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

  Now that he and Dr Coyle were alone in the kitchen, Jackson felt able to offer, on a confidential and semi-informal basis, his considered opinion of the case as so far outlined. ‘Bit of a balls-up, this, if you ask me.’

  ‘Aren’t they all?’

  ‘Yes, but I mean … A bit of a sod. How old do you reckon this kid was?’

  ‘Seventeen. Eighteen.’

  ‘All right. Better give me the rest of the medical. What you’ve got.’

  ‘She died soon after we got here. Time of death, six ten p.m.’

  ‘Cause?’

  ‘Fractured skull with serious internal haemorrhage. Impending hypothermia a contributory factor.’

  Jackson didn’t even try to write that down. ‘Not that cold, is it?’

  ‘It is if you’re lying out there in the rain with next to nothing on.’

  ‘How long a time?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’d say at least twenty minutes.’

  Outside the house the ambulance had just started up. It was a sound that they’d both heard many times before, but all the same neither of them spoke for a few moments. Jackson sipped at his tea mug and Kate rested her clasped hands on the surface of the kitchen table and then unclasped them again. They were both thinking the same thing.

  ‘So the accident took place at some time before ten to six, on your reckoning. Not a hell of a lot of traffic goes down this road, you know. I’d say for once we’ve got a fair old chance of nabbing the bugger.’

  ‘If there was an accident, yes.’

  Jackson looked up from his notebook, pencil still raised. ‘You’re not suggesting someone ran over the kid on purpose?’ The noise of the motor outside rose and then faded as the ambulance drove slowly away.

  ‘Look,’ Kate said. ‘I’m puzzled. Paddy’ll do the PM for you tomorrow and that’ll maybe clarify the picture. Meantime I ought to stick to the obvious medical facts. There’s a fractured skull, like I said, and a compound fracture of the right forearm and there’s a whole list of minor injuries and contusions that aren’t in any way consistent with her having been hit by a motor-car and which therefore we have to attribute to some other cause, right …? And my provisional conclusion is that the girl was beaten up. Or else got herself into some kind of a fight. Dr Mighell agrees. In fact he’ll go a stage further. He thinks she was raped.’

  ‘But you don’t?’

  ‘I think it very likely, too, but I wouldn’t commit myself on that until Paddy finds some harder evidence of it than what we’ve got. You’ll want to get the clothes she was wearing off to the Heath, of course, but … some of the normal items appear to be missing. No panties. No underclothes of any kind. No stockings. And of course only the one shoe, though we found the other lying on the road … as I told you …’

  ‘What had she got on under that anorak thing?’

  ‘White cotton blouse. Short blue skirt. Nothing else.’

  ‘The tabloids’ll like it,’ Jackson said. ‘But I don’t.’

  ‘I don’t, either, but I wouldn’t call it evidence of rape. There’s some very characteristic bruising but you sometimes get that in normal intercourse, and whatever happened, if it happened, it wasn’t her first sexual experience. In any case, the cause of death was that blow to the head and that wasn’t done in a fit of over-enthusiasm, you can take that as read.’

  ‘Hard blunt object?’

  ‘A hard blunt-edged object, yes.’

  ‘A brick, maybe? Or a rock by the side of the road? Something like that?’

  ‘Or the edge of a wall. Only there wasn’t one. Not where she was lying.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jackson said, putting away his notebook. ‘That’s going to be a problem – finding the exact spot … Of course you did the right thing, picking her up, but on a night like this—’

  ‘Do us a favour, Jacko. I left a marker.’

  ‘You did?’ Jackson was delighted. ‘Good on yer. We won’t be able to do much more than rope it off tonight but the scene-of-crime boys will be there first thing tomorrow morning, don’t you worry. You didn’t notice any skid marks on the road, I don’t suppose?’

  ‘Cars don’t leave tyre tracks in puddles. The road was damned nearly under water.’

  ‘So all you noticed at first was that shoe?’

  ‘At the side of the road, yes. In fact I didn’t see it. Dobie did.’

  Jackson’s expression became somewhat apprehensive. ‘Yes. Where is Mr Dobie?’

