by Desmond Cory
‘Dobie?’
‘Yes.’
‘Dobie’s wife?’
‘Yes. And that other one. Mrs Whatname.’
‘Oh, well. Why would he do that?’ An experienced academic, Traynor evaded the question with dexterity. ‘Nice little thing, I always thought.’
‘I’ve had the Chief Constable’s personal assurance that the police regard the case as closed. Both cases, that is. But that in itself is hardly … What I’d really like to know is how he did it.’
‘Me, too.’
‘Or more exactly how he managed to get away with it.’
‘Yes. But then there’s this opposing school of thought, as you might say, which holds that he was in fact responsible for bringing the murderer to book.’
‘But no one’s been brought to book that I’m aware of.’
‘Just so. Which adds fuel to the fire of those who maintain the contrary contention.’
‘Well,’ the Rector said, after a pause during which he regarded Traynor’s empty sherry glass with a certain suspicion. ‘Something’s got to be done, don’t you agree?’
Now that the matter had been democratically discussed and a safe return effected to square one, Traynor felt able to put forward a suggestion. Or more exactly, a proposition. ‘When all’s said and done, Dobie is a distinguished scholar. Probably the most distinguished scholar in the department. Whether he may or may not, as the case may be, have murdered his wife is, strictly from the academic viewpoint, irrelevant. He has, however, unquestionably been overworking.’
‘He has?’ The Rector was shocked. Such accusations had rarely been levelled against members of his academic staff.
‘No doubt about it.’
‘But this is still the summer vacation.’
‘That, in fact, is the period when most of the staff pursue their research interests, free from all unmannerly interruption by the student body.’
‘Yum,’ the Rector said. He might, he thought, be unwise to press the point further. ‘And what exactly is the nature of Dobie’s research?’
‘I understand him to be probing the ultimate secrets of the universe.’
‘Ah.’ The Rector sighed wistfully. ‘An intellectually taxing pursuit, I shouldn’t wonder. Possibly productive of brain fever and similar undesirable spin-offs.’
‘Indeed.’
‘Also of regrettable anti-social tendencies.’
‘Very probably.’
‘Perhaps we might offer him a sabbatical.’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘No. He wouldn’t accept it.’
‘Shit,’ the Rector remarked.
‘I was thinking rather in terms of a Visiting Professorship.’
‘You mean … somewhere outside the UK?’ The Rector brightened visibly. ‘Maybe Fiji? Kuala Lumpur? Ulan Bator?’
‘Let’s say somewhere sufficiently far removed from his present sphere of operations—’
‘Ah, but would any of those places be far enough?’
‘It’s debatable. But in any case, none of them represents an immediate possibility. Whereas Cyprus—’
‘Cyprus?’
‘North Cyprus, to be exact. My old friend Bernard Berry is at present heading the Department of Mathematics in the University of Salamis. And North Cyprus, I might point out incidentally, is a country which doesn’t exist.’
‘Doesn’t exist? My dear fellow—’
‘It has no official recognition and hence no diplomatic representation elsewhere. For the same reason, other countries have no embassies there, either. In such circumstances, Dobie can hardly prove to be a serious embarrassment to the Foreign Office or to anyone else. Nor could he be held responsible for starting up a war or an internal revolution, a possibility which would otherwise have to be very seriously borne in mind.’
The Rector picked up a pen and made quite a lengthy entry into his notebook. ‘And this friend of yours—’
‘Professor Berry has very recently contacted me and asked me to recommend an appointee for a Visiting Professorship of Mathematics and as a matter of extreme urgency. I’d be pleased, with your permission, to nominate Dobie for the post.’
‘That would really be an admirable solution to the problem. When you say urgent …?’
‘Immediately. Forthwith. I understand that the vacancy has arisen as a result of the previous incumbent’s sudden and unexpected demise.’
