Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Box Set

by Douglas Adams

  The Judgment of King Wen:

  Chun Signifies Difficulties At Outset, As Of Blade Of Grass Pushing Up Against Stone. The Time Is Full Of Irregularities And Obscurities: Superior Man Will Adjust His Measures As In Sorting The Threads Of The Warp And Woof. Firm Correctness Will Bring At Last Success. Early Advances Should Only Be Made With Caution. There Will Be Advantage In Appointing Feudal Princes.

  Line 6 Changes:

  The Commentary of the Duke of Chou:

  The Horses and the Chariot Obliged to Retreat.

  Streams of Bloody Tears Will Flow.

  Dirk considered this for a few moments, and then decided that on balance it appeared to be a vote in favor of getting the new fridge, which, by a staggering coincidence, was the course of action he himself favored.

  There was a pay phone in one of the dark corners where waiters slouched moodily at one another. Dirk threaded his way through them, wondering whom it was they reminded him of, and eventually deciding that it was the small crowd of naked men standing around behind the Holy Family in Michelangelo’s picture of the same name, for no more apparent reason than that Michelangelo rather liked them.

  He telephoned an acquaintance of his called Nobby Paxton, or so he claimed, who worked the darker side of the domestic-appliance supply business. Dirk came straight to the point.

  “Dobby, I deed a fridge.”

  “Dirk, I been saving one against the day you’d ask me.”

  Dirk found this highly unlikely.

  “Only I wand a good fridge, you thee, Dobby.”

  “This is the best, Dirk. Japanese. Microprocessor-controlled.”

  “What would a microprothethor be doing id a fridge, Dobby?”

  “Keeping itself cool, Dirk. I’ll get the lads to bring it round right away. I need to get it off the premises pretty sharpish for reasons which I won’t trouble you with.”

  “I apprethiade thid, Dobby,” said Dirk. “Problem id, I’m not at home at preddent.”

  “Gaining access to houses in the absence of their owners is only one of the panoply of skills with which my lads are blessed. Let me know if you find anything missing afterwards, by the way.”

  “I’d be happy to, Dobby. Id fact if your ladth are in a mood for carting thtuff off, I’d be glad if they would thtart with my old fridge, it badly needth throwing away.”

  “I shall see that it’s done, Dirk. There’s usually a skip or two on your street these days. Now, do you expect to be paying for this or shall I just get you kneecapped straight off, save everybody time and aggravation all round?”

  It was never 100 percent clear to Dirk exactly when Nobby was joking, and he was not keen to put it to the test. He assured him that he would pay him as soon as next they met.

  “See you very soon then, Dirk,” said Nobby. “By the way, do you know you sound exactly as if someone’s broken your nose?”

  There was a pause.

  “You there, Dirk?” said Nobby.

  “Yed,” said Dirk. “I wad judd liddening to a reggord.”

  “Hot Potato!” roared the hi-fi in the café.

  “Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick it up,

  “Quick, pass it on, pass it on, pass it on.”

  “I said, do you know you sound exactly as if someone’s broken your nose?” repeated Nobby.

  Dirk said that he did know this, thanked Nobby for pointing it out, said goodbye, stood thoughtfully for a moment, made another quick couple of phone calls, and then threaded his way back through the huddle of posing waiters to find the girl whose coffee he had appropriated sitting at his table.

  “Hello,” she said meaningfully.

  Dirk was as gracious as he knew how to be.

  He bowed to her very politely, doffed his hat, since all this gave him a second or so to recover himself, and requested her permission to sit down.

  “Go ahead,” she said, “it’s your table.” She gestured magnanimously.

  She was small, her hair was neat and dark, she was in her mid-twenties, and was looking quizzically at the half-empty cup of coffee in the middle of the table.

  Dirk sat down opposite her and leant forward conspiratorially. “I expeg,” he said in a low voice, “you are enquirigg after your coffee.”

  “You betcha,” said the girl.

  “Id very bad for you, you dow.”

  “Is it?”

  “Id id. Caffeide. Cholethderog in the milgg.”

