The Victim in Victoria Station Page 4

“Nigel Evans, if you say I imagined the whole thing, I’ll throw something right through that computer screen! The man was dead. I’ve seen enough dead people to know. And as I said at the beginning, I need you to tell me who he was.”

  “Right.” Nigel didn’t believe me, and he was getting bored. I hurried on. “I can remember a little; I worked it out this morning. His first name is Bill; I told you that. I remembered because I have a nephew named Bill, and they look a little alike. And he’s of Irish descent—the dead man, I mean. That’s probably where he got his looks.”

  Nigel, who is half Welsh and despises the Irish, snorted.

  “It’s not much to go on, I know. But he was one of the partners in a software company that’s apparently going great guns.” I told him the few things I’d remembered. Faint indications of interest were beginning to stir, I could see.

  “Do you remember anything at all about the sort of software he was involved with?” he asked after a moment.

  “Nothing. It didn’t mean anything to me.”

  “But was it application software, or an operating system, or a specialized database, or some kind of browser, or—”

  “Nigel, stop! All those words are—just words to me.”

  He sighed elaborately and ran a hand through his thick black hair. “Right, got you. We start at square one. Have you ever heard of word processing?”

  “Of course. Writers use it. Kind of like typing, only on a computer.”

  Nigel rolled his eyes skyward, but nodded. “Okay. Sort of. How about spreadsheets?”

  I shook my head.

  “If a word processor is sort of like a very smart typewriter, then a spreadsheet is like a combination of a ledger and a calculator. It’s used for bookkeeping.” Nigel’s voice took on a kind tone, that of the patient teacher explaining to the five-year-old why one plus one equals two. “I’ll make it easy. Suppose that you want to balance your checkbook. First you must make certain you’ve entered all the figures correctly, then you must do all the sums, to be sure your records match up with the statement from the bank. If you kept your checkbook on a computer spreadsheet, it would do all that automatically. So long as all your entries were made properly, you couldn’t make a mistake.”

  “I see,” I said with little enthusiasm. In nearly fifty years of writing checks, I’ve had trouble reconciling my record with the bank statement twice. Both times it was the mistake of the bank.

  “Well, then, take another example. I know, your recipe file. You probably use one of those pretty little boxes with cards in it.”

  I nodded, but my brows knit in a puzzled frown.

  “Every time you want to find a recipe, you have to go through the file and try to remember whether you filed that one under meat or entrée, pudding or gateau, right?”

  I smiled at that. “How do you know about recipe files?”

  “Greta has one. She’s a brilliant cook, my mum-in-law, but it takes her ages to find a recipe.”

  “Well, actually, mine’s probably even worse than hers, because I cut things out of magazines and then forget to file them at all, so I’ll be looking for a recipe that uses up the roast beef I have left over, and end up two days later finding it under a pile of crossword puzzles.”

  “Aha! Now, there you have a perfect use for a database program. You type those recipes into your computer, and then later when you want to use up roast beef, you just type in ‘beef’ and hit the search key, and it finds all the beef recipes. Or it’ll keep an address book for you, one that can’t get lost or have the pages fall out. Or a Christmas card list.”

  “All right, I begin to see. Actually I think Meg was using something like that—oh, nobody you know, just someone I met out at the Museum of Miniatures last year. But she was going through an awful lot of work to get all the information typed in.”

  “Yes, well, entering data is a pain; I’ll give you that. But the point is, these are all common uses for a computer that the average person can apply to ordinary life. That’s one reason these programs are called application software.”

  The light dawned. “Oh, Nigel, that’s very good. I do begin to understand. But we haven’t gotten any further, because I don’t think what Bill talked about was any of those things.”

  “I didn’t think so, either,” said Nigel cheerfully, “because all that stuff has been around for years, and there’s nothing fabulous and new on the horizon in that area, not really. But there are lots more possibilities. Now, did he at any time use the word ‘windows’?”

  “Windows? The windows on the train didn’t open, if that’s what you mean. It was air-conditioned. But why would he be talking about windows when we were discussing computers?”

  This time Nigel’s laughter lasted till he had tears in his eyes. “I—I’m sorry, Mrs. Martin,” he said shakily when he could speak again. “That was beastly rude of me. But really—have you ever heard of Bill Gates?”

  “Of course,” I said with lofty dignity. “He makes computers, or something, and he’s richer than the Queen.” I didn’t mention how I had come by that information, or how recently.

  “Richer than God, is the usual comparison. But he doesn’t make computers, he makes software, or his company does. And his best-known product is an operating system, or a series of operating systems—that’s the basic software that makes a computer know how to do everything else—called Windows. I can absolutely guarantee that nobody who comes up with any other operating system is going to talk about it without comparing it to Windows. So if your Bill didn’t say the word, he wasn’t talking about a new operating system. We progress.”

  “If only by elimination.”

  “Exactly. Can you remember if he talked about the Internet, or the Web?”

  “Yes!” I was triumphant. “Yes, he did! I remember now. That was what it was! Nigel, you’re wonderful. He said it was a—a motor, I think he said, does that make sense? To use on the Internet. And he said it made things much easier for people doing business in other countries, because—I can’t remember why …” I trailed off doubtfully.

