The Strange Attractor (5 page)

“You were at the inquest.”

“Yes,” Dobie said. “I was.”

“Who are you?”

Her own approach seemed to be pleasingly direct. “My name’s Dobie. John Dobie. May I… ?”

“Why not?”

Thus encouraged, Dobie seated himself beside her. “He was one of my students.”

“Oh. I see.”

“Until last year.”

“I’m afraid I don’t remember your name.”

“It’s Dobie.”

“My memory’s bad but it’s not
that
bad. I meant, I don’t remember his ever mentioning it.”

“No special reason why he should have done.” At close range, her voice lost its finishing-school tone, seemed huskier and much less self-assured. It sounded better that way. There was even the faintest trace of a Kaird’f accent somewhere underneath. “He only came to my lectures. That was all.”

“I suppose you’re used to speaking to lots of people. You don’t get nervous or anything. Me, I’m petrified.”

“So am I, sometimes. Though it’s usually all right once you get started. And you did very well, I thought. It wasn’t such a very big audience but it’s never easy.”

“It was kind of you to come.
My
name’s Kate Coyle.”

“I know. Are you really what he said? A police pathologist?”

“I’m a part-time police pathologist. I do night duty and I stand in for Paddy Oates when he’s away. Because I need the money. Why do you ask?”

“I just wondered… Well, if there was anything…?”

“I didn’t do the autopsy. But no, there wasn’t anything that would explain it.”

“No medical reason for it?”

“Or any other that I can see.”

She looked different, too, squinting sideways into the bright sunlight. Already it had brought a faint flush to her otherwise rather pallid cheeks. She looked a great deal younger than in the courtroom, more like her true age which Dobie guessed to be somewhere in the middle thirties. Yet still somehow a little worn round the edges. An interesting face, when you looked at it closely.

“I don’t think the coroner felt that I did very well. He got quite narky about that bloody gun. Said I should have reported it. The trouble is, he’s right. I should have.”

“But otherwise, you’re satisfied with the verdict?”

“It seems an odd word to use. But he shot himself all right. Was he a… a particularly
bright
student? Or something?”

“He was, yes. And yet,” Dobie said, “for the last five days I’ve been trying to remember what he looked like. And I can’t.”

“What he
looked
like?… Dark-haired. Scruffy. Pathetic.”

“That describes ninety per cent of them. You know, I get to see an awful lot of students, but I hardly ever get to
know
them.”

“Well, I understand that,” Kate said. “But then why are you…?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps I feel a little guilty about it. I feel I should be able to remember him.”

“Here.” She opened her handbag. “See if this helps.”

Dobie took the photograph. It was passport sized and murky in colour, having clearly been taken on one of those do-it-yourself machines, but the facial outlines were clear enough and his recollection was instant. Fidgety Phil. The one whose hands were always moving, playing with a slide-rule, toying with a pencil, riffling a notepad. Front row, right-hand desk. Eyes always moving, too, slithering this way and that. A nervous lad. “So
that’s
Cantwell.”

“Remember him now?”

“Yes.” He gave her back the photograph. “I’m all right with names, you know. And faces, most of the time. It’s putting the two together that I find tricky.”

“It’s like that with lots of people.”

“I think,” Dobie said, rather to his own surprise, “my wife’s having an affair.”

Dr Coyle, on the other hand, evinced no surprise at all. “And I suppose you feel guilty about that, too.”

“Yes, I do. I always thought it would be the other way round. But it isn’t.”

“Women don’t feel guilty about that sort of thing. Not as a rule.”

“Don’t they?”

“We usually rationalise it, somehow. While men tend more to look for some kind of distraction to take their minds off the problem. The usual kind of distraction is another woman. And so it goes on. Ad infinitum.”

“Big fleas and little fleas.”

“Exactly.” Kate studied the distant woods on the hill that lifted itself across the horizon way towards Caerphilly.

“Sammy’s a
very
little flea, though, isn’t he? Not much of a distraction, really.”

“There’s a problem, all the same. A kind of counter-problem.”

“Not a very interesting one. I don’t know why he did it, but if I
did
know it wouldn’t bring him back. Nothing can do that.”

She had lowered her head again and appeared to be studying the shape of her hands, which again lay folded upon her dark-skirted lap. Small pale hands with neat blunt fingernails.
She
was anything but fidgety. And yet, Dobie thought, that outward relaxation, here as in the courtroom, somehow conveyed the sense of some deeper inward tension. He said, “Do people often talk to you like this?”

“Of course they talk to me. I’m a doctor.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Kate, who knew that it wasn’t, nodded and said, “Yes, they do. All the time.”

“People used to talk to
me
a lot. I got very tired of it, of listening to problems and so forth. So in the end I sort of shut myself off. It isn’t hard to do. In fact it’s easy.”

“I know.”

“But don’t
you
do that,” Dobie said.

He saw that she was crying. Female tears invariably embarrassed him, but not on this occasion; it was obvious that she had something to cry
about
and that these indeed were not female tears but the true
lacrimae rerum
, a celebration of that great star-laden sadness that sometimes moved behind mathematical symbols as he manoeuvred them across the emptiness of a paper page. Of course he got tired of it. Anyone would. But it was a celebration for all that. He felt in his pocket and discovered there a large white cotton handkerchief, which Kate accepted.

“Can we maybe talk more later? About Sammy?”

