The Shy Traffickers (Professor Dobie Book 4)

by Desmond Cory

  “Wotcha mean, nothing? What’s them yellow patches, then? He’s got them on his tongue, too.”

  “Oh, in themselves they wouldn’t be … But then there’s the obvious locomotor ataxy we have to consider. Because that’s a pretty clear indication of a Humboldtian syndrome.”

  “Is that what he’s got? … A local motor what-you-said?”

  “Oh yes. And very far advanced, in my opinion. You can put your tongue back in, Merv, it’s not a pretty sight.”

  Mervyn did so. “But I … But I …”

  “Of course I’m wondering if … You haven’t had any dealings with Africans lately, I don’t suppose? Or anyone from Central Africa particularly?”

  “Africans? … Wot? … All over the bloody place these days, ain’t they? How’m I supposed to—”

  “Or have you come into contact with apes? Chimpanzees? Or maybe even monkeys?”

  Apes? … Looking at him closely, as Guffin now was, it was impossible to deny the likelihood of certain very obvious simian connections. Extremely intimate ones, at that. “Look, Merv … Merv …”

  “Looks to me like he’s contracted some form or other of the Ebola virus, you see. In which case, he’s a walking hot zone. You ought to get him into an isolation ward right away, preferably under level four biosafety conditions. Racal suits and so on.” Mervyn certainly looked considerably unhealthier than when he’d come in but then, so did Guffin. Even when you took the effect of that mustard-and-brown lampshade into account. “If you ring Porterdown, they’ll tell you what’s the best thing to do. They may want to bring the military in on it, of course.”

  “Milly milly … Whaffor?”

  “To carry out the proper decontamination procedures. This building could well be the epicentre of an outbreak or even of an epidemic, which’d be a very serious matter as there’s no known cure. I suppose you could get all his clothes sent to an incinerator for a start, but as it’s a viral disease and incredibly resilient—”

  “Not like AIDS, izzit?”

  “Oh heavens, no. Nothing like AIDS. It’s far far worse than that. It works so quickly, you see, once it gets a grip. You could say it rushes through the whole body. Turns your intestines into a slimy mush in a matter of minutes. On the up side, Merv doesn’t have to worry about giving up smoking because he won’t have time to get through more than another couple of packs anyway.” Kate, despite her cramped position, managed the outward form of a regretful shrug. “All he can really do now is watch out for the first obvious signs. Reddening of the eyeballs, to begin with. Hazy vision. Bouts of giddiness. Then of course—”

  “’Ere! … Wait! … Hang on! … His eyeballs are red! …”

  “Are they? … Oh well. There you go. Next thing the actual flesh’ll start rotting away and in the consequent shrinkage of the epidermis—”

  Guffin was becoming more and more alarmed. “Oh cripes! … He had that!”

  “Who did?”

  “Primrose. Shrinkage of the … Melanie was on about that. Her being used to better things, like. My Gawd, who’d a thought it?” Guffin, visibly appalled, was turning shakily away towards the door. “I got to let Stainer know about all this. It could put a different whatchamaycallit upon the matter.”

  “Complexion?”

  “Yeah. Sort of. Hey, where’s the blower?” Turning back to stare suspiciously towards Merv. “You ain’t been using the phone here, have you? Breathing all over it as like as not?”

  “Me? … Why’d I want to do a thing like that? … Are you tellin’ me I ain’t allowed to breathe no more?”

  “That,” Guffin said, “remains to be seen. We’ll have to see what the Man thinks about it.”

  Olly, meantime, had got through to Columbella on the cellular. If what Peter Crumb had told her was true, and it almost certainly was, no time was to be lost. “Columbella …”

  “Olly? … Olly, I’ve been trying to raise you this past couple of hours … Listen. Dobie—”

  “Never you mind about Dobie. To hell with him.”

  “No, you don’t understand. There’s this virus – he was threatening to close us down—”

  “For God’s sake stop babbling, Columbella. I’m killing the whole story. It’s played out. It’s dead. I’m coming back to the office tonight. This sodding place pisses me off.”

  At the other end of the line, silence. For a moment. Then Columbella said, in a high-pitched squeak,

  “But what’s happened, Olly?”

