I looked at the well-fleshed worldly-wise face and thought of chief petty officers and ships' engineers. The same easy assumption of command: the ability to size men up and put them to work. People like Vince Akkerton were the indispensible getters of things done.
'How old,' I said, 'was Chris Norwood?'
'Thirtyish. Same as you. Difficult to say, exactly.' He drank. 'What sort of trouble did he get you in?'
'A couple of bullies came to my house looking for something of his.'
Fog, I thought.
'What sort of thing?' said Akkerton.
'Computer tapes.'
If I'd spoken in Outer Mongolian, it couldn't have meant less to him. He covered his bewilderment with beer and in disappointment I drank some of my own.
'Course,' said Akkerton, rallying,'there's a computer or some such over in the office. They use it for keeping track of how many tons of Burgundy Beef and so on they've got on order and in the freezers, stuff like that. Working out how many thousands of ducks they need. Lobsters. Even coriander seeds.' He paused and with the first glint of humour said, 'Mind you, the results are always wrong, on account of activities on the side. There was a whole shipment of turkeys missing once. Computer error, they said.' He grunted. 'Chris
Norwood with his carrots and onions, he was peanuts.'
'These were computer tapes to do with horseracing,' I said.
The dark eyebrows rose. 'Now that makes more sense. Every bleeding thing in this town practically is to do with horseracing. I've heard they think the knacker's yard has a direct line to our Burgundy Beef. It's a libel.'
'Did Chris Norwood bet?'
'Everyone in the firm bets. Cripes, you couldn't live in this town and not bet. It's in the air. Catching, like the pox.'
I seemed to be getting nowhere at all and I didn't know what else to ask. I cast around and came up with, 'Where was Chris Norwood killed?'
'Where? In his room. He rented a room in a council house from a retired old widow who goes out cleaning in the mornings. See, she wasn't supposed to take in lodgers, the council don't allow it, and she never told the welfare, who'd been doling out free meals, that she was earning, so the fuss going on now is sending her gaga.' He shook his head. ' Next street to me, all this happened.'
'What did exactly happen?'
He showed no reluctance to tell. More like relish.
'She found Chris dead in his room when she went in to clean it. See, she thought he'd have gone to work; she always went out before him in the mornings. Anyway, there he was. Lot of blood, so I've heard. You don't know what's true and what isn't, but they say he had bullets in his feet. Bled to death.'
Christ Almighty…
'Couldn't walk, you see,' Akkerton said. 'No telephone. Back bedroom. No one saw him.'
With a dry mouth I asked, 'What about… his belongings?'
'Dunno, really. Nothing stolen, that I've heard of. Seems there were just a few things broken. And his stereo was shot up proper, same as him.'
What do I do, I thought. Do I go to the police investigating Chris Norwood and tell them I was visited by two men who threatened to shoot my television and my ankles? Yes, I thought, this time I probably do.
'When…' My voice sounded hoarse. I cleared my throat and tried again. 'Which day did it happen?'
'Last week. He didn't show up Friday morning, and it was bloody inconvenient as we were handling turnips that day and it was his job to chop the tops and roots off and feed them into the washer.'
I felt dazed. Chris Norwood had been dead by Friday morning. It had been Saturday afternoon when I'd flung my visitors' Walther out into the rose bush. On Saturday they had been still looking for the tapes, which meant… dear God… that they hadn't got them from Chris Norwood. They'd shot him, and left him, and they still hadn't got the tapes. He would have given them to them if he'd had them: to stop them shooting him; to save his life. The tapes weren't worth one's life: they truly weren't. I remembered the insouciance with which I faced that pistol, and was in retrospect terrified.
Vince Akkerton showed signs of feeling it was time he was paid for his labours. I mentally tossed between what I could afford and what he might expect and decided to try him with the least possible. Before I could offer it, however, two girls came into the bar and prepared to sit at the next table. One of them, seeing Akkerton, changed course abruptly and fetched up at his side.
'Hullo, Vince,' she said. 'Do us a favour. Stand us a rum and coke and I'll pay you tomorrow.'
'I've heard that before,' he said indulgently, 'but this friend of mine's buying.'
Poorer by two rum and cokes, another full pint and a further half (for me), I sat and listened to Akkerton explaining that the girls worked in the Angel Kitchens office.
Carol and Janet. Young, medium bright, full of chatter and chirpiness, expecting from minute to minute the arrival of their boyfriends.
Carol's opinion of Chris Norwood was straightforwardly indignant. 'We all worked out it had to be him dipping into our handbags, but we couldn't prove it, see? We were just going to set a trap for him when he got killed, and I suppose I should feel sorry for him, but I don't. He couldn't keep his hands off anything. I mean, not anything. He'd take your last sandwich when you weren't looking and laugh at you while he ate it.'
'He didn't see anything wrong in pinching things,' Janet said.
'Here,' Akkerton said, leaning forward for emphasis, 'young Janet here, she works the computer. You ask her about those tapes.'
Janet's response was a raised-eyebrow thoughtfulness.
'I didn't know he had any actual tapes,' she said. 'But of course he was always around. It was his job, you know, collecting the day-sheets from all the departments and bringing them to me. He'd always hang around a bit, especially the last few weeks, asking how the computer worked, you know? I showed him how it came up with all the quantities, how much salt, you know, and things like that, had to be shifted to each department, and how all the orders went through, mixed container loads to Bournemouth or Birmingham, you know. The whole firm would collapse you know, without the computer.'
'What make is it?' I said.
'What make?' They all thought it an odd question, but I'd have gambled on the answer.
'A Grantley,' Janet said.
I smiled at her as inoffensively as I knew how and asked her if she would have let Chris Norwood run his tapes through her Grantley if he'd asked her nicely, and after some guilty hesitation and a couple of downward blushes into her rum and coke, said she might have done, you know, at one time, before they discovered, you know, that it was Chris who was stealing their cash.
'We should have guessed it ages ago,' Carol said, 'but then the things he took, like our sandwiches and such, and things out of the office, staples, envelopes, rolls of sticky tape, well we saw him take those, we were used to it.'
'Didn't anyone ever complain?' I said.
Not officially, the girls said. What was the use? The firm never sacked people for nicking things, if they did there would be a strike.
'Except that time, do you remember, Janet?' Carol said. 'When that poor old lady turned up, wittering on about Chris stealing things from her house. She complained, all right. She came back three times, making a fuss.'
'Oh sure,' Janet nodded. 'But it turned out it was only some odd bits of paper she was on about, you know, nothing like money or valuables, and anyway Chris said she was losing her marbles, and had thrown them away, most like, and it all blew over, you know.'
I said, 'What was the old lady's name?'
The girls looked at each other and shook their heads. It was weeks ago, they said.
Akkerton said he hadn't known of that, he'd never heard about the old lady, not down with his Veg.
The girls' boyfriends arrived at that moment and there was a general re-shuffle round the tables. I said I would have to be going, and by one of those unspoken messages Akkerton indicated that I should see him outside.