The Strange Attractor

by Cory, Desmond

  “Good evening, Sir Guy. I hope I’m not late.”

  “Ah, that’s the nice thing about corpses. They usually wait.” Emitting a sinister cackle redolent of advanced senility, Hunter-Poke advanced avariciously upon the cadaver. “A nice well-nourished one for you today. Bet she cuts up lovely.”

  “You’d like me to carry out the dissection again?”

  “Oh, I think so, don’t you? My old hands aren’t as steady as once they were.” Hunter-Poke illustrated this contention by poking the late Mrs Corder in the ribs with a quivering index finger. “Picked her out of the sea, did they now? Well, she didn’t drown. That’s obvious.”

  Kate, in her turn, moved forwards to scrutinise the palely upturned face. “I think I’ve seen her somewhere before.”

  “Local lady, isn’t it? You could have done.” Hunter-Poke pushed the head slightly sideways while Kate was still staring down at the face. “She took a bit of a knock before she went in, as you can see. Unless she picked it up on the way down.”

  “Well, we’re not here to make guesses, are we?” Kate said. “I’ll get washed up and do the prep if it’s all right with you.”

  “Oh, carry on by all means, dear lady,” Hunter-Poke said.

  Pathologists are rarely very good cooks, but mathematicians are worse. Between them they managed well enough, however, chiefly by reading and following the instructions on the back of the frozen food packet, and Dobie found the atmosphere of Kate’s small kitchen, now doing additional service as a temporary dining room, restful and congenial. And also neat and clean, which made for a change. There was a huge Aga cooker which made contented bubbling sounds, saucepan things were hung on convenient wall hooks (so that one didn’t have to stoop down to put them into cupboards, cracking one’s head on the shelving in the process) and hot water gushed copiously from the taps. An old-fashioned kitchen, you might say, devoid of almost all modern inconveniences. The beef stew they ate sensibly with soup spoons a procedure that Jenny had always regarded as being vulgar – and, as it tasted rather nice, they mopped up the remnants from the plates with pieces of bread. Kate, for all her slender not to say skinny frame, clearly had a man-sized appetite. “It’s being so cheerful,” she said, “as keeps me going. But food helps, there’s no denying it.”

  “Doing autopsies doesn’t seem to put you off. I think it would me.”

  “Not when you’d got used to it.”

  “You’ve done a lot?”

  “Not all that many. It’s only a part-time thing, really. They call me in when no one else is available, but that happens more often than you might think. The truth of the matter is, I need the wonga. I haven’t got all that big a practice here, I might do better if I had a partner.”

  “Surely if the practice isn’t very big—”

  “A male partner. Lots of people still don’t like woman doctors, you know. At least corpses don’t have prejudices, or if they do they don’t show them.” Kate helped herself to a slice of the enormous slab of Cheddar that stood on the table and bit into it with small shark-like teeth. “… I’ve seen her somewhere before, you know. I’m sure of it.”

  “Who?”

  “Your friend. Mrs Corder.”

  “She’s been living here these past twenty-five years,” Dobie said. “You could have done. Or maybe seen her picture in the papers.”

  “What papers?”

  “The local ones. She did a lot of charity work. Giving prizes at flower shows and so forth.”

  “Rich, was she?”

  “Alec is. And successful.”

  “I just caught a glimpse of him today. I didn’t take to him much. But it must be nice.”

  “What must be nice?”

  “To be rich and successful.”

  Dobie watched her munch away at the cheese. Her face, he thought, was a little too wide in proportion to its length and, as she ate, small muscles flexed under the cheekbones. She looked like a rather energetic cat enjoying a breakfast canary. He said, “It can’t be a coincidence, can it?… Their both getting killed like that. There has to be some connection.”

  “You said they were friends.”

  “I meant some outside connection. And then again, Sammy Cantwell…”

  “Sammy worked for Corders.”

  “Yes.”

  “But there’s no other connection, is there?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  Leaning back and stretching out a hand, Kate could switch on the electric coffee percolator without getting up from the table. She did so.