  “Nothing’s happened. That’s the whole trouble. Except that George Stainer’s here. Don’t have to elaborate none on that, do I?”

  “But if George Stainer—”

  “If Stainer don’t want the story to run, then it don’t run. It’s simple as that. I expect he’d send flowers to my funeral if we was to go on running it, but I can do without that sort of delicate attention for a long while yet. This is serious, Columbella. I’ve had a hot tip.”

  “Okay. I’ll tell Manderson you’re dumping the story. But he won’t be best pleased.”

  “D’you fink I’m pleased? After all the work I put in on it? I’m just about chocker an’ you better believe it. He can give me the boot if he wants. I don’t care.”

  “Well, Olly, that has to be borne in mind as a definite possibility. He rather went a bundle on that glamorous-death-doctor angle. In fact if you could get some kind of a story out of her, he said he’d be willing to go up to fifty thousand for the TV rights. And that ain’t a bunch of lavander.”

  “I wouldn’t want lavander at my funeral, either,” Olly said.

  Ringing off.

  Dobie was up against the old enemy. The enemy of all mankind. Not sin, or suffering, or anything like that. No, he was up against the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states (when put in a nutshell) that a bullet can’t hit its target before it’s been fired. Or, for that matter, miss it, either. Not even the Dobie Paradox could circumnavigate that one. Or not completely.

  Of course, to understand Dobie you had to understand the Dobie Paradox (which hardly anyone did) and its effect upon his in any case notably ungregarious nature. You couldn’t call him a recluse, exactly, but you could certainly say that his increasingly desperate efforts to explain the bloody thing to whomsoever had created in him a marked withdrawal syndrome with certain weird side-effects (a fear of flying, a tendency to shy away from certain gateposts, etc.) In the days of what he now thought of as his profligate youth, Dobie had sat at the side of a swimming-pool which was being filled with water by a hosepipe; he had observed how the wild writhings of the hosepipe nozzle in the shallow water had quietened as the water deepened, finally to settle down in a fixed position as the pool had filled. It had, however, thereupon been further filled by two blondes in minimal bikinis who had diverted Dobie’s attention from the problems of wave mechanics to those of topological analysis, these last seeming to him at the time to be of more immediately pressing a nature. What all this had to do with the Big Bang theory and the so-called afterglow of creation was what Kate couldn’t quite grasp, though the topology part of it she understood readily enough.

  “The point is, or was, that given a circular pool and all other factors demonstrably constant, the movement of the end of the hosepipe should have been predictable. Conforming to an identical pattern every time. So it was, when I ran the computerised simulations and worked out the corresponding equations in terms of classical wave mechanics. No problem, okay? But when you ran the actual experiment, the pattern didn’t conform. It was different every time. In fact, random. So as there was no point in trying to determine what the cause of the difference was, I got the computer going on the problem of what we mean when we say that something is different to something else. Or … how any physical event can be said to differ from another one. And what the computer eventually came up with …”

  Kate thought she knew the answer to that one. “Strange attractors?”

  “Well, yes. But they weren’t called that at the time. They weren’t cal
led anything, they were just sets of symbols. All I did was correlate the sets to establish what I called a theory of influence and that’s what’s now called the Paradox. Because that’s what it is. Paradoxical. Unfortunately, it seemed to offer a means of reconciling certain other paradoxes, or discrepancies, like those between the postulates of classical wave mechanics and those of quantum mechanics, which in those days was just what a lot of physicists and radio-astronomers and people like that were looking for. On the other hand,” Dobie admitted with reluctance, “lots of other people seemed to think it just took physics back to Giordano Bruno, in other words, the drawing board. So there you go.”

  “And does it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see. Good job it doesn’t apply to medical science.”

  “Oh, but it does.”

  Dobie hadn’t broken off from his computations, or not exactly, but he had reached that semi-somniferous stage wherein he could type complex instructions on the keyboard while at the same time allowing his weary brain to dwell on these and other recollections of the past, pleasant and otherwise. While he was in this state of mind his brain invariably hung out an invisible notice saying DO NOT DISTURB; since this notice was invisible, Jackson naturally ignored it and effected a considerable disturbance by trampling noisily up the stairs and thundering even more noisily with his knuckles against the closed door of Dobie’s room. Dobie looked round blearily and, ceasing his labours, ambled across to open the door. “Oh. It’s you, Jacko.”

