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

  ‘But what about that chap of yours, Raich?’

  ‘What chap?’

  ‘The one they sent back here for murdering his wife out in the boondocks somewhere. Malta, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Seymour.’ Carter snorted. ‘Absolute piffle. All based on a drug-related confession, if you’ll credit it, which wouldn’t have passed muster in … Ask the Professor about it, if you like. He knows a great deal about the case.’

  There was a brief silence. Tigger opened his mouth as though about to interject yet another chortle, but then didn’t. ‘Professor Dobie,’ Mighell said, ‘seems to know a good deal about a great many things with a criminal connection, despite his disclaimer.’

  Dobie felt more than a little uncomfortable. ‘Not really. Only through pure chance that led to our finding … You see, the Director wanted to ask me if I’d be prepared to recommend—’

  ‘We know all about that,’ Mighell said, somewhat brusquely. ‘But we’ve all learnt to be sceptical when we hear of events being attributed to the workings of chance. Unconscious motivations that’s what we look for. Not only in criminals, but in all those connected in any way with the crime. The victims, even. No, the victims especially. There are very powerful arguments which suggest that murder victims are often drawn towards their own deaths and indeed often unconsciously but actively work to bring their own deaths about. I don’t know if you’ve read—’

  ‘I don’t think the girl could have wanted to die,’ Dobie said, ‘if that’s what you’re saying. She was only seventeen, after all.’

  ‘The age is irrelevant, and in any case the sixteen-to-twenty age group is demonstrably more prone to suicide than most others. But that isn’t exactly what I’m saying. You’ve just put forward the classical layman’s misinterpretation, in fact. You see, it’s been statistically established that children of divided families, children whose parents are divorced or otherwise separated—’

  ‘Like Elspeth?’

  ‘Yes and no. I’m putting forward a generalization to which you might cite any number of individual—’

  ‘What sort of generalizations would you make about the person who killed that girl?’

  ‘Oh, I think a fairly normal and easily recognizable type.’

  ‘So you’d say – generalizing, of course – that in murder cases it’s usually the victim who’s a bit weird and not the murderer?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I think that modern psychiatric research has established that pretty firmly.’

  ‘Ha ha ha ha. Ha ha.’

  Jackson, Dobie thought, should at once be informed that he was barking up the wrong tree. But then he hadn’t been told about the right tree, not as yet. All the same, if, as it appeared, it was the murder victim who ought to be arrested, then some substantial revision of normal police procedures would certainly be necessary. Maybe if he … Oh. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I was only saying that if you’d care to read my recent paper on the psychopathology of the violent criminal, I’d be happy to lend you a copy.’ This was the tall thin one. Hudson. ‘I think it’ll bring you up to date on the latest thinking on the matter. Recent research, you see, has suggested that many preconceptions of the general public—’

  ‘Does that chap you mentioned come into it?’

  ‘Seymour? Oh no. But that’s a case in point. The citing of actual case histories is decidedly vieux jeu these days, indeed it’s an unfortunate survival—’

  ‘I meant that cannibal chap.’

  Hudson regarded him curiously. ‘You haven’t seen the film?’

  ‘The film? No, I rarely go—’

  ‘Ah. That explains it. My allusion was to a fictional character, you see, who was in the habit of murdering people and storing various parts of their anatomies in the fridge, this against the contingency of unexpected guests having to be entertained to dinner. The same unexpected guests, in their turn—’

  ‘I see.’ Dobie thought that for once he did, but it was obviously prudent to be cautious. ‘He’d be some kind of a pervert, to your way of thinking?’

  ‘Well, we shouldn’t jump to over-rash conclusions. Cannibalism has a long and respectable history and is after all regarded with approval in many cultures. In the context of our own culture, of course … but then that’s what clinical psychiatry is all about. Taking the broader view.’

  ‘I suppose,’ Dobie said, ‘it helps you to stay sane.’

  ‘Well, that’s one way of putting it.’

