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

  ‘There you are, then,’ Dobie said. ‘That’s it.’

  ‘What do you mean, that’s it? How can I—’

  ‘That’s your blunt wooden implement. A nasty weapon. Fine for beating someone up, but difficult to kill someone with it. You’ll have to look for it, of course. It may not be easy to find, but it’s well worth trying.’

  ‘A hockey stick,’ Jackson said. He considered the matter for a while. ‘A hockey stick,’ he said again. Then, in more thoughtful and measured tones, ‘A hockey stick …’ This seemed likely to go on for ever.

  ‘She was carrying it, you see,’ Dobie added, with a view to introducing an element of variety into the conversation. ‘She was carrying it. A hockey stick. Yes. Who was?’

  ‘Beverley was.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She had to. Look, never mind all that, Jacko, unless you can find the thing or some part of it you’ll never be able to prove anything. But that’s what she was struck with. Take my word for it.’

  ‘A hockey stick. Yes. No. Look, in all my professional experience I’ve never heard of anyone being murdered with a hockey stick. It’s …’

  ‘Don’t say it, Jacko. Look for the thing.’

  ‘In the Centre?’

  ‘Yes. Because if it isn’t there, you’ll never find it.’

  ‘You got a flea in your bonnet about that place, Mr Dobie. I don’t see any way I can go poking around up there again without getting a bee in my ear.’

  ‘Of course you can. We’ll go together if you like. Just don’t tell Pontin.’

  ‘Tell Pontin?’ Jackson giggled hysterically. ‘Oh yes, I can see myself telling Pontin. Just been up to the Centre again, sir, with Mr Dobie, not causing any trouble for anyone, mind, just looking for a stolen hockey stick. You know what, Mr Dobie? You’re dangerous. You should carry a government health warning sticker, you should, This Man Ruins Policemen’s Careers. Have a heart, Mr Dobie, please. I got a wife and family to consider.’

  Dobie was inexorable. ‘It’s no good, Jacko. You’ve got to find that hockey stick if you want to prove your case. Or find what’s left of it. Just one little blood stain—’

  ‘My case? What case? I haven’t got a case. Have you?’

  ‘Well, no. Not really. Not yet. That’s why we need to find the hockey stick, don’t you see. Just one little fingerprint—’

  A click. Jackson had hung up. Dobie shook his head sadly as he replaced the receiver, not actually on the cradle, no, but near enough to make very little difference. It was ever thus, he reflected. They hadn’t believed Galileo, either. Just because he’d passed his leisure hours dropping things over the edge of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Not hockey sticks, of course, but the principle was the same. Also the effect, if you happened to be passing underneath at the time. But that hadn’t stopped our hero. Nothing had. Or, er … well, yes, the Inquisition had, come to think of it. But that was different. Or was it? There’d been Pontins around even in those days. That was all it proved …

  No. It didn’t prove anything. In the long run there was only one kind of proof that counted; you didn’t need to be a Galileo to see that. Mathematical proof. Mathematics doesn’t deal with what is; it deals with what must be. You can argue about the one, but not about the other. Dobie got up from the chair and went back to his own irreparably untidy but comfortable bed-sitting room, where Eddie was waiting. Eddie, his trusty IBM. ‘Now look, Eddie,’ Dobie said, ‘you better not goof on this one or I’ll be cross with you. Very cross.’ Eddie, who had long ago privately arrived at the conclusion that his lord and master was mad as a hatter, said nothing and went on waiting. He wasn’t booted yet. Dobie switched on and repaired this omission and then got to work on the keyboard.

  HOLIDAY MARCH 24th TEN DAYS

  £2000 £3000 TO FOLLOW

  He set for CRYPTO and then for ANAL and watched the letters and numerals begin to spin round each other like demented roulette wheels. They were likely to go on doing this for the next five minutes or so, no doubt enjoying themselves hugely at this release from the irksome restrictions of a man-made construction; to the outward observer, however, the show as such was somewhat lacking in zip and Dobie therefore retired pensively to his armchair, where he lit and started to smoke a cigarette. When he had finished it he looked again towards Eddie; the monitor was now blank except for the single word appearing in the centre of the screen,

  NEGATIVE

  and that was, of course, to be expected. Dobie stubbed out his dog-end and returned to his labours at the keyboard. He was still so engaged some forty minutes later when Kate walked in, apparently miffed.

  ‘Dobie, you left the telephone off the hook again.’

