by Desmond Cory
THE DOBIE PARADOX
Desmond Cory
Copyright © Desmond Cory 1993
In the Professor Dobie series:
THE STRANGE ATTRACTOR (also published as THE CATALYST)
THE MASK OF ZEUS
FOR DAVID
keep the fan mail coming
‘I can’t get out - I can’t get out,’ said the starling
Laurence Sterne
Synopsis
‘I’ll say one thing for Mr Dobie,’ Foxy said. ‘No murderers are safe when he’s around. He makes a tidy job of it while he’s at it.’
‘Not many policemen are safe when he’s around, either,’ Jackson replied. With feeling …
Eccentric mathematics professor John Dobie and his rather more practical girlfriend Dr Kate Coyle are braving an Atlantic gale to visit a patient in a local clinic when they find a young girl lying in a coma by the rain-soaked roadside. Despite their best efforts, however, seventeen-year-old Beverly Sutro dies of her injuries that evening.
Is she the victim of a hit-and-run on the lonely windswept hillside or did someone have altogether more deliberate plans for her death? To the irritation of the Cardiff Police, Dobie - in his own inimitable way - begins to investigate. With Professor Dobie assisting the police with their enquiries anything can happen. And does.
Initially, Dobie’s wayward attentions are focused on the local clinic, where Adrian Seymour (the brilliant young author) is undergoing treatment for drug addiction. But the trail leads ever outwards until it points, alarmingly, to the chief of a powerful crime syndicate currently (and deservedly) doing porridge. Then luckily Kate is on hand to help with matters forensic, for Dobie has stumbled on a vital clue …
CRITICAL ACCLAIM
From Publishers Weekly
Math whiz and extremely absentminded professor John Dobie and his best girl, Dr. Kate Coyle, find murder in a “loony bin'” in their latest appearance (following The Mask of Zeus ) in Cory's bold and witty series. Assembled at the Tongwynlais Rehabilation Centre near Cardiff are various substance-addicted souls, including a famous author who has asked Dobie to vouch for his worthiness. Of course, there are legions within and without academia who strongly doubt Dobie's sanity, not to mention the Welsh police who have understandably ambiguous responses to his canny solutions of nasty murders. Next to the Centre is the fancy girl's school where the promiscuous Beverly Sutro, whom Dobie and Kate find near death on the side of the road, was a student. Beverly has unexplained amounts of money, a lover (or possibly a client) and a dysfunctional family with strong ties to organized crime. Dobie has a puzzle, in which the pieces are the Centre's infiltrated computer system, his author friend's hynosis-induced dreams of Beverly and the cryptic note in the girl's pocket. Dobie, who has trouble remembering friends' names and operating an automobile, is a wizard with computers and cryptic notes. In the hands of a lesser talent than Cory's, Dobie would be a joke rather than what he is: a fresh, comic presence with an uncanny ability to lure readers into his weird yet oddly logical world.
Intro
The second time around he hurt her with his hands in such a way that she knew he meant to hurt her but this was something she’d almost expected and she gasped a little but went right on doing it with him, screwing up her eyes tightly against the pain until they watered. Tonight she had for the first time come into contact – of the closest kind – with real violence, genuine violence, and in its way it was exciting, as if all her life she’d been paddling about in a swimming pool and now here she was in the open sea, the sweeping rollers lifting her from side to side, the ship tilted over behind her on its beam ends, going down, going down, while she swam strongly towards a far-off shore, all round her other people struggling drowning in the foam-slashed waves,
‘Mmmmmm-mmmmm,’ she said, and then, ‘Aaaaaaahhhh …’
and after a while the other people were gone and she was alone again as usual, beached and breathless on the shore
and a little later she rolled inelegantly off the hard and bumpy bed which was more of a couch, really, and had hurt her ribs and started to get dressed thinking, well, I made it again, it wasn’t all that good but yes, exciting yes because of all that pent-up violence in him, a lot of other girls have probably found that out but they didn’t matter because they were all gone now under the waves
looking down at her legs as she zipped up her short skirt and noticing the red fingermarks on her thighs that would soon be darkening into bruises, his grey slate-coloured eyes turned towards them also so for a moment she was afraid that he would want her and take her again.
