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

by Desmond Cory

  ‘A warning from an undisclosed source.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘Maybe this once,’ Jackson said, extending his hand towards another vigorous shake, ‘we’ll be able to frustrate the workings of Amnesia. I’ll pass on the word.’

  ‘Always happy to be of help, Inspector.’

  Humping his briefcase, Jackson turned away towards the door. The briefcase contained, of course, Dobie’s assorted corpus delicti; Dobie was always happy to be of help, too, but he wasn’t, not really; the tried and trusted methods (Jackson thought) are what you should rely on. He wouldn’t mind betting that the fifteen minutes he’d just spent with Micky Mannering would ultimately prove to be of more value to the investigation than the thirty minutes he’d spent in the kitchen at Ludlow Road, even throwing in all those pieces of papers and those bits of London leaf or whatever he’d called it. Mannering, after all …

  ‘Oh, by the way …’ Micky said.

  Jackson turned back, one hand on the doorknob. ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘You don’t know a man called Dobie, do you?’

  ‘Yes. Dobie? Yes. I do. Why?’

  ‘Because he was round here this morning asking me pretty much the same kind of questions that you’ve been putting to me. And I was faintly curious.’

  The same kind of … ‘You didn’t tell him anything, did you?’

  ‘I saw no reason to reveal any privileged information.’

  ‘Good. Good,’ Jackson said, making his exit.

  In fact he wasn’t mollified. In fact he was wondering what Mannering had meant by that. No doubt there’s a distinction to be made between leaving a convenient gap between words and meaning and being a bloody liar … but it’s not a distinction, Jackson felt, that many lawyers are prepared to recognize. And least of all Micky Mannering …

  Kate came in from the bathroom lightly parboiled and pink-flushed and slid herself with an interesting undulatory motion into the bed. The mattress, which was old and had been through a lot lately, creaked comfortingly. Dobie, the ever observant, noted that she was wearing, if only just, one of her more stimulating nighties, the one whose use was normally reserved for their occasional weekend visits to country hotels. OK, Dobie thought, it’s Tuesday, but who’s counting?

  Not Professor Dobie. For once.

  She was, he further noted, looking down at him solicitously while undoing the buttons of his pyjama jacket. (The green one with the trendy purple stripes.) ‘Not too tired?’

  ‘No, no, oh no.’

  It was warm in the bedroom and Kate almost at once decided that she didn’t really need the nightie after all. Half an hour or so later she began to make occasional puffing noises instead of near-continuous yowly ones and said, ‘No. You weren’t.’

  ‘Nor were you.’

  ‘It behoves a doctor to stay fit and get lots of healthy exercise. Indeed, as many lots as possible. You can be quite effective in your methods sometimes, Dobie, outré though they may be.’

  ‘We like to think so,’ Dobie said complacently.

  ‘All men like to think so,’ Kate said. Deflating him. Fortunately at this stage a little deflation might pass as being natural and even inevitable; Dobie was well enough aware that, in general terms, the bed thing was going rather well these days – bearing in mind, as you had to, that the vestigial remnants of Kate’s Irish Catholic conscience hadn’t yet quite disappeared down the plughole and no doubt added, in her case, a distinctive sinful savour to the proceedings … He himself had been prone on occasion to self-recriminatory moods of rather more idiosyncratic a nature; these had arisen when he had first realized that theirs was not, after all, to be a short-term relationship (of the kind that he, and probably Kate, had originally envisaged) but more of what you might call a long haul – a prospect which almost invariably arouses certain misgivings in the male partner, especially those who happen to be pushing fifty and who hope to be able in due course to push sixty with an equal confidence.

