The Strange Attractor

by Cory, Desmond

The noise of an aircraft, passing high overhead, came to them both as a distant whisper.

  Friday morning. End of term. Everybody frantically trying to finish marking exam papers, except for Dobie. He’d finished his already. But there was a packet of stuff just arrived from George Campbell at MIT, six mini-discs loaded with computations, and to judge from George’s accompanying letter some of the new sets were exciting. “That should keep you busy through the summer,” Mary Mayfield said. Mary Mayfield was the departmental secretary. She was very nice.

  “What about your own plans? Spain again this year?”

  “Yes, I got an early booking. I’m off Monday. Six nice long weeks on the Costa del Concrete, should be fun.”

  “I’m sure it will be,” Dobie said. “I expect my wife’s got something up her sleeve for me. But I don’t know what it is.”

  “She’s in the business, isn’t she? So she ought to… Oh, by the way. Telephone call for you. Earlier this morning.”

  “What, from Jenny?”

  “No. A Mrs Corder.” Mary was checking the indecipherable scrawl on her notepad. “Eight o’clock tonight, was that right?”

  “Yes, you needn’t have bothered. I hadn’t forgotten.”

  “Well, she says can you make it at her place instead of yours?”

  The Corders’ house was the far side of Porthkerry Park, twenty miles distant at least with some nasty bumpy stretches. Dobie sighed. “I suppose so.”

  “That’s good because I said you could.”

  At five o’clock, to make matters worse, it started to rain and by half-past seven it was pelting. Doubtless, Dobie thought as he peered astigmatically through the blurred windscreen, Jane that morning had had a peremptory word with a passing butterfly and her resultant accurate assessment of the forthcoming global climate had decided her to conduct such interviews as she had arranged for that evening cosily at home. It was, after all, a very palatial home. Dobie had only visited it two or three times before, but he had been impressed. You were meant to be impressed. It was placed on a narrow promontory thrusting out across the Bristol Channel, so close to the sea that in rough weather the waves sloshed right across the portholes, and its trendy-architect bungalow design included all manner of refinements and creature comforts, which (or so Dobie hoped) might well include a little something to warm the cockles, after a drive like this one. The house was called Pantmawr. Nobody knew why. Though of course you had to call it something.

  There was a large gravelled space outside where Dobie halted his steed, punctiliously leaving a clear space through to the front gate from the double garage in the corner (which anyway was closed). He checked the time before getting out. Three minutes to eight. Very punctual. The rain was still fairly whizzing down and he felt in no great hurry to leave his agreeably bottom-warmed car seat. To the south the horizon was dark with scudding clouds, black as a kookaburra’s khyber and obscuring what on a less inhospitable evening would have been a spectacular sunset. He could just make out a few vague lights twinkling half-heartedly on the Somerset coast. The prospect of a little something continued to beckon him and he got out of the car and squelched purposefully over to the front door, loose gravel crunching under his feet.

  Tie straight? Flies zipped up?

  Yes.

  About to press the doorbell, he saw that a sheet of paper had been folded and tucked neatly under the brass knocker that provided an alternative, if unseemly, method of announcing one’s arrival. He took it and unfolded it. It said:

  BACK SOON PLEASE GO IN

  MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

  This message had been typed in red, for some unfathomable reason, and Jane’s squiggly signature appended in purple ink. Dobie tried the door. It was open all right. And of course all this was typical. He went through into the hallway, left his raincoat on a convenient hook and walked on into the sitting-room, which seemed to be rather more than comfortably warm. Central heating on, in midsummer. Probably no one had bothered to turn it off.

  He glanced at the note again before dropping it on to one of the side tables. He wondered what SOON meant. Probably anything from five to forty-five minutes. At least it was clear what MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME meant, and he saw that a whisky decanter and tumbler had been placed on a table beside the cocktail bar, in a shaded alcove on the far side of the room. Jane was an irritating woman, but she had her points. It was five past eight now and the sun well over the yardarm, time for a stengah, what?… Dobie giggled foolishly to himself as he listened to the pleasant trickle of Glenlivet Double Malt tilting into the waiting tumbler; there was something a bit memsahib-ish about old Jane, with her ruthless concern for the welfare of the natives and other lesser breeds without the law, such as men in general. Give ’em whisky and make ’em wait; in university circles she’d end up a Vice-Chancellor, nothing was more certain. Whereas Jenny…