  ‘Over at the Director’s place, wherever that is. He had an appointment with the Director this evening – that’s why we’re here. We can go round and pick him up if you want to have a word with him, but frankly I don’t think—’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Jackson said, and sighed heavily. ‘Yes, better leave him out of it as long as we can. I know he means well, but the Super still froths at the mouth whenever he hears Mr Dobie’s name mentioned. Which isn’t often. We make sure of that.’

  He finished off the remains of his cuppa, his expression clearing slightly. After all, Kate was right. There wasn’t any reason for Dobie to be involved in this one, not that he could see, and every policeman learns to count his blessings, such as they are. Yes, stay out of this, Dobie, Jackson said to himself. Stay out of it and Make My Day.

  ‘The point is that when the reports come in … you may find that this is a nasty one.’

  ‘Know what I’m thinking?’ Jackson pushed his empty cup away and leaned an elbow confidentially on the table. ‘Maybe not a hit-and-run at all. Maybe one of those back-of-the-car snogs that goes wrong. Badly wrong. So Charley just shoves her out of the car door and drives off. He’d have to have lost his chump completely but it’s been known to happen. Four years ago out at Newnham, to give you an instance.’

  ‘But the girl wasn’t dead.’

  ‘He might have thought she was. If he panicked.’

  ‘But she wouldn’t have got herself bruised all over like that in the back of a car. A car with seat cushions, anyway. That’s not a medical opinion. That’s my personal experience.’

  ‘And in any case, only a hypotenuse.’

  ‘Some pretty acute angles are involved, certainly.’

  ‘Have to come up with facts, Kate, not fragments of your imagination. Still less with trips down Memory Lane of however flagrant recall.’

  ‘Fragrant.’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  All the time the rain was whispering at the windows, running down from the roof gutters; as yet, no sign of a let-up. Against that sound, the louder grumble and creak of another car coming to a halt outside. Jackson went over to the window and drew back the curtain. ‘Foxy’s back. Couldn’t have had too far to go.’

  ‘Elspeth says the school’s only half a mile up the road.’

  ‘Well, there you go.’ Jackson was buttoning his raincoat, his shoulders hunched a little in anticipation of the coming drenching. ‘Could only happen in this country, of course.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Putting a posh girls’ school right next door to a remand home full of junkies and juvenile delinquents. Some kind of a genius for organization, that took.’

  ‘I know which of the two I’d rather be in,’ Kate said, ‘if my school was anything to go by.’

  ‘Best days of your life. Not for her they weren’t.’ Jackson turned round sombrely. ‘We’ll go and pick up your Mr Dobie and then we’ll take a look-see where she ended up.’

  No way Dobie was going to take a look-see.

  From his damp roosting-perch on the passenger seat he watched the dark raincoated figures sploshing up and down the side of the road, shadows leaping across the ground in the light of their waving torches. The squad car had been drawn up some little way ahead and from its roof a sharper, more powerful beam of light was directed downwards towards the neatly roped-off area where the formulaic printed sign said:

  POLICE

  SCENE OF ACCIDENT

  – swinging to and fro in the gusty wind. The rain was coming down as
hard as ever but the clouds to the south and east seemed to have lifted a little; peering through the closed and spattered side-window, Dobie could make out the distant lights of the M4 motorway and beyond them the paler glow emanating from good old Tin City, Cardiff itself. Leaning back then and pressing the back of his unfractured cranium against the head-rest, he thought of the sparkling lights of Iskele seen in the afterglow of a Mediterranean twilight against the crouching outline of the Karpaz mountains, only a little brighter than the millionfold sparkle of the stars in the darkening sky beyond; he sighed to himself, as Jackson had done. Cyprus hadn’t been all bad, by any means.

  Kate, sitting beside him, wasn’t saying anything. She was watching the activities of Jackson and the other two officers, holding in her hands the sodden handkerchief that, knotted round a stone, she had left as a marker for them and now and again twisting it between her fingers as though to wring the water from it. Something was up, Dobie thought. Something wrong here, too. But she wasn’t saying anything and he thought it best for the time being to respect her silence. In the end, sure enough, it was Kate who broke it. Casually enough.

