The Shy Traffickers (Professor Dobie Book 4) Page 24

  Kate, despite herself, was a little intrigued. “Are you a hood?”

  “Am I what?”

  “You know. A gangster? … Only hoods call you lady on the telly. Oh, and taxi-drivers. Perhaps you’re a psychopathic taxi-driver, like the one in—”

  “Praps nothing. I’m a business man. Or that’s to say, I’m private secretary to an important local businessman, recently defunct.”

  “How recently?”

  “Very recently.”

  “Would that be … Mr Primrose?”

  Nicholas Guffin – for this was he – nodded solemn agreement. “Oh shit,” Kate said. “It’s all got to do with that then. I might have known.”

  “Being a business man, like I said, I got a business proposition to put before you. On behalf of another principal who would rather not be named. Okay?”

  “Not really. People don’t usually tie women down on a bed before putting business propositions to them, do they?”

  “You’d be surprised,” Guffin said. “Takes all sorts to make a world, as they say.”

  “Well. I’m—”

  “Shut up, will you? – and listen. This is serious.”

  “No, it’s not. This is totally ridiculous. And also acutely embarrassing. Surely you can —”

  “No need to be embarrassed,” Guffin said, with a gesture of casual disclaimer. “Or excited. Doctors don’t get over-excited and nor do I. Now look. You seen this?” He withdrew from his pocket a folded copy of the Daily Snipe and flourished it dramatically before dropping it to the floor. “I know you have so I dunno why I ask. All right. You’re in a real tough spot now so here’s the deal. We get you out of the country with a nice new British passport and with a coupla thousand dollars in a local bank account, so’s you can start out in a bit of style, right? South of France, say, Spain, anywhere you like. We might even talk South America if that’s what you fancy, you get the picture?”

  Cat-like and rat-like, Ratel- and wombat-like … Kate in fact had no idea what a ratel was but if it looked anything like Nicholas Guffin, she felt sorry for it. She was, moreover, suspicious of this generous offer. Minor film starlets and television actresses no doubt had to fend off (or accept) similar propositions three times a week, but such was far from having been her previous lot in life (though Dobie, she now recalled, had invited her out to the local cinema only last February).“Sounds too good to be true. I bet there’s a catch.”

  “No catch. You just give us some information, that’s all.”

  Kate sighed. “What sort of information?”

  “Like where you got the consignment stashed, that kind of information. You see, George … the boss, he’s a reasonable sort of a fellow. He’s quite willing to let bygones be bygones once he’s got the business end of it settled. I mean … Okay, in principle he disapproves of you bumping off one of his local managers but there you go, a contract’s a contract, we all know that. He’s got a pretty good idea of who it was who hired you, don’t you worry, and there may be a score or two to be settled later but all that’s none of your concern. No. Just come across with what we want to know and you’ll be sitting pretty … Okay?”

  “No. Who are you, anyway?”

  “Thought I explained all that.”

  “Not really. What’s your name?”

  “Doesn’t matter what my name is, does it? Me, I’m a cog in the wheel, just like you are.”

  “I’m nothing of the kind. I’m a doctor. And whatever you may have read in that paper —”

  “Let’s put it another way. Let’s assume for the sake of argument you don’t know where the consignment is, ’cos that’s probably what I’d say if I were in your place. Could be the truth, too, like, why would you? … Okay – but your husband does, right? So if you’d like to tell me where your husband is right now so we can go round and pay him a friendly call, well, the boss’ll probably settle for that. And if you tell me you don’t know where he is, now that I will not believe. You got some kind of a meeting-place fixed up, that’s obvious. So, I mean … why be difficult about it when it isn’t in anyone’s interest? Least of all yours?”

  Kate said, after due consideration,

  “This is rather awkward.”

  “Yeah. For me, too. I’m under pressure, too, being just a cog in the wheel, like I said. Or you might say a toad under the harrer.

  Jackson was being thoroughly harrowed also.

