The Strange Attractor

by Cory, Desmond

  “Well, I understand that,” Kate said. “But then why are you…?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps I feel a little guilty about it. I feel I should be able to remember him.”

  “Here.” She opened her handbag. “See if this helps.”

  Dobie took the photograph. It was passport sized and murky in colour, having clearly been taken on one of those do-it-yourself machines, but the facial outlines were clear enough and his recollection was instant. Fidgety Phil. The one whose hands were always moving, playing with a slide-rule, toying with a pencil, riffling a notepad. Front row, right-hand desk. Eyes always moving, too, slithering this way and that. A nervous lad. “So that’s Cantwell.”

  “Remember him now?”

  “Yes.” He gave her back the photograph. “I’m all right with names, you know. And faces, most of the time. It’s putting the two together that I find tricky.”

  “It’s like that with lots of people.”

  “I think,” Dobie said, rather to his own surprise, “my wife’s having an affair.”

  Dr Coyle, on the other hand, evinced no surprise at all. “And I suppose you feel guilty about that, too.”

  “Yes, I do. I always thought it would be the other way round. But it isn’t.”

  “Women don’t feel guilty about that sort of thing. Not as a rule.”

  “Don’t they?”

  “We usually rationalise it, somehow. While men tend more to look for some kind of distraction to take their minds off the problem. The usual kind of distraction is another woman. And so it goes on. Ad infinitum.”

  “Big fleas and little fleas.”

  “Exactly.” Kate studied the distant woods on the hill that lifted itself across the horizon way towards Caerphilly.

  “Sammy’s a very little flea, though, isn’t he? Not much of a distraction, really.”

  “There’s a problem, all the same. A kind of counter-problem.”

  “Not a very interesting one. I don’t know why he did it, but if I did know it wouldn’t bring him back. Nothing can do that.”

  She had lowered her head again and appeared to be studying the shape of her hands, which again lay folded upon her dark-skirted lap. Small pale hands with neat blunt fingernails. She was anything but fidgety. And yet, Dobie thought, that outward relaxation, here as in the courtroom, somehow conveyed the sense of some deeper inward tension. He said, “Do people often talk to you like this?”

  “Of course they talk to me. I’m a doctor.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  Kate, who knew that it wasn’t, nodded and said, “Yes, they do. All the time.”

  “People used to talk to me a lot. I got very tired of it, of listening to problems and so forth. So in the end I sort of shut myself off. It isn’t hard to do. In fact it’s easy.”

  “I know.”

  “But don’t you do that,” Dobie said.

  He saw that she was crying. Female tears invariably embarrassed him, but not on this occasion; it was obvious that she had something to cry about and that these indeed were not female tears but the true lacrimae rerum, a celebration of that great star-laden sadness that sometimes moved behind mathematical symbols as he manoeuvred them across the emptiness of a paper page. Of course he got tired of it. Anyone would. But it was a celebration for all that. He felt in his pocket and discovered there a large white cotton handkerchief, which Kate accepted.

  “Can we maybe talk more later? About Sammy?”

  “It won’t help,” Kate said indistinctly.

  “Not him, no. But it might help me.”

  He got up and walked away down the dusty path. Kate, inaudibly sniffling, watched him go. After a while she put the handkerchief, not very noticeably dampened, into her handbag. She felt a little better now, she thought.

  More relaxed.

  The telephone was ringing as Dobie entered his flat. Nobody, as was evident, was there to answer it. Only us chickens. He bolted into the sitting-room and grabbed the receiver.

  “Yes?… Yes… Oh hullo, Jane.”

  No hurry after all. He pulled up a chair and sat down on it, panting slightly. “Look, I’ve just this moment got back myself, I don’t think she’s in.”

  “You I’d like to speak to.”

  “What?”

  “I said, it’s you I wanted to speak to.” Jane had the habit, when speaking to him over the telephone, of enunciating with exceptional clarity and in tones one might normally use when addressing foreigners, total imbeciles or golden retrievers. And not only over the telephone, either. This always made Dobie feel and even speak (when an occasion arose) like Bertie Wooster. “Oh, right-ho,” he said.