  Nowadays, though, they seemed both to have returned to that earlier pristine state of innocence in which the whole thing had seemed to be perfectly natural and extremely nice and they didn’t even have to be anxious any more as to whether such a desirable state of affairs could be indefinitely maintained; it certainly could, Kate assured him, always provided (she added severely) he was able to keep his mind on the job, at any rate while he was actually doing it – something the other blokes of whom she had had carnal experience (well, two, in point of fact, including her husband, not very impressive statistically or physically, either, come to think of it) had seemed to have no difficulty in doing but which Dobie … Dobie … Oh, fuck Dobie. Yes, why ever not? … A certain amount of wool-gathering and whatnot had after all to be expected if you chose to shack up with an acknowledged world-class berk, and absence of mind could always be compensated for by a sufficiently emphatic presence of body. Thought control isn’t everything, indeed no. Better to let the whole bang shoot go haywire, as quite frequently now it appeared to.

  Indeed yes.

  ‘I didn’t hurt you, did I?’ Dobie enquired. Hopefully.

  ‘No, but keep right on trying, by all means. Well … Perhaps not by all means. But don’t feel you have to impose strict limits on your range of expression.’

  ‘I’m afraid I must for the moment.’

  ‘Well, get off, then.’

  Dobie did so and lay on his back, snorting quietly. After a while Kate said, ‘I know what you’re thinking about.’

  ‘Hmmmm-mffff.’

  ‘I’m telepathic. Or getting to be. It’s funny how it always happens after … Maybe you should ask your new psychiatrist friends about it. Bedepathy. A fascinating topic.’

  ‘An interesting field for experiment, certainly.’

  ‘Forget it, Dobie. You’ve got all the lab equipment you need right here.’

  ‘So what was I thinking about?’

  ‘Sex.’

  ‘Good God. That’s amazing.’

  ‘And violence.’

  ‘Violence. Yes. I suppose I was. I was sort of wondering what … brings it out.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kate said. ‘It’s inherent in the act, isn’t it? Or ought to be. But of course there are …’

  ‘Limits. Like you said. But nobody likes limits. So if the violence thing gets really brought out … That girl must have brought it out somehow. In someone.’

  Dobie reached for and lit a cigarette. Kate disapproved of his smoking in bed, but tonight with any luck she might feel that he deserved a self-congratulatory whiff. Anyway, she didn’t say anything. She just went on staring up towards the ceiling. But after a while she turned her head towards him and said, ‘Dobie, there isn’t any point in going into all that. Not really.’

  ‘I suppose it could be argued that she asked for it.’

  This suggestion stung her up a little, as he’d expected it would. ‘That’s a pretty typical male-chauvinist-pig sort of comment, isn’t it? Coming from you.’

  ‘I didn’t mean asking for sex. I meant asking to be …’

  ‘Murdered?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Kate, having turned her head, shook it, returning it in the process to its original position. ‘I’m familiar with the theory. I don’t believe it.’

  ‘All the same,’ Dobie said, ‘there was something about her. Something I can’t quite … Maybe you didn’t sense it, but I did. I felt it quite strongly when I had to carry her over to the car … I don’t know how to describe it, but it was almost like feeling scared. Not of her, of course. Of myself. That girl was dangerous. Really, she was.’

  Kate went on looking at him out of her large moist greenish-grey eyes. She seemed at least to be taking him seriously. ‘You have hidden depths, Dobie. You know that?’

  ‘So have lots of other men and it probably isn’t a good idea to stir them up.’

  ‘You think that’s what she did?’

  ‘Well, don’t you? She didn’t have anything on, did she? I mean underneath.
No knickers or bra or anything like that.’

  ‘But that doesn’t mean what you want to make it mean. Maybe she wouldn’t … I never used to wear a bra myself. Not until I was twenty.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I didn’t need one.’

  ‘What about knickers?’

  ‘Mind your own business,’ Kate said.

  ‘I’m not, of course, doubting your word—’

  ‘I should hope not. Girls don’t like wearing bras, you know. Not necessarily. Finicky things. You’re usually much more comfortable without them. Besides, it’s a nice feeling when you haven’t got one on and you’re running downstairs. Not, of course, as nice … But I digress.’

  Dobie sensed that his attention was being distracted from the main point at issue, possibly deliberately but in any case very successfully. ‘All the same, there was something very unusual about that girl. Something … sly …’

  Kate snorted contemptuously. ‘How can you be sly when you’re unconscious? Don’t talk such rubbish. And use the bloody ashtray – not the carpet.’