  Dobie took a healthy swig at the contents of his glass (no sensible man would pollute Glenlivet with water, much less soda) and turned away. He’d no idea where Jenny would end up. At the present rate of striking she’d be lucky if this time next year she wasn’t being shipped off to South America or Mauritania or some such awful place, and when she got there she wouldn’t even enjoy it. He gazed glumly at the array of photographs on the mantelpiece. Jane was there all right, both in a posed studio shot and (looking naturally very much younger) in a wedding photograph, clutching the right arm of a correspondingly youthful Alec. Another black-and-white shot of an even younger Jane clad in an abbreviated swimsuit and bathing cap turned out, on closer examination, to be a photograph of Wendy; there seemed to be some kind of cup or sporting trophy on a small table somewhere in the background, but either the camera was slightly out of focus or else (and more probably) Dobie was. Further along the mantelpiece Alec was genially keeping up the good work, shaking hands with the Prince of Wales; this one had an inscription that said “Prince of Wales” Industrial Award – Corder Acoustics, Cardiff. The award itself, which appeared to be a small silver plaque, was mounted on a wooden shield directly alongside. There was writing on the plaque also, but Dobie couldn’t read it. Odd that. The light was decidedly dim here, but even so.

  And still no sign of Jane. Dobie went back to the alcove and sat down on the leather-backed couch behind the table. He took off his glasses, polished them with his handkerchief and put them back on. Everything still seemed to be fogged at the edges. He listened to the drumming patter of raindrops on the roof.

  “Not here,” he heard himself say in quite a loud voice. “Gone to Parish.” He giggled again, this time audibly and took another shwig of whishky, why the hell not. Alec had crates of the shtuff down in the sheller. Then he took off his glasses again and rubbed his eyes. Then sat back on the couch and closed them. A warm glow of well-being radiated outwards from his stomach. The steady beat of the raindrops was soporific. Shopo— Yes. Soporific. He felt woozhy but pleasantly woozhy. Piles of cotton-wool-like clouds drifted peacefully across the horizon.

  Dobie slept.

  He woke up very abruptly and at once decided that he wasn’t feeling all that great. Something was wrong and he didn’t know what. He could still hear the rhythmic beat of raindrops but over and above that sound there was a very loud screaming whine that it took him a moment or two to identify as the sound of a jet engine, of an aircraft passing very low overhead. It was that sound, he realised, that had woken him up.

  For the rest he knew exactly where he was and what he was doing; he was sitting on a couch in Jane Corder’s house and he had just drunk a glass of whisky and had dropped off to sleep but that had to be wrong because his face felt stiff and everything looked wonky… Perhaps I’m ill, he thought, and they’ve put me to bed. Why didn’t I wake up before? Good God, perhaps I did pass out, how else could they have… ? How very silly/odd/embarrassing/frightening. Frightening because I can’t move my arms or my legs and that’s because I’ve been TIED UP… HELP HELP! But this is just bloody ridiculous, incredible…

  All of that
but none the less true. His wrists had been tied, not painfully but securely, behind his back and his ankles similarly fastened, not with a rope but with what looked like somebody’s tie. Peering downwards with difficulty, Dobie recognised the tie as his own. Such pain as he felt – which was really more of a marked discomfort – came from the region of his mouth, which someone had thoughtlessly sealed up with what had to be a wide strip of sticking plaster. He had already made, inadvertently, a rather disgusting gugging noise; he didn’t attempt to make any further sounds, but listened instead. Apart from the thump of the falling rain and the fast-receding thrum of the aircraft engine, he couldn’t hear anything. All was silent.

  His vision still seemed to be slightly hazy but he remembered now he’d taken his glasses off and put them on the table. There they were, beside the whisky decanter and the almost-empty tumbler. But even without them he could see quite clearly the face of the ornamental clock on the far wall, the hands of which now showed twenty to nine. Twenty to nine? He’d been sleeping, then, for something like half an hour. Unless it was twenty to nine in the morning but no, that wasn’t possible, the electric light was still burning in the comer and the curtains still drawn and there was an armchair over there with its back towards him and someone was sitting in it.

