Twice Shy

Peter's father is giving evidence of identity. He won't speak to Donna. He somehow thinks it was her fault that Peter was careless with the boat. He's been perfectly beastly.'

'Mm,' I said noncommittally.

'A man from the insurance company came here, asking if Peter had ever had problems with leaking gas lines and wanting to know if he always started the engine without checking for petrol vapour.'

Peter hadn't been careless, I thought. I remembered that he'd been pretty careful on the canals, opening up the engine compartment every morning to let any trapped vapour escape. And that had been diesel, not petrol: less inflammable altogether.

'Donna said she didn't know. The engine was Peter's affair. She was always in the cabin unpacking food and so on while he was getting ready to start up. And anyway,' Sarah said, 'why all this fuss about vapour? It isn't as if there was any actual petrol sloshing about. They say there wasn't.'

'It's the vapour that explodes,' I said. 'Liquid petrol won't ignite unless it's mixed with air.'

'Are you serious?'

'Absolutely.'

'Oh.'

There was a pause: a silence. Some dying-fall goodbyes. Not with a bang, I thought, but with a yawn.

On Tuesday, Ted Pitts said he hadn't yet had a chance to buy the tapes for the copies and on Wednesday I sweet-talked a colleague into taking my games duty for the afternoon and straight after morning school set off to Norwich. Not to see my wife, but to visit the firm where Peter had worked.

It turned out to be a three-room two-men-and-a-girl affair tucked away in a suite of offices in a building on an industrial estate: one modest component among about twenty others listed on the directory-board in the lobby: MASON MILES ASSOCIATES, COMPUTER CONSULTANTS: rubbing elbows with DIRECT ACCESS DISTRIBUTION SERVICES and SEA MAGIC, DECORATIVE SHELL IMPORTERS.

Mason Miles and his Associates showed no signs of over-work but neither was there any of the gloom which hangs about a business on the brink. The inactivity, one felt, was normal.

The girl sat at a desk reading a magazine. The younger man fiddled with a small computer's innards and hummed in the manner of Ted Pitts. The older man, beyond a wide open door labelled Mason

Miles, lolled in a comfortable chair with an arm-stretching expanse of newspaper. All three looked up without speed about five seconds after I'd walked through their outer unguarded defences.

'Hullo,' the girl said. 'Are you for the job?'

'Which job?'

'You're not, then. Not Robinson, D.F?'

'Afraid not.'

'He's late. Dare say he's not coming.' She shrugged. 'Happens all the time.'

'Would that be Peter Keithley's job?' I asked.

The young man's attention went back to his eviscerated machine.

'Sure is,' said the girl. 'If you're not for his job, er, how can we help you?'

I explained that my wife, who was staying in Peter's house, was under the impression that someone from the firm had visited Peter's widow, asking for some tapes he had been working on.

The girl looked blank. Mason Miles gave me a lengthy frown from the distance. The young man dropped a screwdriver and muttered under his breath.

The girl said, 'None of us has been to Peter's house. Not even before the troubles.'

Mason Miles cleared his throat and raised his voice. 'What tapes are you talking about? You'd better come in here.'

He put down the newspaper and stood up reluctantly, as if the effort was too much for a weekday afternoon. He was not in the least like Sarah's description of a plump grey-haired ordinary middle-aged man. There was a crinkly red thatch over a long white face, a lengthy stubborn-looking upper lip and cheekbones of Scandinavian intensity; the whole extra-tall body being, as far as I could judge, still under forty.

'Don't let me disturb you,' I said without irony.

'You are not.'

'Would anyone else from your firm,' I asked, 'have gone to Peter's house, asking on your behalf for the tapes he was working on?'

'What tapes were those?'

'Cassettes with programs for evaluating racehorses.'

'He was working on no such project.'

'But in his spare time?' I suggested.

Mason Miles shrugged and sat down again with the relief of a traveller after a wearisome journey. 'Perhaps. What he did in his spare time was his own affair.'

'And do you have a grey-haired middle-aged man on your staff?'

He gave me a considering stare and then said merely, 'We employ no such person. If such a person has visited Mrs Keithley purporting to come from here, it is disturbing.'

I looked at his totally undisturbed demeanour and agreed.