  In the space of a few short hours the pile of bumf on his desk had grown to imposing dimensions. Among the varied papers and printouts therein was a copy of the Medical Examiner’s report, Paddy Oates having done his stuff with more than his usual celerity. He was, it appeared, confidently of the opinion that Rodney Primrose had neither been drowned at sea nor spiflicated by a lengthy fall from a passing aeroplane, the nature of his injuries precluding any such theoretical suppositions. Paddy was, however, prepared to put forward, cautiously and tentatively, the counter-suggestion that someone had shot him, presumably with the bullet that Paddy had earlier, cautiously and tentatively, removed from inside his skull. Its more precise location and the course of its trajectory were then clearly described (by Paddy) in terms that, however readily comprehensible to a forensic pathologist, were immediately dismissed (by Jackson) as the usual gobbledegook. The final effect of its impact, as Paddy implied in his masterly summary, had been to do Rodney Primrose a bit of no good, but then Jackson knew that already. “Fat lot of use this is,” he grumbled, casting it aside. “Gets us just about nowhere. Still, don’t it always.”

  “Tell you what.”

  “Yes?”

  “I got a theory.”

  “A what?”

  “Well, I been reconstructing the crime, so to speak.”

  Jackson effortfully raised his eyes and removed his glasses. “What film you talking about now, Foxy?” Detective-Sergeant Box’s so-called theories were, as he well knew, almost invariably derived from the more way-out elaborations of Hollywood film directors and as such, equally invariably subject to instant dismissal; all the same, the flimsy occupying his present attention had to be about the hundred-and-fiftieth of the five hundred that had apparently accumulated on his in-tray overnight and almost any form of interruption was welcome. Even coming, as this one did, from Foxy Boxy, whose own desk was similarly overweighted with paperasserie and whose right hand was now waving a print-out in the air like it was some kind of bloody banner. Or a white flag, maybe. “If it’s that one where the geezer’s trying to lay it on General de Gaulle and he bends over just when the geezer’s going to —”

  “No, no. Nothing like that. What it is, I got the record sheet here for that small-arms course Kate Coyle took a couple of years back and it’s deeply significant. That’s what.”

  Jackson reached across to pluck the document from his colleague’s fingers and, having replaced his glasses, surveyed it with disfavour. “What’s so snifficant about it?”

  “She can shoot. That’s what’s significant about it. Look at that overall percentage. And the rating. Best of the course.”

  Jackson grunted. “I can’t see what—”

  “I’d say on that evidence anything she shoots at she’d be liable to hit, wouldn’t you?”

  “Well, on the face of it—”

  “So how come she didn’t?”

  “Didn’t what?” Jacko, temporarily befogged.

  “How come she missed him? Okay, she got him, but she scored on a ricochet from all accounts. In other words, she fluked it. The scores she put up on the firing range … They’re not flukes.”

  “No. Not a flukey sort of person, Kate Coyle isn’t. So what are you getting at?”

  “Well … I reckon what she did was, she aimed to miss.”

  “Miss Primrose? Why should she—”

  “No. Miss her husband.”

  Jackson shook his head slowly. “A case of mistaken identity, right? By your reckoning? I thought of that already, Foxy.” He took his glasses off again and stared out of the window. “Well,
there’s one thing there I can agree with. I can imagine her capable of doing that. And not the other. So it could well have happened just the way you’ve figured it out. But then why the hell didn’t she tell us all that when she had the chance?”

  “I dunno. Wasn’t there, was I? – when you … Could’ve had her reasons, though. If that’s what happened, it’s still pretty bad. She killed the guy, when all’s said and done.”

  “Three to five,” Jackson said thoughtfully. “On a manslaughter charge. That’s the least she could hope to get. So maybe she’d prefer to run, yes, I can see that.”

  “She did run. And now we got to find her.”

  “Well, Mr Dobie isn’t going to help. I’ve sounded him out already. And he won’t go along with the idea that Kate shot the berk more or less by accident. Says it won’t wash. Mind you, I might have said the same if I were in his place.”