  “Are you there?” the voice said suspiciously. Are you all there, was what its tone implied.

  “I think so. I mean yes, I am. Definitely. Cogito ergo sum.”

  “I’m glad to find you in such high spirits. In fact I’m glad to find you at all. I’ve been trying to get through to you most of the day. I want to have a little chat with you, John. Privately.”

  “Oh, right. Fire away.”

  “No, not over the telephone if you don’t mind.” No one but a congenital idiot would have conceived of such a plan, as was now obvious. “Are you free tomorrow evening?”

  “Well, I’m rather bogged down this week,” Dobie said. “Exam papers and such. And Jenny’s off to Paris day after tomorrow, did she tell you?… Oh. She did. What about Friday? I finish work on Friday. What about Friday evening, say around—”

  “Let’s say at exactly eight o’clock.”

  “Fine.” Dobie took out his pocket diary and scribbled in it furiously.

  “Now you won’t just forget about it, John? I know when you’re busy you often tend—”

  “No, no, I’ve written it down, look forward to it.”

  “Bye then.” The phone clicked in his ear. Dobie, perceiving that in his haste he had made the appropriate entry for eight a.m. on the Thursday morning, drew a little arrow to rectify the error and put his diary away in his coat pocket.

  It was odd about Jane. Certainly there was nothing remotely Aunt Agatha-like in her appearance, which was that of a tall well-manicured fluffy blonde well preserved for her age which had to be about the same as Dobie’s. Which was forty-eight. All the same. Jenny was right. She was bossy. An eye like Ma’s, as Bertie would have put it, to threaten and command. And since she was, in point of concrete fact, Wendy’s Ma, no doubt Wendy felt the same way about it. In view of this general agreement, then, it was odd that Jenny should have taken to her quite so strongly. Perhaps Jane supplied a certain element that was lacking in her married life. Dobie wasn’t bossy. Certainly not.

  Ineffectual, more like it. Maybe that was why she’d got the blonde wig. In imitation, conscious or otherwise, of Jane. Well, you had to admit Jane’s turn-out was always impeccable. As befitted a very rich man’s consort. If it was elegance you were after. Jenny couldn’t really compete. Which mightn’t stop her from trying, all the same.

  Nothing you can do to help, Kate Coyle had said. But that hadn’t stopped him from trying, either. Ineffectually, of course. At the police station, where he’d stopped on the way back home, the fuzz had barely given him the time of day. What had been the big copper’s name? I’m all right with names, Dobie thought. Most of the time. Superintendent…

  Pontin.

  That was it.

  “… I’m not questioning the cause of death,” Dobie had said plaintively. “What I want to know is why he did it.”

  “Why he did what?”

  “Killed himself.”

  “Oh, he’ll have had his reasons,” Pontin said.

  “Yes, but what are they? Nobody seems to have come up with anything. And it seems there wasn’t any letter or anything like that. Suicides usually leave letters, don’t they? – or some kind of indication why they—”

  “Offhand, sir, I can’t give you the exact statistics, but I’m pretty sure some bloke or other will have worked them out by now. Fed
’em into a computer, like as not. That’s what happens to everything these days, far as I can see. I don’t believe too much in all that stuff meself. It’s still the old-fashioned bobby on the beat who brings the villains in, don’t you be in any two minds on that score, Mr Robey. They may have all them machines an’ stuff up at the Yard—”

  “Then why do you think he did it?”

  “Now look, sir, I’m just a policeman. A public servant. I can’t afford to spend much of my time in thinking. In fact that’s part of the trouble, if you ask me. These kids who go to the colleges, they’re highly strung. Intellectual, you know what I mean? Could be he didn’t have any reason at all that you or I would recognise. Just sits there thinking to himself and then he ups and does it. It’s all got to do with the strain of modern life.”

  “You could have something there,” Dobie said.