  Nigel’s boredom had evaporated completely. His voice dropped in pitch and began to hum with excitement. “A search engine, was that it?”

  “Yes! Engine, not motor, that’s right.”

  “And it incorporates a universal interpreter to search in other languages?”

  I was struck with awe. “Nigel, I think that’s it! How did you know?”

  He had to swallow before he could answer. “Because, if you’re talking about what I think you are, it’s the hottest piece of software on the market, at least for business use. And, Mrs. Martin, if your story is true, this is going to be very big news all over the world. I think you’re telling me Bill Monahan’s dead.”

  “Monahan! Yes!” I was filled with the almost physical relief that comes when we finally pin down something we’ve been trying to remember. “I knew you were the person to come to. You’re a genius.”

  “Mrs. Martin,” Nigel said intently, “it doesn’t take a genius to know you could be in serious trouble. If someone’s murdered Bill Monahan—good lord, Monahan—and they think you can identify them—” He whistled softly.

  “But why is he so important? You make him sound like a cross between a prime minister and a rock star. I’ve never heard of him.”

  “A few years ago nobody had ever heard of Bill Gates, either.”

  “Are you saying—?”

  “Look, I think I need to explain a little about the computer industry.” He leaned back in his chair and stretched his cramped fingers. “Computers have been around for a good deal longer than people realize, but back in the early days they were monsters. Have you ever heard of Univac?”

  “Yes, of course, dear. I’m surprised you have.” I felt I had to get a little of my own back. “Most of you children know nothing of what happened before you were born.”

  He ignored my attempt at patronizing. “Did you ever see Univac?”

  I shook my head.

>   “Neither did I, naturally, but I’ve seen pictures. It occupied the whole of a large room. It required special air-conditioning. It took centuries to complete a task, by today’s standards, and it had far less power and capacity than the most rudimentary of today’s laptops. It was of use only to businesses and research scientists. And that was the way computers were for the first couple of decades.

  “The chaps who started to change things were Bill Gates, on the one hand, and Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, on the other. They were your basic nerds, working out of their garages, but what they developed, working independently, was what led to these machines in here.” He gestured to the room full of computers.

  “The Jobs-Wozniak version eventually became Apple, computers sold complete with all the programs installed. Gates concentrated on ways to make computers more useful to ordinary people, what we now call software, and his company eventually became Microsoft. These three blokes, working with nothing, essentially, except brilliant minds, became the industry leaders, worldwide. They changed the world forever. Bill Monahan is—or was, if we’re right—the same sort of chap. That’s the way the computer industry is, you see. One person—or two; Bill’s partner is Walter Shepherd—can begin with nothing and become a multimillionaire almost overnight. Monahan’s company, Multilinks International, was on its way to the top. Now—who knows?” Nigel shrugged elaborately, and I sat there, stunned.

  What in the world had I gotten into?

  “Good heavens,” I said finally.

  “Right.”

  I pulled myself together. “Well, but Nigel—I still don’t understand. It sounds as though these early men did lots of things, really advanced, totally new things. Why should one thing, one piece of software, make such a difference now to one small company?”

  “Because that’s the way life is nowadays. Gates and Jobs and Wozniak were pioneers. They invented the wheel. Now anyone who figures out a radically new way to make it spin can be rich by tomorrow—if not on his own, then through being bought out by the big guns. And Monahan and his friends came up with an incredible spin.”

  I sighed. “Explain it to me. In words of one syllable.”

  Nigel sighed in turn. “It’s not easy to explain to someone who knows nothing about the Internet, but I’ll try. Or no, I’ll show you. Look.”

  He moved the mouse, and the swirling pattern that had filled his screen disappeared. Peering through the bottom of my bifocals, I saw a screen full of lists and boxes.

  “What would you like to know about?” Nigel asked with a grin. “Anything. Cabbages to kings.”

  I was willing to play the game, if it eventually brought him around to the point. “Um. Kings.”

  “Any one in particular?”

  “Henry the Eighth.”

  Nigel tapped out “King Henry VIII” on the keyboard; it appeared in one of the boxes. He clicked his mouse. A moment or two went by with nothing happening, and then the screen changed. Nigel pointed.

  “You see that number? The computer found that many references to the old devil.”

  I read the number in disbelief. “Does that really say over a million? How could that be? And what good is it? It would take months to sort through all that material.”

  Nigel gave a satisfied little nod. “Exactly. The problem is the search engine—the program that just went through all the databases it uses. Because of the way this particular search engine is configured, it looked for the words ‘king’ and ‘Henry’ and the numeral ‘VIII,’ and has listed every single source for even one of those referents.”

  “But that’s foolish. I could do much better going to an encyclopedia.”

  “You’re quite right. Now, there are ways I could limit the search and get better results, closer to what we want. Or there are other search engines I could use. In fact, I’ll do that.”

  He moved the mouse around. An arrow on the screen also moved, pointing to various locations. Nigel clicked here and clicked there and typed in something else, and eventually a new list appeared.

  “2,427,” I read. “That’s still a lot, but it’s much more manageable.”

