The Dobie Paradox: british mystery novel: where nothing is as it seems Read online

  Kate stared at him, her hand still clutching a butter-laden knife. ‘That’s what I think, too. But I’m a doctor. You’re supposed to be different. For God’s sake don’t start going human on me, Dobie, I don’t think I could stand it.’

  ‘You don’t see me as the little friend of all the world?’

  ‘Frankly—’

  ‘No. Well, you’re wrong. Right now the world needs all the friends that it can get, and you don’t have to be a mathematician to see that. It’s obvious.’

  ‘But you are a mathematician. It’s what you do. And from what people tell me, you’re a bloody good one. What they probably mean is that you do less damage being a mathematician than you would working in any other capacity, but that’s beside the point. Dobie …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Say after me, “I’m a mathematician.” ’

  Dobie shrugged. ‘All right. “I’m a mathematician.” ’

  ‘ “I am not, repeat not, engaged in the practice of criminal investigation.” ’

  ‘Kate, be reasonable. Why should you think—’

  ‘ “I am in no way to be confused with Sexton Blake or even with bloody Batman and my good friend Kate Coyle, who is familiar with my foibles, is prepared to sign an affidavit to that effect. She is also prepared to shoot me dead with a double-barreled shot-gun if I start sticking my nose again into matters which are best left to our hard-working and efficient police force, under whatever pretext, including that of a misguided and muddleheaded philanthropy.” I hope the message is coming through loud and clear, Dobie bach, because—’

  ‘Kate, you haven’t got a double-barreled shot-gun.’

  ‘No. But I know someone who has.’

  Some little time after this rather one-sided conversation had been thus brought to a crushing conclusion, the hard-working and efficient cohorts of which Kate had made mention tiredly converged, all three of them, on Detective Superintendent Pontin’s office. Jackson, Box, and Detective Constable Wallace, a recent and bewildered recruit from the uniformed branch, had spent an exhausting morning at the Dame Margaret School for Girls way out in the back of beyond; Pontin, on the other hand, was fresh from a hearty and satisfying lunch at the Rotary Club and from a point of vantage behind his desk was hence enabled to inject his team with a touch of his own unquestioned dynamism and energy, to say nothing of his intimate and hard-earned knowledge of the criminal world. ‘First of all, Jackson, what you do is, you round up all the illegal aliens and see what they’ve got to say for themselves. Standard interrogation procedures, of course. Stamp ’em into the floor if you have to but no rough stuff, mind, I’m prepared to be very strict on that point. Just make sure you swab up afterwards and don’t let the buggers see their lawyers whatever you do.’

  ‘Sir, we can’t do that, sir.’

  ‘And why the hell not?’

  ‘They’re aren’t any illegal aliens, sir, in the middle of Glamorgan. Hardly any Welshmen, if it comes to that. And besides you shouldn’t call them that, sir, on account of its being racial incrimination.’

  ‘Who says so?’

  ‘The Chief Constable, sir.’

  ‘Well, it’s about time someone took a firm line on the matter because I for one have had about enough of it. We’re in the Common Market now and don’t you forget it.’

  ‘Yes sir. That’s clearly understood, sir.’

  ‘It’d better be. Now then. Who’ve you got lined up to take the chop?’

  Jackson cleared his throat. ‘It’s early days yet, sir, but we’re pursuing some very promising lines of enquiry.’ Most of the Sixth Form at Dame Margaret’s might, he thought, be held to fall into that category, and not a few of the Upper Fifth, for that matter. ‘I think I can say we’ve established a fairly definite terminus ad quim.’

  ‘Excellent. Splendid. A what?’

  ‘Let me expatuate, sir.’

  Pontin listened with barely concealed impatience while Jackson expatuated and Detective Constable Wallace wiggled his finger about inside his nose. Pontin gathered that his A-team had covered a good deal of ground, had explored a considerable number of fruitful avenues, and that at the present moment in time it could safely be said that several likely suspects had been subliminated from future judicious enquiries. ‘Don’t,’ Pontin said, ‘come the old soldier with me, Jackson.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘What have you got to report, man?’

