The Dobie Paradox: british mystery novel: where nothing is as it seems Page 23

  ‘And your way is to invite middle-aged ladies to tea and cakes at Lumley’s?’

  ‘As part of what you might call a wider picture, yes.’

  ‘It usually is. But yours is at least a different wider picture, just as you say. I suppose that’s why I’m talking to you like this. It’s certainly why I accepted your invitation in the first place.’ The blue, blue eyes had become cloudy and even introspective. ‘It makes for a change. Quite a pleasant one, really.’

  ‘You mean …?’

  ‘I mean I’ll accept all men’s motives as being ulterior but some are more ulterior than others. And yours are very ulterior indeed. Morris said he thought you were an interesting man and I agree, I agree with him in most things, really. That’s what’s important in marriage – in the long run.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say my motives are more ulterior than Sergeant Box’s. Or the Elephant’s Child’s, for that matter.’

  ‘Satiable curiosity?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Mrs Train shook her head. ‘Your questions, as you call them, aren’t at all like Mr Boxy’s. They’re hardly questions at all. You’re not curious about the same things.’

  ‘Well, no,’ Dobie admitted. ‘I’m not a policeman. I’m just letting off steam, that’s all. Just trying to—’

  ‘Because you’re under pressure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I know. I can tell. Maybe that’s what makes you seem so interesting. All the men at the Centre, even Morris … They’re not like that at all. Everything’s routine and they go along with it, all of them. I dare say they’re clever but they’re oh so dull. They’re never under any kind of pressure at all. That’s why I don’t think … You have to be under pressure to commit a murder, don’t you?’

  ‘You also have to be physically able to do it. And it seems that nobody at the Centre was. Everyone’s got some kind of an alibi. At least in so far as the police have been able to discover.’

  ‘Really? Really? Morris will be greatly relieved, I can tell you. Of course it wasn’t the staff he was worried about. It was the inmates. Because some of them, well, some of them are …’

  ‘Under pressure.’

  ‘I was going to say, maybe a little unstable.’

  ‘Well,’ Dobie said. ‘They’re all in the clear. Everyone is, on the face of it. That’s why this little chat with you has been so enlightening.’

  ‘It has? Well, good Heavens. I can’t think how.’

  Dobie, having paid the bill like a little gentleman, was about to turn away counting his change when someone tapped him belligerently on the right shoulder. Not Jackson. Not, this time, Carter. But another chap. ‘I’d like the chance of a word with you,’ Mighell said, ‘Professor.’ He invested the last word with far more sibilants than it could decently be expected to contain, so that the overall aural effect was that of an overloaded kettle boiling over, or possibly that of an irritated black mamba, poised and about to strike. The darkened colour of his visage indeed suggested these unlikely images to be more appropriate to his mood than one might have supposed. ‘Er, well,’ Dobie said, ever ready with a witty comeback.

  ‘If you can spare the time …’

  ‘No problem. Of course. Yes. No hurry at all.’ Dobie glanced towards the welcoming covert of the adjacent saloon bar. He wasn’t fond of Earl Grey tea, not really; a short snifter, he thought, might help to take the taste away. Besides, after forty-five minutes of Mrs Train … ‘I thought maybe a quick one …’

  ‘If you insssissst,’ Mighell said, doing it again. ‘But what I have to sssay I can sssay quite briefly. I sss-suggessst that the business you may imagine you have with the ss-staff at our Centre, whatever it is, is frankly none of yours, and you have no right to bother Mrs Train with it. Or anyone else. It’s improper behaviour by any sss-standards and,’ advancing his face to within six inches of Dobie’s, ‘I trusssst I make myself clear.’

  ‘Not altogether,’ Dobie said, fumbling for his handkerchief. ‘Let’s talk it over, though, man to psychiatrist.’