  “And they’re much more to the point.” Nigel clicked the mouse again, and the screen began to move, rolling up like movie credits. “Look at the references. An encyclopedia, a history book, another encyclopedia—and if you’ll look at the précis with each entry you’ll see they all refer to King Henry VIII of England. But do you notice anything else about them?”

  I watched while the whole list moved rapidly past. “Well, I can’t really read them. They go by too quickly. But I can’t say I notice anything in particular.”

  “That’s probably because it’s too obvious,” said Nigel with a grin. I gave him a little smack. “Ouch! Okay, but you really did have the chance to see what I was getting at. You remember we talked earlier about an interpreter?”

  “Oh! Oh, of course, how stupid of me. They’re all in English!”

  Nigel beamed. The slow pupil had finally gotten it. “Right. Now look at this.” More clicking and typing. “You see, I’ve typed in exactly the same words I did at first. King Henry VIII. Now watch.” He clicked the mouse button.

  Instantly the screen changed. A list appeared in several columns of small print. I could read only a few of the words on the screen. The others were in languages, even alphabets, of which I knew nothing.

  “Is that Japanese?” I pointed.

  “No, that’s Korean. That’s the Japanese, there. But don’t ask me what all the others are, because I haven’t a clue to most of them. Choose one you’re able to read.”

  “Goodness, I feel like an ignoramus. I don’t know any of them! Except French. I used to be sort of good at that in college.”

  Nigel moved the arrow to the word Français and clicked. Again with no pause the screen filled with what I could, with difficulty, read as references to “le roi Henri VIII d’Angleterre.”

  “Now,” said Nigel, who was clearly enjoying his demonstration immensely, “you do it.” He relinquished his chair and sat me down in it. “Move the cursor—that’s the arrow, you move it by moving the mouse—”

  “I had figured out that much,” I said rather acidly.

  “Good for you.” Nigel grinned. “Move it to that icon there.”

  “Icon?”

  “The little pictures. They’re symbols—”

  I just looked at him.

  “—as I’m sure you’ve realized,” he went on in a hurry. “Go ahead, click the left button twice.”

  The little picture in question was a silhouette of two faces, nose to nose, like the old puzzle picture that could also look like a vase. I did as I was told.

  The words on the screen shivered, became muddled, and then cleared.

  They were all now in English.

  “In other words,” I said slowly, “I could look up anything in English and find all sorts of information in lots of other languages. And then have it translated back into English.”

  “And that’s only part of it,” said Nigel. “I could have entered the search in any language, not just English, and got the same results. Not only that, but even though I can’t tell which is which, I know what a lot of the languages are.” He took the mouse from me and made the computer return to the screen with all the listings. “That, I think, is Hindi. I’m pretty sure that’s Sanskrit, and somebody told me that’s Urdu—or maybe it’s that one.”

  My mind had begun to work at last. “The languages of the developing countries. Nigel, now I understand what Bill Monahan was telling me. This could be a very important tool for people in these countries! Even if they don’t read and write English well, they could get all kinds of information from English sources. And French, and Japanese, and—the mind boggles! This could open up the world for them!”

  “And there’s one last feature that really put this little gem over the top. Suppose you’re in business in, let’s say, Zaire. You intend to develop a source of—of something valuable, gold or uranium or
zinc or diamonds or I don’t know what. You need information about, perhaps, world legislation with regard to mineral rights. But for obvious reasons you don’t want anyone to know what you’re looking for. Almost any other information source can be traced. Phones can be tapped, library records can be searched, paper leaves a trail.”

  “I thought the Internet was pretty easy to invade,” I objected. “I may not know much about how it works, but I’m sure I’ve read about privacy concerns.”

  “And you’re quite right. Except, not when you’re using the Multilinks search engine. It’s encrypted, with an absolutely unbreakable code. I had to use a code to get into it just now, and nobody—repeat, nobody—except me can ever find out that today I looked up Henry VIII.”

  “And nobody would ever know that the man in Zaire was checking on mineral rights. Or,” I said, my voice shaking a little, “on how to stage a coup, or build nuclear weapons.”

  “Yes. Now do you begin to see why Bill Monahan was on his way to being Mr. Megabucks? And why you may have got yourself straight into the middle of a hornet’s nest?”

  5

  I sat back, stunned. “There’s something I haven’t told you, Nigel,” I said finally. The words came out as a shaky whisper.

  I cleared my throat. “Someone tried to break into my house last night.”

  “What!”

  I nodded. “I thought—the police thought—it was just a burglar. He didn’t get in. We have deadbolt locks. Well, that’s what we call them in America, anyway—the kind that need a key from either side, so even when he broke the glass in the kitchen door—”

  Nigel groaned, his head in his hands. “Why didn’t you tell the police about your dead man?”

  I noted that Nigel, too, was beginning to assume my ownership of a corpse. “I didn’t know last night that there was anything peculiar about his death. I still don’t know it, if you want to pick nits. He might have died a perfectly natural death. The only suspicious circumstance is that the doctor person, whoever he was, didn’t report anything.”

  “He did more than not report the death,” Nigel argued. “He must have spirited Monahan away somehow, or the body would have been found right away.”