  ‘Well, sir, bugger all, really.’

  … Except, of course, for the terminus ad quim which seemingly had nothing to do with bus stops but merely established that moment (in time) when the deceased person to wit Miss Beverley Sutro had last been seen alive and in robust health and ingesting, in fact, a sizeable portion of roast lamb and potatoes with treacle pudding to follow. ‘Do themselves all right, they do,’ Detective Constable Wallace interjected. ‘Cor.’

  ‘In short, sir, she partook of lunch with the rest of the chicks, ah, young ladies, and no one claims to have seen her since. Seems that Saturday afternoons a lot of the girls play hockey and the rest mess around. Go out for invigorating walks and such. They’re supposed to tell the duty mistress where they’re going and then to go there in couples but the senior girls sometimes don’t bother and go out by themselves as often as not. Beverley Sutro did, anyway.’

  ‘But no one saw her leave? Bit odd, that.’

  ‘No one remembers having seen her leave. But there’d have been a lot of toing and froing going on at that time, from all accounts. It’s the only free afternoon the kids get and everyone’s anxious to make the most of it. They all have to be back for six o’clock roll-call, you see. Six o’clock they all have sort of a high tea. With currant buns.’

  Detective Constable Wallace sighed windily. Pontin had enjoyed an excellent lunch but the A-team hadn’t. In fact they hadn’t had lunch at all. Even an old currant bun, Wallace thought, would have gone down very nicely. On the edge of bloody starvation he was, boyo. Wallace sighed for his former cosy beat on the Hayes with its friendly coffee stall on the Island. Not all beer and skittles, Mum, working in the CID.

  ‘We can’t complain,’ Jackson said, ‘at any lack of copperation on the part of the public. Or the school authorities, like. No fuss about a search warrant, nothing like that. They let us take a good look at the girl’s personal belongings but I can’t say we came up with very much. No diaries, nothing useful like that. Except it seems she was on the pill and they weren’t too happy about that. They didn’t say anything, though.’

  ‘Who didn’t? Who’s they? Try to be more explicit, Jackson.’

  ‘The School Secretary, sir. Name of Bramble. Not too prickly, though, was she? Haw haw. Made the school records available to us,’ Jackson continued hurriedly, ‘and we’ve got photostats of them for what they’re worth, which at first glance isn’t very much. I couldn’t get to see the Headmistress. She was feeling poorly. But I don’t think the answer—’

  ‘Prostrate with shock, no doubt.’

  ‘No, sir. Toothache.’

  ‘Toothache?’

  ‘Terrible toothache, Miss Bramble told us. But anyway, I don’t think the answer to this little problem lies at the school, unless any of the kid’s friends can give us a lead on where she was that afternoon or who it was she was seeing. Because that’s what we’ve got to find out. What she was doing between the hours of two and six pip emma – that’s the mystery.’

  ‘Having it off,’ Box said. ‘According to Paddy Oates.’

  ‘And getting herself beaten up. But where and who by? We have to assume that the feller who did it had a car. Whether he had a meeting arranged with her or whether it was a casual pickup, he’d have to have wheels. No other theory makes sense.’

  ‘A sordid encounter, by the sound of it.’ Pontin seemed to be noticeably cheered. ‘We’ll get the Press Officer on to it at once. Might even make the nationals if we act promptly. Got a photograph we can use, I hope?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Several. Of course if she was taking
the pill the inference is she was getting … or was seeing someone on a pretty regular basis, so maybe we ought to proceed on that presumption. And Saturday afternoons is just about the only free time she’d have for that sort of thing, so that could give us a useful starting-point. Unless she sneaked out at night, which of course is a possibility. Miss Bramble didn’t think it was very likely, though. They do their best at the school to stop that sort of behaviour, she says. Any girl doing that would be instantly repelled.’

  ‘And so I should damn well hope,’ Pontin said. ‘That’s the trouble with the younger generation these days. No discipline. Satan finds work for idle hands to do. Bring back the cat is what I say.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say the girl seems to have been idle, exactly.’

  ‘You miss my point, Jackson. As usual. Bit of a trouble-maker, was she? In other respects?’