  “When you first went into that bedroom,” she said, “you thought it was Jane Corder lying on the bed. When really it was Jenny. How could you have possibly made a mistake like that? They weren’t the least bit alike.”

  “I didn’t make a mistake,” Dobie said. “It was Jane Corder.”

  “She was in the sea by then. Just like you said.”

  “I never said she was in the sea. Jackson inferred that she was from what I told him, and even then I don’t think he fully believed it until she was actually found there. But she wasn’t in the sea. She was in my bedroom. Or she was at around ten o’clock that night.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” Kate said. “She wasn’t drowned. She died in the same way as Jenny, except that the blow was upward instead of downward and landed lower down, just above the base of her neck. Then she was pushed into the sea. It could have happened exactly as you said. Except, of course, you could have done it. You were there in the house. And all that stuff about a burglar… You could have made it up.”

  “I know,” Dobie said.

  “But then you couldn’t possibly have done them both. And Jackson probably can’t decide which one of the two to nab you for.”

  Dobie was alarmed. “You mean… arrest me? My God, I hope he doesn’t do that.”

  Kate disconnected the percolator and lifted it over to the table, almost but not quite overbalancing her chair backwards in the process. “Dobie, there has to be someone up there who likes you. I mean, your presence here is the strongest argument for the existence of a deity I’ve ever come across.”

  “Oh,” Dobie said. “That’s your considered medical opinion, is it?”

  “Not really. As a doctor, I don’t have any views on theology. But then I can’t be a doctor all the time. I have my likes and dislikes. And intuitions. For instance, I don’t take much to your Jenny, either.”

  “You never knew her.”

  “Exactly.”

  Saturday night after-dinner conversation, Dobie thought. As on so many previous occasions with the Traynors or the Wains or eating out now and then at the Trattoria or the Park Hotel or that Chinese place. Intuitions and their role in mathematical research. Whether God could abrogate the laws of syllogism. Whether Gorbachev would change the rules of the Russian rat-race. Tobacco smoke, black coffee and brandy. Pleasant and even sometimes stimulating. All the ingredients here, except that they weren’t dressed for it; he jacketless and tieless, Kate in some loose kind of a housecoat thing, a caftan, maybe. But no. This was different. In one way, this was unreal. In another way, it was all those other after-dinner conversations that now seemed to be unreal and always had been. “… I probably didn’t, either,” Dobie said.

  “Did you think you did? At one time?”

  “We never really knew each other at all. But that, you see, seemed to make it more… exciting. Probably when we first met we found each other a bit overpowering, I’d never met anyone like her and I don’t think she’d met very many people like me. So… Well. There you go.”

  “What was unusual about her?”

  “I don’t quite know,” Dobie said. “Something was.”

  “I don’t have to ask that question of you,” Kate said. “You really are some kind of weird. An awful lot of women find that attractive. And then you’re sort of uncouth, physically. I mean, a smoothie you’re not. I can quite see that you might have a certain appeal.”

  “Maybe. But that was where it seem
ed to go all wrong.”

  “The sexual side of it?”

  “Yes. No, well, we did it, I don’t mean that. But she just didn’t seem to enjoy it much, is all. She’d sort of… ”

  “Close her eyes and think of England?”

  “Somewhere a good deal further away than that. Outer Siberia, maybe. To judge by the results.”

  “You didn’t ask anyone for advice?”

  “What sort of advice?”

  “A marriage counsellor or someone like that?”

  “No,” Dobie said. “I thought maybe things would get better. But they didn’t. And Jenny never seemed to… It was as though she thought all marriages were like that.”

  “Probably more of them are than you might suppose. More coffee?”

  Dobie pushed his mug across the table. “That’s why I found it hard to believe, when I got the idea she might be seeing someone else. Or hard to imagine.”

  “She wasn’t with anyone else,” Kate said, “while she was in Paris. Not in the way you mean. The way we’re talking about. If you thought she was.”