  “You know you left the front door downstairs unlocked, Mr Dobie? Careless, that. Anyone could wander in and help themselves to whatever Kate keeps in her medicine cabinets. Quite dangerous stuff, as like as not.”

  Dobie was in no mood to accept reproof. “I’ve been busy, Jacko. Very busy. Too busy to worry about front doors and things like that. And I’d have thought that you’d be busy too, right now. Looking for Kate.”

  “Oh, we’re looking for her,” Jackson said, plumping himself tiredly down in Dobie’s squeaky-springed armchair. “Don’t think we’re not. I mean, that’s why I’m here. We’re looking for her all right. Question is, why aren’t you?”

  “Well,” Dobie said, seemingly a little ill at ease, as (Jackson thought) well he might be. “I have to suppose that Kate knows what she’s doing. So for me, the real question is whether anyone else does.”

  “Meaning us rozzers?”

  “Yes.”

  “We know what we’re doing all right.”

  “So what are you doing?”

  “We’re looking for her.”

  “And when you find her?”

  “Well, then we got to arrest her again.”

  “Yes. But you can’t expect me to go along with that idea, now can you? What’d be the point of it? When you know damned well she didn’t do it.”

  “I can’t say that I know that, Mr Dobie. And even if I could, it wouldn’t be enough. It’s all got to be proved, like, and how can we start in on doing that if she won’t talk to us?” Jackson sniffed appreciatively at the smoke-laden air. “I always thought that tobacco smoke was supposed to be bad for computers.”

  “It’s supposed to be bad for me, too. Or so Kate always says.”

  “And you got a cigarette stuck behind your ear.”

  Dobie, startled, removed the object in question and gazed at it reproachfully. “So I have. I must have forgotten to light it.”

  “It is lit, Mr Dobie.”

  “Ah. Yes. So it is. That accounts for the strange burning sensation that I … but never mind …” Dobie took a lengthy drag. “Waste not want not, I always say.”

  “I dunno how you can stand this ’orrible fug. With the heat and all. Dog days we used to call them. I’ve no idea why.”

  “Because the Romans believed days of excessive heat to be caused by the influence of Sirius, the Dog Star. Caniculares dies, they called them. Commencing around the third of July and—”

  “Well, I’d like to hear all about that some other time, Mr Dobie.” He should of course have remembered that Dobie was highly unamenable to normal introductory chatting-up procedures, somehow contriving invariably to go off on a tangent and disappear into thin air like a wraith of smoke up a chimney. A very allusive customer, was Mr Dobie. Almost as allusive a customer, Jackson thought, as Dai Dymond himself, though in a very different way. And in pursuance of that train of thought, “Funny the way we brought all this on ourselves, so to speak, when we shopped Dai Dymond. I mean, no sooner’ve we got the old bastard inside than those London mobs start moving in. And better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know, as the saying has it. It’s like what they call a voracious circle.”

  “Quite so. I’ve encountered exactly the same problem—”

  “And,” Jackson said, ignoring this interruption, “you can’t rule the devil you do know out of the equitation, neither, just on account of he’s doing snuff. Sort of a minor hindrance to him, really, having to run the show from clink instead of that posh pad of his in Park Place. Of course, when you put Big Ivor out of business—”

  “Me? … I had nothing to do with it. All I did was—”

  “… I’m not saying Dai isn’t feeling the breeze, mind you. The Stainers are real trouble. That’s why he called cop on this one, to my way of thinking. Don’t see why he’d want to turn canary otherwise.”

  “Jacko …”

  “What?”

  “You’re expressing yourself obscurely,” Dobie complained.

  “That coming from you, Mr Dobie, I take as a compliment. No, just thinking out loud, I was, sometimes when I’m feeling a bit tired I … But what I’m saying is, it’s a real complex situation Kate’s gone and got herself into. More to it than meets the eye, as you might say.”