  A further forty-five minutes later Dobie was (more or less) securely ensconced at the bar counter, one leg curled around the bar stool and the other straightened out and perpendicular to the floor (which appeared to have receded from him slightly during the past ten minutes, though this was strange). This posture caused him somewhat to resemble a more than slightly inebriated marabou stork about to launch off from a chimney-pot, although Dobie had, in point of fact, no such eccentric plan of action in mind. His companion of the moment, however, appeared to be quite seriously considering the advisability of such a gesture, or of some other less spectacular form of suicide, such as heaving himself in front of a bus, Mighell’s former mood of extreme irateness having slowly subsided into one of profound dejection, possibly similar to those celebrated in verse by the poets Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley, inter alia. ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right,’ he was saying, not very distinctly. ‘But psychiatrists are subject to these fits of jealousy in just the same way as everybody else. Doctors, after all, aren’t immune from smallpox. We’re all human beings, after all. And besides, jealousy isn’t always irrational. It’s a great mistake to imagine that it is.’

  His clarity of utterance wasn’t notably impeded by the quantity of whisky and ginger he’d recently imbibed but by the head-in-hands and generally mopey posture he was currently adopting. Dobie, who had failed to catch most of the foregoing, was relieved – although only slightly – to see him raise his chin in order to stare sadly at his own reflection in the angled bar mirror. ‘All the same,’ he, Dobie, ventured, ‘being surrounded as you are by professional advisers—’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of taking my troubles to any of that lot,’ Mighell said scathingly. He seemed almost to be alarmed at this suggestion. ‘My God, no. They’d be useless. Besides, my position precludes … I’m the Senior Consultant, after all.’ He continued for a while to survey himself from this position of lonely eminence. ‘They’re supposed to come to me if they have problems.’

  ‘And do they?’

  ‘Do they what? Have problems? Or talk to me about them?’

  Dobie wasn’t sure, either. ‘I suppose I meant, do they ever ask you for—’

  ‘Do they hell. No. They don’t. Of course, I haven’t been there very long. But even if I had …’ Mighell at last withdrew his gaze from the mirror in order to study the contents of his tumbler, which would soon stand in urgent need of replenishment. ‘I don’t see eye to eye with them on any number of issues. That’s not unusual, mind. Psychiatrists hardly ever agree about anything. You see, there are so many different … different …’

  ‘Approaches?’

  ‘Yes. Or methods of evasion, more like it. It’s like being a bloody schoolmaster sometimes … in a public school at that … All that breezy superficial optimism on the surface and underneath … Oh my God …’

  ‘It’s odd you should say that.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s what I felt myself when I was there. I was reminded in some ways of that school your daughter goes to … It struck me as being almost equally repressive, in its way.’

  ‘We don’t try to be repressive. Just the opposite. We try to offer, offer … But of course we’re dealing with delinquents. There has to be a severe underlying discipline.’

  ‘I was thinking more of the staff.’

  ‘I see what you’re getting at. Yes.’ Mighell considered the idea in silence for a moment. A morose silence, but one seemingly indicative of serious thought. Serious thought, however, clearly required a little more material sustenance. He summoned the barman. ‘I see what you mean. Yes, you have a point there.’

  ‘The school has a discipline, too. Naturally. But—’

  ‘And I approve of it. Certainly. Otherwise, I wouldn’t send my daughter there. But it’s an established discipline, the place has been run like that for years and years and so have lots of other private schools … and our place hasn’t. Every damned thing’s been chan
ged. We’ve got all these blasted hi-tech devices, we get all the backing we need from those fools at the Ministry for any proposal we make that strikes them as being in some way new, everyone’s into the latest theories of psychotherapy and what have you … but if you ask me whether we really know what we’re doing, then I’d be hard put to it to give you an honest answer. The old Remand Home system had its faults, Heaven knows, but at least everyone knew where they were. While now …’

  ‘Kate says it’s the same with doctors. She doesn’t know what she’s doing half the time, but of course the patients can’t be allowed to guess that. Because you can’t do anything at all if you haven’t got their confidence.’

