The Strange Attractor

by Cory, Desmond

  “Except that she’s gone. Jane has. Mrs Corder.”

  “Ah, but gone where, if you see what I mean? I take it there’s a Mr Corder about?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “So where’s he?”

  “I’ve no idea,” Dobie said. “He may be still at his office. Corder Acoustics. In Cardiff.”

  Jackson looked at his wrist-watch. “A bit late for that, isn’t it?”

  “He does work late most days.”

  “But he lives here, I suppose?… Well, I expect we can trace him without too much trouble. But maybe we shouldn’t notify him until things are a little clearer. Let’s see now. Last seen wearing. The lady had on a raincoat, I think you said?”

  “Navy blue raincoat, yes. The sort with the hood thing you can pull up over your head. I couldn’t see much else but she was wearing dark slacks, I think they were navy blue as well. And shoes, of course. Black shoes.”

  “Not boots?”

  “No, definitely not boots. Shoes. With flat heels.”

  Sober, Jackson had already decided. And even coherent. Up to a point. Going by what Dobie said, there had to be at the very least a strong presumption of foul play, but the presumption didn’t seem to be strong enough to justify the pressing of all the alarm bells. Jackson flipped his notebook shut. “I’ll ask you to excuse me for just a moment, sir…”

  Detective-Sergeant Box was in the kitchen, gazing gloomily at the floor. Red and ochre tiles, not very revealing. There were marks on it all right, but then there are marks on most kitchen floors. “Find anything?”

  “Bit of blood,” Box said, with no very marked relish. “Over by the sink.”

  “Says he cut himself trying to get loose.”

  “Yes, there’s blood on the knife blade too. No more’n a drop. Wasn’t a stabbing, whatever else may have happened.”

  “Puzzle, isn’t it,” Jackson said. It wasn’t a question. He picked up one of the frayed strips of silk that Box had collected and carefully placed on the kitchen table, surveyed it, put it down again. “Check the car?”

  “Yes. In the garage. Motor’s warm. The Fiesta, that’s Mr Dobie’s. Checked that, too.”

  “Warm?”

  “No. Cooled off. Been out in the rain.”

  Jackson fingered his lip thoughtfully. When all was said and done… two cars here and only one person. “We’ll have that knife anyway. And the whisky decanter. When the hell’s that Evans going to get here?”

  “Probably lost his way.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me.”

  There wasn’t much more that he could do until the dabs sergeant arrived. Nothing he could reasonably hold Dobie for, either. No body. No blood. No signs of struggle. Nothing. He clumped sadly back to the sitting-room.

  “Perhaps you won’t mind coming round to the station in the morning, sir, to make a formal statement. By then perhaps we’ll have got things cleared up here a little. You say you’re a professor at the university?”

  “Yes,” Dobie said. This was one of the few things he felt relatively sure about.

  “Wonder if that’s what’s behind all this business of tying you up? Them students get up to all manner of larks. You wouldn’t believe.”

  “You mean you think all this is some kind of practical joke?”

  “I’m not saying it is, mind. But it could be. Perverted sense of humour is what they got, some of them.” Jackson shook his head sadly. “Or here’s another line of thought. That whisky you drank, now…”

  “Yes, I’d thought of that. Perhaps it was drugged. That could be why I —”

  “Well, we’ll be checking on that. Nothing easier. And if it was and we can see what kind of drug it is we’re dealing with…”

  “You’re thinking in terms of one that might induce hallucinations?”

  “I’m thinking out loud is what I’m doing. But these kids get their hands on some very funny stuff these days, there’s no denying it. I’ve come across some cases—”

  “What kids?” Dobie then began to speak very rapidly. “Unless it was that chap in the raincoat, he could have got here ahead of me and been in the house all the time – I wouldn’t have known, see what I mean? The front door wasn’t locked so suppose he got here before I did, read that note, went on in—”

  He certainly seems, Jackson thought, to have had a nasty shock. No doubt about that. And that car in the garage wasn’t a hallucination, either. Though, of course… “About that note, sir. What did it say, exactly?”