  “Well, now,” Dobie said. “As a matter of fact—”

  “But we keep coming back to this idea that it could have been more or less of an accident. We don’t reckon Kate meant to shoot Primrose or anyone else. We think she saw Primrose looking out the window and mistook him for her husband … and being at that time pretty angry with her husband for one reason or another she thought she’d give him a fright. Okay, so she took a potshot at him, aiming to miss. Well, she did miss him by a clear three feet, you can see the mark on the wall inside the office where the bullet hit. What got Primrose was the ricochet. So it was all what you could call an accident.” Jackson waved a hand dismissively, smiling benignly. “Of course we’ll have to put her on a manslaughter charge when we catch up with her but it won’t be murder. Not if her lawyer pushes that line of defence.”

  “But Kate insists she never fired that gun at all. We’ve been through all this, Jacko.”

  “I know, but that’s just plain stupid. Maybe she’ll change her story when she realises we know just how it happened. What beats me is why she up and run the way she did.”

  “It’s not very nice,” Dobie said, “being accused of a murder you didn’t commit. It’s hurtful to the feelings. And I ought to know.”

  “Yes, but that was a long time back and you ought to let has-beens be bygones. Or is it the other way round? … Anyway, if she plays it right there won’t be a murder charge, that’s the whole drift of my argument. And that’s why I’ve come along to see you. Because if by any chance you know where she is—”

  “Of course I know where she is.”

  “Ah.” Jackson breathed out a satisfied sigh. “We thought you might.”

  “That Stainer person you just mentioned … He’s got her.”

  Jackson’s final exhalation turned into a peculiar choking sound, rather as though his throat had been abruptly transfixed by the fangs of an extremely short-sighted vampire. “What makes you think that?”

  “Well, it’s what I’d do if I were in his place and wanted to find out—”

  “Look, Mr Dobie … What do you know about George Stainer?”

  “Not very much. But this girl I was talking to last night, Melinda I think the name was … She told me it was this
Stainer chap who really ran this Codron Corp, whatever that is. So obviously he’s the fellow I have to see.”

  “To see?”

  “Yes.”

  “See George Stainer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Look, Mr Dobie, you don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “Yes, I do. I’m saying that I want to see—”

  “Look, how can I put this to you? I don’t suppose you’ll ever have heard the name of … Coyle?”

  “Coyle? Yes. Quite often.”

  Jackson clicked his tongue. “No, no. Slip of the tongue. Kray, I meant to say. Reggie Kray?”

  “Know him quite well.”

  “You …?”

  “Reader in Mathematics at Oriel College. Though in fact I believe he’s in Australia now. Adelaide or somewhere like that. In fact Reggie and I once had quite a protracted—”

  “Not that one, Mr Dobie.”

  “Another one?”

  “Another two in fact. They were twin brothers.”

  Dobie shook his head firmly. “No, no. Reggie hasn’t got a twin brother. I can say that with relative certainty because—”

  “But this is a different Reggie Kray. Not the one you—”

  “With a different twin brother?”

  “Yes. No. Mr Dobie, you’re getting me confused. The one I’m talking about, he’s a notorious criminal.”

  “That’s the fellow. That’s Reggie Kray all right.”

  “There were two of them, Mr Dobie, is what I’m saying. They used to rule the London underworld with … with a … like …”

  “Britannia?”

  “No. A rod of iron, I was going to say. Very, very unpleasant characters, the both of them. You wouldn’t want to have any dealings with people like that.”

  “Oh. Then I won’t.”

  “No, you won’t, because we put them away twenty years back. And one of them’s dead anyway. But this geezer you say you want to see, he’s just the same. Only nastier. That’s the point I’ve been trying to put before you.”

  “Yes. But how does my Reggie Kray come into it?”

  “He doesn’t. Except to obfuscerate the issue. Look, when it comes to dealing with Stainer and his like, I can tell you I’m happy enough to sit back and let the Specials pick up the can and carry it, and I’ve dealt with plenty of real naughty villains in my time. So if you’re now proposing … Look, you remember Ivor Halliday, don’t you?”