  ‘Did you get to see your friend?’

  ‘Yes. But he’s not a friend, exactly. Just someone who … you know about all that.’

  ‘So how’s he doing?’

  ‘Well, it seems they’re proposing to release him. Actually, the place isn’t at all what I’d expected. Everyone there seemed perfectly normal to me.’

  ‘Well, they would, wouldn’t they …? But what did this Train character want, exactly?’

  ‘He wants me to recommend Seymour for some kind of a teaching job. So that he can get shot of him, I suppose.’

  ‘And will you?’

  ‘I don’t see why not. But I have to see one of the other shrinks there first. To discuss Seymour’s case history, as they call it.’

  ‘Mighell?’

  ‘No. Not Mighell. Why?’

  ‘Didn’t strike me as a man of biting intellect. That’s all.’

  ‘Oh. He’s having an affair with this chap Train’s wife, according to Elspeth.’

  ‘Very likely. It’s a favourite occupation with psychiatrists. Screwing each other’s wives and then psychoanalysing themselves to find out how they feel about it. Research activity, they call it.’

  ‘What do they feel about it?’

  ‘They usually feel they haven’t yet collected enough material so they have to try it again with someone else’s. What’s with this Train geezer then?’

  ‘He isn’t a man of biting intellect, either. But his wife’s a bit of a hum— a strikingly attractive woman. If,’ Dobie added hurriedly, ‘you like the type.’

  ‘Not altogether a wasted evening, then.’

  ‘Not altogether, no, I wouldn’t say that.’

  ‘H’mmmmmm,’ Kate said.

  At which juncture, perhaps opportunely, Jackson’s face appeared at the driver’s window, which Kate wound down.

  ‘Won’t be needing you any more, Dr Coyle, so there’s no point in keeping you hanging around. In fact we’ll try not to trouble you again until the inquest.’ A sizeable dollop of rainwater decanted itself from the car roof and landed splashily at the back of his neck. ‘Lumme, what a night,’ Jackson said.

  ‘Have you found anything?’

  ‘Hell, no. Nothing here but mud. We’ll have to take another look come daylight.’

  ‘Policeman’s lot,’ Kate said, rather more cheerfully than might have been expected. When, after all, one has got wet oneself, some satisfaction is to be derived from the prospect of other people getting a great deal wetter, especially when a steaming hot bath awaits one at home. Though Dobie would be needing one, too. He didn’t seem to have realized yet that he had his backside parked in the middle of a puddle … Yes, how had all that water got on to the passenger seat, anyway?

  When they got back to Ludlow Road they took a hot bath together, in order to save hot water, and subsequently went to bed (Kate’s bed). After this equivalent of a Special Birthday Treat Dobie should have gone to sleep like a lamb, but he didn’t. Kate knew why not.

  ‘Want to take a pill, Dobie?’

  ‘Good Lord, I thought you’d taken it.’

  ‘Not that one, you fool.’

  ‘Oh,’ Dobie said. ‘Am I being restive again?’

  ‘Yes, and for the wrong reasons.’ Kate switched on the bedside lamp and stared at him somewhat grumpily. She couldn’t help but feel that Dobie’s inability to relapse into post-coital coma reflected somewhat adversely upon her own recent spirited performance or, to be exact, performances. Though on the other hand … ‘Dobie, it’s what I do, you may think it an unsuitable job for a woman but that’s not my fault.’

  ‘I don’t think that for a moment.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘She wasn’t hit by a car, though. Was she?’

  After a pause, during which Kate fumbled for a cigarette and lit it …

  ‘No, probably not,’ Kate said.

  ‘But she was hit by somebody.’