  “The point is it wasn’t addressed specifically to me. Someone else might have read it and thought…” Dobie’s head was aching rather badly now. He closed his eyes for a moment. “It’s over there on that table. You can read it for yourself.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  Dobie opened his eyes again. “It isn’t?”

  “No, sir. That’s where you said you put it but it isn’t there now. Hence my question.”

  “It said, ‘Back soon’ – I remember wondering how soon ‘soon’ would be – and then ‘Go in and make yourself at home,’ or something like that. It was typed in red ink and the paper had got a bit damp so the ink was a bit smeary. But not so you couldn’t read it.”

  “She was expecting you, you said – at eight o’clock?”

  “And I got here exactly on time.”

  “Then why wasn’t she here?”

  “I don’t know. The note didn’t say.”

  Jackson had made a note, too, in his little black notebook. He read through it again.

  Poss. burglar (?)

  tall medium build

  grey belted raincoat + funny hat

  heard dragging noise + splash

  “An odd business, then,” he said, “and no mistake.”

  Dobie sat down heavily in the armchair. His own armchair in his own sitting-room. Home sweet home. Looking round him, he didn’t think much of it. But then right now he was trying not to think too much about anything.

  After a while he got up and started to prowl round in slow pantherine circles. He was afraid of dropping off to sleep again and being thus perhaps caught up in some endless Yeatsian cycle… Silly, but there it was. What kind of a drug would knock you out like that, anyway? A Mickey something? Maybe in the morning he’d give a ring to Peter Draycott or any other of the Pharmacology boys who might happen to be still around. On the first day of the summer vacations. What a way to start them.

  In the morning, though. Not now. Though in fact it wasn’t really all that late. Just gone ten. Incredible. He hadn’t yet had anything to eat, but his head was paining him and he wasn’t hungry.

  What he chiefly needed, he thought, was a cup of black coffee and some aspirin, followed by a restful hour with the Heutling String Quartet. He wended his way, therefore, to the bedroom to get the aspirin bottle, which would, he thought, be reposing in the drawer of Jenny’s night table, where she usually kept it. Switching on the overhead light, he observed with no great sense of surprise that Jane Corder was lying stretched out on top of the bed without very much in the way of clothes on. She appeared to be dead. He felt no great surprise because, naturally, he didn’t believe it. He advanced, nevertheless, upon the bed in order to… you know… investigate.

  His investigation revealed that Jane Corder was lying stretched out on top of the bed without very much in the way of clothes on. She appeared to be dead. She was dead. “Oh my God,” Dobie said. “Oh my God. Oh my God. Whatever next.” Jane Corder didn’t reply, but he wasn’t really talking to her, anyway.

  The pain in his head had suddenly become murderous, as though his brains were leaking slowly out through the back of his skull. It couldn’t be Jane. Clearly it couldn’t. But it was. He couldn’t see her clothes anywhere, apart from the (normally) fetching black bra-and-pantie set that was all she was wearing. A large bath towel, however, was lying on the floor at his feet; he picked it up and drew it carefully over the corpse, shrouding her decently from head to feet. He knew that he shouldn’t really have touched
anything, but knew also that he couldn’t let her go on lying there like that. It wasn’t nice.

  He turned and made a bolt for the French window, which fortunately wasn’t locked; he had time, therefore, to get out on to the balcony before being sick. Vomiting had at least the side-effect of seeming, if only temporarily, to ease his headache. When he had finished throwing up he went back to the sitting-room, picked up the telephone and dialled Jane’s number. He thought that with any luck the police would still be there.

  They were.

  Jackson, Box and the hitherto elusive Sergeant Evans were there within twenty minutes. Half an hour later, Detective-Superintendent Pontin arrived. Not, it must be said, in the best of tempers.

  “What we got here then, Jackson?”

  “What you might call complications, sir,” Jackson said.

  “Just what we don’t need. Now I don’t want any nonsense with this boyo, Jackson, I want a straight-forward confession out of him and that’ll be an end to it. I’ve had enough of naked women in bedrooms and all that multi-cultural rubbish. Girl’s on the books, I take it? Done any previous?”

