The Strange Attractor

by Cory, Desmond

  Jackson advanced. “I believe you sent for me, sir.”

  “Take a seat. Take a seat. Jackson?”

  “Sir?”

  “What’s a pundit?”

  “I think it’s one of them Indian geezers, sir, as comes up and strangles you from behind.”

  “Ah. Yes, that sounds very likely. Well now, what can I do for you, Jackson?”

  “You sent for me, sir.”

  “I did?… Oh yes. Yes. Right. We got to get things moving, Jackson. Time we fingered someone on this Dobie business.”

  “Yessir. In fact I just had a call from Mr Dobie. I’ve arranged to meet him—”

  “I’m not interested in arrangements, Jackson. I’m interested in arrests. I’ve been reading these autopsy reports very carefully, very carefully indeed, and I’m not satisfied, I’m not satisfied at all. I don’t believe this Dr Coyle knows her butt end from her knucklebone.”

  “Yes,” Jackson said. “It’s the time factor that’s, well… crucial.”

  “Quite so. It’s her estimate of the time of death of that Dobie woman that’s been holding us up, right? And from what you tell me, Dobie’s shacking up with her right now. It’s a case of barefaced collusion if I ever came across one. We’ve got to break this so-called medical evidence, Jackson, if we want to get anywhere. I wouldn’t set much store by it at the best of times.”

  “And how are we going to set about doing that, sir?”

  “Bring her in for questioning, of course. I’ll soon put her through the hoops. Find out just what it is she’s been up to with that… that… pundit.”

  “If you say so, sir.”

  “I do so say so, Jackson.”

  “I’ll send someone round right away.”

  It wasn’t a job that Jackson fancied himself; Kate Coyle, as he knew from past experience, could be quite a formidable bit of crumpet when she got her Irish up. Besides, he had an appointment and was now in some danger of arriving late. Foxy Boxy was nowhere in sight that morning so he deputed Detective-Constable Grimwade to execute this tricky mission. “Just ask her if she’d be good enough to accompany you to the station you know – be tactful about it. And you needn’t be in too much of a rush to get there. She won’t be through with her patients till half-past twelve at the earliest.”

  “Rely on me, sir,” Grimwade said.

  Jackson got into his car and scooted off.

  The colourful columns of that morning’s daily press had stimulated other imaginations beside Pontin’s and there was still a fair-sized crowd surrounding the Corders’ house when he arrived. The front door was opened to him by a dark-haired girl who frowned down at him mistrustfully. “Miss Corder?… Detective-Inspector Jackson. I spoke to you on the phone.”

  “You’re late,” Wendy said. “Mr Dobie’s been here these past ten minutes. He’s in the sitting-room if you’d like to join him.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry. I was unavoidably—”

  “And now I’m late. I have to get to work. Make sure the door’s locked behind you when you leave, if you don’t mind?”

  More than a touch, Jackson thought, of her father’s well-known energetic irascibility. He watched her head towards the garage with long athletic strides, then turned and went through the hallway into the sitting-room, having taken due care to close the front door behind him. Dobie, he saw, had ensconced himself in the alcove at the far end of the room beside the cocktail bar; in his rôle of mystery witness he had seemingly adopted an interesting windblown appearance, as though someone had just pulled him backwards through a giant hair-dryer. His ears that morning didn’t seem quite to fit. As a result, his glasses were poised on his nose at a lopsided angle. Leaning forwards as into the teeth of a hurricane, he saluted Jackson with a cordial handshake before falling back into the sofa cushions with a curious rolling motion, like that of a dying duck in a thunderstorm. “Are you feeling all right, Mr Dobie?” Jackson inquired.

  “I’m fine. Just didn’t get too much sleep last night.”

  “Ah.” Jackson sat down cumbrously. “You’re letting these things prey on your mind, perhaps. You don’t want to do that if you can help it.” The sofa was certainly a good deal more comfortable than it appeared to be. Lapped in upholstered luxury he surveyed the sitting-room, which looked very much as it had looked before. “Now may I ask why you’ve brought me here, sir? Some other aspect of the matter, maybe, as you feel you’d like to talk to me about?”

