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

  ‘Yesh, but—’

  ‘And Halliday of course had already arrived that morning. All he had to do was locate the Haining kid and then she’d slip him the gun and he’d carry out the contract and disappear. Only Daly was beginning to get cold feet. She hadn’t expected to find the place seething with police asking awkward questions, she hadn’t expected Mr Dobie here to be showing such a lively curiosity into the computer entries, and worst of all Halliday had read about the girl in the newspaper and had to have a pretty good idea of who had done it to her. Of course, it’s ironic in a way – Halliday working out this plan for killing someone else’s son and finding his own daughter being killed as a direct result. Of course Daly couldn’t have known the kid was his daughter but he wouldn’t be disposed to let her off on that account. An eye for an eye, that was always Ivor’s motto. Daly was good as dead once Ivor had got hold of her again, and she knew it.’

  ‘And show …’ Dobie said. ‘And show …’ He had almost given up, but not quite.

  ‘Yesh, and show she decided to cut her losses and run. Halliday being one of the losses, of course. She had to kill him before he got a chance to kill her, was the way she saw it. So she didn’t give him the gun, after all. She gave him a bullet instead. Smack between the eyes. There’s those around as’d give her a medal but of course we can’t allow that sort of thing. Not on Her Majesty’s property, anyway.’

  Kate could barely restrain her admiration. ‘Jacko, I think it’s simply brilliant, the way you’ve gone and worked it all out.’

  ‘Oh well,’ Jackson said modestly. ‘Old-fashioned police methods usually come up with the goods, y’know, sooner or later. It don’t do to be relying all the time on flushes of constipation.’

  ‘Though perhaps it’s just as well the case won’t ever come to court.’

  ‘You’re right there. But then it seems they don’t very often when Mr Dobie’s around. He’s a dab hand at saving the taxpayers’ money.’

  ‘Washn’t on purposh,’ Dobie said indignantly. ‘If a little money was shpent on the proper upkeep of the road shistem—’

  ‘It’s not as though she drowned, Mr Dobie. Dead before she hit the water, according to Dr Coyle here. Took most of the windscreen with her so it’s not surprising. You got off pretty lightly, if you ask me. Shame about the face, of course, but then it looked a bit odd to start with. And you can always grow another moustache when those stitches have healed.’

  ‘Over my dead body,’ Kate said.

  Rather a rash thing to say, perhaps. But then Dobie was such an obviously harmless person …

  She sat with him for quite a while after Jacko had gone, in a companionable silence. He wasn’t after all in very bad condition. It only hurt him when he laughed, as the old joke had it. Soon a pristine Dobie would be safely returned to her, to go maundering about the place as ineffectually as ever.

  He wasn’t really in tune with the modern world, that was the trouble. He wasn’t into all the contemporary trends. Not in criminology or psychiatry or education or anything else. He had no sense of modern values. That had to be the real Dobie Paradox. Dobie himself.

  There he was, propped up on the pillows, as good as gold. He wasn’t really going to blow up the known physical universe, was he?

  Hadn’t he got himself deep enough into the soup already?

  Kate sighed. Yes, that was the trouble with Dobie all right …

  You never could tell what the bastard would be up to next …

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  FOR DAVID

  Synopsis

  CRITICAL ACCLAIM

  Intro

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10