  ‘Yes. It could still have been an accident, though. In the sense that maybe no one meant it to happen. She could have hit her head against the side of a wall or the edge of a table, that sort of injury’s …’ She stopped. No, this wasn’t a good idea. ‘Look, I gave the kid a once-over because I was there but it’s Paddy’s pigeon now and Jacko’s, there’s nothing in it for me any more and God knows there’s nothing in it for you. You want to know what I think …? I think she had a spat with the boyfriend and he got a bit too rough with her. Maybe she’d let him go ahead a few times before but today for some reason she wouldn’t and this other kid got over-excited and went ahead anyway and while she was thrashing about … that happened somehow … And so within a couple of days or so Jacko’s going to pull in some shit-scared little yobbo and send him down for a stretch because that’s what he does for a living, like he’s a cop, but it’s not my sort of scene and it’s not yours, either, so … stop thinking about it, will you, Dobie? If you’d be so kind …’

  It wasn’t like Kate to get so worked up and Dobie was a little puzzled by her vehemence. ‘Well, I’ll try. It’s just that she looked …’

  ‘I know how she looked. I may be a doctor but that doesn’t mean I haven’t got any human feelings.’

  ‘Indeed no,’ Dobie said.

  Kate smoked most of the rest of her cigarette and then said, ‘What made you think she hadn’t been hit by a car? It looked that way to me. At first.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Dobie said. ‘There just seemed to be something wrong. Somewhere.’

  3

  By the morning it had rained itself out and although the sky was laden with fast-scudding clouds, these parted every so often to let a weak and wintry sunlight filter through. Dobie, having golloped down a nourishing breakfast, put on his raincoat (well, not his raincoat, in fact, but one that he had mistakenly acquired when leaving a late-night party at the house of a friend of his – now an ex-friend, in all probability, although, as Dobie pointed out to Kate, the raincoat fitted him perfectly well, at least when left unbuttoned, and certainly no worse than Colombo’s), and climbed into his battered blue Fiesta (which really was his own, it having been some time since Dobie had driven home in someone else’s car) and set off, waving nonchalantly, to keep (it was hoped) his appointment with Dr Carter. Kate had intended to spend a quiet Sunday morning answering some extremely important letters but the day (thanks to Dobie) had got off to such a parenthetical start that she found herself instead pottering about the house in an unusually aimless sort of way, doing things that needed to be done and thinking about this and that. She was telling herself severely that this wouldn't do when Jackson rang, providing yet another interruption, certainly, but a welcome one. And it wasn’t long before Jacko, never a cop to bush for very long about the beat, raised the matter of their mutual concern.

  ‘I don’t understand what it is about Mr Dobie. He just seems to have some sort of natural infinity
with the criminal mind.’

  ‘Bollocks, Jacko. He has nothing of the kind.’

  ‘Well, but take that other business. I know he says he worked it all out on his little computer but he’s the one who sets the computer, isn’t he? Or pogroms it or whatever it’s called.’

  This was undeniable. ‘I suppose that when he’s being a mathematician he inhabits a totally amoral universe, and on that occasion he turned out to be dealing with a totally amoral criminal. But not many criminals are like that. In other words, that time he fluked out. Chances are he never will again.’

  ‘Well, I dunno,’ Jackson said. ‘He could probably tell you exactly what the chances are, of that or of anything else. That’s the trouble.’

  ‘No. That’s not the trouble. The trouble is that people talk to him. They tell him things and they don’t even know they’re doing it. Because he’s such a dumb cluck on the face of it that … I mean, I find myself doing it, damn it. I wasn’t going to tell him a bloody thing about that girl and next thing you know there I am, spilling it out, and it’s all sheer speculation, I mean what do I know about it? He really is the most aggravating man.’

  ‘The Super would agree with you on that one,’ Jackson said. He produced a sinister rumbling sound from the inner depths of his stomach. This was not the product of indigestion. It was a laugh. The special one he used when he found himself having to work on Sunday mornings. Hollow, you might call it. Though Kate, in fact, ignored it.

  ‘But there again – he has a sweet nature, though you mightn’t think so. He’s kind and considerate. In fact he’s a kind, considerate psychopath and you’ve got to admit that’s rather unusual.’

  Jackson repeated the sound, occasioning a crackling sound in the telephone receiver. ‘We all know you’re keen on him, Kate, but what’s wrong with that? Why bring it all to me on a damp spring morning?’

  ‘Because I want you to keep him out of this business with the Sutro girl, if you possibly can. And anyway you raised the subject. I didn’t.’