The Strange Attractor

by Cory, Desmond

  “What sort of money problems?”

  “He owed me a month’s rent, by way of example. And he’d bought a very expensive computer on hire-purchase. But as I say—”

  “Were you pressing him for payment in any way?” The coroner hesitated. “I don’t mean to suggest that if you had, it would have been at all improper.”

  “I didn’t press him for payment in any way. He had a good job and he was working very hard and I assumed whatever difficulties he was having were only temporary.”

  “So that when you entered the room and discovered the body, it would be fair to say that you were greatly surprised?”

  “Surprised and horrified.”

  “Horrified. Yes. As would be natural. Thank you, Dr Coyle. I’ll now call upon Detective-Inspector Jackson.”

  The tall man in rimless glasses had already risen to his feet. Dobie sighed again and did likewise, not to give evidence but to beat an inconspicuous retreat. He’d had about enough. Cantwell was dead and there an end. The rest was tedium. Surprised and horrified. Who wouldn’t be?

  The crinkly-haired geezer, who as it transpired was in fact the famous Dickie Bird, emerged from the courtroom some forty minutes later and readily accepted Dobie’s offer of a lift back to his office. “Got my own car in for servicing, as it happens. So sitting in on this shindig was a bit damned inconvenient, really. Specially as I didn’t have much to say. These your wheels?”

  “These are they,” Dobie agreed, opening the door of the Fiesta and clambering in.

  “Noticed you in there, of course. In fact I was wondering what you had to do with it.”

  “Just an interested observer,” Dobie said. “At least, I started off that way. I got less interested as time went by.”

  “I know just what you mean. Who was that boyo whose name you mentioned?”

  “Marryat.”

  “I think I remember him. And there used to be a… Dr Traynor?”

  “He’s the head of my department. Mathematics.”

  Bird slid a finger inside his shirt collar, the tightness of which appeared to be troubling him. “Coroner didn’t seem to like that bit about the gun. I don’t know if you noticed.”

  “What bit about the gun?”

  “It being unlicensed.”

  “Oh? My attention may have wandered at that point. I suppose your wife doesn’t ever wear a wig?”

  “Eh?… I don’t have one.”

  “I didn’t mean your wig. A ladies’ wig.”

  “No, a wife is what I don’t have. I’m not married. Sorry.”

  Dobie continued to drive in silence for the next five minutes or so, during which time, as he noticed, his passenger appeared to be gripping the handle of the car door with unnecessary tenacity. Bird, breaking the silence, then said. Take a right here, if you’d be so good.”

  “Pentyrch Road, isn’t it?”

  “That is Pentyrch Road. On the right there.”

  “Ah yes. It’s a little while since I’ve been this way.”

  The turning having been successfully executed, Bird appeared to relax very slightly. “Visited us before, have you?”

  “Just the once, I think. About five years ago. Of course you’ve expanded quite a lot since then.”

  “Indeed we have. Five years ago? That’s before my time, actually. You’ll probably hardly recognise the place now. With the new extensions.”

  Dobie in fact didn’t recognise it, but it wasn’t the sort of place you could easily drive past without noticing. Not even Dobie, who was good at that sort of thing. There were considerable expanses of plate glass and laminated concrete, a very large sign that said CORDER ACOUSTICS LTD above a logo design, high iron fencing and a driveway only slightly smaller than that which conducts casual visitors to the front steps of Buckingham Palace. Dobie got the message. “Here, is it?”

  “Nowhere else.”

  There was even a security guard at the main gate who, however, waved them through as soon as Bird had wound down the window and advanced his visage through the gap thus provided. Dobie was then directed through an alarming proliferation of white-painted signboards and finally parked the car adjacent to yet another signboard that said ADMIN OFFICES. “I thought you were in charge of the research section.”

  “So I am,” Bird said, dismounting. “But I can’t take you in there, I’m afraid, lot of nonsense no doubt but there it is. We’ll go up to my office here and have our little chat. Come along.”