The Rector was now showing every sign of an unwonted enthusiasm for the project, as outlined. ‘Better and better. One might say ideal. No doubt there are any number of hideous and debilitating local diseases—’
‘Well, no. I think it’s a fairly healthy place, as far as that goes. Berry didn’t expound that point in any detail but I was led to believe the poor young lady met with some kind of violent death. A car accident, maybe … I’m not at all sure. Most unfortunate, if so, but it’s an ill wind—’
‘A lady, you say?’
‘Yes. A most promising—’
‘And a … violent death? T’ck t’ck t’ck. Still, it does seem to be the sort of place where Dobie should find himself in his element, so to speak. And you think the appointment is one that he might accept?’
‘I’ll certainly bring my powers of persuasion to bear. Such as they are.’
‘Then I’ve every confidence that we’ve found the solution to our little dilemma,’ the Rector said. ‘You’re a very persuasive fellow, Bill. Now I wonder if I can tempt you to a little more sherry?’
In fact the Rector, for once, wasn’t making a fuss about nothing or a mountain – to use one of his own preferred expressions – out of a molehill. Dobie was feeling pretty much under the weather these days. Traumatised, maybe.
He had his reasons.
Jenny’s death and its attendant unpleasant circumstances had naturally provoked in him a violent nervous reaction. At first this reaction had been conveniently dulled by shock and by his subsequent sustained efforts to unravel those unpleasant circumstances, or in other words to find out who had murdered her. Although this effort had in one sense been crowned with complete success it had also, from another viewpoint, to be seen as a failure, since Jenny’s murderer had never – as the Rector had rightly observed – been brought to book but had died instead of a broken neck, having been pitched full tilt down a steep staircase by (as the police maintained but couldn’t satisfactorily prove) Professor Dobie himself.
‘Letter for you, Dobie.’
‘Ugh,’ Dobie said.
Well, he was never at his best before breakfast.
The whole Strange Attractor affair had created a miasma of seething rumour which, in conjunction with the near-libellous outpourings of the tabloid press, had in turn converted Dobie into a semi-mythical figure around which the serried ranks of Rome and Tuscany (his supporters and detractors respectively) had engaged in furious, if exclusively verbal, combat. Dobie himself, meantime, instead of straddling the bridge Horatius-like and belligerently shaking the computer print-outs that only he could wield, had retired to a cosy cubby-hole provided by his good friend Kate Coyle where he had worked himself almost to a standstill checking out a series of programmed formulae originating from his American colleagues at MIT and from which, as Traynor had hinted, some kind of unified field theory might eventually be derived … maybe in ten or fifteen years’ time but not, as Dobie’s frenzied work-style appeared to indicate, within the ten-week space of a summer vacation.
If his colleagues were worried about him, so was Kate …
He opened the letter and read it while she was frying the eggs and bacon.
Dear Professor Dobie,
I am delighted to be able to offer you the post of Visiting Professor at the University of Salamis for the coming semester.
Your teaching abilities have been most warmly commended by my old friend and colleague Professor Traynor, but of course your work in the field of Gaussian paradox stands as a sufficient recommendation in itself. We would indeed be greatly hon
oured if you should agree to join us.
I may add that your skill as a supervisor has been also praised by your predecessor in the post, Mrs Derya Seymour (whom perhaps you will remember as Ms Derya Tüner).
Your teaching commitments here would not be particularly onerous. I would be most happy to have you conduct our fourth-year course in Finite Element Method, which will certainly pose no problems to you, and the relevant seminars and study groups. The medium of instruction here, of course, is English.
You will find details of salary, accommodation, etc., on the attached sheet furnished by the university administration. Please contact me directly if you require any further information. I hope very much you will be able to join us before the commencement of term in early September.
Yours most sincerely,
Bernard Berry
Chairman
Dept. of Mathematics
‘Ugh,’ Dobie said again. He knew a bug-letter when he saw one. He passed the letter over to Kate and got going on the eggs and bacon while she read through it attentively.
‘Well, I’d call that a very charming letter.’
‘Ugh.’
‘Oh, don’t be so grumpy.’
