow Dirk pressed the Play button.
"Oh, Susan, hi, it's Gordon," said the tape once again. "Just on my way to the cottage--"
"Cottage!" exclaimed Gilks, satirically.
"It's, er, Thursday night, and it's, er... 8:47. Bit misty on the roads. Listen, I have those people from the States coming over this weekend..."