  ‘Kate?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Killing people is wrong, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Very wrong. Unless, of course, you’re a doctor. Why do you ask?’

  ‘I just wanted to be reassured on the point,’ Dobie said. ‘I was afraid I might be indulging myself in outmoded preconceptions.’

  ‘Well, what’s wrong with that?’

  ‘It seems one has to take the broader view. But there again, they’re a very strange lot up at that place.’

  ‘They have a remarkably high success rate, though, in dealing with these social misfits. A model institute, in fact, of its kind.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ Dobie said. ‘If I thought I were a social misfit, a brief chat with any of those fellows would do a great deal to restore my confidence.’

  ‘You are a social misfit.’

  ‘I am? Well, there you are, then. That accounts for it.’

  Kate sighed. ‘Accounts for what?’

  ‘For … I don’t know. For my feeling a good deal better about things in general.’

  ‘You mean your paradox?’

  ‘I suppose so. With all these other advances in the frontiers of knowledge that are being made day by day, I don’t really see how my little effort is going to make things any worse than they are already. By the way, you threw four then. Not five.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Kate said. Since the dice still lay face upwards on the board, the evidence was incontrovertible. Gloomily, she made the required adjustment. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘You’re always cheating, Kate.’

  ‘Only when I’m going bankrupt.’

  ‘You’re always going bankrupt.’

  This being also incontrovertible, Kate took refuge in bluster. ‘It’s a silly game, anyway.’ Though the source of the whole trouble lay in over-investment, as she knew very well. It was so much nicer to have a little red hotel sitting snugly on the corner of the square rather than on all those nasty little green things that got knocked over when you threw the dice. Or more exactly, when Dobie did. ‘All games are silly, when you think about it.’

  ‘That’s why people play them,’ Dobie said. ‘The silliness is the only common factor. At any rate, that’s what Wittgenstein decided. Come on, hand over.’

  ‘Don’t rush me.’ Kate passed across the table an enormous bundle of funny money, hoping he wouldn’t count it. Ruin now stared her in the face. It was a pity, she thought, Dobie couldn’t be persuaded to bring his undoubted mathematical talent to bear of the real world of high finance and make a killing on the market. Or there again, perhaps it wasn’t. ‘There must,’ Kate said, ‘be something else we could do to while away the evening.’

  ‘Yes, but we usually do that later.’ Dobie rattled the dice, threw them, reached across for the Community Chest cards. ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I have to go to a Rehabilitation Centre.’

  ‘Serve you right. Your sins were bound to find you out.’ Dobie placed the small plastic motor-car he was driving round the board on the appropriate corner square and sat back, moodily surveying his considerable gains. ‘Do you have any dealings with that lot, Kate?’

  ‘With the psychs, you mean? No. When I was at Guy’s I once had to give forensic evidence against the Professor of Criminal Psychiatry and it wasn’t a very pleasant experience … but hell, he was nice about it afterwards and I haven’t any hard feelings. I mean, they have their methods and we have ours.’

  ‘But what are their methods? I mean that lot up at the Centre?’<
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  Kate also sat back, leaving the dice on the table. At this stage of the game, a few moments’ respite was welcome. Not that she had much hope of … ‘I don’t know much about them at all. The place used to be a straightforward remand home but under the new dispensation I don’t think anyone knows what they do, exactly. Well, they rehabilitate people. Obviously.’

  Dobie shook his head, unsatisfied. ‘What they do is, they play games. If you ask me.’ He reached across for his borrowed copy of Hudson on The Psychopathology of the Violent Criminal and riffled through the pages. ‘The people they’re treating play games with them and so they play games right back. Only thing is, they’re all writing books of rules … like this one … and all the rulebooks seem to be different. I’m going to have a chat with Jacko tomorrow, in any case.’

  ‘I don’t think Jacko’s very interested in psychopathology or in anything else that he can’t spell.’

  ‘He wouldn’t mind catching a murderer, though.’