  “I see—so it was just my health you were thinking of.”

  “I was thiggigg of meddy thiggs,” said Dirk airily.

  “You saw me sitting at the next table and you thought, ‘There’s a nice-looking girl with her health in ruins. Let me save her from herself.’ ”

  “In a nudthell.”

  “Do you know you’ve broken your nose?”

  “Yeth, of courth I do,” said Dirk crossly. “Everybody keepth—”

  “How long ago did you break it?” the girl asked.

  “Id wad broked for me,” said Dirk, “aboud tweddy middidd ago.”

  “I thought so,” said the girl. “Close your eyes for a moment.”

  Dirk looked at her suspiciously.

  “Why?”

  “It’s all right,” she said with a smile, “I’m not going to hurt you. Now close them.”

  With a puzzled frown, Dirk closed his eyes just for a moment. In that moment the girl reached over and gripped him firmly by the nose, giving it a sharp twist. Dirk nearly exploded with pain and howled so loudly that he almost attracted the attention of a waiter.

  “You widge!” he yelled, staggering wildly back from the table clutching his face. “You double-dabbed widge!”

  “Oh, be quiet and sit down,” she said. “All right, I lied about it not going to hurt you, but at least it should be straight now, which will save you a lot worse later on. You should get straight round to a hospital to have some splints and padding put on. I’m a nurse, I know what I’m doing. Or at least I think I do. Let’s have a look at you.”

  Panting and spluttering. Dirk sat down once more, his hands cupped round his nose. After a few long seconds he began to prod it tenderly again and then let the girl examine it.

  She said, “My name’s Sally Mills, by the way. I usually try to introduce myself properly before physical intimacy takes place, but sometimes—” she sighed—“there just isn’t time.”

  Dirk ran his fingers up either side of his nose again.

  “I thigg id id trader,” Dirk said at last.

  “Straighter,” Sally said. “Say ‘straighter’ properly. It’ll help you feel better.”

  “Straighter,” said Dirk. “Y’ed. I thee wad you mead.”

  “What?”

  “I see what you mead.”

  “Good,” she said with a sigh of relief, “I’m glad that worked. My horoscope this morning said that virtually everything I decided today would be wrong.”

  “Yes, well, you don’t want to believe all that rubbish,” said Dirk sharply.

  “I don’t,” said Sally.

  “Particularly not The Great Zaganza.”

  “Oh, you read it too, did you?”

  “No. That is, well, not for the same reason.”

  “My reason was that a patient asked me to read his horoscope to him this morning just before he died. What was yours?”

  “Er, a very complicated one.”

  “I see,” said Sally skeptically. “What’s this?”

  “It’s a calculator,” said Dirk. “Well, look, I mustn’t keep you. I am indebted to you, my dear lady, for the tenderness of your ministrations and the loan of your coffee, but lo! the day wears on, and I am sure you have a heavy schedule of grievous bodily harm to attend to.”

  “Not at all. I came off night duty at nine o’clock this morning, and all I have to do all day is keep awake so that I can sleep normally tonight. I have nothing better to do than to sit around talking to strangers in cafés. You, on the other hand, should get yourself to a casualty department as soon a
s possible. As soon as you’ve paid my bill, in fact.”

  She leaned over to the table she had originally been sitting at and picked up the running-total lying by her plate. She looked at it, shaking her head disapprovingly.

  “Five cups of coffee, I’m afraid. It was a long night on the wards. All sorts of comings and goings in the middle of it. One patient in a coma who had to be moved to a private hospital in the early hours. God knows why it had to be done at that time of night. Just creates unnecessary trouble. I wouldn’t pay for the second croissant if I were you. I ordered it but it never came.”

  She pushed the bill across to Dirk, who picked it up with a reluctant sigh.

  “Inordinate,” he said, “larcenously inordinate. And, in the circumstances, adding a fifteen percent service charge is tantamount to jeering at you. I bet they won’t even bring me a knife.”

  He turned and tried, without any real hope of success, to summon any of the gaggle of waiters lounging among the sugar bowls at the back.