  ‘Maybe you can’t be sly but you can look sly. She looked as though she liked playing games – and I don’t mean hockey or basketball or anything like that. I mean games with people. Games with men.’

  ‘Sex games?’

  ‘Yes, but sex games she thought she could win. If that makes any sense.’

  ‘It does, in a way. But, Dobie, the kid was only seventeen.’

  ‘You get to play that kind of game early if you play it at all.’

  She was silent for a moment. ‘Yes. That’s true.’

  ‘After all, it makes the world go round.’

  ‘Sometimes it makes it seem to. Just now, for instance. And I can see what you’re getting at all right. Games of the kind you mean can be pretty dangerous.’

  ‘That’s their attraction,’ Dobie said. ‘For that kind of a girl.’

  ‘The fact remains that someone raped her and killed her and you ought to be thinking more about what kind of a man … That’s if you have to think about it at all. And I wish you wouldn’t.’

  ‘I can’t help it. Because there’s a paradox there somewhere and paradoxes are what attract me. Rape and murder are crimes all right but there’s nothing paradoxical about them. So they don’t interest me, much. But that girl does.’

  ‘Dobie, she was a girl, not a bloody theorem.’

  True enough, Dobie thought. And what do I know about girls? All I really know about Beverley Sutro is that she’s dead. And death embarrasses people. So at once they try to turn you into some kind of an abstraction, and the living person that once was there gets left by the wayside. I’m like everyone else in that respect, but I’m very much more used to dealing with abstractions than most people are. Perhaps I’m too used to dealing with abstractions, as Kate’s suggesting. But she knows me better than anyone else does, and she knows that in bed or out of bed it’s all part of the same thing which isn’t just physical and isn’t just mental but either way has very little abstract about it. Dobie could also well enough recall, though, the surprisingly slight weight of the Sutro girl’s body against his arms as he’d picked her up, its youthful flexibility, the suggestion of an almost feverish warmth under the cold damp skin; nothing very abstract there, either. No more than a reminder, perhaps, of sexuality, of a potential for sexual violence, but if you’re too used to dealing with abstractions – as many men are nowadays – then maybe that kind of a reminder can come as a bit of a shock …

  ‘Jacko,’ Dobie said, ‘knows her mother.’

  ‘The Italian woman?’

  ‘She isn’t Italian. She married an Italian. But her maiden name was apparently Irene Jones. Jacko used to know her, I should have said. Professionally.’

  ‘Why, what was her profession?’

  ‘His profession, I meant, not hers. She had a few brushes with the law in days gone by, or so I gather.’

  ‘What sort of brushes?’

  ‘Well, I’m not quite sure. The usual, I suppose. Ripping off the mugs in the casino where she worked. Drugs, maybe. This, that, and the other. As far as I can see, she started off as what they used to call a good-time girl, though in her case that’s a bit of a misnomer. Anyway she borrowed too much money from the wrong people and couldn’t pay them back … so as she was a looker they gave her a job on the tables. Then she went on the game for a bit and in the end she got shacked up with some nightclub manager or someone like that. Well, not the end, exactly, but—’

  ‘Dobie …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Your methods are effective but you have some pretty weird ideas about pillow talk. What’s with you tonight?’

  ‘No, listen. That’s when Jacko put the arm on her, see? But she had a smart goby called Micky Mannering and he got her off. Then she met some rich character from London who got off with her and went and married her. But then two or three years ago she ditched him, in favour of the Eyetie. I like a story that has a happy ending,’ Dobie said. ‘Don’t you?’

  Kate by now was regarding him with deep suspicion. ‘You didn’t get all this stuff from Jacko.’

  ‘Well, no. Not all of it, no. Most of it I got from this Mannering bloke, in fact, after the school headmistress had very kindly—’

  ‘You’ve been talking to Micky Mannering?’

  ‘Yes. And in return for a modest consultation fee—’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Fifty nicker. Very reasonable. I mean, even the vocabulary I’ve picked up is cheap at the price.’

