“What missing question?” exclaimed Richard, confused by the sudden pause, and leaping in with the first phrase he could grab.
Dirk blinked as if at an idiot. “The missing question that George the Third asked, of course,” he said.
“Asked who?”
“Well, the Professor,” said Dirk impatiently. “Don’t you listen to anything you say? The whole thing was obvious!” he exclaimed, thumping the table. “So obvious that the only thing which prevented me from seeing the solution was the trifling fact that it was completely impossible. Sherlock Holmes observed that once you have eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible. Now. Let us go.”
“No.”
“What?” Dirk glanced up at Susan, from whom this unexpected—or at least, unexpected to him—opposition had come.
“Mr Gently,” said Susan in a voice you could notch a stick with, “why did you deliberately mislead Richard into thinking that he was wanted by the police?”
Dirk frowned.
“But he was wanted by the police,” he said, “and still is.”
“Yes, but just to answer questions! Not because he’s a suspected murderer.”
Dirk looked down.
“Miss Way,” he said, “the police are interested in knowing who murdered your brother. I, with the very greatest respect, am not. It may, I concede, turn out to have a bearing on the case, but it may just as likely turn out to be a casual madman. I wanted to know, still need desperately to know, why Richard climbed into this flat last night.”
“I told you . . .” protested Richard.
“What you told me is immaterial—it only reveals the crucial fact that you do not know the reason yourself! For heaven’s sake, I thought I had demonstrated that to you clearly enough at the canal!”
Richard simmered.
“It was perfectly clear to me watching you,” pursued Dirk, “that you had very little idea what you were doing, and had absolutely no concern about the physical danger you were in. At first I thought, watching, that it was just a brainless thug out on his first and quite possibly last burgle. But then the figure looked back and I realized it was you—and I know you to be an intelligent, rational, and moderate man. Richard MacDuff? Risking his neck carelessly climbing up drainpipes at night? It seemed to me that you would only behave in such a reckless and extreme way if you were desperately worried about something of terrible importance. Is that not true, Miss Way?”
He looked sharply up at Susan, who slowly sat down, looking at him with an alarm in her eyes which said that he had struck home.
“And yet, when you came to see me this morning you seemed perfectly calm and collected. You argued with me perfectly rationally when I talked a lot of nonsense about Schrödinger’s Cat. This was not the behavior of someone who had the previous night been driven to extremes by some desperate purpose. I confess that it was at that moment that I stooped to, well, exaggerating your predicament, simply in order to keep hold of you.
“You didn’t. I left.”
“With certain ideas in your head. I knew you would be back. I apologize most humbly for having misled you, er, somewhat, but I knew that what I had to find out lay far beyond what the police would concern themselves with. And it was this: If you were not quite yourself when you climbed the wall last night . . . then who were you—and why?”
Richard shivered. A silence lengthened.
“What has it got to do with conjuring tricks?” he said at last.
“That is what we must go to Cambridge to find out.”
“But what makes you so sure—?”
“It disturbs me,” said Dirk, and a dark and heavy look came into his face.
For one so garrulous he seemed suddenly oddly reluctant to speak.
He continued, “It disturbs me very greatly when I find that I know things and do not know why I know them. Maybe it is the same instinctive processing of data that allows you to catch a ball almost before you’ve seen it. Maybe it is the deeper and less explicable instinct that tells you when someone is watching you. It is a very great offense to my intellect that the very things that I despise other people for being credulous of actually occur to me. You will remember the . . . unhappiness surrounding certain exam questions.”
He seemed suddenly distressed and haggard. He had to dig deep inside himself to continue speaking.
He said, “The ability to put two and two together and come up instantly with four is one thing. The ability to put the square root of five hundred and thirty-nine point seven together with the cosine of twenty-six point four three two and come up with . . . with whatever the answer to that is, is quite another. And I . . . well let me give you an example.”
He leaned forward intently. “Last night I saw you climbing into this flat. I knew that something was wrong. Today I got you to tell me every last detail you knew about what happened last night, and already, as a result, using my intellect alone I have uncovered possibly the greatest secret lying hidden on this planet. I swear to you that this is true and that I can prove it. Now you must believe me when I tell you that I know, I know that there is something terribly, desperately, appallingly wrong and that we must find it. Will you go with me now to Cambridge?”
Richard nodded dumbly.
“Good,” said Dirk. “What is this?” he added, pointing at Richard’s plate.
“A pickled herring. Do you want one?”
“Thank you, no,” said Dirk, rising and buckling his coat. “There is,” he added as he headed toward the door, steering Richard with him, “no such word as ‘herring’ in my dictionary. Good afternoon, Miss Way, wish us Godspeed.”
25
THERE WAS A rumble of thunder, and the onset of that interminable light drizzle from the northeast by which so many of the world’s most momentous events seem to be accompanied.
Dirk turned up the collar of his leather overcoat against the weather, but nothing could dampen his demonic exuberance as he and Richard approached the great twelfth-century gates.
“St Cedd’s College, Cambridge,” he exclaimed, looking at them for the first time in eight years. “Founded in the year something or other, by someone I forget in honor of someone whose name for the moment escapes me.”