  “Not like Kate Coyle, though, to go round making trouble for everyone.”

  “It’s like Mr Dobie, though. It’s right up his street.”

  “Oh God,” Foxy said. “You can say that again. You reckon he really does know where she’s got to?”

  “Oh, he knows all right. But he’s not saying. I’m going to have to go round and have another little heart-to-heart with him, all the same. Try to show him the error of his ways.”

  It was obvious that he wasn’t looking forward to this proposed expedition very greatly. Foxy didn’t blame him.

  13

  The leather things around her wrists appeared to be damp. She had to have sweated rather a lot and that, no doubt, would have caused the leather to contract. As it dried out, then, its grip might be correspondingly loosened. Yes, but how long would it take to dry out? … There’d be physical laws determining that kind of thing. Dobie was fairly sound on the laws of physics, having done as much as anyone else to screw them up. He’d know about molecular whatever-it-was. Pity he wasn’t here to explain it to her. But then if he were here, he could presumably untie the bloody knots and save himself the trouble.

  He wasn’t very good at explaining things. Not really. Least of all at explaining his goddam Paradox. She’d given up on that one. Though what was causing all the trouble, she’d gathered, was not so much the paradox itself as the conclusions to be drawn from it, which suggested that the universe was egg-shaped, having not, after all, been formed by a Big Bang but by being squeezed out of a rapidly widening hole in infinity. “Though of course it’s not an egg-like shape, Kate, it’s an egg-like motion that you have to imagine.” “Ah. Of course. Yes.” “Rather as though it had popped out of a black hole, you see, which is why the black-hole boys are getting uptight about it.” “They are?” “Well, some of them are. But of course there are black holes in this universe and so other universes may be popping out of them all the time. Except that time doesn’t exist in a black hole.” “It doesn’t?” “No, no. That’s the point.” It would not have been well taken, Kate couldn’t help feeling, in that convent in darkest Dublin where she had received her own early education, Copernicus being there regarded as altogether a bit of a quare feller and Galileo, though an Italian and hence presumably a good Catholic boy at heart, something of a pishogue in matters mathematical and not to be compared in that respect to Father O’Leary, a man to bandy equations with the best of them and off whose tongue Euclidean demonstrations would slide as smoothly and easily as shit off a hot shovel. But Father O’Leary wasn’t here, either, and hence had, like Dobie, to be regarded as a broken reed, begorra. Kate sighed and rolled her eyes upwards. Nothing might serve her now, she thought, but desperate measures.

  “… Beam me up, Scotty,” she implored.

  No reply. Captain Dobie wasn’t on the bridge today. Having it off with that Lieutenant Uhuru, as was to be supposed, boldly going where no man had gone before or at least … Kate rolled her eyeballs downwards again and sighed deeply. You should not loiter in the glen, In the haunts of goblin men … Indeed no. But she had no other choice. For the time being …

  At that moment (in time, or wherever else) Starfleet Commander Dobie was not, in fact, succumbing to the advances of that Lieutenant Uhura but was on the contrary conducting yet another of his interminable space safaris out in the blue with his keyboard securely yoked in outspan and his narrowed eyes fixed on the scrub-scattered veldt of the monitor screen before him. His fingers moved rapidly, irrhythmically, hither and thither, conducting his battered prairie wagon along uncharted routes where indeed no man had ever wanted to go before, no man having the best of reasons for this studied apathy. Watching Dobie probe in this manner the ultimate reaches of infinity had to be accounted as one of the world’s most mind-bogglingly boring occupations and his audience, who had come to that conclusion some forty-five minutes earlier, was becoming restive.

  “Hey Dobie …?”

  “Yes?”

  “Wotcha doing?”

  “Well,” Dobie said. “I’m glad someone’s asked that question because I’m none too sure myself. But you could say that I’ve been trying to establish the mathematical basis of a given temporal situation in terms of what used to be called a space-time continuum. Because I thought it might be useful.”