  “Well, no, sir. She’s the wife of a prominent local businessman. Or that’s what I’ve been told.”

  “Oh. Right.” Pontin was in no mood thus to be baulked. “What about him?”

  “Says he’s a university teacher, sir.”

  “Christ, now. Drugs, then. That’ll be the story. He’s been pushing heroin, for a monkey.”

  “As yet, sir, we’ve no evidence—”

  “Don’t tell me, Jackson. I been there before. Rushed it down the loo he has, the crafty dodger. What about the body? Any signs of actual physical torture?”

  “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, sir, but then we haven’t—”

  “Got the murder weapon?”

  “Yes, I think so, sir. A typewriter.”

  Pontin clicked his tongue. “The murder weapon, Jackson, for God’s sake.”

  “Yes, sir. A typewriter. Significant blood traces.”

  “He hit her over the head with a typewriter?”

  “That’s my present reading of the case, sir.”

  “Good God. What are we coming to? What’s Paddy Gates got to say about it?”

  “Paddy’s on holiday, sir. So I called Katie Coyle. That sounds like her arriving now.”

  To prevent Dobie from further interfering, however ineffectually, with the progress of police inquiries Jackson had incarcerated him in his study. Pontin found him there, slumped down in his chair at the computer desk; in the grip of some powerful nervous reaction, he was snoring faintly. Pontin shook him briskly by the shoulder, resting his burly frame against the desk; the desk creaked ominously in protest. This complaint Pontin ignored.

  “Just a little chat, sir, if you don’t mind, Detective-Superintendent Pontin.”

  He fixed Dobie with what would have been a cold and level inquisitorial stare if the light from the Anglepoise above the desk hadn’t been so strong as to make him blink uncontrollably, causing him to resemble a barn owl repressing a sneezing fit. “… Yes, we’ve met before, I rather fancy. Can’t remember what it was I sent you down for, but I never forget a face. And yours is familiar. Very familiar.”

  What he had in fact for the moment forgotten was Dobie’s name. It was a standing grievance with Pontin that the criminals with whom he customarily dealt never had readily memorable names, like Featherstonehaugh or Pontefract. It didn’t matter. It would come back to him. “Wait a second now. Don’t tell me… Shoplifting, that was it, I recall it distinctly. Tacey’s Stores? Ladies’ knickers? In 1982, wasn’t it? I never forget—”

  “It was the day before yesterday, actually. At the police station.”

  “At the… What were you nabbed for?”

  “Nothing. I came in to ask you about Sammy Cantwell.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Nothing. That’s where you saw me before.”

  Pontin decided to change tack, as was his frequent strategy when dealing with a slippery witness. Leaning in a confidential manner towards his victim, he adopted an altogether more insidious, avuncular tone. “Now see here, Mr um ah. I think I should tell you that we’ve managed to locate the murder weapon. And doubtless there’ll be prints. Oh yes, we’re pretty sure we’ll find plenty of prints. And bearing that in mind, you may feel you’d be well advised to run through your story with me once again. Just for my benefit. Possibly we’ll find that you explained it all to Inspector Jackson a little too hurriedly, see? And there may even be a few little points where you’d like to change your… Just a few little… Wake up, will you?”

  “Eh?” Dobie said. “Oh yes. I’m sorry. I really have had a very tiring day.”

  “I’m quite sure you have and what I want to know is, what that lady is doing without any clothes on in your bedroom.”

  Dobie yawned. “I think it’s the gas fire. It makes me doze off.”

  Pontin began to speak very slowly and distinctly, in a way that reminded Dobie acutely of Jane herself. “I want. To know. What that lady. Is doing. In the bedroom.”

  “Oh yes. You mean Jane. She isn’t doing anything. She’s dead.”

  “Ah.” Pontin leapt at once upon the cogent point. “Then you admit. That you know. Who she is?”