  ‘Oh, did I? Well, it doesn’t matter. I didn’t want to make any more calls anyway.’

  ‘As always,’ Kate said, ‘your logic is irrefutable but contrives somehow to miss the point completely. Which is that someone else might want … Oh, never mind. What game are we playing tonight? Space Invaders? Or shouldn’t I ask?’

  ‘In a way, yes,’ Dobie said, blinking at her as she plumped herself down in the armchair he himself had not long since vacated. The incriminating dog-end was tucked away well out of sight underneath it, but some vestiges of the aroma might still be … In any case, this was his room and if attacked on the surreptitious-whiffing score he was fully prepared to brazen the matter out. ‘I’m invading someone else’s space, you might say. Doing a little quiet hacking, as we experts call it.’

  ‘Hacking?’ Kate, as he had anticipated, rose sharply to the bait. ‘That’s illegal.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘Who have you been hacking into?’

  ‘Oh, just some of the Ministry of Health records at the Welsh Office. Child’s play, really. I had the access code to start with, you see, and … Yes, but it’s all very puzzling. I think I’ll have to bring Merrick in on it. He knows their set-up back to front, which is the way some of it seems to be coming out. Which is what I expected, but on the other hand—’

  ‘What do you mean, back to front?’

  ‘Well, not literally back to front, no, but there’s been some kind of an erasure. Or correction. To the Rehabilitation Centre file. I’ve been running through the entries for the last couple of weeks and there’s this … irregularity come up. On March 24th. Last Saturday.’

  ‘The day of the …?’

  ‘Yes,’ Dobie said.

  ‘What is the irregularity?’

  ‘It’s like I said. There’s a demagnetized strip where something’s been erased and something else put in. Well, concretely a record fiche for someone called Martin Cooper. Does that name ring a bell with you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nor with me. But according to the fiche, he entered the Centre for treatment on the morning of the 24th. Quite a long history of drug addiction, took a course of treatment in 1989 some place in Bristol but it couldn’t have been too successful because here he is back again – voluntarily, apparently. I can’t see anything odd about it at all except that he’s maybe a little older than the average for the Centre. But then so is Adrian and quite a few others. I can’t make it out.’

  ‘Can I see?’

  Kate peered for a while at the monitor screen as Dobie scrolled the disc entry. Then shook her head. ‘Why does there have to be anything odd about it? People arrive at the Centre for treatment two or three times a week. It’s on the 24th, well, OK – that’s just a coincidence. Surely?’

  ‘Yes. But it’s the erasure that interests me, you see. There shouldn’t be any erasures on a Central Office fiche. Not ever. Unwanted or inaccurate entries, they get transferred to store. I’m, er … intrigued.’

  ‘But what can you do about it?’

  ‘Not much. But maybe Gwyn can. A hard-disc erasure isn’t necessarily gone for ever. Sometimes it’s possible to restore the original, or at least to piece parts of it together through an enhancement process. Only you’ve got to know exactly what you’re doing. I don’t and Gwyn does.
And even if he can’t get the original text back, he may at least be able to trace the source of the erasure. It doesn’t have to have been done through the Central computers – any of the computers with access through the modem link could have set it up. And if he can trace it to the Rehabilitation Centre computer that’ll be interesting because that particular link apparently got broken on Saturday and therefore that computer couldn’t have been the source. I don’t know if you’re following me.’

  ‘Perfectly. Something’s gone wrong and you don’t know what.’

  ‘Yes, that does put it in a nutshell.’ Mournfully, Dobie disconnected the modem and flicked the OFF switch. Relieved of its arduous duties, the computer dropped peaceably into a dreamless sleep, snoring faintly.

  ‘And so you’re going to get poor old Gwyn Merrick to sort it all out for you.’

  ‘Exactly. If he can.’

  ‘Dobie, have you no moral conscience at all? Or putting it in another way, haven’t you got enough enemies already?’

  ‘Me? I haven’t an enemy in the world, outside of Cambridge. And anyway, needs must when the devil drives.’

  Kate gave it up, as she always did when Dobie started to bring theology into the argument. If he couldn’t be stopped, he might, she had found, none the less sometimes be diverted. ‘Pork chops,’ she remarked cunningly, ‘in the oven. But of course, if you’re really busy …’

  ‘No, no, pork chops? Really?’ Dobie rose from his seat with some alacrity. ‘In that case, let the good times roll.’

