Tonight?’
‘Yes.’
I stood up. ‘Under the circumstances I consider that entirely inappropriate, and I won’t do it. Now, if you’ll forgive me, I have to go back to town.’
He neither turned nor made an answer. I left him there and closed the study door quietly behind me. I was at a loss to understand his driving insistence that Penny and I should marry quickly. That, and the offer of the job in Australia, had me worried. If this was the way he engaged his staff, not to mention picking a son-in-law, I was surprised how he’d got to where he was.
Penny was telephoning when I entered the hall. She replaced the receiver and said, ‘I’ve been talking to the hospital; they say she’s resting easier.’
‘Good! I’ll be back tomorrow evening and we’ll go to see her. It might make her feel better to have someone else around, even a comparative stranger like me.’
‘I don’t know if that’s a good idea,’ said Penny, doubtfully. ‘She might be … well, self-conscious about her appearance.’
‘I’ll come anyway and we can decide then. I have to go now – it’s late.’ She saw me to my car and I kissed her and left, wondering what kind of bee was buzzing in Ashton’s bonnet.
Next morning, when I walked into the office I shared with Larry Godwin, he looked up from the Czechoslovakian trade magazine he was reading and said, ‘Harrison wants to see you.’ Harrison was our immediate boss.
‘Okay.’ I walked straight out again and into Harrison’s office, sat in the chair before the desk, and said, ‘Morning, Joe. Larry said you wanted to see me.’
Harrison was a bit of a stuffed shirt, very keen on formality, protocol and the line of authority. He didn’t like me calling him Joe, so I always did it just to needle him. He said stiffly, ‘On checking the weekend telephone log I found you had disclosed yourself to a police officer. Why?’
‘I was at a house-party over the weekend. There was a nasty incident – one of the daughters of the house had acid thrown in her face. She was taken to hospital and, when the police pitched up, I was alone in the house and they started to get off on the wrong foot. I didn’t want them wasting time on me, so I disclosed myself to the officer in charge.’
He shook his head disapprovingly and tried to hold me in what he supposed to be an eagle-like stare. ‘His name?’
‘Detective-Inspector Honnister. You’ll find him at the cop-shop in Marlow.’ Harrison scribbled in his desk book, and I leaned forward. ‘What’s the matter, Joe? We’re supposed to co-operate with the police.’
He didn’t look up. ‘You’re not supposed to disclose yourself to all and sundry.’
‘He wasn’t all and sundry. He was a middle-ranking copper doing his job and getting off to a bad start.’
Harrison raised his head. ‘You needn’t have done it. He would never seriously suspect you of anything.’
I grinned at him. The way you tell it co-operation is a one-way street, Joe. The cops co-operate with us when we need them, but we don’t co-operate with them when all they need is a little setting straight.’
‘It will be noted in your record.’ he said coldly.
‘Stuff the record,’ I said, and stood up. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me I have work to do.’ I didn’t wait for his permission to leave and went back to my office.
Larry had switched to something in Polish. ‘Have a good weekend?’
‘A bit fraught. Who’s pinched our Who’s Who?’
He grinned. ‘What’s the matter? Wouldn’t she play?’ He fished out Who’s Who from among the piles of books which cluttered his desk and tossed it to me. Our job called for a lot of reading; when I retired I’d be entitled to a disability pension due to failing eyesight incurred in the line of duty.
I sat at my desk and ran through the ‘A’s and found that Ashton was not listed. There are not many men running three or more factories employing over a thousand men who are not listed in Who’s Who. It seemed rather odd. On impulse I took the telephone directory and checked that, and he was not listed there, either. Why should Ashton have an ex-directory number?
I said, ‘Know anything about high-impact plastics, Larry?’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘A chap called Ashton runs a factory in Slough making the stuff. I could bear to know a little more about him.’
‘Haven’t heard of him. What’s the name of the firm?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know much. There might be a trade association.’
‘Great thinking.’ I went to our library and an hour later knew there were more associations of plastics manufacturers than I wotted of – there was even one devoted to high-impact plastics – but none of them had heard of George Ashton. It seemed unnatural.
Gloomily I went back to my office. It’s a hard world where a man can’t check up on his prospective father-in-law. Ashton, as of that moment, knew a hell of a lot more about me than I knew about him. Larry saw my face and said, ‘No luck?’
‘The man keeps a bloody low profile.’
He laughed and waved his hand across the room. ‘You could ask Nellie.’
I looked at Nellie and grinned. ‘Why not?’ I said lightly, and sat at the console.
You don’t have to cuddle up to a computer to ask it questions – all you need is a terminal, and we called ours Nellie for no reason I’ve ever been able to determine. If you crossed an oversized typewriter with a television set you’d get something like Nellie, and if you go to Heathrow you’ll see dozens of them in the booking hall.
Where the computer actually was no one had bothered to tell me. Knowing the organization that employed me, and knowing a little of what was in the monster’s guts, I’d say it was tended by white-coated acolytes in a limestone cavern in Derbyshire, or at the bottom of a Mendip mineshaft; anywhere reasonably safe from an atomic burst. But, as I say, I didn’t really know. My crowd worked strictly on the ‘need to know’ principle.
I snapped a couple of switches, pushed a button, and was rewarded by a small green question mark on the screen. Another button push made it ask:
IDENTIFICATION?
I identified myself – a bit of a complicated process – and Nellie asked:
CODE?
I answered:
GREEN
Nellie thought about that for a millionth of a second, then came up with:
INPUT