‘You didn’t have to be so rough,’ she said.
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t say much and when he spoke to her it was always in that flat gritty monotone which irritated her,
she didn’t know why. He had a good body, though, for a man of his age; hard and muscular. All those press-ups and exercises he did. He’d hurt her all right.
She finished dressing quickly because she’d overstayed her time and because she wasn’t wearing very much anyway. His grey eyes watched her all the time. ‘So when do I see you again?’
‘Better if we don’t meet next week,’ the man said. ‘I’ll phone you. Saturday.’
‘You’ll know by Saturday?’
Again, he didn’t say anything. He reached down a hand to pick his discarded shirt up from the floor.
‘You might at least talk,’ she said. ‘You were talking about five thousand before. That’s something to talk about.’
‘I’ll call you. Soon as I’ve made the deal.’
‘Five thirty. That’s the best time.’
He swung his good white body off the bed, pushed back his tousled hair, using both hands. A strange gesture, that, but she’d noticed it before. ‘Where do you fancy?’
‘What?’
‘For our holiday? Spain? Italy? Egypt? Or should we just stick a pin in a map?’
She didn’t answer for a moment because the word Italy had slipped into her now near vacant mind dripping like a golden honeycomb with the sun and the shadow of the mountains on the lake and the tup-tupping sound of a slow-moving motor-launch and once in her mind had expanded like a balloon, so fast that her mind couldn’t absorb the sudden influx of images. And so in the end she didn’t answer at all. She watched him pull up his trousers, buckle his snakeskin belt. He dressed very quickly, too. With him, it would be a matter of habit. She watched him open the metal cabinet that stood beside the couch. She watched him, she watched him. She found herself watching him all the time now, as he watched her, though not quite in the same way.
‘You’d better take this now,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘The gun.’
‘Oh. All right.’
It was heavier than she’d expected and when she took it from him she almost dropped it.
‘Is it loaded?’
‘Yes.’
But now at last his eyes had discarded her. There wasn’t anything more to say or to do. The bed games were over and a new game could start. An even more violent game than the other. Oh yes, it was exciting.
She went out, hearing as she walked away the door close very softly behind her. Now she was swimming again, strongly, strongly, behind her the ship was going down
and she didn’t care.
1
It had been, in Dobie’s view, an unusually fine afternoon for the time of year – low-lying cloud, a little friendly drizzle, with cool pneumonia-provoking breezes drifting in from the north-east. By the early evening, however, nor
mal climatic conditions for the Cardiff area had returned and the rain was coming down in torrents. The woods above Rhiwbina were heaving about in the grip of an Atlantic gale and the trees to either side of the road, already well in leaf, were barely visible through the blurred windscreen of Kate’s battered Cortina, which chugged its way determinedly onwards with its headlights dipped against the prevailing all-enveloping fog. The roof was admitting a certain amount of freezing rainwater, much of which was dripping down on to the back of Dobie’s neck, and Dobie was dispirited. He and Kate were arguing, as usual. He twiddled the volume control knob of the dashboard cassette-player to no noticeable effect; snafu, again as usual. ‘He bellows, anyway.’
‘He does not so.’
‘Not a patch on Gigli, I assure you.’
‘I don’t care. He’s sexy.’
On the tape the poor old Commendatore, defending his daughter’s honour, was about to be run through and through by sneaky Don Giovanni. Dobie’s favourite opera, but isn’t it everybody’s …? Except Kate’s, of course. Kate preferred Verdi. Inexplicable. But they weren’t arguing about that, anyway. ‘He’s not supposed to be sexy. He’s supposed to be dying of something or other. You’ve got the wrong opera.’
‘It’s too loud anyway.’
‘The knob thing won’t work.’
‘I know that. I’ve got to get it fixed. Look, why not switch the bloody thing off? This trip was your idea. Not mine.’
‘It wasn’t exactly my idea. This chap Train’s, if anyone’s. I don’t know why he—’
‘Oh, shut up, Dobie, I’m trying to drive.’