  Burglars, of course. He’d been tied up by a burglar. That seemed to be the only rational explanation. But what would a burglar be doing sitting in an armchair?

  Nothing very much. Just sitting there. Dobie could make out the shape of an elbow protruding over the side-arm of the chair, and above the chair the outline of a rather weird pork-pie-type hat. The elbow was clad in grey cloth, in all probability part of a grey raincoat; not of a jacket or suit, anyway. So whoever it was, it certainly wasn’t Jane. Dobie’s first and somewhat hysterical reaction, in fact, was to imagine that he had somehow become converted into a disembodied spirit and that the fellow sitting in the armchair was he himself, or anyway his own doppelganger. This quirk of fancy, obviously unworthy of a university mathematician, could only be excused by the weird situation in which the said mathematician now found himself… Not, mind you, that Lewis Carroll hadn’t been on to something with all that business of mirror-images, a great deal of work remained to be done in the matter of resolving left-right transferences into the appropriate polar equations; but (Dobie decided) this probably wasn’t the best time to do it. Getting himself ungagged and unbound was an evident number one priority; since, however, the bloke in the armchair was almost certainly the person who had thus rendered him helpless, there couldn’t be very much point in making gug-gugging noises at him. Which took you back to square one. Burglars don’t sit down in armchairs, do they? – when they’re on the job; they get on with burgling as a sensible person should. It was all very mysterious and inexplicable.

  And uncomfortable, of course. Though really he’d had little time in which to register the degree of his discomfort; the whisper of the descending aircraft was still just audible although the power of the jets had now been cut – clearly it was coming in to land at Rhoose airport. And now, however, things appeared to be happening back here at the ranch. The burglar, rising abruptly from the chair to afford Dobie a brief glimpse of a grey belted raincoat with a turn-up collar (similar to those affected at one time in his distinguished career by the late Humphrey Bogart), had begun to behave in an altogether more burglar-like way, padding swiftly but silently across the beige carpet and finally disappearing altogether from Dobie’s angle of vision, this to the sound of a gently closed door. The kitchen door, if Dobie’s recollections of the house’s geography were correct. He commenced at once to wriggle about, like a worm on a hook. He couldn’t either unfasten or break the knots at his wrists but he might, he thought, be able, once the coast was clear, to retrace the steps of the burglar in a series of wallaby-like hops and, once in the kitchen, discover some more effective way of freeing himself from his bonds. A nice sharp knife, for example. While savouring in advance the beauty of this ingenious plan, he heard the front door come open and then close. The burglar had gone.

  Thank heaven for that.

  Leaning forward and about to initiate the first of his kangaroo-jumps, he heard sharp, firm footsteps coming from the hallway and realised that he had misinterpreted the situation. It wasn’t that the burglar had left. Somebody else had come in. They sounded to him like female footsteps. A moment later, this impression was confirmed as he heard Jane’s voice, calling him in puzzled and somewhat disgruntled tones. “Dobie?… John? Where are you?”

  She ought, of course, to be apprised of the situation that had arisen. “Mmmmmmmmmm-mmmmmmmmm,” Dobie said.

  He didn’t think she’d heard him, and it soon became obvious that she hadn’t. She stood for a moment or two by the sitting-room door, gazing this way and that; she was wearing a raincoat, too, a very wet raincoat, which no doubt accounted in part for her disgruntlement. Having failed to locate him in the dimness of the alcove where he crouched, she looked, still in some perplexity, towards the kitchen door and then advanced towards it. “Oh my God, John… What are you up to now?”

  “Mum-mum-mum-mum,” Dobie remarked.

  A moment after she had vanished from view he heard the side door open again and the footsteps pause, then an unpleasant thumping sort of noise, as though the door, in opening, had run into some kind of hard and fixed obstruction. A gasp. A slithery sound. A thud. Then silence.

  The aircraft had to have landed by now.

  Oh Jesus, Dobie thought.

  The sounds that he had just heard could be given an alternative explanation. A nastier one. It was at least feasible that someone had hit Jane very forcibly on the head. This wild theory gained in feasibility as the silence continued. Other hypotheses might no doubt be put forward, but right now Dobie couldn’t think of any. He was feeling much too scared. Too scared to think straight. Much too scared, in fact, to think at all. He listened, instead.