“St Cedd?” suggested Richard.
“Do you know I think it very probably was? One of the duller Northumbrian saints. His brother Chad was even duller. Has a cathedral in Birmingham if that gives you some idea. Ah, Bill, how good to see you again,” he added, accosting the porter who was just walking into the college as well. The porter looked around.
“Mr Cjelli, nice to see you back, sir. Sorry you had a spot of bother, hope that’s all behind you now.”
“Indeed, Bill, it is. You find me thriving. And Mrs Roberts? How is she? Foot still troubling her?”
“Not since she had it off, thanks for asking, sir. Between you and me, sir, I would’ve been just as happy to have had her amputated and kept the foot. I had a little spot reserved on the mantelpiece, but there we are, we have to take things as we find them.
“Mr MacDuff, sir,” he added, nodding curtly at Richard. “Oh, that horse you mentioned, sir, when you were here last night, I’m afraid we had to have it removed. It was bothering Professor Chronotis.”
“I was only curious, er, Bill,” said Richard. “I hope it didn’t disturb you.”
“Nothing ever disturbs me, sir, so long as it isn’t wearing a dress. Can’t abide it when the young fellers wear dresses, sir.”
“If the horse bothers you again, Bill,” interrupted Dirk, patting him on the shoulder, “send it up to me and I shall speak with it. Now, you mention the good Professor Chronotis. Is he in at the moment? We’ve come on an errand.”
“Far as I know, sir. Can’t check for you because his phone’s out of order. Suggest you go and look yourself. Far left corner of Second Court.”
“I know it well, Bill, thank you, and my
best to what remains of Mrs Roberts.”
They swept on through into First Court, or at least Dirk swept, and Richard walked in his normal heronlike gait, wrinkling up his face against the measly drizzle.
Dirk had obviously mistaken himself for a tour guide.
“St Cedd’s,” he pronounced, “the college of Coleridge, and the college of Sir Isaac Newton, renowned inventor of the milled-edge coin and the catflap!”
“The what?” said Richard.
“The catflap! A device of the utmost cunning, perspicuity and invention. It is a door within a door, you see, a . . .”
“Yes,” said Richard, “there was also the small matter of gravity.”
“Gravity,” said Dirk with a slightly dismissive shrug, “yes, there was that as well, I suppose. Though that, of course, was merely a discovery. It was there to be discovered.” He took a penny out of his pocket and tossed it casually onto the pebbles that ran alongside the paved pathway.
“You see?” he said. “They even keep it on at weekends. Someone was bound to notice sooner or later. But the catflap . . . ah, there is a very different matter. Invention, pure creative invention.”
“I would have thought it was quite obvious. Anyone could have thought of it.”
“Ah,” said Dirk, “it is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto nonexistent blindingly obvious. The cry ‘I could have thought of that’ is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn’t, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too. This if I am not mistaken is the staircase we seek. Shall we ascend?”
Without waiting for an answer, he plunged on up the stairs. Richard, following uncertainly, found him already knocking on the inner door. The outer one stood open.
“Come in!” called a voice from within. Dirk pushed the door open, and they were just in time to see the back of Reg’s white head as he disappeared into the kitchen.
“Just making some tea,” he called out. “Like some? Sit down, sit down, whoever you are.”
“That would be most kind,” returned Dirk. “We are two.” Dirk sat, and Richard followed his lead.
“Indian or China?” called Reg.
“Indian, please.”
There was a rattle of cups and saucers.
Richard looked around the room. It seemed suddenly humdrum. The fire was burning quietly away to itself, but the light was that of the gray afternoon. Though everything about it was the same, the old sofa, the table burdened with books, there seemed nothing to connect it with the hectic strangeness of the previous night. The room seemed to sit there with raised eyebrows, innocently saying “Yes?”
“Milk?” called out Reg from the kitchen.
“Please,” replied Dirk. He gave Richard a smile which seemed to him to be half-mad with suppressed excitement.
“One lump or two?” called Reg again.
“One please,” said Dirk, “and two spoons of sugar if you would.”
There was a suspension of activity in the kitchen. A moment or two passed and Reg stuck his head around the door.
“Svlad Cjelli!” he exclaimed. “Good heavens, well, that was quick work, young MacDuff, well done. My dear fellow, how very excellent to see you, how good of you to come.”
He wiped his hands on a tea towel he was carrying and hurried over to shake hands.
“My dear Svlad.”
“Dirk, please, if you would,” said Dirk, grasping his hand warmly. “I prefer it. It has more of a sort of Scottish dagger feel to it, I think. Dirk Gently is the name under which I now trade. There are certain events in the past, I’m afraid, from which I would wish to disassociate myself.”
“Absolutely, I know how you feel. Most of the fourteenth century, for instance, was pretty grim,” agreed Reg earnestly.
Dirk was about to correct the misapprehension, but thought that it might be somewhat of a long trek and left it.
“So how have you been, then, my dear Professor?” he said instead, decorously placing his hat and scarf upon the arm of the sofa.