  ‘No, sir. A well-behaved girl, they say. And the school records seem to bear it out. Intelligent, too. Down for her A-levels this year and expected to do very well in them. A model pupil, you might say.’

  ‘A model? What sort of photographs have you got of her, Jackson, for God’s sake?’

  ‘Not that sort of model, sir. At least, nothing like that has been suggested to me. Mind you, it’s quite a respectable career for a girl these days, or so I’m given to understand. Not that my wife would be very happy if our Winifred—’

  ‘Can I prevail upon you, Jackson, to leave your Winifred out of it? Unless she can make material contribution to this enquiry?’

  ‘I’ve no reason to suppose so, sir, but if you wish me to pursue the matter with her when I get back home—’

  ‘I don’t wish for anything of the kind, I’m only suggesting, I’m only putting forward the tentative suggestion, Jackson, that you stick to the bloody point at issue, else we won’t get anywhere. Will we now? Will we, Campdown?’

  ‘Wallace, sir. Gwynfor Wallace, my name is. Well, in fact my friends call me Edgar, but that’s not my real name, see? They only call me that because—’

  ‘Never you mind all that, Wallace. Most interesting, but never mind that now. What, in your opinion, Wallace, is the most promising lead you’ve so far turned up in this enquiry? What course of action do you feel should be undertaken in this matter? I think you must agree that I’ve shown a remarkable degree of patience in listening to all this guff but sooner or later, Wallace, when push comes to shove—’

  ‘Well, sir, I reckon as we ought to find out who done this girl in.’

  Pontin’s pent-up breath emerged from his nose with a loud hissing noise like an overloaded electric kettle. ‘I must admit I’ve been slowly coming round to that same conclusion. So why don’t you all get out of here and do exactly that? This bloody girl’s been raped and murdered, damn it, you’re looking for a rapist and a murderer, not someone who’s pinched a couple of quid from a pinball machine, and I want the bugger collared by this time yesterday. So get things moving, Jackson. I don’t want reports, I want results.’

  Outside the office, Wallace cast longing eyes down the passageway in the general direction of the cafeteria. ‘Does he always go on like that?’

  ‘Often enough,’ Box said. ‘This sort of thing, you see, it upsets the apple cart. That’s why he’s sounding off.’

  ‘Upsets it how?’

  ‘You ought to know how, Edgar. Blokes who go out and rape girls … It usually isn’t very long before they’re trying to do the same thing again. And this one could have had a bit more fun than he expected, stomping her as well. Could be a nasty business. Very nasty.’

  ‘Ah,’ Wallace said. ‘Well, I’ll just nip round the corner and get us some packets of crisps.’

  ‘That’s good thinking, Edgar,’ Jackson said.

  Dobie, in abstracted mood, had driven past the main entry to the crematorium but, realizing his mistake, had lit before he could turn back on an unobtrusive back entry leading to a small and unobtrusive car park shadowed by an appropriate growth of cypress trees. Walking from there towards the main buildings, he was mildly surprised to find the pathway running through a substantial acreage of assiduously laid-out graves with marble fenders, gravel, and all the doings; apparently you could also be buried here, if you so desired, in what people conservative in their tastes (such as himself) would take to be a right and proper way. The tended lines of graves stretched out to left, to right, from where he now stood, all in formal order, revealing an impersonal symmetry of the kind that laymen usually call mathematical being ignorant, as the laity by definition are, of the jungle-like confusion, disorder, and chaos upon which the logical constructions of the physical sciences are totteringly based. Dobie sat for a while on a convenient bench, leaning forwards into the sunlight which hurled an unimaginable jumble of cosmic particles at his no less inconceivably elaborate physical form and feeling a certain melancholy awareness of the difference now existent between his own vaguely contemplative brain and that of Mrs Jennifer Dobie, now deceased, reduced to ashes and incarcerated underground somewhere not very far away. Or very far away indeed, according to how you looked at it. Dobie felt sad.