‘Ugh. Ugh.’ Dobie was not this time expressing his sentiments but merely had his mouth full of buttered toast. ‘Wock,’ he said, finally clearing the obstruction, ‘do you think?’
‘I think you should go.’
‘Oh. You do,’ Dobie said, ‘do you?’ He ruminated while chewing further cud.
‘You need a nice long break,’ Kate said firmly. ‘You know you do. You said so yourself when Bill Traynor asked you about it.’
‘He didn’t ask me about it. He broached the subject. That’s all.’
‘Whatever.’
‘And I told him this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’m not much of a one for holidays. Sun oil and beaches and all that sort of thing.’
‘It’s not supposed to be a holiday. It’s a job.’
‘I’ve got a job. And so have you. And you can’t get away right now. Can you?’
‘No, I can’t. But—’
‘There you are, then.’
Dobie glowered crossly at his coffee cup. Kate had a job all right. She was a GP and, in cases of emergency, a police pathologist. No way she could get away at the start of the sniffle season. Doctoring is of course an admirable profession but not one that invariably makes for a satisfying marital relationship. The hours are too long and the work too tiring. Not, of course, that Dobie and Kate were married. They weren’t. Or not, at least, to each other. Dobie had been married, certainly, but wasn’t disposed to repeat the experience. Once bitten, twice shy is one of the oldest and most frequently tested of all mathematical precepts. As for Kate …
Oh, well. Skip it.
In fact Dobie was extremely fond of Kate and had in the recent past and on appropriate occasions afforded her signal instances of his favour, this on the whole to their mutual satisfaction. On what occasions, you ask? Well, there, you might say (or the Rector might have said) was the rub. It was true that of late he’d been working much too hard and had been subjected to a great deal of nervous strain, as are most figures of universal celebrity. Whether this was the sufficient cause of this lamentable lack of, er, um, sexual ardour on his part or merely an excuse for it he didn’t know. He was a mathematician, damn it, not a psychiatrist. It seemed to be rather a pity, though, since it had all started off so well.
‘You need a break,’ Kate said again. There was certainly nothing in Kate’s external aspect to account for Dobie’s indifference; most of his colleagues considered her quite a dish and would have wished to get so lucky. He had, after all, the certainty of immediate medical attention should over-exertion on her mattress lead to a myocardial infarction, a prospect which otherwise invariably does very little to fortify the over-forties. ‘From me, as much as from anything else. And that’s the truth of the matter.’
‘No, it isn’t.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘No, it isn’t.’
‘Yes, it is. You’ve gone and got me all mixed up in your mind with what happened to Jenny and with what happened afterwards and you’ve got to disconnect me from all that somehow and forget all about it. If you go away for a spell that’ll maybe do the trick.’
Kate wasn’t a psychiatrist, either. There were times when Dobie felt like reminding her of the fact, but he restrained himself from doing so now; as yet they hadn’t quarrelled over breakfast and this didn’t seem to be the right moment to begin. ‘What happened afterwards,’ he said, ‘was very nice indeed and you know it was.’
‘Yes, but it all happened too soon and too quickly and that’s why you’re feeling guilty about it.’
‘I do not so.’
‘Yes, you do.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Yes, you do. And so you should. After all, you practically raped me.’
‘I most certainly did not.’
‘Well, if you didn’t then you should have and then maybe I wouldn’t feel guilty about it. It was just typical male lack of consideration.’
‘Do you feel guilty?’
‘Yes. Well … Sort of responsible.’
‘But that’s silly.’
‘I know. Maybe I need a nice long break, too.’
‘If you’re serious,’ Dobie said mutinously, ‘I could always move back to my old flat. It looks as though we won’t be able to sell it, anyway, with interest rates up where they are. I can’t think why the Chancellor of the Exchequer—’
‘That might be a good job for you, too. They could certainly use a mathematician or two at the Treasury. But sad to say you haven’t been offered the post. This one you have.’
‘I wouldn’t want to be a Tory Chancellor, anyway,’ Dobie said, even more mutinously than before. ‘Not, of course, that they’re going to get in again. After this poll tax business—’
‘Yes, they will.’