  Dobie was silent for a moment, gazing at the percolator as she tilted it over the mug. “You can… tell about things like that?”

  “Yes. You can. What gave you the idea? – in the first place?”

  “There wasn’t a first place. I mean there wasn’t a specific moment when I suddenly realised… Nothing like that. I suppose it was just a sort of a change in her attitude. Not towards me. Towards things in general. About three months ago, it started. I thought it was a change for the better, at first, because she seemed a lot more… light-hearted. Always singing round the place. Off-key. It was driving me nearly bonkers.”

  “And you took that to be a side-effect of infidelity.”

  “No. Of course not.” Dobie made an exasperated gesture that endangered the security of his newly-replenished coffee mug. “It’s hard to… There were lots of little things. Things she was secretive about. She hadn’t been that way before. That business about the money, for instance – you know about the money?… She brought back from France? I didn’t know anything about it when they asked me. I felt a bit of a twit, in fact. Not knowing. And then there was the wig…”

  “The wig?”

  “Fluffy blonde thing, I couldn’t make out… I only found it one day by accident because she kept it hidden away in one of her bedroom drawers. I wouldn’t have minded her wearing a wig, why ever should I? But I couldn’t ask her about it, either, she might have thought I’d been… nosing around. Or something.”

  “I think in your place,” Kate said, “I’d have been more worried about weekends in Paris than about that sort of thing. It seems pretty trivial.”

  “Yes, but a trip to Paris at least is explicable. The other isn’t.”

  “Had she been there before?”

  “Oh yes. She has a summer job with a French travel firm, she has to go there for briefings and so on. This was, let’s see… her third trip since she… Since the end of May, I think. This time she could have drawn some advance pay or something like that. But again, why should she have?”

  “Perhaps she meant to give you a surprise.”

  “I got that, all right,” Dobie said.

  Some kind of disloyalty had to be involved in discussing his marital problems in this way; it was something, as he himself had just admitted, that he’d never done before. But Jenny was dead. That made a difference. His pretensions to loyalty, to her memory or whatever, were also a part of that vaguely emotional baggage which had encumbered him for so long and which her death made it necessary for him to discard. Because if I do that, Dobie thought, maybe I can get to know her, after all. Knowledge may come too late and still be important. Talking like this to Kate may make it all a bit easier, but it’s only a step along the way. He blinked ponderously, ladling sugar into his coffee, seeing the road stretch out ahead of him, stony, dusty, dangerous. Perhaps this evening was one he’d remember in the distant future. You never can tell.

  “What about you, Kate?”

  “Me?”

  “You wear a wedding ring.”

  “Oh, that.” She looked down at her hand almost as though in surprise. “Well, the other Dr Coyle’s with an oil company somewhere in the Middle East and it’s a good long while since anyone inquired after him. And when they do, that’s about all I can tell them. We’re not in touch. If we ever were.”

  “He’s a doctor, too?”

  “He is that.”

  “You said something earlier on about wanting a male partner.”

  “I didn’t mean it. Yes, that was the whole idea when we were both students. It wasn’t a good idea. It didn’t work out. I think we were probably sold on the idea more than on each other. And that was the trouble. Stupidity.”

  “The work still has to be done,” Dobie said, “whether you do it together or not.”

  “That’s very true.”

  “It’s there to do and so you get on with it. It’s like that with me. I don’t know if it’s a good thing but it’s something that I’m good at. Whether it’s enough… That’s another matter.”

  “It is if it has to be.”

  “I’m not sure about that.”

  The telephone rang in the next room and Kate went to answer it. While she was gone, Dobie golloped his coffee reflectively and wondered if he was really sure that he wasn’t sure. Because what he did wasn’t work, exactly. Teaching was work, despite what some people said. The patterns that formed on his monitor screen were something else. There because he formed them first in his mind. Created them. Out of nothing. Not work but a feeling. The only feeling he could now allow himself. Kate wasn’t gone very long.

  “It’s for you.”

  “For me?”

  “Pontin. He wants to speak to you.”