  Sally Mills took her bill and Dirk’s and attempted to add them up on Dirk’s calculator.

  “The total seems to come to ‘A Suffusion of Yellow,’ ” she said.

  “Thank you, I’ll take that,” said Dirk, turning back crossly and relieving her of the electronic I Ching set, which he put into his pocket. He resumed his hapless waving at the tableau of waiters.

  “What do you want a knife for, anyway?” asked Sally.

  “To open this,” said Dirk, waggling the large, heavily Sellotaped envelope at her.

  “I’ll get you one,” she said. A young man sitting on his own at another nearby table was looking away at that moment, so Sally quickly leaned across and nabbed his knife.

  “I am indebted to you,” said Dirk and put out his hand to take the knife from her.

  She held it away from him.

  “What’s in the envelope?” she said.

  “You are an extremely inquisitive and presumptuous young lady,” exclaimed Dirk.

  “And you,” said Sally Mills, “are very strange.”

  “Only,” said Dirk, “as strange as I need to be.”

  “Humph,” said Sally. “What’s in the envelope?” She still wouldn’t give him the knife.

  “The envelope is not yours,” proclaimed Dirk, “and its contents are not your concern.”

  “It looks very interesting though. What’s in it?”

  “Well, I won’t know till I’ve opened it!”

  She looked at him suspiciously, then snatched the envelope from him.

  “I insist that you—” expostulated Dirk, incompletely.

  “What’s your name?” demanded Sally.

  “My name is Gently. Mr. Dirk Gently.”

  “And not Geoffrey Anstey, or any of these other names that have been crossed out?” She frowned, briefly, looking at them.

  “No,” said Dirk. “Certainly not.”

  “So you mean the envelope is not yours either?”

  “I—that is—”

  “Aha! So you are also being extremely . . . what was it?”

  “Inquisitive and presumptuous. I do not deny it. But I am a private detective. I am paid to be inquisitive and presumptuous. Not as often or copiously as I would wish, but I am nevertheless inquisitive and presumptuous on a professional basis.”

  “How sad. I think it’s much more fun being inquisitive and presumptuous as a hobby. So you are a professional while I am merely an amateur of Olympic standard. You don’t look like a private detective.”

  “No private detective looks like a private detective. That’s one of the first rules of private detection.”

  “But if no private detective looks like a private detective, how does a private detective know what it is he’s supposed not to look like? Seems to me there’s a problem there.”

  “Yes, but it’s not one that keeps me awake at nights,” said Dirk in exasperation. “Anyway, I am not as other private detectives. My methods are holistic and, in a very proper sense of the word, chaotic. I operate by investigating the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.”

  Sally Mills merely blinked at him.

  “Every particle in the universe,” continued Dirk, warming to his subject and beginning to stare a bit, “affects every other particle, however faintly or obliquely. Everything interconnects with everything. The beating of a butterfly’s wings in China can affect the course of an Atlantic hurricane. If I could interrogate this table leg in a way that made sense to me, or to the table leg, then it could provide me with the answer to any question about the universe. I could ask anybody I liked, chosen entirely by chance, any random question I cared to think of, and their answer, or lack of it, would in some way bear upon the problem to which I am seeking a solution. It is only a question of knowing how to interpret it. Even you, whom I have met entirely by chance, probably know things that are vital to my investigation, if only I knew what to ask you, which I don’t, and if only I could be bothered to, which I can’t.”

  He paused, and said, “Please will you let me have the envelope and the knife?”

  “You make it sound as if someone’s life depends on it.”

  Dirk dropped his eyes for a moment.

  “I rather think somebody’s life did depend on it,” he said. He said it in such a way that a cloud seemed to pass briefly over them.

  Sally Mills relented and passed the envelope and the knife over to Dirk. A spark seemed to go out of her.

  The knife was too blunt and the Sellotape too thickly applied. Dirk struggled with it for a few seconds but was unable to slice through it. He sat back in his seat feeling tired and irritable.

  He said, “I’ll go and ask them if they’ve got anything sharper,” and stood up, clutching the envelope.

