The Dobie Paradox: british mystery novel: where nothing is as it seems Page 5

  And they don’t know about it, either. The doctors. I tried to tell them about it but the words wouldn’t fit. All so confused, all those dead people and the flicker of the lamplight and on the edge of the lamplight those two great shapes, struggling, interlocked, the woman my wife and not my wife, the man me and not me, their legs sprawled out and kicking in the swirl of shallow waves racing up from the beach, and then of course I killed her but I know now it wasn’t me but the other one, if it was me I wouldn’t be here, all alone and facing up to Reality again … Ping-pong and crossword puzzles and UB40 and Kingston Town …

  He opened his eyes and saw that Reality was a tweed-suited chap, sporting a truly weird moustache and wearing slightly too small a raincoat, plodding purposefully across the room towards him. Reality had got wet lately. Reality paused in front of the table and then drew up a chair and sat down, knocking over in the process an empty glass that had contained until recently something under half a pint of Coca-Cola. Reality was real all right but clearly a bit of a … Ah. ‘Mr Dobie …’ Who else? It was the moustache, of course, that had fooled him. Briefly. ‘Welcome to Toad Hall.’

  ‘Is that what you call it?’

  ‘It’s what we call it and it’s where I’m at. Thanks to you, I’m told. Instead of in that dump in Cyprus.’

  Dobie blew out his moustache thing dismissively, causing it to rise and fall like a passing Pacific roller. ‘I think you’ve been misinformed. I didn’t have very much to do with it. And if it comes to that, these doctors here … Why do they all look like retired Army officers?’

  ‘Could be that’s what they are. Or cashiered, more like it.’

  ‘How very odd.’

  ‘Not really. They run this place like bloody Catterick. I mean, the nurses … Nurses they call ’em. NCOs to a man.’

  ‘You had a Turkish Army guard last time I saw you.’

  ‘So I did.’

  ‘I expect you’re better off here. But you’ll be wanting to get out of it all the same.’

  ‘That I am, sorr.’

  Dobie was looking guardedly round him as he spoke, not, it seemed, finding his immediate surroundings altogether reassuring. ‘Is it all right to talk here?’ Though what he saw was a large and quite pleasantly appointed recreation room with oak-panelled walls upon which hung a number of tasteful nineteenth-century water-colours depicting benevolent aspects of the local scenery. These were without exception being studiously ignored by the room’s inhabitants as was, for that matter, Dobie himself.

  ‘Talk, walk, do anything you like between the hours of six and nine. Anything, that is, that meets with the approval of the powers that be. As the weather’s somewhat unseasonable this evening—’

  ‘I meant talk in here. As opposed to somewhere a bit more private.’

  ‘Privacy …? Now, that’s a little difficult to achieve. With television monitors everywhere and Big Brother forever on his guard. Now you mention it, I believe there is a Visitors’ Room … but I haven’t had many visitors. In fact, you’re the first. Charlie Chan here doesn’t get many, either. Right, Charlie?’

  Charlie, hearing his name mentioned, nodded emphatically without raising his eyes from the newspaper on the table and while still chewing meditatively on the end of his ballpoint. ‘Right. Lots and lots.’

  ‘Gets a bit inscrutable at times, does Charlie.’

  ‘I see,’ Dobie said.

  ‘Horse doesn’t get many, either. That big old lad asleep over in the corner … Horse, well, it’s really Crazy Horse but people don’t call him that, not to his face. Last chap to do it’s still being scraped off a wall and that’s why Harry’s here. No, not many of us are receiving visitors, now I think about it.’

  ‘Unlikely reaction of train-spotter to twenty-four across. Eleven letters, haven’t got any of them.’

  ‘What’s twenty-four across then?’

  ‘Haven’t got that either.’

  ‘… Doesn’t get many visitors, Charlie doesn’t.’

  ‘Well,’ Dobie said, a little desperately, ‘how are you feeling?’