‘Oh no, they won’t.’
‘Look,’ Kate said sweetly, ‘be a Visiting Professor instead. There’s a dear.’
‘Well, I’ll think about It,’ Dobie said.
A former student of yours, Dobie thought.
Curious.
Of course he remembered Derya Tüner well enough, not only for her outstanding mathematical abilities but for certain other and more obviously outstanding qualities. He even remembered the guy she’d apparently gone and married. Adrian, that was the name. Adrian Seymour. A somewhat bumptious young git. ‘Derya Tüner, now,’ he said diffidently.
‘You’ll remember her, surely. You were her supervisor.’
‘Oh, of course. Certainly. Yes. But. However.’
Traynor, who was very familiar with Dobie’s rather peculiar methods of verbal communication, sighed deeply. ‘Derya Tüner, when she was studying here. Though she usually spelled it Turner. In fact I believe there should be two little dots over the u, as in a German umlaut. But since we all found it rather difficult to pronounce—’
‘Ah, yes.’ Dobie recalled having experienced some difficulty himself and practised cautiously for a while. ‘Üüüüüüüü. Üüüüüüüü. Üüüüüüüü.’
Traynor glanced nervously over his shoulder. Several other of their colleagues were sitting around in the staff room; not all of them were as accustomed as he was to Dobie’s modes of expression and there had been a considerable fuss made in the media of late about mad-cow disease and its possible transmissibility to the human species. ‘In any case,’ he said, ‘the name is Seymour now. Or was Seymour, I suppose I should say. Did you ever meet her husband?’
‘I did, yes,’ Dobie said, abandoning his linguistic experimentation with some reluctance. ‘At least, he was her fiancé at the time. But yes, I did. He was attending our School of Dramatic Studies, I seem to remember. Held to be brilliant, all the same. By some.’
‘She had interests in that field herself, of course.’
&nb
sp; ‘She did?’
‘I’m surprised that it’s slipped your memory.’ Untrue. He would have been more surprised if it had acted otherwise. ‘Quite a promising actress, or so I believe. Don’t you remember we all went to that rather odd dramatic society production in which she played the, ah, leading lady? And Borrodaile got rather disgracefully sloshed and hiccuped loudly throughout the entire performance?’
‘That wasn’t Borrodaile. That was me.’
‘You see? You do remember.’
‘Of course I do. And I most certainly wasn’t sloshed. Very far from it. What happened was that an inadvertently swallowed potato crisp—’
‘Quite so. Very embarrassing.’
‘I wasn’t in the least embarrassed.’
‘I didn’t mean for you,’ Traynor said.
Dobie was silent for a few moments, reflecting. The occasion upon which he was reflecting had now receded into the distant past, having taken place all of five or six years ago, but his recollection of it was moderately clear, at least by his own somewhat unexacting standards. ‘Sort of a Greek thing, was it not? All the girls romping around in see-through nighties?’
‘Could you really …? Or rather … that’s to say … I suppose, yes, it might be so described.’ Traynor pulled himself together with a visible effort. ‘Very short tunics, anyway. Or what you might call Freudian slips.’
This was a shaft of wit which Dobie, inevitably, missed, or rather ignored completely, his gaze remaining expressive only of untold suffering recollected in tranquillity. It was true that, faced with the altogether daunting horrors of an entire evening spent observing an amateur, indeed an undergraduate theatrical performance in the company of his departmental colleagues, he had fortified himself against the prospective abyss of excruciating boredom not wisely, as some fool or other had once put it, but too well; disgracefully sloshed, however, was in his view overstating the case. And the performance had, in the event, revealed certain redeeming qualities – in Derya Tüner’s case, indeed, very nearly all of them. A promising actress, was she, then? Well, yes. Dobie vaguely remembered various announcements and proclamations as having emerged from her other end in a clear and resonant voice. Obviously a lot of highbrow tosh, probably literature or something like that. But the legs, of course … Phenomenal …