“It won’t help,” Kate said indistinctly.

“Not him, no. But it might help
me
.”

He got up and walked away down the dusty path. Kate, inaudibly sniffling, watched him go. After a while she put the handkerchief, not very noticeably dampened, into her handbag. She felt a little better now, she thought.

More relaxed.

The telephone was ringing as Dobie entered his flat. Nobody, as was evident, was there to answer it. Only us chickens. He bolted into the sitting-room and grabbed the receiver.

“Yes?… Yes… Oh hullo, Jane.”

No hurry after all. He pulled up a chair and sat down on it, panting slightly. “Look, I’ve just this moment got back myself, I don’t think she’s in.”

“You I’d like to speak to.”

“What?”

“I
said
, it’s
you
I wanted to speak to.” Jane had the habit, when speaking to him over the telephone, of enunciating with exceptional clarity and in tones one might normally use when addressing foreigners, total imbeciles or golden retrievers. And not only over the telephone, either. This always made Dobie feel and even speak (when an occasion arose) like Bertie Wooster. “Oh, right-ho,” he said.

“Are you there?” the voice said suspiciously. Are you
all
there, was what its tone implied.

“I think so. I mean yes, I am. Definitely. Cogito ergo sum.”

“I’m glad to find you in such high spirits. In fact I’m glad to find you at all. I’ve been trying to get through to you most of the day. I want to have a little
chat
with you, John. Privately.”

“Oh, right. Fire away.”

“No, not over the telephone
if
you don’t mind.” No one but a congenital idiot would have conceived of such a plan, as was now obvious. “Are you free tomorrow evening?”

“Well, I’m rather bogged down this week,” Dobie said. “Exam papers and such. And Jenny’s off to Paris day after tomorrow, did she tell you?… Oh. She did. What about Friday? I finish work on Friday. What about Friday evening, say around—”

“Let’s say at exactly eight o’clock.”

“Fine.” Dobie took out his pocket diary and scribbled in it furiously.

“Now you won’t just
forget
about it, John? I know when you’re busy you often tend—”

“No, no, I’ve written it down, look forward to it.”

“Bye then.” The phone clicked in his ear. Dobie, perceiving that in his haste he had made the appropriate entry for eight a.m. on the Thursday morning, drew a little arrow to rectify the error and put his diary away in his coat pocket.

It was odd about Jane. Certainly there was nothing remotely Aunt Agatha-like in her appearance, which was that of a tall well-manicured fluffy blonde well preserved for her age which had to be about the same as Dobie’s. Which was forty-eight. All the same. Jenny was right. She was bossy. An eye like Ma’s, as Bertie would have put it, to threaten and command. And since she was, in point of concrete fact, Wendy’s Ma, no doubt Wendy felt the same way about it. In view of this general agreement, then, it was odd that Jenny should have taken to her quite so strongly. Perhaps Jane supplied a certain element that was lacking in her married life. Dobie wasn’t bossy. Certainly not.

Ineffectual, more like it. Maybe
that
was why she’d got the blonde wig. In imitation, conscious or otherwise, of Jane. Well, you had to admit Jane’s turn-out was always impeccable. As befitted a very rich man’s consort. If it was elegance you were after. Jenny couldn’t really compete. Which mightn’t stop her from trying, all the same.

Nothing you can do to help, Kate Coyle had said. But that hadn’t stopped him from trying, either. Ineffectually, of course. At the police station, where he’d stopped on the way back home, the fuzz had barely given him the time of day. What had been the big copper’s name? I’m all right with names, Dobie thought. Most of the time. Superintendent…

Pontin.

That was it.

“… I’m not
questioning
the cause of death,” Dobie had said plaintively. “What I want to know is why he did it.”

“Why he did what?”

“Killed himself.”

“Oh, he’ll have had his reasons,” Pontin said.

“Yes, but what
are
they? Nobody seems to have come up with anything. And it seems there wasn’t any letter or anything like that. Suicides usually leave letters, don’t they? – or
some
kind of indication why they—”

“Offhand, sir, I can’t give you the exact statistics, but I’m pretty sure some bloke or other will have worked them out by now. Fed ’em into a computer, like as not. That’s what happens to everything these days, far as I can see. I don’t believe too much in all that stuff meself. It’s still the old-fashioned bobby on the beat who brings the villains in, don’t you be in any two minds on
that
score, Mr Robey. They may have all them machines an’ stuff up at the Yard—”

“Then why do
you
think he did it?”

“Now look, sir, I’m just a policeman. A public servant. I can’t afford to spend much of my time in
thinking
. In fact that’s part of the trouble, if you ask me. These kids who go to the colleges, they’re highly strung. Intellectual, you know what I mean? Could be he didn’t have any reason at all that you or I would recognise. Just sits there thinking to himself and then he ups and does it. It’s all got to do with the strain of modern life.”

“You could have something there,” Dobie said.

Looking down at the notepad upon which he had been doodling, he saw that he had covered the page with squiggly representations of the Eiffel Tower. Curious, that.

There was a strong wind blowing at the airport and Dobie stood on the waving base with his shoulders hunched and his hands driven deep into his pockets, watching Jenny walk briskly with the other passengers towards the waiting 727. When she turned to look back he waved, since that’s what waving bases are for, and she raised the hand that wasn’t carrying her holdall and then walked on. Back on Saturday. That’s if I don’t get held up.