Twice Shy

The Lower VI were studying radioactivity. I told them to continue the set of experiments with alpha particles that they had started last week and I sat on my high stool by the blackboard from where I often taught, and watched the Geiger counters counting with my mind on Angelo Gilbert.

Options, I thought.

I could yet once again ring the police. I could say an unstable man is holding my wife hostage at gunpoint. I could say I thought it was he who had killed Christopher Norwood. If I did, they might go chasing out to the Keithly house and try to make Angelo surrender and then Sarah could be a hostage not for three little cassettes, but for Angelo's personal liberty. An escalation not to be thought of.

No police.

What, then?

Give Harry Gilbert the tapes. Trust that Angelo would leave Sarah and Donna undamaged. Do, in fact, precisely what I'd been told, and believe that Angelo wouldn't wait for me to walk into Donna's house and then leave three dead bodies behind when he walked out of it.

It wasn't logically likely, but it was possible.

It would have been better if I could have thought of a good valid logical reason for the murder of Chris Norwood. He hadn't given Angelo the finished computer programs because if he had there would have been no need for Angelo to come to me. I had speculated, not for the first time, on exactly what had happened to Liam O'Rorke's original notes, and what had happened to the tapes Peter told me he had sent to the person who had commissioned them. To C. Norwood, Angel Kitchens, Newmarket.

To Chris Norwood, comprehensive thief. Cocky little bastard, Akkerton had said. Vegetable chef Akkerton, feeding his paunch in the pub.

I supposed that Chris Norwood, when first faced with Angelo, had simply said that Peter Keithly was writing the programs and had all the notes, and that Angelo should get them from him. Angelo had then gone threateningly to Peter, who had been frightened into giving him programs which he knew were incomplete. By the time the Gilberts discovered they were useless, Peter was dead. Back Angelo must have gone to Chris Norwood, this time waving a gun. And again Chris Norwood must have said Peter Keithly had the programs on tapes. That if he was dead, they were in his house. He would have told him that, I thought, after Angelo had shot up the stereo. He would have begun to be really frightened: but he would have still wanted to keep the programs if he could, because he knew they were a meal ticket for life.

Chris Norwood, I guessed, had twice not given Angelo what he wanted; and Chris Norwood was dead.

I also had fooled and obstructed Angelo twice, and I couldn't be sure that I wasn't alive because I'd had a handy rifle. Without his father there to restrain him, Angelo could still be as volatile as the petrol vapour that had killed Peter, even if he thought he finally had his hands on the treasure he'd been chasing for so long.

Some of the Lower VI were getting their nuclei into knots. Automatically I descended from the heights of the stool and reminded them that cloud chambers didn't cloud if one neglected to add dry ice.

No more runarounds, Angelo had said.

Well…

What tools did I have, I thought. What skills that I could use?

I could shoot.

I couldn't on the other hand shoot Angelo. Not while he had a Walther to Sarah's head. Not without landing myself in jail for manslaughter at the least.

Shooting Angelo was out.

I had the knowledge that Physics had given me. I could construct a radio, a television, a thermostat, a digital clock, a satellite tracker and, given the proper components, a laser beam, a linear accelerator and an atomic bomb. I couldn't exactly make an atomic bomb before lunch.

The two boys who were using the alpha-particle-scattering analogue were arguing over the apparatus, which consisted of one large magnet bombarded by a host of small ones. One boy insisted that the power of permanent magnets decayed with time and the other said it was rubbish, permanent meant permanent.

'Who's right, sir?' they asked.

'Permanence is relative,' I said. 'Not absolute.'

There was a flash of impermanent electrical activity at that moment in my brain. The useful knowledge was to hand.

God bless all boys, I thought.

CHAPTER 9

Ted Pitts hunched over the Harris all through lunchtime, making and testing the copies on the new tapes.

'There you are,' he said finally, rubbing his neck. 'As far as I can see they're perfect.'

'Which set do you want?' I said.

He peered at me earnestly through the black frames. 'Don't you mind?'

'Choose which you like,' I said. 'I'll take the others.'

He hesitated, but decided on the originals. 'If you're sure?'

'Certain,' I said. 'But give me the original boxes, Oklahoma and so on. It might be better if I hand them over in the right wrappings.'