  The admin offices, unlike the college buildings, were provided with an efficient lift which whizzed them silently and speedily up to the top floor. Dobie was impressed. “How many employees do you have working here?”

  “You mean in my section? Or overall?”

  “All together.”

  “Sixty-three on the staff, not counting the cleaners and other odd sods.”

  “Good heavens. Five years ago it was Alec Corder and maybe a dozen others.”

  “Well, there you are. You know Alec then?”

  “I used to see more of him than I do now but we haven’t altogether lost touch.”

  “Yes, that figures. He’s pretty busy these days. Okay, come into my parlour.”

  Bird’s parlour (or cage) had, as Dobie at once acutely observed, all the doings. Plate glass windows, fitted carpet, football-pitch-sized desk and a very youthful secretary whose desk was only very slightly smaller and carried an imposing array of communications equipment. “Any calls, Wendy?” asked Bird, proceeding as he spoke to his own relatively unimpeded sphere of operations and plumping himself down in the commodious armchair located somewhere in the middle distance behind it.

  “Oh yes. Quite a few. On your pad. Hello, Mr Dobie.”

  Dobie had heard of secretarial efficiency but this was ridiculous. He turned his head incredulously. “How did you… Oh, it’s Wendy. I didn’t know you worked here.” You couldn’t get used to the way these kids sprouted up nowadays. “Of course it’s been some little while…”

  “Well, I’ve been here nearly a year now. Dad was keen for me to get to know the ropes sort of thing. So…”

  “So here you are. How is Alec these days?”

  “Fine. And Jenny?”

  “Yes. I mean, all right. Okay.”

  “Wendy, my love,” Bird said, breaking into this cordial exchange of civilities, “we’ve had a tedious afternoon and we could use some nice hot coffee. Can do?”

  “I think we might manage that,” Wendy said, getting up and heading for the door. Good God, she was as tall as her mother now. Not far short of six feet. But agile with it. Or lissom might be the word. “So,” Bird said, as the closing door deprived Dobie of this pleasing spectacle, “you know our little Wendy, then?”

  “Not so little now.”

  “Indeed she isn’t. Take a seat, why don’t you?… Flits from flower to flower a bit, Wendy does. I don’t mind it when she settles in here, but it’s a bit of a strain having the boss’s daughter typing your letters for you. You always wonder if… However. Yes, Cantwell.” Spinning expertly round in his chair, he extracted a green cardboard folder from a filing cabinet. “Should be all in here. What was it you wanted to know, exactly?”

  “I don’t quite know what I want to know. That’s the trouble. Basically I’m curious as to why he did it.”

  “Ah well.” Bird ran his finger cautiously up and down the edge of the folder. “I don’t think I can help you there. Puzzles us all.”

  “Would you agree with what that doctor said? That he didn’t have any close friends?”

  “I wouldn’t know what he got up to in his free time, of course. But if you mean here at Corders… No, I don’t think he did. Most of the people in the section are a good deal older than he was, of course. But he got on with them all right. No friction. I’d know if there was.”

  “Why did they put him in R and D in the first place?”

  “I expect Alec thought we needed some young blood.” Bird looked up and giggled reflectively. “Sorry. I should have c
hosen my words a bit more carefully there. But he was up to the work all right. I’d soon have had him transferred if he wasn’t. Ah, here’s the coffee.”

  In proper cups and saucers, Dobie noted gratefully; no plastic horrors here. Wendy placed these items on the desk and then retired undulatingly to her own demesne, Dobie’s appreciative attention, however, being this time focused on the whisky bottle that Bird had produced from some hidden recess under the football pitch. “A snifter with it?”

  “Please,” Dobie said. Offers of this kind he rarely felt able to refuse.

  “I reckon we’ve earned it.”

  “The workman is worthy of his hire. What was the nature of his work?”

  “In broad terms?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can’t give you a detailed answer because we’re getting very hot on security these days. But there’s nothing very secret about it. What we’re doing, we’re using laser beams to burn information on to a newly developed kind of magnetic ferrite film, same like in information storage systems. We get the data out again by lower-power laser projection through the film on to a photo-sensing device. Electronic focusing, naturally. Nothing much to it.”

