‘Hey,’ I protested, ‘who got here first?’
The simple order of precedence identified the crowd into various insurance assessors, air-accident inspectors, a transport firm surveying the possibility of shipping the helicopter to Scotland, a salesman hoping I would order a new Jaguar and the man to open the safe.
I took the last one pronto into the house, even though he was apparently the latest on the scene. He looked at the hatchet job, scratched his head, asked if there was anything fragile inside (yes, I said, computer disks) and said he thought it a case for a drill.
‘Drill away,’ I said.
The rest of the men outside had sprouted notebooks and were discussing the mechanics of bricks-on-sticks on accelerators. By no means impossible, they agreed. Very dicey, but possible. The helicopter-shipper asked questions about fuel in the tanks. Not much there, I told him. My sister had said she would have to refuel at Oxford. Full, the tank and auxiliary tank held about 130 litres, she’d said, but she’d flown from Carlisle on that. The shipper began discussing technical ways to disassemble the tri-hinge rotor, and lost me.
The air-accident inspector produced a letter from Lizzie which he asked me to read and confirm. Neither of us had seen the collision, she wrote. I confirmed it.
Insurance assessors, hers and mine, said they’d never seen anything like it, not right outside someone’s back door, that was. They’d studied Sandy’s report. They asked me to sign various forms. I signed.
The Jaguar salesman told me about the Jaguar XJ220. Made in Bloxham, near Banbury, he said. Only 350 of them built, costing £480,000 each.
‘Each?’ I repeated. ‘Four hundred and eighty thousand pounds each?’
Did I want to order one?
‘No,’ I said.
‘Just as well. They’re all sold.’
I wondered if it were I who was surreal and whether my concussion was worse than I suspected.
‘Actually,’ the salesman said, ‘I came to see if your XJS could be salvaged.’
‘And can it?’
Shaking his head, he looked with regret at the whole-looking white rear end of my pride and joy. ‘I might find you another one like it. That same year. Advertise for one, secondhand. And they’re still in production. I could get you a new one.’
I shook my head. ‘I’ll let you know.’
I wouldn’t seek a twin, I thought. Life had changed. I was changing. I would buy a different car.
The flock of notebooks returned to their vehicles and drove away, leaving only the workmanlike van of the safecracker beside the wreck on the tarmac. I went in to check on his progress and found my safe door open but minus its lock mechanism, which lay bent on the floor.
We discussed the possibility of mending the safe but he advised me to take the insurance money and buy a newer and better model which he would be happy to sell me. It would not, he assured me, have a lock that could be assaulted by an axe.
He went out to the van for a pamphlet with illustrations and an order form, and I signed my name again. He shook my hand. He asked me to check that the contents of the old safe were untouched and, when I’d done that, to sign his worksheet. I signed.
When he’d gone, I retrieved the packet of money and the back-up floppy disks and went into the kitchen to phone the computer wizard. Sure, he agreed, bring the disks in for a check as soon as I liked; he would be in his workshop all afternoon and would wash Michelangelo out of my hair with his little virus scrubbers. Did all computer wizards talk like that, I wondered?
‘Great,’ I said.
I made coffee and drank it and thought a bit, and after a while telephoned the local Customs and Excise office.
I explained who I was. They knew of me, they said. I explained that as my horseboxes went fairly regularly across the Channel, I wanted an up-to-date list of what could and could not be carried in them, in view of the ever-changing European regulations. My drivers were confused, I said.
Ah, they said understandingly. They didn’t themselves deal with import and export, but mostly with tax. If I wanted the up-to-the-minute gen on international movement of goods I would need to see their Single Market Liaison Officer in the regional office.
‘Which regional office?’ I asked.
‘Southampton,’ they said.
I almost laughed. They enlarged. The Southampton regional office was actually in Portsmouth. The Single Market Liaison Officer there would answer all my questions and give me the latest copy of the Single Market report. If I wanted to go there in person, they suggested I should arrive well before four o’clock. It was Friday, they explained.
I thanked them and looked at my watch. Plenty of time. I drove to Newbury, shopped for a week’s food and ran the wizard to earth in his workshop, which proved to be a smallish room half lined with large brown cardboard boxes bearing words like ‘Fragile’ or ‘This way up ALWAYS.’ A busy desk bore piles of papers — letters, invoices, pamphlets — held down by public house ashtrays used as paperweights. Ceiling-high bookshelves supported instruction manuals and catalogues by the score. Plastic-covered leads snaked everywhere. A table along one wall bore a keyboard, two or three computers, a laser printer and a live colour monitor showing a bright row of miniature playing cards apparently halfway through a game of patience.
‘Black jack on red queen,’ I said, looking.
‘Yeah.’ He grinned, ran his hand through his hair, and with a mouse moved the cards around on the screen. ‘It’s not coming out,’ he observed, and switched it all off. ‘Did you bring your disks?’
I handed them to him in an envelope. ‘There are four,’ I said. ‘A new one for each calendar year since I took over the business.’
He nodded. ‘I’ll start with the latest.’ He fed it into a drive slot in one of the computers on the table and called up onto the monitor the directory of the files stored for the current year.
Muttering under his breath he pressed a series of keys on the keyboard and in a while the screen was flickering rapidly with letters and numbers as he scanned my disk for deadly strangers.
Lone rangers, I thought. Aliens everywhere.
‘There we are,’ he said, when the flickering steadied to a single message. ‘Scan complete. No virus found.’ He grinned at me. ‘No Michelangelo. You’re safe.’
‘That’s... er... rather more than extremely interesting,’ I said.
‘How?’
‘I used the disk last to back-up the work entered on the main office computer a week ago yesterday,’ I said. ‘That was March 3rd.’
His eyes savoured the knowledge.
‘On March 3rd, then,’ he said, ‘I’d say there was no Michelangelo in your office. Right?’
‘Right.’
‘So you caught it on the Friday or Saturday...’ He pondered. ‘Ask your secretaries if they fed anyone else’s disks into your machine. Say, for instance, someone lent them a game disk, like the patience game, which no one should do, really, it’s an infringement of copyright, but say they did, well, Michelangelo could have been lurking in the game disk and it would leap across to your machine instantly.’
‘The monitor in the office is black-and-white,’ I said.
‘Kids would play patience in black-and-white,’ he replied. ‘Like Nintendo. No problem. Did you have any kids in the office?’
‘Isobel’s brother, Paul,’ I said, remembering his name on the list. ‘He’s fifteen. Always cadging money from his sister.’
‘Ask him, then. I’ll bet that’s where your trouble lies.’
‘Thank you very much.’
‘I may as well scan your other disks, just to be safe.’ He fed the three others through the scanning process, all with nil results. ‘There you are, then. At present they’re clean. But, like I said, you have to patrol your defences all the time.’