  Looking down at the notepad upon which he had been doodling, he saw that he had covered the page with squiggly representations of the Eiffel Tower. Curious, that.

  There was a strong wind blowing at the airport and Dobie stood on the waving base with his shoulders hunched and his hands driven deep into his pockets, watching Jenny walk briskly with the other passengers towards the waiting 727. When she turned to look back he waved, since that’s what waving bases are for, and she raised the hand that wasn’t carrying her holdall and then walked on. Back on Saturday. That’s if I don’t get held up.

  The plane took off on time, anyway.

  Driving back, Dobie slipped one of his favourite tapes into the cassette-player. The C major string quintet, K.515. But not even the lilt of the opening theme did much to soothe his sense of unease. At the roundabout he turned left, heading not back home but for Culverhouse Cross and Cardiff. He didn’t want to go back to the flat. Not just yet.

  He stopped some way short of the castle and got out the street map. Ludlow Road was off the City Road and appeared to be a cul-de-sac. There was, as he soon discovered, nothing very prepossessing about it; the usual drab late-Victorian houses ran to either side of it, alleviated here and there by glass shop frontages. About halfway down on the left-hand side, however, someone had plonked down a modern supermarket of modest size, its windows filled with posters announcing various cut-price offers and bearing the pine-tree logo of a well-known supermarket chain. Dobie, parking opposite, wondered if there was anything he wanted to buy but couldn’t think of anything; Jenny would certainly have left the pantry shelves and the fridge well stocked. Number 12, almost directly opposite, was a solidly-built (as Kate had said) two-storey construction conforming pretty much to the general and depressing pattern of the other houses in the street; it bore, however, an inscribed plaque which said:

  DR CAITLIN COYLE

  Consulting Hours

  1000 - 1230

  1700 - 1900

  Three worn stone steps led up to the front door. Dobie climbed them.

  Cantwell’s rooms were decidedly a cut above the usual student digs. Luxurious, no. But spacious and comfortable. Two armchairs, adequately cushioned, had been placed to either side of a three-bar electric fire with two small tables conveniently adjacent; the bed, on the far side of the room, was plumply mattressed and an electric radio-cum-alarm-clock stood on the night table, its large digital figures greenly glowing. Nearby was an enormous wardrobe, Edwardian in its majesty, and an almost equally capacious chest of drawers. Along the far wall were shelves that held a couple of dozen textbooks, a rather swish Sony cassette-player and a few cassette boxes, while right-angled to it was a work-desk, much less impressively dimensioned than the monstrosity in Dickie Bird’s office but sizeable, none the less, offering adequate space for an IBM computer and monitor, a Smith Corona word processor and several loose-leaf notebooks. “Is all this stuff valuable?” Kate asked. “It looks as though it might be.”

  “I wouldn’t throw any of it away. IBM computers aren’t cheap.”

  “I don’t know what to do with it.”

  “Pack it up,” Dobie suggested, “until the next of kin claims it. There was an uncle or something, wasn’t there? I don’t know what the legal position is otherwise. Did he leave a will?”

  “I don’t think so. Anyway I’ve no idea how you… disassemble the thing.”

  “I can do that for you, if you like. I’ll find some boxes. Of course you don’t know the guy’s address.”

  “The uncle? No. I doubt if he’s even been notified.”

  “Didn’t he have an address book?” Dobie had opened one of the notebooks and was glancing through it.

  “If he did, nobody’s found it.”

  “He may have got it on database.”

  “On what?”

  “On the computer. Did the police check on it? Probably not, if the one I spoke to’s anything to go by. He didn’t hold with computers and all that modern rubbish.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Superintendent Pontin.”

  “Oh, Pontin, yes. He’s a right berk. Crowd control at football matches, that’s what he likes best. Reckons he could improve on Hillsborough if they gave him a chance and I bet he bloody well would.”

  “He certainly wasn’t very informative,” Dobie admitted. He swivelled the desk chair around and seated himself at the computer. “We may get more cooperation out of this. Let’s see.”