  9

  Bad enough, Jackson thought, to be chivvied this way and that by bloody Pontin. Bad enough, but unquestionably part of the policeman’s lot; all Detective Inspectors have Detective Superintendents upon their backs to bite them; if it wasn’t Pontin, it would be someone else, clearly nothing was to be gained by pricking against the kicks in that respect. But there wasn’t any reason he could think of why he should let himself be bullied by Professor Dobie. Or if not bullied, exactly, then obscurely compelled to comply with Dobie’s invariably mildly phrased suggestions. ‘I don’t know,’ he complained grumblingly, ‘why I’m doing this, I really don’t.’ It was true. He didn’t. He’d never intended to. He still couldn’t think why he’d changed his mind … Yet here he was, clumping about like a plain-clothes Babe in the Wood, hoping for Dobie to pull a rabbit out of a hat. Or out of a burrow. Or from somewhere.

  All against his better judgement …

  He leaned his back for a moment against a convenient tree-trunk and watched Dobie proceed at a curious knock-kneed and camel-like lope, reminiscent of that adopted by Groucho Marx when in pursuit of a fleeing waitress, on a zigzag course through the conifers or whatever they were, peering myopically upwards the while into their clustered and overhanging branches. ‘Early days yet,’ Dobie babbled incoherently. ‘Never despair.’

  ‘All very well, but I’m not going to waste another morning …’ He stopped and sighed, observing that Dobie had tripped over his own feet again and fallen into a clump of laurel bushes. Breathing sterterously, Jackson stooped to help extricate him.

  ‘I know,’ Dobie said, surveying the damage sustained by his right trouser-leg with some misgivings, ‘it’s what you might call a long shot. But my reasoning is that no one would want to risk being seen carrying a thing like that around, I mean it’d stick out like a sore thumb, wouldn’t it? Except with the one person where it would have the opposite effect, I mean it’d almost establish her identity, if you follow me.’

  ‘Mr Dobie, I’m convinced that nobody would wish to follow you anywhere, other than out of sheer idle curiosity. To see what kind of a … What exactly are you looking for?’

  ‘Something like that,’ Dobie said, pointing upwards. ‘If you’ll observe the configurations of that branch up there, the one stuck in between the … You see the one I mean? The one that conforms in outward appearance to the shape of a hockey stick? Well, if we could find a … a …’

  He stopped, with his mouth gaping open. ‘It looks,’ Jackson said, with some asperity, ‘like a hockey stick because it is a hockey stick. What a peculiar place to …’ He, too, stopped abruptly, also with his mouth open. ‘A hockey stick. Oh my God. Is that what you …? Yes. It is. You said a hockey stick, didn’t you? Yes. A hockey stick. Well, don’t just stand there, damn it. Let’s get it down.’

  ‘It would seem to be, er … rather securely lodged. And also, er … rather high up. Oh well.’ Dobie removed his jacket. ‘I used to be renowned for my skill at climbing trees when I was a boy. Doubtless the art of it hasn’t altogether deserted me.’ He embraced the tree trunk ardently. ‘The trick of it, of course, is to secure an adequate foothold before you … Whoops. Yes. Well, it’s no more than another trifling wound. All the same, perhaps you’d better give me a leg-up over the first bit. You see, the initial absence of support … Yes, the right shoulder, if you’d be so good. Once I’ve secured the necessary purchase, you see, I can … Yes. That’s fine. Now …’

  ‘AAAAAAAAAAA!’ Jackson said.

  Clutching his shoulder, he watched morosely as Dobie disappeared Winnie the Pooh-like up into the wilderness of overlapping branches. By the time Dobie had reappeared some twenty feet above ground level the agony, he thought, had somewhat abated. ‘Where is it?’ Dobie cried. ‘Where? Where?’

  ‘A bit to your right, Mr Dobie. You see that branch sticking out by your right foot? Well—’

  ‘You mean this rather thin one here? AAAAAAAAAAA!’ Dobie said.

  Jackson ducked involuntarily as there descended upon him with some velocity, (a) one hockey stick, (b) one rather thin branch (broken), (c) Professor Dobie, this last accompanied by a miniature hailstorm of small twigs, leaves, and derelict birds’ nests. ‘Of course,’ Dobie said, massaging his ankle, ‘I must have gained considerably in weight since the days of my former expertise. It was foolish of me to omit that factor from my calculations.’