  ‘Listen, Dobie, you are not going to—’

  ‘Someone’s playing games,’ Dobie said. ‘There’s a games player around somewhere. I’m sure of it. Like Wendy. I’ve been through this before. That’s how I’m sure.’

  For a moment Kate didn’t say anything. Dobie had just mentioned a name that hadn’t been mentioned by either of them for quite a time, and Kate didn’t know if that was a good sign or not. In the end she said, ‘But of course you don’t know who.’

  ‘Not yet. But I’ve got some evidence. And it’s evidence I’m talking about. Not theories.’

  ‘Well, Jacko might be interested in that. Not an awful lot of evidence had come his way, as far as I can make out.’

  ‘It said in the paper that Pontin expects an arrest at any moment.’

  ‘A cardiac one, if so. He’s overdue for it.’ Kate reached absentmindedly for the box and started to put the pieces away. Commencing, naturally, with Dobie’s hotels.

  ‘Anyway,’ Dobie said, ‘even if he doesn’t want the evidence, I still have to give him the money.’

  ‘Money? What money?’

  ‘Yes, I was going to tell you about that.’ So he did.

  6

  Miss Bramble’s office was pleasant enough, Dobie decided, if you could rid yourself of the illusion that you were in some Red Army outpost in the wilds of Kazakhstan, with a wide-open window giving out on to versts and versts and versts of the frozen tundra. A closer examination might have revealed that the view was in fact of muddy and water-logged playing fields, their monotony relieved by the occasional set of drab grey goalposts, but Dobie preferred not to examine the view at all, regaling himself with the more agreeable spectacle of pair after pair of nicely rounded and well-scrubbed schoolgirls’ knees, emerging from neat blue skirts in the frieze of colour photographs that ran almost the whole way round the room and which immortalized the outward aspect, if not the achievements, of the Dame Margaret’s First XI over the past twelve years or so. Dobie searched in vain for Elspeth’s pleasing features among those displayed in these assemblies, but couldn’t find it … one face among so many … and found himself shuddering retrospectively at the raw determination with which these charming young ladies grasped their hockeysticks. How did hockey ever become a game for girls, Dobie wondered. Loosely organized mayhem. That was what it was.

  No doubt it all went back to the Greeks and the bloody Olympic games and so to the public school tradition, Thomas Arnold and all that. The Greeks had a lot to answer for, when you thought about it. And not least, of course, for their bloody language. God, Dobie had loathed Greek at school, and still did …

  A fine training for the mind, they’d always told him. Then when he’d got to Oxford they’d told him mind was an outdated concept and anyway didn’t exist, the double-crossing bastards. Luckily, there was always mathematics. No outdated concepts there. Everything exists in mathematics, quite independently of mind.

  You know where you are with mathematics. While outside the field of the integer … Well. Yes. Room for confusion. And plenty of it.

  Miss Bramble’s office was pleasant enough, if you didn’t mind the Spartan atmosphere. Not much in the way of refinements. A formica-topped desk, a swivel chair (standing forlornly empty in its owner’s absence), a white telephone set, an electric typewriter on a side-table, a couple of filing cabinets, and underneath it all, bare floorboards. Highly polished, certainly, but bare. So were the walls, except for all those team photographs. Beverley, from all accounts, had lacked the team spirit. She hadn’t gone a bundle on the Spartan way of life. The cold showers and fresh air ethos. All those dank and dismal playing fields, stretching away out into infinity. Not after Italy, and life with a rich new poppa. Dobie found it rather hard to blame her.

  He looked round as the door opened.

  ‘The Headmistress will see you now,’ Miss Bramble said.

  Not all that formidable a lady, Dobie decided. Fortyish and bespectacled, certainly, but to all outward appearance amiable enough. Amiable, but definitely displeased. ‘I trusht,’ she said severely, ‘thish shcurrilous shtory will not be refeated outshide thish room. It sheemsh to me thatsh not too much to ashk.’

  ‘Only to the pleesh, I mean the pleeth, of coursh.’

  ‘I musht inshisht that nothing be shed to the presh in the preshent shercumshtanshish.’