  ‘Great. It’s a great life. An elegant sufficiency,’ Seymour said, ‘content, retirement, rural quiet, friendship, books … The eighteenth-century ideal, in fact. All our modest needs are catered for. Except booze and birds, of course, which anyway Thomson neglected to mention.’

  Thomson …? One of the doctors here, perhaps. ‘But this isn’t the eighteenth century.’

  ‘You put your finger on the spot, Professor. Friendship’s at a discount these days, and maybe it’s just as well.’ Seymour stared disparagingly towards the giggling group at the far end of the room. ‘Idle shallow things, for the most part. I am not of their element. But it’s better here than at Everdene, anyway, where I was before. They make you do deep-breathing exercises there. And then they put you in a dark room and tell you to look at a candle.’

  ‘How,’ Dobie asked, ‘can you see the candle if the room’s dark?’

  ‘The candle’s lighted, of course.’

  ‘But then the room isn’t dark.’

  Sharp as a nail this evening, was Professor Dobie.

  ‘Be that as it may,’ Seymour said, breathing deeply through his nose, ‘it may be a useful exercise for Sufi mystics but it wasn’t my kind of scene. I believe it’s supposed to test your susceptibility to hypnosis but I’m not into that kick, either. Self-hypnosis, who needs it?’

  ‘I thought you had to lie on a couch and talk about this and that. But I’m not very—’

  ‘Oh, we do that here all right. And they give us hypnotherapy, if it comes to that, and do things with coloured lights – they could run a pretty good disco with the equipment they’ve got. But most of the time they leave you alone in your room to do your thing and that’s OK,’ Seymour said, ‘because it’s coming back.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The rise, the roll, the carol, the creation.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I’m writing another book. Started one, anyway.’

  In fact he did look a great deal healthier than he had in Cyprus some six months ago. Paler, of course, but fuller in the face than before and the ragged beard he had then affected was now neatly trimmed. No, he looked surprisingly fit, this in contradistinction to most of the other young people in the room who seemed, frankly, to be a weedy lot, with the possible exception of the fellow with the wavy blond hair who sat smoking over by the curtained window and who looked as though he might at any moment be going to bite his cigarette holder right through. He, and of course the formidable Mr Horse peacefully slumbering in the far corner.

  ‘What sort of a book?’

  ‘A novel.’

  ‘Oh.’

  A silly question, in that Dobie already knew Seymour to be a novelist and allegedly one of some promise – indeed he had actually read one of Seymour’s fictional effusions, a minor opus entitled The Mask of Zeus, and had, he had subsequently decided, never before encountered such unadulterated guff. He quite saw, however, that it wouldn’t do to say so.

  ‘And,’ Seymour said, ‘I keep a journal. Notes from Underground. Seymour in Loonyland. It may be of interest in later years, to me if to no one else.’

  ‘Well, I expect you’ll have met some, er … interesting characters in here.’

  ‘Not really. Just a crowd of teenage junkies, if you want to know the truth. With a few long-term nutters they couldn’t find room for anywhere else.’

  ‘You mean like Crazy—’

  ‘Don’t say it.’

  ‘But he’s fast asleep …’

  ‘Maybe he is and maybe he isn’t. You never can tell with these screwballs.’

  ‘So what’s it about?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The book.’

  ‘Oh, the book … Well, to begin with it was about the dream but now it’s about something else.’

  After a while Dobie said, ‘What dream?’ having in the interim taken off his glasses, polished them, and put them on again.

&nbs
p; ‘I’m pretty sure it has to be a dream. Everybody tells me that it must be. But … the trouble is I’ve almost lost it. So I just can’t be sure.’

  ‘You know,’ Dobie said, ‘I had a remarkable dream myself the other night in which I imagined I was lecturing to a group of my students about a dream I’d had the night before … only to find that I couldn’t remember it … and the peculiar thing is, that’s exactly what happened in the dream as well. Most extraordinary.’

  After a considerably longer pause Seymour said, ‘No, it wasn’t that sort of a dream at all.’