  Dobie got up with a certain reluctance and went to the telephone. In fact it wasn’t Pontin. It was Alec Corder.

  “Alec? I thought it was… Alec, I’m terribly sorry, this about Jane… ”

  There were rattling noises and a sound of voices in the background. The call, no doubt, was coming through from Pontin’s office, where Corder would by now as a matter of course have assumed command. “… Well, we’re both in the same boat, aren’t we?” Corder was saying. “Far as that goes. Anyway, I’ve been on to the Chief Constable and he’s promised me he’s really going to get things moving on this one, so we can set our minds at rest on that score. Meantime I think we ought to get together and talk things over, what d’you say?”

  “Yes, I think we should,” Dobie said. “But it’s a bit late tonight. How about—”

  “No, no, not tonight, I’ve had a hell of a day and I imagine you have, too. Can we say tomorrow morning? At my place? Any time to suit you?”

  “All right,” Dobie said.

  “Good. Elevenish, then. Bloody business, this, any way you look at it, and worse for you than for me in some ways. From all accounts. But we’ll talk about all that tomorrow.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  The telephone clicked in Dobie’s ear and he looked at it for a moment before replacing it on its cradle. He’d expected to hear from Alec but not quite so soon. But then he hadn’t allowed for Alec’s manic energy; it went without saying that he didn’t share it. Unenergetically, he lumbered back to the kitchen, where Kate was finishing the washing-up. “I was going to give you a hand with that,” Dobie said, not very convincingly.

  “Not to worry. It’s finished.” She was indeed in the act of removing her dinky apron. “I could do with an early night and so could you. Sunday tomorrow, thank heaven.”

  “That was Alec Corder on the buzzer. I said I’d run over and see him in the morning.”

  “Back for lunch?”

  “Yes. Or I would think so. But I can’t very well—”

  “That’s okay. I’ll fix up something. And if you could manage to keep out of trouble between now and next nosh-time, I’d be much obliged. I know it’s asking a hell of a lot—”
/>
  “What sort of trouble could I possibly get into?”

  “Oh Christ,” Kate said. “You name it.”

  Sammy’s room. But Dobie’s room, now. The bed neatly made, Dobie’s weekend bag resting at its foot. The computer on the work-table showing its keys to him in a welcoming smile, recognising a computer-friendly occupant. The room seemed a little dark after the French-windowed and airy lightness of Dobie’s own bedroom, but not at all gloomy; more like a burrow, a secure recess of some deep warren where a weary rabbit might rest its limbs safe from the scrabbling paws of pursuing terriers. A place where Dobie’s special form of work might be prosecuted in peace and relative quiet. His student digs hadn’t been so very different.

  And Cantwell, too, perhaps a kindred spirit. With his A grade in mathematics, his computer software programmed to handle Lorenzian equations. Dobie wondered if he’d thought to bring the Mandelstam set to bear on the isolation problem; it was something he could check on later. Cantwell was dead now, but not completely gone. His work was there, could be carried on; his bed was there, and could be slept in. An early night. Why not?

  The holdall was there, too, of course, and Dobie’s pyjamas were in it. He put it on the bed and unpacked it. George Campbell’s programmes and the mini-discs went on to the work-table; his spare suit… Dobie opened the wardrobe. Sammy Cantwell’s clothes still hung there, but there was plenty of room for one suit more. One suit more. One suit more…

  Alongside that grey belted raincoat…

  On the shelf above the raincoat, a slightly flattened pork-pie hat…

  Instead of putting away the suit, Dobie took out the raincoat and turned it round. There had, of course, to be hundreds like it. Probably thousands. This one had a little name-tag inside the collar with S. Cantwell written on it in marking ink. Dobie felt in the pockets. They were empty except for a crumpled sheet of paper. The paper had words written on it, too. Dobie stared at it uncomprehendingly.

  BACK SOON PLEASE GO IN MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

  … Or not written but typed. In red. With a purple squiggle underneath. Dobie sat down on the bed, holding the sheet of paper in his hand.