  “Oh yes. And is it?”

  “Not really. Though of course there’s a connection.”

  “There is?”

  “Well, it’s the cause of all crime, isn’t it? Time is. Or rather the fact that it always goes forwards, so to speak, and never backwards.”

  “Don’t get it.”

  “But it’s obvious. I mean, supposing time went into reverse … Well, then you’d have the criminals chasing the police in very fast cars, driving backwards, and then breaking out of a bank and putting all the money back in the safe deposits. It’d have quite a revolutionary effect on society, so it would.”

  Olly couldn’t believe that she was hearing this. Old Dobie had to be totally meshuggah as well as … as well as … whatever else he was. “But that’s just screwy. It can’t be done.”

  “But I have to determine the reasons why it can’t be done. And that will be of help in solving certain other elementary problems that present themselves on occasion. Such as how it is one can’t be in two places at the same time. Or in two times at the same place, for that matter.”

  “I can’t see that it does.”

  “Does what?”

  “Matter. You don’t teach the kids this stuff, do you? At that university place?”

  “Well, paradox theory—”

  “Have you always been teaching mathematics?”

  “Oh no. No, I had a much more, you know … exciting job to begin with.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I taught Latin.”

  “Ah.”

  “The point is that time doesn’t go forwards or backwards. That’s why it can’t be done. It’s just there. Or here, as the case may be. Depending on how you look at it. Heisenberg got that part of it right, anyway.”

  “He did?”

  “Yes. Quantum mechanics are basically sound, after all. The difficulty arises when you have to translate it into another kind of language. A mathematical kind of language. Like in ballistics.”

  “Like in what?”

  “Ballistics. When you work out what happens to a bullet after you’ve fired it.”

  “It kills someone, don’t it?”

  “Yes. In the present instance. But the problem—”

  “Look, Mr. Dobie, you being a professor an’ all I got to suppose you know all about figures.” The problem, as far as Olly was concerned, was one of how best to proceed with the seduction of Dobie when his whole attention was being absorbed by that bloody computer and when he was talking all this piffle when it wasn’t. He had to be brought back into touch with reality, was what it all boiled down to. “But you haven’t said yet what you think about mine.”

  “Your …?”

  “My figure. I mean, wossa marrer wiv it?” She’d had enough of culture for the time being. “Doncha like it?�
�

  “Oh I do, I do. Remarkably svelte. And, er … Yes. But that blouse thing of yours has become unbuttoned, by the way. At the top.”

  “I know. I just now unbuttoned it.”

  “Yes, yes, make yourself comfortable by all means. It is a little hot in here, isn’t it? In fact I … Oh dear.¨ He turned back to the computer, rubbing his chin. “Heat. Now that’s a factor I should maybe have taken into account. I wonder if …”

  “Y’see, you mustn’t think all girls like playing hard to get. We’re not all like that Melanie.”

  At the bottom as well, Dobie now observed. Perhaps he should have opened a window. Supposing, then, he could introduce the symbol v to represent the quotient of h/f … yes, but that would involve a certain amount of re-programming. Bother. “The difficulty would seem to be … You know about primary indices, of course …”

  “No. But I’m ready to learn.” Olly indicated said readiness by leaning forwards over his chair to peer down at the screen, thus bringing the material content of a red nylon bra cup all but into contact with his nose. She breathed deeply. So did Dobie.

  “You don’t?”

  “No.”

  “That’s strange. I distinctly recall your showing some interest in a primary index filing system when we first met.”

  “Well, right now maybe I could show you some—”

  “But that,” Dobie said, chuckling amusedly, “was when I thought you were from the Hog. Silly of me. You see, I was expecting—”

  “Who is this Hog? Another of your … associates?”

  “No, no. It’s a place. Somewhere in Holland.”

  “… You don’t mean the Hague, do you?”

  “Oh heavens, no. That’s a whisky.”

  Boy, Olly thought, could I ever use one. But maybe a subtle downwards adjustment of the shoulder-strap …