  ‘What wasn’t?’

  ‘My dream.’

  ‘Ah. Well, there you are, then.’

  ‘It’s a something wrong somewhere sort of a dream, you know what I mean?’

  ‘Like, you’re looking for something only you can’t find it and you don’t know what it is anyway?’ Kate had once narrated to him a dream of this kind, though this was also in fact a fairly accurate description of Dobie’s attempts at mathematical investigation. ‘A friend of mine who once had roast pork for dinner—’

  ‘There are dead bodies,’ Seymour said. ‘Everywhere.’

  ‘Bodies?’

  ‘Skeletons. Deep underground somewhere. And two of them are, you know, making love to each other and when the man looks up at me, it’s me. And the woman’s my wife. But when we speak, when they speak, I can’t understand what they’re saying. It doesn’t sound very frightening. But it is.’

  Dead bodies are frightening, Dobie thought. Though it’s hard to say why.

  ‘Did you have this dream when you were in Cyprus?’

  ‘It is a dream?’

  ‘You said it was. I don’t see how it could be anything else, the way you tell it.’

  ‘Well, that’s right. Exactly. And yet … I don’t remember ever having actually had the dream. But I must have. Else, how would I remember it at all?’

  ‘Perhaps you should tell the shrinks … the doctors here about it. That’s if it worries you.’

  ‘Oh, I have. That’s how we spend the time here, didn’t you know …? Thinking of things like that to tell the doctors about. I only just got through a session with Popeye, Dr Carter … He’s all right but he doesn’t … And the trouble is I’m starting to remember it differently. Like it wasn’t Derya in the dream at all but somebody else.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know. Some girl or other I’ve never seen before, or not to my knowledge. It’s ridiculous. But her hair’s all wet like Derya’s was … and she has these big staring eyes … There wasn’t anyone like that in Cyprus that I can recall.’

  Dobie’s mildly interested expression didn’t change. ‘Then maybe it’s someone you’ve seen here.’

  ‘If so,’ Seymour said, ‘it’s a something wrong here sort of dream and … Well, I’ll be getting out of this place pretty soon and it’s maybe just as well.’

  He hoped so, anyway.

  The typewriter was a few years old but in good working order. He slid a sheet of paper into the roller and, after the usual moment’s pause for thought, began to type.

  Saturday March 24th

  D. duly appeared this evening, thereby rather confounding me. He didn’t seem to be at all as I remembered him, though perhaps that isn’t surprising. My memories of those last weeks in Cyprus are really very hazy. Unconscious suppression, Popeye claims. There may be something in it. If so, they can stay suppressed as far as I’m concerned. Sometimes I wonder if I wouldn’t go back there one day, or to some other unsuspected isle in far-off seas … But these are thoughts that have to occur to everyone at the fag-end of a long Welsh winter. The weather today was quite appalling; windy dark cold wet, the lot. I didn’t venture out at all and I don’t think anyone did. I may have eaten of the insane root that takes the reason prisoner but I know what I don’t like and sheets of freezing rain come high on the agenda.

  But I do remember thinking of myself (overdramatically) in those days as living in a cage. A caged tiger. Now I really am in a cage I feel a good deal better, which is ironical. Or if not better, different. A tamed and shabby tiger, like all the others. I don’t know if Professor D. can really do anything much to get me out of here – he really gave the impression of being more at home in this place than any of us, which again is ironical. I don’t even know why he should want to help, unless it’s because of Derya. Perhaps when I am out of here I’ll be able to think about these things more clearly. Right now I don’t choose to.

  Change of subject.

  A new neighbour for me today, as well as a visitor. The new boy got here this morning and they put him next door. Charlie’s been moved further down the passageway. Only a glimpse of him so far but he’s nearer my age than most of the others – maybe a bit older. A bad sign, I suppose, when you start assessing people in terms of their age-groups – it shows how difficult it is to communicate with anyone here. In fact the older ones are the worst, in terms of unpredictability – Horse, for example. The new one’s a big guy, too, so they may be keeping a careful eye on him at the start.