  ‘Exactly. But,’ Mighell said, ‘a doctor can assume he has the patient’s trust to begin with. Otherwise the patient wouldn’t have come at all. But a psychotherapist can’t work from that kind of a premise. Far from it. Ingrained distrust of us – that’s the usual attitude.’ He surveyed his freshly loaded tumbler with affection and tested its contents briefly. Ah. Yes. Excellent. He tested it some more.

  ‘It must be fatiguing work. Trying to overcome it.’

  ‘You had better,’ Mighell said, rather surprisingly, ‘believe it. Normally, a patient wants to be cured. Our lot very often don’t. Not really. They don’t want to be coerced into taking up a useful role in society. They’re social misfits and they like it that way. Sometimes it’s difficult to blame them. Sometimes you may even start to think that they may be right.’

  ‘And that way madness lies?’

  ‘That’s the trouble. Some of them are mad. Quite a few of them, in fact. Mind you, that’s layman’s language. Any time you want to define what madness is … well, you can go crazy that way, too. The inside of the brain might as well be filled with blotting-paper, for all we really know about it. But I’m being much more frank than I really should.’

  Dobie shook his head. Nothing actually rattled about in there, so presumably all was well for the moment. ‘Isn’t that the Director’s job, though? To give direction?’

  ‘That’s easy to say. Morris is an admirable chap and he does his best, but he lacks sensitivity. That’s the root of the problem with Ja … He’s basically a very insensitive man. My tragedy is that I’m extremely sensitive … But I don’t look it. I know I don’t. I have deep feelings but when I give them external expression, people laugh at me. Which makes me more sensitive than ever. You didn’t, of course. Just now. I’m grateful to you for that.’

  It can’t be very nice, Dobie thought, to be possessed of a totally humourless personality. It has to make you prone to all kinds of untoward emotions … such indeed as jealousy … while at the same time disabling other people from taking you seriously. One might normally expect Morris Train, rather than Mighell, to be anxiously treading in Mrs Train’s footsteps; Dobie had tactfully refrained, however, from pointing this out. Instead, he had indeed taken Mighell’s initial and rather incoherent complaints quite seriously; it would be an exaggeration to say that he now had Jack’s outraged suitor eating (metaphorically) out of his hand, but the central issue was now being circumlocuted, as usual, on a reasonably friendly basis. Psychiatrists, Dobie had decided, are unhappy men.

  ‘My ex-wife,’ Mighell said, ‘never really understood me. I don’t know that Elspeth does, either. Now that she’s at an age when … That’s where Jack was so helpful to me, to begin with. The teachers at the school are all very well but … it’s not the same. And Jack is a thoroughly nice woman, you know, despite appearances. And despite these, er … complications that have arisen …’

  ‘She doesn’t seem to regard them as such.’

  ‘I know. That’s because she …’ Mighell heaved the anguished sigh of a shattered soul lacerated by the thorns of life and leaking blood over what Jackson would have called the lickle prickles. ‘She seems to regard me as in need of some kind of sex therapy or, or … some purely temporary release from frustration …’

  ‘Aren’t we all? According to you lot?’

  ‘No, no. Or, yes, in a way, but that’s another misunderstanding. Perhaps she’s spent too much time in the company of psychiatric specialists – a little learning is a dangerous thing, in whatsoever field of specialization. And I wouldn’t say that many of my present colleagues have progressed very far beyond that stage, for that matter. As for—’

  ‘It may just be that that’s how she looks at things.’

  ‘It is. That’s what I’m saying. The problem is to persuade her that things are otherwise, when everyone else is … or is trying to relieve their inner tensions in different ways. And distressingly old-fashioned ways at that. Look at Carter and Hudson … all those cold baths and vigorous physical exercises, rushing round and round in little white shorts … It’s positively nineteenth century, the way they behave.’

  I arise from dreams of thee, And my little shorts I get in, And I do some foul P. T., And I feel a perfect cretin … It was very curious how these ludicrous rhymes seemed to be entering Dobie’s head, totally unbidden. ‘Sex is quite old-fashioned, too, surely. Although some of my students seem to think they’ve just discovered it. As indeed they have,’ Dobie said genially, ‘from their point of view. One has to be – what’s the word? – tolerant.’

