Twice Shy

'Peter was writing the programs for someone called Chris Norwood,' I said. 'I don't suppose you've ever heard of him?' I made it a question but without much hope, and he shook his head and suggested I ask his Associates in the outer office. The Associates also showed nil reactions to the name of Chris Norwood, but the young man paused from his juggling of microchips long enough to say that he had put everything Peter had left concerning his work in a shoe-box in a cupboard, and he supposed it would do no harm if I wanted to look.

I found the box, took it out, and began to sift through the handwritten scraps of notes which it contained. Nearly all of them concerned his work and took the form of mysterious memos to himself. 'Remember to tell RT of modification to PET.' 'Pick up floppy discs for LMP.' Tell ISCO about L's software package.' The bug in R's program must be a syntax error in the subroutine.' Much more of the same, and none of it of any use.

There was a sudden noise and flurry at the outer door, and a wild-eyed breathless heavily flushed youth appeared, along with a suitcase, a hold-all, an overcoat and a tennis racket.

'Sorry,' he panted. 'The train was late.'

'Robinson?' the girl said calmly. 'D. F?'

'What? Oh. Yes. Is the job still open?'

I looked down at another note, the writing as neat as all the others: 'Borrow Grantley Basic tape from GF'. Turned the piece of paper over. On the back he'd written, 'C. Norwood, Angel Kitchens, Newmarket.'

I persevered to the bottom of the box, but there was nothing else that I understood. I put all the scrappy notes back again, and thanked the Associates for their trouble. They hardly listened. The attention of the whole firm was intently fixed on D.F. Robinson, who was wilting under their probing questions. Miles, who had beckoned them all into the inner office, was saying, 'How would you handle a client who made persistently stupid mistakes but blamed you for not explaining his system thoroughly?'

I sketched a farewell which nobody noticed, and left.

Newmarket lay fifty miles to the south of Norwich, and I drove there through the sunny afternoon thinking that the fog lay about me as thick as ever. Radar, perhaps, would be useful. Or a gale. Or some good clarifying information. Press on, I thought: press on.

Angel Kitchens, as listed in the telephone directory in the post office, were to be found in Angel Lane, to which various natives directed me with accuracy varying from vague to absent, and which proved to be a dead-end tarmac tributary to the east of the town, far from the mainstream of High Street.

The Kitchens were just what they said: the kitchens of a mass food-production business, making frozen gourmet dinners in single-portion foil pans for the upper end of the market. 'Posh nosh' one of my route-directors had said. 'Fancy muck,' said another. 'You can buy that stuff in the town, but give me a hamburger any day' from another, and 'Real tasty' from the last. They'd all known the product, if not the location.

At a guess the Kitchens had been developed from the back half and outhouses of a defunct country mansion; they had that slightly haphazard air, and were surrounded by mature trees and the remnants of a landscaped garden. I parked in the large but well-occupied expanse of concrete outside a new-looking white single-storey construction marked Office, and pushed my way through its plate-glass double-door entrance.

Inside, in the open-plan expanse, the contrast to Mason Miles Associates was complete. Life was taken at a run, if not a stampede. The work in hand, it seemed, would overwhelm the inmates if they relaxed for a second.

My tentative enquiry for someone who had been a friend of Chris Norwood reaped me a violently unexpected reply.

'That creep? If he had any friends, they'd be down in Veg Preparation, where he worked.'

'Er, Veg Preparation?'

'Two-storey grey stone building past the freezer sheds.'

I went out to the car park, wandered around and asked again.

'Where them carrots is being unloaded.'

Them carrots were entering a two-storey grey stone building by the sack-load on a fork-lift truck, the driver of which mutely pointed me to a less cavernous entrance round a corner.

Through there one passed through a small lobby beside a large changing-room where rows of outdoor clothing hung on pegs. Next came a white-tiled scrub-up room smelling like a hospital, followed by a swing door into a long narrow room lit blindingly by electricity and filled with gleaming stainless steel, noisily whirring machines and people dressed in white.

At the sight of me standing there in street clothes a large man wearing what looked like a cotton undervest over a swelling paunch advanced with waving arms and shooed me out.

'Cripes, mate, you'll get me sacked,' he said, as the swing-door swung behind us.

'I was directed here,' I said mildly.

'What do you want?'

With less confidence than before I enquired for any friend of Chris Norwood.