“Well,” said Reg, “it’s been an interesting time recently, or rather, a dull time. But dull for interesting reasons. Now, sit down again, warm yourselves by the fire, and I will get the tea and endeavor to explain.” He bustled out again, humming busily, and left them to settle themselves in front of the fire.
Richard leaned over to Dirk. “I had no idea you knew him so well,” he said with a nod in the direction of the kitchen.
“I don’t,” said Dirk instantly. “We met once by chance at some dinner, but there was an immediate sympathy and rapport.”
“So how come you never met again?”
“He studiously avoided me, of course. Close rapports with people are dangerous if you have a secret to hide. And as secrets go, I fancy that this is somewhat of a biggie. If there is a bigger secret anywhere in the world I would very much care,” he said quietly, “to know what it is.”
He gave Richard a significant look and held his hands out to the fire. Since Richard had tried before without success to draw him out on exactly what the secret was, he refused to rise to the bait on this occasion, but sat back in his armchair and looked about him.
“Did I ask you,” said Reg, returning at that moment, “if you wanted any tea?”
“Er, yes,” said Richard, “we spoke about it at length. I think we agreed in the end that we would, didn’t we?”
“Good,” said Reg, vaguely, “by a happy chance there seems to be some ready in the kitchen. You’ll have to forgive me. I have a memory like a . . . like a . . . what are those things you drain rice in? What am I talking about?”
With a puzzled look he turned smartly around and disappeared once more into the kitchen.
“Very interesting,” said Dirk quietly. “I wondered if his memory might be poor.”
He stood up suddenly, and prowled around the room. His eyes fell on the abacus which stood on the only clear space on the large mahogany table.
“Is this the table,” he asked Richard in a low voice, “where you found the note about the salt cellar?”
“Yes,” said Richard, standing up and coming over, “tucked into this book.” He picked up the guide to the Greek islands and flipped through it.
“Yes, yes, of course,” said Dirk, impatiently. “We know about all that. I’m just interested that this was the table.” He ran his fingers along its edge, curiously.
“If you think it was some sort of prior collaboration between Reg and the girl,” Richard said, “then I must say that I don’t think it possibly can have been.”
“Of course it wasn’t,” said Dirk testily. “I would have thought that was perfectly clear.”
Richard shrugged in an effort not to get angry and put the book back down again.
“Well, it’s an odd coincidence that the book should have been . . .”
“Odd coincidence!” snorted Dirk. “Ha! We shall see how much of a coincidence. We shall see exactly how odd it was. I would like you, Richard, to ask our friend how he performed the trick.”
“I thought you said you knew already.”
“I do,” said Dirk airily. “I would like to hear it confirmed.”
“Oh, I see,” said Richard, “yes, that’s rather easy, isn’t it? Get him to explain it, and then say, ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I thought it was!’ Very good, Dirk. Have we come all the way up here in order to have him explain how he did a conjuring trick? I think I must be mad.”
Dirk bridled at this.
“Please do as I ask,” he snapped angrily. “You saw him do the trick, you must ask how he did it. Believe me, there is an astounding secret hidden within it. I know it, but I want you to hear it from him.”
He spun round as Reg reentered bearing a tray, which he carried around the sofa and put onto the low coffee table that sat in front of the fire.
“Professor Chronotis . . .” said Dirk.
“Reg,” said Reg, “please.”
“Very well,” said Dirk, “Reg . . .”
<
br /> “Sieve!” exclaimed Reg.
“What?”
“Thing you drain rice in. A sieve. I was trying to remember the word, though I forget now the reason why. No matter. Dirk, dear fellow, you look as if you are about to explode about something. Why don’t you sit down and make yourself comfortable?”
“Thank you, no, I would rather feel free to pace up and down fretfully if I may. Reg . . .”
He turned to face him square on, and raised a single finger.
“I must tell you,” he said, “that I know your secret.”
“Ah, yes, er—do you indeed?” mumbled Reg, looking down awkwardly and fiddling with the cups and teapot. “I see.”
The cups rattled violently as he moved them. “Yes, I was afraid of that.”
“And there are some questions that we would like to ask you. I must tell you that I await the answers with the very greatest apprehension.”
“Indeed, indeed,” Reg muttered. “Well, perhaps it is at last time. I hardly know myself what to make of recent events and am . . . fearful myself. Very well. Ask what you will.” He looked up sharply, his eyes glittering.
Dirk nodded curtly at Richard, turned, and started to pace, glaring at the floor.
“Er,” said Richard, “well, I’d be . . . interested to know how you did the conjuring trick with the salt cellar last night.”
Reg seemed surprised and rather confused by the question. “The conjuring trick?” he said.
“Er, yes,” said Richard, “the conjuring trick.”
“Oh,” said Reg, taken aback, “well, the conjuring part of it, I’m not sure I should—Magic Circle rules you know, very strict about revealing these secrets. Very strict. Impressive trick, though, don’t you think?” he added slyly.
“Well, yes,” said Richard, “it seemed very natural at the time, but now that I . . . think about it, I have to admit that it was a bit dumbfounding.”
“Ah, well,” said Reg, “it’s skill, you see. Practice. Make it look natural.”
“It did look very natural,” continued Richard, feeling his way, “I was quite taken in.”
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Box Set Page 19