Staring fixedly through the smeared windscreen, where the wipers didn’t seem to be working any too well, either. Instead of going flip-flop, flip-flop, they went flip-squeak. Flop. Flip-squeak. Flop. Disconcerting. Dobie turned the control knob again and he and Giovanni relapsed together into an injured silence. The argument wasn’t really about Italian tenors or about car journeys undertaken in inclement weather. It was, Dobie knew full well, about his moustache, a recently acquired accoutrement to which Kate had taken totally unreasonable objection.
Everyone wore moustaches in Cyprus, the Island of Aphrodite, whence Dobie was but of late returned. At least, all the men did. The Turkish ladies there – and concretely Dobie’s two honey-blonde and interminably legged assistants at the university there – had, as Dobie had discovered, a clear predilection for this unostentatious form of male adornment; the trouble was that Kate, of course, had discovered this as well and, since her feministic tendencies precluded her from admitting to an unbecoming jealousy, was now constantly making snide remarks about it. It was not true that, as she maintained, it made him look like a rat peering out from behind a lavatory brush; on the contrary, it lent a certain dignity and weight to his otherwise unremarkable features and anyway it was his blasted upper lip and he’d do what he liked with it. Really there were times when Kate …
‘Whoops,’ Kate said, steering into the ditch as near as dammit. Dobie removed his glasses and wiped them carefully.
‘Where the hell are we, anyway?’
‘I don’t know,’ Kate said. ‘But if anything else breaks down we’ll be up shit creek, that’s where. Without a paddle. I can’t see a bloody thing and what’s more nor can anyone else. We haven’t passed another car in ages.’
‘It can’t be much further,’ Dobie said pacifically. ‘There’ll be a sign or something. Bound to be.’
Saying TONGWYNLAIS REHABILITATION CENTRE or words to that effect. Those, at any rate, had been the words heading the letter Dobie now carried in his inside coat pocket. But of course it wasn’t in Tongwynlais. That would have been too easy. No, it was somewhere in that tangled confusion of narrow rutted roads crisscrossing the wilderness of woods beyond the Black Swan and leading you towards the Caerphilly mountains; only fifteen minutes out of Cardiff, yet you might as well have been out on the Brecon Beacons. The woods were two or three miles behind them now, down in the valley, and here on the bare exposed moorland the wind was tearing at them with a seemingly redoubled strength; the fog was getting thicker and the teeming rain was showing no sign of easing. Kate had slowed the speed of the car now to something like twenty miles an hour but the occasional angle of glistening grey granite walls still showed up in the tilted beam of the headlights with an alarming suddenness. ‘We could go past it, just as easily. Maybe we should pull in somewhere till the rain stops.’
‘I don’t think it’s going to. Pity we didn’t start out a half-hour earlier.’
‘Well, we didn’t,’ Kate said shortly. ‘What’s that light over there on the left?’
Dobie readjusted his glasses and peered out through the side window. ‘Some kind of a farmhouse.’
‘Ugh. Wuthering Heights, maybe.’
Kate, being a practising GP and out in all weathers, was presumably more used to this sort of thing than he was. It was almost unbelievably dark, bearing in mind that it wasn’t all that late not yet six o’clock, in fact. You could even say it was early for a social call, but then they weren’t making a social call, or not exactly. On arrival, though, some kind of invigorating sustenance might well be provided for the inner man – or woman, in Kate’s case – and couldn’t come along too soon, as far as Dobie was concerned. This funny farm, or whatever it was, surely couldn’t be very far away, always assuming they weren’t on the wrong road completely, as had to be on the cards. Dobie leaned forwards in the passenger seat, gazing myopically through the swimming windscreen. Flip … Squeak … Flop. The headlights giving perhaps twenty feet of blurred visibility, the long dark streamers of rain swinging across their arc. Kate was right; you couldn’t really see—
‘What’s that in the road?’ Dobie shrilled abruptly. ‘A head …? I mean, ahead …? Watch out you don’t—’
Kate was already applying the brakes. The car, predictably, stalled. The object lying in the road a little way in front of it looked more like a foot, in point of fact. They stared at it, perplexed. ‘What is it?’