  ‘Dobie,’ Kate wailed. ‘You are some kind of a freak, did you know that? Micky Mannering—’

  ‘You see, the kid’s name isn’t really Sutro at all.’

  ‘Micky Mannering—’

  ‘It’s her adopted name. From the guy who married her mother. But that was only about ten years ago, she’d have been … seven, eight years old at the time. No, her real father’s reckoned to be this night-club bruiser bloke her mother was living with at the time. Who’s a bit of a villain. A complex picture, isn’t it? And a somewhat chequered childhood, wouldn’t you say?’

  Kate gave up. ‘You want to take a look at my relatives in Ireland if you’re into complex pictures. God knows how many of them there are. I lose track myself. As for a chequered childhood, you should hear poor old Jacko go on about his … and his own man whaling into him with a carpet slipper.’

  ‘Set him on the straight and narrow, though.’

  ‘He’s a straight cop as they go, certainly. I like Jacko.’

  ‘So do I. But this Beverley kid may well have learnt her lessons in a different way. Had a schooling in the university of life, so to speak.’

  ‘One might think so. Yes. Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘So she’d have been something of a fish out of water in that school which in fact they sent her to. I know they say she was bright in class and all that. But that isn’t the point.’

  ‘Where did she come from anyway? The mother?’

  ‘You mean originally?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Monmouth, I think. I’m not sure. Why?’

  ‘Monmouth? That’s interesting.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘The Duke of Monmouth. He caused an uprising.’

  ‘So did she, apparently. On any number of occasions. And you’re doing very nicely yourself in that respect.’

  ‘Ah.’ Kate brightened. ‘Going for the record, are we?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘That’s the trouble with you,’ Kate said, nuzzling his neck. ‘You lack ambition.’

  ‘I’ll tell you one thing for free,’ Kate said later. A good deal later. ‘I get to see a lot of dead bodies in my profession. And live ones are better.’

  Dobie didn’t feel like offering any cogent reply but on the whole he thought that Kate was right. As usual.

  7

  The following morning he had some good news. The good news arrived, as Kate observed, in an envelope carrying an
Austrian stamp and a Vienna postmark and after listening for the best part of a minute to his self-satisfied grunts, ‘Who’s it from?’ she asked.

  ‘Otto Bodenheimer.’

  ‘Is he offering you the lead in his next biblical epic?’

  ‘No, no. He’s the Director of the Heisenberg Institute.’

  ‘Oh well,’ Kate said consolingly. ‘Never mind.’

  ‘But it’s all most encouraging.’ Dobie waved a slice of buttered toast vehemently in the air, dripping Oxford marmalade over the tablecloth. ‘Listen to this. He says … Where is it? Ah yes. He says, “It is with the most profound reluctance that we have concluded that the paradox as propounded, in the absence of any of-a-decisive-nature refutation and subject to an in-all-parts-effectively-demonstrable confirmation, must stand.” There you are. He couldn’t put it more clearly than that, now could he?’

  ‘In German, probably not.’

  ‘This should make those berks sit up in Cambridge,’ Dobie said, chortling. ‘It’s going to be like Eddington, all over again.’ He looked in some surprise at his marmaladeless slice of toast and reached for the butter knife.

  ‘Who’s Eddington?’

  ‘He didn’t like black holes.’

  ‘Nor do I,’ Kate said. ‘They breed mice.’

  ‘Anyway, he wants me to give a lecture.’

  ‘Eddington?’

  ‘No. He’s dead. Bodenheimer.’

  ‘And will you?’

  ‘He’ll pay me two thousand dollars and expenses.’

  ‘I’ll pack your bag right now.’

  ‘No, don’t do that. The conference isn’t till next September. That’ll give you time to pack your own bag as well.’

  ‘I can come, too?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Wunderbar.’

  ‘Provided,’ Dobie said morosely, ‘Bicknell and the All Souls crowd haven’t shot me down before then.’

  ‘They won’t.’

  ‘What makes you so sure?’

  ‘Because you ’ave the little grey cells, ’Astings, an’ zey ’aven’t.’

  ‘C’est vrai,’ Dobie said, brightening. And then, on reflection,