  Dobie, having yawned cavernously again, began to show some signs of making a spirited recovery. “Jane? Of course I know Jane. I’ve known her for years. She’s probably my wife’s best friend.”

  “Then what made you. Decide. To kill her. Sir?”

  Dobie saw the trap in time. “Beg pardon?” he said.

  “Someone.” Pontin executed a chopping motion with his right hand. “Bopter. An accident, perhaps. Was it?”

  “Good heavens, no, I didn’t kill her. She wasn’t killed here, you know.”

  “Not here?”

  “No. It was over in her house, I saw how it happened. Didn’t that other chap tell you? Earlier this… There was this burglar with a hat and a raincoat and then he must have brought her over here and put her in my bedroom but I didn’t see her because I had this headache and it wasn’t until I thought I’d better have an aspirin that I went to get it, you see.”

  Throughout this account Pontin had slid himself slowly back along the full length of the desk, his attitude, moreover, undergoing another subtle change. “Yes. Yes,” he said nervously. “I think I’ve got all that. Excuse me one moment.” Keeping his face turned towards Dobie, he trundled himself back towards the door and beckoned hurriedly to the constable outside. “Better keep a pretty close eye on this one, Constable. He could be on to us both at the drop of a hat.”

  “Yessir. I will, sir,” the constable said.

  “He’s been under a bit of a strain lately, I shouldn’t wonder,” Pontin said, returning to his former position and smiling upon Dobie disarmingly. He was a man who knew his duty and only his glazed-over eyeballs betrayed his inward terror.

  “Let’s try again, now, shall we? – from a different angle. At least we know you were on friendly terms with the deceased. You’ve admitted that, anyway.”

  “Yes. Certainly. So was Jenny.”

  “So that gives us a starting point.” Pontin paused. “Who’s Jenny?”

  “My wife. She’s in Paris.”

  “I see. In Paris. So you thought while the cat was away—”

  This was a mistake. “What cat?” Dobie said suspiciously. “I haven’t got a cat. Ah. Maybe you’re thinking of Kate. No, Kate’s got nothing to do with it. Except of course she was at the inquest.”

  Off again, Pontin thought, glancing cautiously round the room to make sure that no hatchets, chain saws, baseball bats or any other death-dealing weapons were to be seen in the immediate vicinity. “We haven’t had an inquest yet. We’ve only just found the body. Who’s this Kate you’re talking about, when she’s at home?”

  “She isn’t at home. She’s here. She just got here.”

  “Ah, she’s here, is she? N
ot in Paris?”

  “No, no. That was my wife.”

  “Who was?”

  “The other one. Jenny. She’s my wife. The other one isn’t. The one in the bedroom. In fact she’s somebody else’s.”

  “Good. It helps, you see, once you’ve got the background clear. You say your wife has gone to Paris because of this other woman. Now what I want to know—”

  “No, wait, you’ve got that wrong. There isn’t another woman.”

  “Now I understood you quite distinctly to say—”

  “I didn’t say another woman. I said the other woman.”

  “That’s right. Jenny, you called her.”

  “Now you’ve got it. Jenny, my wife. My wife is the other woman.”

  The sound of Pontin’s slow, heavy breathing became clearly audible. “Perhaps,” he said, “we’d do better to resume this conversation when you’re feeling a little less excited. You seem to have a bit of an attitude problem, if I may say so.”

  Meanwhile, Kate was carrying out her preliminary examination.

  “Fractured skull all right. Death probably instantaneous. Downward blow from the rear, slightly favouring right hand side. A large flat instrument, something like a brick. No cutting edge. Skin’s torn at point of impact but I don’t see any minor abrasions. Some blood loss from ears and nose, but not very much. She died too quickly. Okay so far?”

  “We know what she was hit with, doctor. What about time of death?”

  “Very recent. I’ll be checking the rectal temperature in a moment but I’d say some time between nine and nine thirty. She must have died just after taking a hot shower so the skin surface would have been fairly warm. Her hair’s still damp, as you noticed. And of course the body’s unusually clean, which is rather a pity. From the pathologist’s viewpoint, that’s to say.”