  He had, of course, the minor consolation of having made what is called a contribution; he had made, that is to say, the unimaginable jumble of cosmic particles now bombarding him a little more unimaginable than it had been before. Only a little more, perhaps … but the effects of even so tiny an adjustment to the balance of so inherently rickety a structure could, as he well knew, prove catastrophic. The walls of Jericho, about to crumble … Those who suppose that what is already unimaginable can hardly be made more unimaginable are clearly unfamiliar with what is conveniently referred to in the textbooks (or in some of the textbooks) as the Dobie Paradox, the exposition of which had originally occupied some fifteen pages of closely written foolscap and some six thousand five hundred hours of Dobie’s own personal space-time continuum. In the seventeen years that had passed since its publication, fourteen people (to Dobie’s knowledge) had read it and three (as far as he could tell) had understood it; the important thing was that no one had undermined or otherwise exploded it, so that as a mathematical theory of unusually long standing it had perforce now to be regarded with some respect.

  What George Campbell and his aides had done with it … That was something else. For a long time now Dobie had politely cooperated with the MIT research team, had answered their queries, had checked their computations … But the truth was it had all passed out of his hands; Dobie thought these days very little about his Paradox, and when he did, it was with a kind of sad wonder – the same kind of sad wonder with which he thought of the late Mrs Dobie’s lively little brain and of what had happened to it, shattered by metal, invalidated by fire in the crematorium furnace. When he thought about it, his thoughts were almost always the reflection of a mood. And that, too, was a curious fate to befall fifteen meticulously argued pages of cold and unimpassioned logic. Mathematicians, though, had moods. The same as anyone else. That was what Kate didn’t seem to understand.

  Dobie stood up, clutching his bouquet of early roses, and walked on.

  This was where he’d met Kate for the first time. Here among the gravestones, sitting on a bench. Not quite a year ago. He had been in rather a strange mood then, too, from which she had rescued him – that didn’t seem to be an inappropriate word. But that didn’t mean that he needed to be rescued from all his moods, to be constantly protected from himself, as Kate now appeared to think. Far from it. Perhaps, Dobie thought, I’m a little worried at what I’ve done, or at what has been in effect done in my name. But I’m not alarmed and I’m not afraid. Here, so to speak, I stand, like Martin Luther. I can do no other. Après moi le déluge – that, too, perhaps. But soon Ararat will poke through the waters again. Life’s like that.

  Here, anyway, was a small patch of dry land at his feet. A small rectangle of grey granite, lettered by a stonecutter’s chisel. The letters said

  JENNIFER DOBIE

  1962 –1989

  Dobie stooped
and dropped the roses on to the granite block, where they obliterated his wife’s name from view. Then he turned away and marched back to his car.

  When he got back to Ludlow Road Kate was still out but the telephone was ringing. She’d switched it through from the clinic reception desk downstairs but she’d forgotten for once to connect it to the answering machine so Dobie picked up the receiver. He was practically an answering machine himself these days, at any rate in so far as the telephone was concerned.

  ‘Dr Coyle isn’t in right now this is a human being speaking but if you wish to leave a message I’ll connect you at once to the recorder if you’ll wait one moment—’

  ‘Is that Mr Dobie?’

  Eh?

  ‘Yes,’ Dobie said. ‘Dobie speaking.’

  A call for Dobie? Unheard of. Unprecedented. Best to proceed with caution. These indeed were deep and uncharted waters. ‘I thought I recognized your voice. This is Elspeth.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Yes, you know … Elspeth …’

  ‘Oh, Elspeth, of course, how nice to hear from you. How’s everything at school?’

  ‘Perfectly bloody, thanks. That’s what I’m ringing you up about.’

  ‘Well, I don’t quite know if I—’

  ‘The police have been round here, you see. Asking people questions and … looking for things, they were poking round the school all the morning.’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s only to be expected,’ Dobie said. ‘They’re just doing their job. No need to worry about it, no need at all.’

  ‘Oh, but there is. Some of the girls have been saying the most awful things.’

  ‘To the police?’

  ‘No, no. Or … Well, I don’t think so. But I … We feel we need some advice, I mean really intelligent advice. Right away.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Then it is Kate you want. Look, as soon as she gets back in—’

  ‘No, I want your advice. So does Midge.’