  Dobie tried the coffee, which was excellent. The additive material wasn’t half bad, either. “So where do acoustics come into it?”

  “Well, the information can relate to sound waves as much as to anything else. And since the laser transmits a light wave, of course, you can make the information damned nearly as detailed as you like. In other words—”

  “Compact discs.” Dobie nodded. “Hi-fi.”

  “About the hi-est bloody fi you ever came across. The problem is getting it back into sonics again without using an amplifier the size of this room. That’s what Cantwell was working on. And I think I can tell you that between us we reckon we’ve got it licked.”

  “Did he think so? I mean, was he enthusiastic?”

  “Oh yes. Very. He had to be. Alec’s got no use for anyone who’s not a hundred and ten per cent behind the job and neither have I.”

  Fine. Except it made less sense than ever.

  “I saw Wendy this afternoon. My word, she’s grown.”

  “Wendy?”

  “You know. Jane’s Wendy.”

  “Oh.” Jenny turned over a page. “At the college, was it?”

  “No, she’s working over at Alec’s place.”

  “I haven’t seen her for quite a while, either. It’s a pity, really, they don’t get on better.”

  “Who, Wendy and Alec?”

  “No, no. Wendy and Jane.”

  “Don’t they?”

  “Well, you know Jane. She does tend to be demanding. She’d boss me around if I gave her half a chance. Where is Alec’s place, anyway?”

  “Pentyrch Road. It’s pretty big now. He must be doing well.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “I gave someone a lift back from the inquest.”

  “Inquest?” This time she actually looked up from her book. “What inquest?”

  “The one on Sammy Cantwell. I thought I’d go.”

  “Whatever for? You’re full of surprises.”

  “I just felt like it.”

  “You have been gadding about.” Setting her book down and swinging her legs off the sofa. “I’m booked to do some travelling myself. The agency rang this morning.”

  “Paris again, is it?”

  “I have to fly over next Wednesday. For two or three days.”

  “Look,” Dobie said. “You know you don’t have to do these jobs if you don’t want to.”

  “I do want to.”

  “That’s all right, then.”

  “When does your vacation start?”

  “Next week.”

  “I may come back with some ideas. I’ll bring the latest brochures.”

  “Yes, do that,” Dobie said.

  He thought that the earnest-looking lad’s efforts had gone to waste but a more detailed search at length revealed a small entry in the morning paper. There was even a modest one-column headline: UNLICENSED GUNS – CORONER HITS OUT. Dobie had observed no such display of pugilistic activity on the coroner’s part but was familiar enough with contemporary techniques of reportage to feel no particular surprise, even when he further observed that his ex-student’s name had been misspelled in a somewhat embarrassing way. He was now inclined to think that he himself had wasted if not much effort, at any rate a good deal of valuable time the previous day and drove off collegewards in a chastened mood. Leaving Jenny fast asleep, as usual.

  But whatever happens, Dobie thought, polluting the mild warmth of the morning with a vast exhalation of tobacco smoke, whatever happens I don’t want to become der zerstreut Professor of popular legend. Mathematicians have to stay on the ball. Fall back on these nineteenth-century gimmicks and you might as well retire. And I don’t want to retire. It’s true what Jenny says; I don’t have to go on teaching if I don’t want to. But I do want to.

  Not because I’m specially good at it. They don’t call me Drip-Dry for nothing. There are all kinds of with-it things that other and sprightlier lecturers (such as Wain) might breezily refer to, such as U2 (whatever that was) and Tottenham Hotspur and crack (or was it crash?) and Lenny Henry… One could surely bring such things into the study of Wallis’s Law, for instance, if only one knew the exact meaning of all those extraordinary concepts. And students such as Hywel Morgan, who frequently multiplied his logarithms, would then surely be on to the exponent of x in a flash. Let the graph of y = 5x represent the parabola described by a regulation football that, having been smartly kicked by Alan Rush (of Morecambe United and Scotland) in the general direction of the goal, is about to be deflected by the opposing scrum-half’s forearm… No, it was no good. Hopeless. And moreover offside. “That is why,” Dobie said gloomily, turning away from the long rows of marble and granite plaques, “a complex number may be represented graphically by a vector, that is to say by trigonometrical notation, which inevitably suggests to our minds the idea of direction.” What in actual fact it inevitably suggested to his mind was a mental picture of Hywel Morgan writing down the word direction and staring at it gloomily. Even that wasn’t so bad. But why didn’t he have a mental picture of Sammy Cantwell? That was bad. That was what rankled.