  ‘Are you all right, Mr Dobie?’

  ‘Perfectly. Perfectly. All’s well that ends well, as the saying has it.’ Dobie reached out to grasp the hockey stick and to essay with it an experimental swish. ‘Now if only we had a ball, Jacko, we could have rather a jolly … Or quite a jolly … er …’

  Jackson turned round to look in the direction of Dobie’s glazed-over stare. The three large gentlemen in white jackets looked back at him inimically.

  ‘Now then,’ Jackson said, anxious to impress upon them from the outset his official status. ‘What’s all this?’

  But once again it was Dobie who appeared to have excited the newcomers’ attention. They gazed at him, fascinated. ‘Lord Greystoke, I presume,’ the largest of the three gentlemen said. He was, Jackson noted with some alarm, a very large gentleman indeed. ‘Answering the call of the wild again, eh, your lordship? Gettin’ a bit long in the toof for swingin’ from bough to bough, though. Best leave that sort of thing to your chimp ’ere.’

  ‘I’ll have you know,’ Jackson said, beside himself with ire, ‘I’m an infected spectre of the local police farce and I’m engaged in an infestication with this gentleman.’

  ‘I see, sir. Well, in that case I’ll ’ave to ask you both to cummalongame. Nice goings-on, I don’t think.’

  The two other large gentlemen nodded purposefully.

  ‘Another fine mess,’ Jackson said, ‘you’ve got me into.’

  ‘Yes. It’s unfortunate that my friend Mr Whyburn wasn’t among our apprehenders. He’d have remembered me at once, I feel certain.’

  ‘Quite a lot of people remember you, Mr Dobie,’ Jackson said meaningfully. ‘A lot of people’ve got good reason to.’ He paused in his prowlings around the cell to grasp the bars of the window and peer mournfully out between them. Well, if you looked on the bright side, it was raining out there now. And no doubt it was useful experience for a policeman, on occasion, to see how the other half lived, so to speak. Though Pontin wasn’t very likely to see it that way. And the whole thing was his fault, as much as Dobie’s. If Pontin hadn’t kic
ked up such a shindy the other day, this visit could have been arranged official-like. Instead of … Oh God, Jackson thought, I’m never going to live this down. ‘I’m never going to live this down,’ he declared, wailfully.

  ‘Oh, nonsense, Jacko.’ Dobie was still fidgeting about with that damned hockey stick, which strangely enough the gentlemen in the white jackets had allowed him to retain – or more probably had feared to confiscate; him Tarzan, lord of the jungle. ‘Mistakes will happen in the best regulated … And there are blood stains, unless I’m much mistaken.’ Peering cautiously at the end with the curve in it. ‘At least you’ve come up with the murder weapon.’

  ‘You’re serious? Yes. You are.’ Jackson advanced. He, too, peered down at what certainly looked like … or feasibly could be … ‘Good God, Mr Dobie … Put it down, you’ll be leaving your prints all over it.’

  ‘Not on the rubber handle, surely. And of course the murderer’s prints won’t be there, either. Unfortunate, that.’

  ‘But I don’t understand. Why would whoever it was have been going round the place with a hockey stick? Why would he want to steal a hockey stick? I suppose we have to assume this is the one that was reported missing—’

  ‘No, no, Jacko, you’ve got the wrong end of the … It was the girl who pinched the hockey stick. Beverley Sutro. She was the one who was carrying it around.’

  Dobie wasn’t very good at explanations, as Jackson had noted once before. His air of resigned stupefaction, if anything, increased.

  ‘Whatever for? She didn’t even play hockey. Leastways, no one ever told me—’

  ‘Elspeth did.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Elspeth Mighell. The girl who lives here. She played hockey every Saturday afternoon, and Beverley played hookey at that same time. She came round here. She was seen here once, among those trees where we found this stick. Mrs Train saw her there and thought it was Elspeth, mainly because it didn’t occur to her that it could have been anyone else. But really all she saw was a tallish dark-haired girl in a short skirt and a parka and … carrying a hockey stick. Beverley was a couple of years older than Elspeth, but they were pretty much the same size and they were both dark haired and from a distance they really looked a good deal alike … especially when they dressed in exactly the same way. I even came close to making that mistake myself, at one point. And all these dark misty afternoons we’ve been having … Well, you know how often you see what you expect to see. The only girl any of the staff would expect to see coming into the Centre is Elspeth and the other kid was clever enough to realize it.’