«I'll tell you,» said Dirk. He went and sat on a nearby bench and opened his case again. He folded the towel away into it and took out instead a small Sony tape recorder. He beckoned Richard over and then pushed the Play button. Dirk's own voice floated from the tiny speaker in a lilting sing-song voice. It said, «In a minute I will click my fingers and you will wake and forget all of this except for the instructions I shall now give you.
In a little while we will go for a walk along the canal, and when you hear me say the words „my old maiden aunt who lived in Winnipeg“…»
Dirk suddenly grabbed Richard's arm to restrain him.
The tape continued, «You will take off all your clothes and dive into the canal. You will find that you are unable to swim, but you will not panic or sink, you will simply tread water until I throw you the lifebelt…»
Dirk stopped the tape and looked round at Richard's face which for the second time that day was pale with shock.
«I would be interested to know exactly what it was that possessed you to climb into Miss Way's flat last night,» said Dirk, «and why.»
Richard didn't respond — he was continuing to stare at the tape recorder in some confusion. Then he said in a shaking voice, «There was a message from Gordon on Susan's tape. He phoned from the car. The tape's in my flat. Dirk, I'm suddenly very frightened by all this.»
CHAPTER 21
Dirk watched the police officer on duty outside Richard's house from behind a van parked a few yards away. He had been stopping and questioning everyone who tried to enter the small side alley down which Richard's door was situated, including, Dirk was pleased to note, other policemen if he didn't immediately recognise them. Another police car pulled up and Dirk started to move.
A police officer climbed out of the car carrying a saw and walked towards the doorway. Dirk briskly matched his pace with him, a step or two behind, striding authoritatively.
«It's all right, he's with me,» said Dirk, sweeping past at the exact moment that the one police officer stopped the other.
And he was inside and climbing the stairs.
The officer with the saw followed him in.
«Er, excuse me, sir,» he called up after Dirk.
Dirk had just reached the point where the sofa obstructed the stairway. He stopped and twisted round.
«Stay here,» he said, «guard this sofa. Do not let anyone touch it, and I mean anyone. Understood?»
The officer seemed flummoxed for a moment.
«I've had orders to saw it up,» he said.
«Countermanded,» barked Dirk. «Watch it like a hawk. I shall want a full report.»
He turned back and climbed up over the thing. A moment or two later he emerged into a large open area. This was the lower of the two floors that comprised Richard's flat.
«Have you searched that?» snapped Dirk at another officer who was sitting at Richard's dining table looking through some notes. The officer looked up in surprise and started to stand up. Dirk was pointing at the wastepaper basket.
«Er, yes» —
«Search it again. Keep searching it. Who's here?»
«Er, well» —
«I haven't got all day.»
«Detective Inspector Mason just left, with» —
«Good, I'm having him pulled off. I'll be upstairs if I'm needed, but I don't want any interruptions unless it's very important.
Understood?»
«Er, who» —
«I don't see you searching the wastepaper basket.»
«Er, right, sir. I'll» —
«I want it deep-searched. You understand?»
«Er» —
«Get cracking.» Dirk swept on upstairs and into Richard's workroom.
The tape was lying exactly where Richard had told him it would be, on the long desk on which the six Macintoshes sat. Dirk was about to pocket it when his curiosity was caught by the image of Richard's sofa slowly twisting and turning on the big Macintosh screen, and he sat down at the keyboard.
He explored the program Richard had written for a short while, but quickly realised that in its present form it was less than selfexplanatory and he learned little. He managed at last to get the sofa unstuck and move it back down the stairs, but he realised that he had had to turn part of the wall off in order to do it. With a grunt of irritation he gave up.
Another computer he looked at was displaying a steady sine wave.
Around the edges of the screen were the small images of other waveforms which could be selected and added to the main one or used to modify it in other ways. He quickly discovered that this enabled you to build up very complex waveforms from simple ones and he played with this for a while. He added a simple sine wave to itself, which had the effect of doubling the height of the peaks and troughs of the wave. Then he slid one of the waves half a step back with respect to the other, and the peaks and troughs of one simply cancelled out the peaks and troughs of the other, leaving a completely flat line. Then he changed the frequency of one of the sine waves by a small extent.
The result of this was that at some positions along the combined waveform the two waves reinforced each other, and at others they cancelled each other out. Adding a third simple wave of yet another frequency resulted in a combined wave in which it was hard to see any pattern at all. The line danced up and down seemingly at random, staying quite low for some periods and then suddenly building into very large peaks and troughs as all three waves came briefly into phase with each other.
Dirk assumed that there must be amongst this array of equipment a means for translating the waveform dancing on the Macintosh screen into an actual musical tone and hunted among the menus available in the program. He found one menu item which invited him to transfer the wave sample into an Emu.
This puzzled him. He glanced around the room in search of a large flightless bird, but was unable to locate any such thing. He activated the process anyway, and then traced the cable which led from the back of the Macintosh, down behind the desk, along the floor, behind a cupboard, under a rug until it fetched up plugged into the back of a large grey keyboard called an Emulator II.
This, he assumed, was where his experimental waveform has just arrived. Tentatively he pushed a key.
The nasty farting noise that surged instantly out of the speakers was so loud that for a moment he didn't hear the words «Svlad Cjelli!» that were barked simultaneously from the doorway.
Richard sat in Dirk's office and threw tiny screwed-up balls of paper at the wastepaper bin which was already full of telephones. He broke pencils. He played major extracts from an old Ginger Baker solo on his knees.
In a word, he fretted.
He had been trying to write down on a piece of Dirk's notepaper all that he could remember of the events of the previous evening and, as far as he could pinpoint them, the times at which each had occurred. He was astonished at how difficult it was, and how feeble his conscious memory seemed to be in comparison with his unconscious memory, as Dirk had demonstrated it to him.
«Damn Dirk,» he thought. He wanted to talk to Susan.
Dirk had told him he must not do so on any account as there would be a trace on the phone lines.
«Damn Dirk,» he said suddenly, and sprang to his feet.
«Have you got any ten-pence pieces?» he said to the resolutely glum Janice.
Dirk turned.
Framed in the doorway stood a tall dark figure.
The tall dark figure appeared to be not at all happy with what it saw, to be rather cross about it, in fact. To be more than cross. It appeared to be a tall dark figure who could very easily yank the heads off half a dozen chickens and still be cross at the end of it.