  “You should go and get your nose fixed,” said Sally Mills quietly.

  “Thank you,” said Dirk and bowed very slightly to her.

  He picked up the bills and set out to visit the exhibition of waiters mounted at the rear of the café. He encountered a certain coolness when he was disinclined to augment the mandatory 15 percent service charge with any voluntary additional token of his personal appreciation, and was told that no, that was the only type of knife they had and that’s all there was to it.

  Dirk thanked them and walked back through the café.

  Sitting in his seat talking to Sally Mills was the young man whose knife she had purloined. He nodded to her, but she was deeply engrossed in conversation with her new friend and did not notice.

  “ . . . in a coma,” she was saying, “who had to be moved to a private hospital in the early hours. God knows why it had to be done at that time of night. Just creates unnecessary trouble. Excuse me rabbiting on, but the patient had his own personal Coca-Cola machine and sledgehammer with him, and that sort of thing is all very well in a private hospital, but on a short-staffed NHS ward it just makes me tired, and I talk too much when I’m tired. If I suddenly fall insensible to the floor, would you let me know?”

  Dirk walked on, and then noticed that Sally Mills had left the book she had been reading on her original table, and something about it caught his attention.

  It was a large book called Run Like the Devil. In fact it was extremely large and a little dog-eared, looking more like a puff-pastry cliff than a book. The bottom half of the cover featured the normal woman-in-cocktail-dress-framed-in-the-sights-of-a-gun, while the top half was entirely taken up with the author’s name, Howard Bell, embossed in silver.

  Dirk couldn’t immediately work out what it was about the book that had caught his eye, but he knew that some detail of the cover had struck a chord with him somewhere. He gave a circumspect glance at the girl whose coffee he had purloined, and whose five coffees and two croissants, one undelivered and uneaten, he had subsequently paid for. She wasn’t looking, so he purloined her book as well and slipped it into the pocket of his leather coat.

  He stepped out onto the street, where a passing eagle swooped out of the sky at him, near
ly forcing him into the path of a cyclist, who cursed and swore at him from a moral high ground that cyclists alone seem able to inhabit.

  11

  INTO THE WELL-KEMPT grounds that lay just on the outskirts of a well-kempt village on the fringes of the well-kempt Cotswolds turned a less than well-kempt car.

  It was a battered yellow Citroën 2CV, which had had one careful owner but also three suicidally reckless ones. It made its way up the driveway with a reluctant air as if all it asked for from life was to be tipped into a restful ditch in one of the adjoining meadows and there allowed to settle in graceful abandonment, instead of which, here it was being asked to drag itself all the way up this long graveled drive, and would, no doubt, soon be called upon to drag itself all the way back down again, to what possible purpose it was beyond its wit to imagine.

  It drew to a halt in front of the elegant stone entrance to the main building, and then began to trundle slowly backward again until its occupant yanked on the handbrake, which evoked from the car a sort of strangled “eek.”

  A door flopped open, wobbling perilously on its one remaining hinge, and there emerged from the car a pair of the sort of legs which sound-track editors are unable to see without needing to slap a smoky saxophone solo all over, for reasons which no one besides sound-track editors has ever been able to understand. In this particular case, however, the saxophone would have been silenced by the proximity of the kazoo which the same sound-track editor would almost certainly have slapped all over the progress of the vehicle.

  The owner of the legs followed them in the usual manner, closed the car door tenderly, and then made her way into the building.

  The car remained parked in front of it.

  After a few minutes a porter came out and examined it, adopted a disapproving manner and then, for lack of anything more positive to do, went back in.

  A short time later, Kate was shown into the office of Mr. Ralph Standish, the chief consultant psychologist and one of the directors of the Woodshead Hospital, who was just completing a telephone conversation.

  “Yes, it is true,” he was saying, “that sometimes unusually intelligent and sensitive children can appear to be stupid. But, Mrs. Benson, stupid children can sometimes appear to be stupid as well. I think that’s something you might have to consider. I know it’s very painful, yes. Good day, Mrs. Benson.”