  He could be a real nutter, I suppose, like Chickenfeed was – I wouldn’t care to have a next-door neighbour going round the place wringing the necks of imaginary chickens all the time. Perish the thought. ‘Interesting people,’ D. said. Well, that’s one way of looking at it. All these little guys who’re running scared here, they may be paranoiac or have persecution complexes like the quacks say but in point of fact they’ve got good reason to be scared. That fellow who thought he was Jack the Ripper was well before my time here, but they still tell stories about him. As far as I know he never actually did any harm to anyone but that’s not the point. He thought that he had and that’s enough. My own imaginings are weird enough, or D. seemed to think so, but they’re not of that kind, not really.

  Before my time … I’m starting to use expressions like that quite naturally. It is like a boarding-school of the fiercer kind – Tom Brown’s Rugby maybe – complete with bullies and cheats and beastly swots and sporting bloods oozing repressed homosexuality, not of course very notably repressed in some cases … I’m Billy Bunter, of course, the fat Owl of the Remove, and they can’t remove me quick enough as far as I’m concerned. Then I’ll be an OB of the Rehabilitation Centre and I’ll go to the annual reunions at Colney Hatch. Ladies and gentlemen … Her Majesty the Queen … Our former gracious hostess … And I’ll invite Professor D. as Guest of Honour. Yes, that’ll be something for me to look forward to …

  These things always happened on a Saturday evening and of course it was Jacko who’d dipped stinking again. He absolutely loathed hit-and-runs and indeed all other forms of what he privately characterized as PPD (Piss-Poor Driving); this was partly because he couldn’t remember the last time he’d got a conviction on a hit-and-run charge and doubted, moreover, whether he ever would until he found himself testifying before a jury composed entirely of confirmed pedestrians – a highly unlikely contingency in the civilized Britain of today. Being as cautious a driver as any other CID Detective Inspector standing in mortal fear of the uniformed branch, it had taken him the best part of forty minutes to get from the shop to the Rehabilitation Centre and, although he knew the location perfectly well, he had come within an ace of doing a Dobie and driving past it; if ever there was an evening when a spot of PPD might be excused, surely this was the one. But then he hadn’t come here to find excuses for anyone. Far from it.

  Jackson didn’t look very much like a policeman. He looked like the man who comes round to fix the telly, and that was rather how he felt about the job these days. You unscrewed the panel, you took a bit of a shufti, you connected various loose wires, and then you went home to a nice cuppa tea. But in fact he was quite an old-fashioned cop with an old-fashioned black notebook in which he had recorded the essential facts of the case, as presented to him by Dr Mighell and Dr Coyle. Being an old-fashioned cop, he of course always called Kate ‘Dr Coyle’ in the presence of other parties, although he knew her very well an
d had in fact almost certainly saved her life a few months ago, in the course of an investigation to which nowadays neither of them ever referred. In his old-fashioned notebook he had duly recorded the name of the deceased BEVERLY SUTRO, Dr Mighell’s name and address, and the address of deceased’s last known residence DAME MARGARET SCHOOL FOR GIRLS nr TONGWYNLAIS as supplied by his informant MISS ELSPETH MIGHELL (14).

  His informant had also supplied him and Dr Coyle with the anticipated nice cuppa tea and they now sat together in the kitchen drinking it while Dr Coyle supplied him with further information on a more confidential and semi-informal basis; Detective Sergeant Box, who might otherwise also have been there, had nipped off smartly to inform the Headmistress, a MISS MIDWINTER, that one of her pupils the aforementioned BEVERLEY SUTRO might now be crossed off the list of potential A-level candidates – this in accordance with the broadly humanitarian policing policies emphasized by Jackson’s superior officer, DETECTIVE SUPERINTENDENT PONTIN, whose name Jackson however hadn’t entered in his notebook because it hadn’t occurred to him to do so.