  ‘Oh, indeed no,’ Dobie reassured her. It was apparent to anyone gifted with Dobie’s acute powers of observation that some considerable part of Miss Midwinter’s testiness had to be attributed to the after-effects of a substantial injection of novocaine, which had swelled up the left side of an already impressive jawline to balloon-like dimensions and which, of course, fully explained Miss Bramble’s initial extreme reluctance to admit him to the Headmistressly presence. ‘It’s just that there’s all this money, you see, that apparently belonged to … And you can’t account for her possession of it in any other way?’

  ‘I cad dot.’

  The Headmistress’s office appeared to be almost as conspicuously lacking in creature comforts as that of her secretary. Indeed, Dobie couldn’t even console himself with the contemplation of all those rows of delectably girlish knees and things, the only aesthetic indulgence here permitted being that which might be (improbably) derived from the large oil painting on the wall directly behind Miss Midwinter’s desk, where her visitors had to look at it but she needn’t – a fact confirming Dobie’s impression that no flies were likely to settle on Midders. The portrait in question was of a fearsome grey-haired harridan in full academic dress and steel-rimmed glasses – no doubt Dame Margaret herself – and faced with this unfortunate reminder of the quintessence of Somervilleanism Dobie could not but shrink, quivering, back into the recesses of his armchair. Non sum qualis eram, he said to himself. But out loud – though not very loud—

  ‘Could she have left school premises at any time, I mean without the proper authorization? Maybe at night?’

  ‘Thatsh imposhible. Our rulesh are mosht shtringent. All our girlsh have been fucked in bed by nine o’clock, without eschepchon.’

  ‘Good Heavens.’ This was the last thing that Dobie had expected. He was aware, of course, that girls’ boarding schools nowadays offered all manner of popular extra-curricular activities, but this seemed to be somewhat out of the ordinary. ‘Isn’t that rather difficult to organize?’

  ‘Fucked up in bed, I should’ve shed. And the shchool gatesh are alwaysh closhed at sheven. We escherchishe conshtant vigilansh in that reshpect.’ Miss Midwinter took a white linen handkerchief from what, Dobie thought, could only be a reticule and pressed it to her cheek. Once the sense of numbness had departed it would, no doubt, hurt like billy-oh. He sympathized but none the less persevered.

  ‘Have you been able to contact Beverley’s parents?’

  ‘Her padents? Imboshable. I hab always been obriged to deal with her buvver’s shallishiter.’

  ‘Her brother’s?’

  ‘I shtinkly shed, her buvver’s, dibben I?�
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  ‘Ah. Yes. Where is her mother, then?’

  ‘In the shoush of Iddly, ash I bereave. Her turd husbin I bereave ish an Iddalian.’

  ‘Her third husband? Really?’

  ‘Yesh.’ The Headmistress lowered her head in sorrow. ‘Marridge bows are not reshpected as wunsh they were, Perfessor. In my own shchooldays, a gel would eshpect to ged married for bugger or worsh, bud it shtifferent now.’

  ‘I’m sure it must be. So I take it this solicitor chap you mentioned will be, ah, responsible for the funeral expenses and so on? How can I get in touch with him?’

  ‘Hish dame ish Maddening. Of Maddening, Maddening, and Polecat. Offishesh in Wesh Shtreet.’

  Dobie had a feeling that he had pushed his luck about as far as it would go. Not that luck had anything to do with it. The obscure form of blackmail that he was currently practising, then. ‘I’m sure,’ he said, ‘that he, too, will be anxious to avoid any untoward publicity that might reflect unfavourably upon the school in general. And I’ll certainly do all that I can to prosecute that end.’

  ‘Bed barden?’

  Dobie didn’t feel like going through all that again so he shook his head sadly, instead. ‘Of course it’s all very tragic. She was quite a promising student, I believe.’ And would seem to have fulfilled her promise in certain directions, but he didn’t much want to go into that again, either. ‘Did you in fact teach her? That’s to say … personally?’