  Now there were other sounds. Sounds as of a heavy weight being pulled or dragged across the kitchen floor. Other soft sounds, impossible to decipher. Then a sharp click and a rattle, the sort of noise made by a sliding doorbolt, a bolt that hadn’t been very recently oiled. Then silence again. Though the sound of the falling rain; that had been going on for so long now as to seem a part of the silence, seemed to have become a little louder. And a steady current of cold air seemed to be entering the room from somewhere. After a while, and emanating as it seemed from outside the house, the sound of what had to have been a pretty loud splash. Dobie felt suddenly very cold. He shivered.

  Hopping was easier than he’d thought it would be. And a beneficial form of exercise, really. The great thing was not to lose his balance and fall over, since he had the feeling that if he did that, he wouldn’t be able to get up again.

  He didn’t fall down. The kitchen door had been left open and the light was switched on, so he could see at once that the kitchen was empty. So far, so good. He was scared all right, but not quite as scared as he’d been before. The next few minutes, though, were extremely frustrating. He had to fumble open sideboard drawers with his fingertips and then turn himself awkwardly around to peer into their dark interiors. When at long last he found where the kitchen knives were kept, it was only to discover that holding the knife by the handle he couldn’t angle the blade sufficiently to saw at his bonds, though he did manage to inflict a nasty cut on his middle finger in the process. Thinking then and belatedly of an ingenious ruse which a more assiduous watcher of TV serials would have hit upon at once, he contrived cunningly to wedge the knife, sharp edge downwards, in the crack of a closed drawer and through this means eventually to reduce half of an expensive blue silk tie (his own) to ribbons. Dealing with the other half then presented, of course, no kind of a problem. Unhobbled but breathing deeply, Dobie walked over to the back door, which stood ajar, opened it fully and peered cautiously out.

  He knew what was out there, in a general sense. A twelve-foot-wide tiled balcony used, in the summer m
onths, as a sunbathing patio but now awash with rain. There were white plastic reclining chairs, getting wet, and a small white plastic table where, under more congenial conditions, tall glasses of cooling refreshments might be placed. At the far end there was a wrought-iron parapet, about three feet high, and beyond the parapet there was a sheer drop of some twelve feet to the open sea, now snarling and gurgling in a thoroughly inhospitable way. On a clear day you could see right across the Channel to the Watchet hills. Tonight you couldn’t. Looking in the other direction on even a miserable day you could see the roof of the double garage and the steps that led down from the patio towards it. Tonight you couldn’t. Tonight it was dark as pitch and the rain was still coming down in sheets. Dobie went back inside.

  In the sitting-room he picked up the telephone and dialled 999. “Get me the police,” he said crisply. “This is an emergency.” That, at least, was what he meant to say. What he actually said was, “Mmmmmm-mmmm-mmmm.” He’d forgotten about the bloody sticking-plaster. He reached up and ripped it off, over-hurriedly. “Owwwwwwwwww,” he said, in a high shrill excited voice.

  The telephone operator seemed unimpressed. “What service did you require, madam?”

  “I’m not a madam, I’m me, I mean it’s a man. I want the police.”

  “One moment, madam,” the operator said.

  2

  “Very inclement weather tonight,” Inspector Jackson observed.

  “It is indeed.”

  “For being called out, I mean, on this kind of a caper.”

  Jackson was, like most policemen, a patient man and one, moreover, well accustomed to dealing with amiable (and some not so amiable) lunatics. He had, indeed, only that morning been summoned forth to investigate the case of one Henrietta Byrd, reported missing, possibly kidnapped, from her parents’ home; Henrietta had turned out to be a budgerigar, this somewhat to Jackson’s chagrin. The facts of the Henrietta Byrd affair, however, he had elucidated pretty quickly – as soon, indeed, as the bereaved owner had shown him Henrietta’s cage, forlornly empty; while the facts that this Dobie character was recounting seemed to make very little sense at all. “What it all boils down to, sir, is that you feel you’ve reason to suspect a crime to have been committed, but you’re far from being sure as to its actual nature. Does that sum it up fairly?”