  Raising his head and taking another puff at his Superking, he saw an echoing drift of smoke rise from the chimney of the crematorium, dark smoke sliding away effortlessly downwind.

  The sky was otherwise almost free of cloud and the sunlight was etching a gently-moving dapple of tree-leaf shadow around his feet. He had now walked three times the length of the path running from the car park to the cemetery and his shoes, he noticed, had got a little dusty. He turned and looked towards the entrance of the funeral parlour, where a few dark-suited figures were now emerging. Not very many. Only four or five. Dickie Bird was one of them, walking alongside a fatter fair-haired chap; no doubt a colleague. The Corder contingent. Dr Coyle was the last figure to emerge; she stood still for a moment, giving the impression of blinking in the sharp sunlight, then turned away in the opposite direction to the others, walking not towards the car park but down the path upon which Dobie himself was standing. Half-way along it, however, she paused and sat down on a convenient wooden bench. She seemed, as Dobie cautiously approached, to be lost in thought, but looked up sharply enough as he came to a final halt beside her.

  “You were at the inquest.”

  “Yes,” Dobie said. “I was.”

  “Who are you?”

  Her own approach seemed to be pleasingly direct. “My name’s Dobie. John Dobie. May I… ?”

  “Why not?”

  Thus encouraged, Dobie seated himself beside her. “He was one of my students.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “Until last year.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t remember your name.”

  “It’s Dobie.”

  “My memory’s bad but it’s not that bad. I meant, I don’t re
member his ever mentioning it.”

  “No special reason why he should have done.” At close range, her voice lost its finishing-school tone, seemed huskier and much less self-assured. It sounded better that way. There was even the faintest trace of a Kaird’f accent somewhere underneath. “He only came to my lectures. That was all.”

  “I suppose you’re used to speaking to lots of people. You don’t get nervous or anything. Me, I’m petrified.”

  “So am I, sometimes. Though it’s usually all right once you get started. And you did very well, I thought. It wasn’t such a very big audience but it’s never easy.”

  “It was kind of you to come. My name’s Kate Coyle.”

  “I know. Are you really what he said? A police pathologist?”

  “I’m a part-time police pathologist. I do night duty and I stand in for Paddy Oates when he’s away. Because I need the money. Why do you ask?”

  “I just wondered… Well, if there was anything…?”

  “I didn’t do the autopsy. But no, there wasn’t anything that would explain it.”

  “No medical reason for it?”

  “Or any other that I can see.”

  She looked different, too, squinting sideways into the bright sunlight. Already it had brought a faint flush to her otherwise rather pallid cheeks. She looked a great deal younger than in the courtroom, more like her true age which Dobie guessed to be somewhere in the middle thirties. Yet still somehow a little worn round the edges. An interesting face, when you looked at it closely.

  “I don’t think the coroner felt that I did very well. He got quite narky about that bloody gun. Said I should have reported it. The trouble is, he’s right. I should have.”

  “But otherwise, you’re satisfied with the verdict?”

  “It seems an odd word to use. But he shot himself all right. Was he a… a particularly bright student? Or something?”

  “He was, yes. And yet,” Dobie said, “for the last five days I’ve been trying to remember what he looked like. And I can’t.”

  “What he looked like?… Dark-haired. Scruffy. Pathetic.”

  “That describes ninety per cent of them. You know, I get to see an awful lot of students, but I hardly ever get to know them.”