‘Looks like a shoe,’ Kate said.
‘Well, what the hell of a place to leave a shoe. You’d think people’d have more sense than to—’
He stopped. Kate was getting out of the car. Dobie watched her run, shoulders hunched against the hurtling raindrops, to pick up the shoe and examine it for a few seconds by the light of the headlamps before returning to the car. ‘It’s a nice new shoe, Dobie. A running shoe, isn’t it? A trainer?’
Dobie had seen that already. ‘It’s a very wet shoe.’ It was, indeed. ‘And just one shoe’s not much use to anyone, is it …? Even if it were your size. Which it isn’t.’
‘It’s a pretty expensive shoe, what’s more. It hasn’t been thrown away, you know.’ Kate was reaching into the glove compartment for her pocket torch. ‘Hang on a mo.’
The car door admitted another brawling gust of wet air and a spatter of rain and Kate was gone again. Dobie, more perplexed than ever, saw the torch beam flick a pale half-moon of light along the side of the road clear of the wider pool cast by the car’s headlamps, the upper part of Kate’s body stooped a little and silhouetted against the semi-clarity. Surely she wasn’t looking for the other one of the pair? With the rain coming down in buckets …? A nice shoe maybe it was, but there have to be limits even to female rapacity. Dobie picked it up and looked at it but it didn’t tell him anything. It was true that in Cyprus (and quite by accident) Dobie had discovered an important clue inside a lady’s shoe, but there was nothing inside this one. Not even a foot. Indeed, but for its small size it could just as easily have been a man’s; all the kids wore these things nowadays …
Kate had stopped by the side of the road, was stooping down even lower. She might even be kneeling. What was she up to …? Dobie sighed and clambered out of the car, tugging the collar of his raincoat a little tighter around his neck. It didn’t help much. He moved forwards a few paces and then saw what Kate was looking at.
‘Oh my God,’ he said.
‘It’s a nasty one.’
‘Yes.’
‘But she’s still alive.’
She didn’t look it. But that was probably an effect of the torchlight, of the open mouth and those widely staring eyes. ‘Here, hold the torch for a minute, Dobie.’
‘All right.’
He stood with his head lowered in the pouring rain, watching Kate’s quick neat fingers moving over the bedraggled body, over the small dark-haired head. He saw that the other shoe was in place on her left foot, at the end of a straight and stiffened leg, a long bare leg, nicely shaped. ‘Try and hold it steady. If you can.’
‘Yes. Sorry.’
He moved a little nearer, but the torch beam went on trembling. After a few seconds Kate’s hands withdrew but she stayed as she was, in a kneeling position, staring into the pale upturned face. ‘Fractured skull. Could be some spinal trauma, too. There often is. We have to get her to hospital.’
‘Hospital. Yes.’ Well, you didn’t have to be a doctor to see that. The kid looked ghastly, whoever she was.
‘Think you can get her into the car? There must be some place nearby where we can ring for an ambulance. Try not to move her head any more than you can help it.’
Dobie handed back the torch and Kate held it in her smaller but steadier hand as Dobie bent down to pick the girl up, feeling, as he lifted her, the impact of the heavy raindrops on his back and shoulders. It was really pelting down, but for the last sixty seconds or so he hadn’t been aware of it. Carrying her over to the car wasn’t so difficult. Dobie was a big man and the girl was small and light … and very, very cold. Dobie supported her head as he carried her, one hand at the nape of her neck, and the tendrils of hair that fell across his wrist felt like feathery icicles. The only tricky bit was manoeuvring her on to the back seat; Kate had pulled off her raincoat to serve as an improvised pillow and arranged the placing of the girl’s head on it with some care. The dark hair was smeared with blood as well as damp with water, and two or three tiny green leaves were stuck to it; Kate flicked them away and directed the torch once again towards the ragged wound underneath. ‘I’ll stay in the back with her, Dobie. You drive.’