  ‘Indeed one has. We are. We try to be. And I for one,’ Mighell said, ‘am getting pretty sick of it. Bring back the birch, I say. Why not?’

  ‘For juvenile misdemeanours?’

  ‘For everything. Not just for other people, either. I see nothing wrong with self-flagellation, in principle. They may have had sound ideas about that in the Middle Ages, though steel-tipped whips would perhaps be a little extreme. Again, the old-fashioned schoolmaster’s cane … They should never have abolished corporal punishment in the schools. I had many a thrashing in my time. Six, eight, of the best, as we used to call it. And I don’t believe I’m a penny the worse for it.’

  Dobie’s gaze, long since somewhat distrait, became positively distant. A curious idea had at that moment occurred to him. An idea that was … well, really a little outré, even by Dobieian standards. But then it would be even more curious if his first real insight into the Beverley Sutro killing should indeed be derived from this obviously unbalanced and half-way sozzled egomaniac and through an encounter brought about by chance and which, until that moment, he’d on the whole have wished to avoid. ‘Yes,’ he said vaguely. ‘An integral part of our British culture, after all. Naval tradition and all that. Rum, sodomy, and the lash. All helped to make us what we are today.’

  In a right mess.

  And that indeed summarized the situation, if only (Dobie later thought sadly), in the sense of a reductio ad absurdum. The more pieces of the jigsaw you pushed into place, the more ridiculous the final picture became. You could say that in that way it closely resembled the Dobie Paradox – a theoretical formulation that had been created under pressure and had served ultimately only to subject its unfortunate begetter to even greater pressure. Or a vicious circle, in vulgar parlance.

  He wondered if it was really true that people only murder when under pressure. It certainly seemed a reasonable assumption, but one from which false conclusions could too easily be drawn. Look for someone who’s obviously under pressure and there’s your murderer … but that wasn’t logical at all. All the same, the police often seemed to think that way. He himself had been under tremendous pressure at the time when his wife had been murdered, and that in itself had apparently made him an object of immediate suspicion. Much the same thing with Adrian Seymour. No, it’s all a matter of the kind of pressure and of who happens to be exerting it. In Beverley Sutro’s case, that second question was easy to answer. Beverley herself had been exerting it and that was why she was dead. In his own, case, well …

  A much less tangible pressure. You could say that his whole professional career was at stake but it wasn’t lying at the mercy of any one person; murdering the Maclennon Professor of Theoretical Physics at Cambridge, however desirable and even laudable a
n aim in itself, wouldn’t affect his position in the slightest. Nor, of course, would his jumping into bed with a seventeen-year-old girl – or with Mrs Train, for that matter. Were he not a professor of mathematics but a psychiatric consultant at the Centre, however, the wider picture would be – as Mrs Train had said – different. He’d be guilty of unprofessional conduct in the one case and of unethical behaviour in the other. And open, surely, to attempted blackmail on either count. Yes, but, but, but …

  It all came down to one thing, one thing that had been obvious from the first. Somebody was playing games.

  He picked up the telephone.

  ‘The sports mistress at the school. Ask her if anything’s gone missing lately. Or maybe been stolen.’

  ‘Stolen? Look, Mr Dobie, that’s a matter for the uniformed branch, I can’t spare the time for that sort of thing right now, especially not after the bollocking I’ve just had from the bloody … from Superintendent Pontin. I’ll tell you the trouble with these ideas of yours, they sound all right but—’

  ‘Jacko.’

  Dobie breathed heavily over the telephone, misting the receiver.

  ‘– but then when push comes to shunt—’

  ‘Jacko,’ Dobie said. ‘Do it.’

  A pause. Jackson appeared to be breathing heavily, too.

  ‘Oh duw,’ Jackson said. ‘All right, then. But this is positively the last—’

  ‘And then ring me back,’ Dobie said.

  Fifteen minutes later, Jackson did so.

  ‘A hockey stick,’ he said. ‘Gone missing, stolen, or strayed. As of last Saturday. So what’s that got—’