  Kate watched him as his fingers first stroked, then tapped the keyboard, his gaze focused the while on the monitor screen. “You’re one of those clever buggers, are you?”

  “You don’t have to be very clever. Just persistent.”

  “Professor of Mathematics and all.”

  The fingers didn’t pause. “Yes. But I didn’t tell you that.”

  “I checked you out,” Kate said.

  She saw that an elliptical figure had appeared on the monitor screen. Another then walked across to superimpose itself on the first. Then another. The fingers stopped tapping. Instead they reached across for the notebook, flipped through its pages. Paused again.

  “Ah,” Dobie said.

  Tap. Tap. Tap. The figure on the screen began to spin round on itself, fluctuating wildly. Kate’s head had now moved close to Dobie’s as they stared at it together. “That’s what he was doing,” Dobie said.

  “What?”

  “He was looking for a strange attractor.”

  “A what?”

  “There it is. See?”

  “All I can see is a circle thing spinning round.”

  Dobie tapped another key and the shape disappeared. Just like that.

  “No addresses. No database. Just some work he brought home.”

  “Oh well. You tried.”

  Dobie was turning the pages of the notebook again. “He was using a fairly simple Lorenz equation. But some of the others here are a bit more complex. Anyway, it all has to do with what’s called the butterfly effect.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “It’s the effect on global climate which is brought about by a single beat of a butterfly’s wings. It’s sort of a hypothetical… Ah. I can see you think I’m joking.”

  “Mathematicians don’t joke, do they?”

  “Don’t they just?” Dobie leaned back in his chair, a little tiredly. “The whole of advanced mathematics these days is just one huge practical joke. Because that’s what the universe appears to be. Beyond a certain point there’s no rhyme or reason to it. So what you do is, you try to locate that point. The point at which the scientifically predictable ceases to be so. In wave mechanics, things like that.”

  “You mean the butterfly is the fly in the ointment.”

  “In so far as you’d like things to be predictable, yes. And physicists certainly do. But mathematics isn’t like that. If everything’s predictable, life’s bound to get a bit damned dull. And mathematics can’t be dull, by definition. There’s always got to be something to find out or there’s no point in doing it at all.”

  “Funny,” Kate said. “Most people think just the opposite.”

 
“That’s because they know it can’t happen. Maybe for a while things can go round and round in a nice smooth orbit, like you saw on the screen there. But then some unknown factor, like the butterfly, interferes and attracts the particles – pulls them out of the pattern. And it all goes haywire. We call that factor a strange attractor. It’s strange in the sense of alien, something that can’t be included in the original equation. It’s quite a frivolous little object otherwise.”

  “Is that how you spend your time? Chasing frivolous little objects?”

  “For months on end,” Dobie said. “They’re elusive. They take a lot of catching. And when you’ve caught one, as like as not you don’t know what to do with it. I suspect that’s what happened to Sammy. In the end he left it where it was. Trapped inside the computer.”

  “Poor little thing,” Kate said. “I know how it feels.”

  “Yes,” Dobie said. “So do I.”

  He got up and went to sit down in one of the armchairs instead. Yes. Very comfy. It wasn’t a bad little room at all. He liked it here.

  “… I’ve just seen my wife off at the airport. She’s gone to Paris.”

  Kate sat down opposite him, not properly but perching herself on the upholstered arm. “Gone for long?”

  “No,” Dobie said. “Not for long.”

  “Is that another dismantling job you have to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Dobie said.

  “Better dismantled than broken into pieces, don’t you think?”

  “That seems logical, Captain. But then we’re not all Mister Spocks. People aren’t logical.”

  “Women even less so than men?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “More subject to their emotions, perhaps?”

  “Perhaps. Or to strange attractors.”

  “How long have you been married, anyway?”

  “Not quite a year.”

  “Oh well, shit, you have to give it a bit more of a chance than that.”

  “That’s what I can’t help feeling,” Dobie admitted.