  “I thought we should take another look at the scene of the crime,” Dobie said. “Rather an apt phrase, that. I mean that’s so exactly what it was.”

  The mystery witness was clearly prepared to be as much of a mystery as usual. Jackson took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. “I promise you, sir, we’ve been over this place very carefully. We may have been a mite remiss in the case of that Mr Cantwell but I don’t think you’ll find that there’s much we’ve missed out on here.”

  “Not you,” Dobie said. “Me. Its almost the first thing I noticed when I sat down here that night and because it was so obvious I went and forgot about it. Don’t you notice anything about this room?”

  Jackson, at something of a loss, blinked about him. “I can’t say I do. It’s all very nice and clean and tidy. Some expensive stuff, of course, in the way of furniture. But I don’t see the point you’re trying to make.”

  “When I came into the room,” Dobie said, “I thought it looked rather like a stage set. You know, in a theatre. I only remembered that last night when I was trying to explain how a symbolic series works in a computer sequence. I said they were like characters in a drama. Which they’re not, really, but I didn’t see how else I could explain it.”

  “You’re not very good at explaining things, sir, if I may say so. I still haven’t got the foggiest—”

  “But it’s obvious. What’s the good of a drama without an audience?”

  Jackson pondered on the matter. Enlightenment still refused to dawn. “What sort of audience had you got in mind?”

  “It’s more what someone else had in mind. Someone thought that I’d make a pretty good audience. Someone made bloody sure that I would be. Set me down right here on this sofa, in the front row of the stalls so to speak, and then tied me hand and foot so that I’d have no choice but to stay there. Not a bad idea at that, but I don’t think many contemporary managements would go to that extreme. The Theatre of Bondage, you might call it. It’ll come, it’ll come.”

  “But what would be the point of this exercise?”

  “I’m telling you,” Dobie said patiently. “Someone wanted me to see the play.”

  “Ah yes. Of course. The play.” Jackson looked once more around the room, wondering if he could subdue this pundit himself or if he wouldn’t be better advised to summon assistance. “Well, the missus quite enjoys a good Agatha Christie now and again, a rat-trap or wherever it’s called, but I myself—”

  “I’d have to be drugged, though,” Dobie said, “before I could be tied up. Otherwise I might have objected to such a procedure. But a sleeping audience is no good to anyone – least of all Agatha Christie. So I’d need to be woken up, you see, before the play could begin. Luckily Agatha happened to know that a convenient curtain-raiser would be coming over from Paris at eight forty-five and that no one could go on sleeping through that racket. The time factor, you see, was crucial. And luck didn’t really come into it. No. It was all planned.”

  “Yes. So you say. But planned to what purpose?”

  “Ah. I thought you’d never ask. Agatha wanted a witness, don’t you see? – someone who’d tell you that Jane had been killed here, in her own home, by some unknown intruder. In fact, of course, she wasn’t.”

  “She wasn’t?”

  “No. She’d been killed all of forty-five minutes earlier, when she got to my flat. She didn’t know that our arrangement had been changed, because she didn’t change it. Agatha did. Just left a message for me with the college secretary. Nothing easier.”

  “But loo
k here,” Jackson said, gobsmacked. “You yourself said—”

  “I was deceived.”

  “Oh.”

  “I didn’t suspect anything. Why should I have? I showed up here, read the little note Agatha had prepared for me, had a little drink and passed out. I don’t know exactly what was in the whisky, Kate says it may have been some kind of valium derivative but it was pretty strong…”

  “Lab says there was nothing wrong with the whisky.”

  “Well, that was never a serious problem. I mean, I was out cold. Agatha would have got back from my place by half-past eight at the very latest and have had plenty of time to truss me up and replace the whisky in the decanter. And when I came to… Well, there of course was Agatha, sitting over there in that armchair and wearing a borrowed raincoat and hat. Act One Scene One. The curtain goes up. Very dramatic.”

  Jackson stared at the back of the armchair. Then made a floundering gesture with his right hand. “Yes, but—”

  “There’s Agatha. And there’s me. A captive audience in every sense of the word. But of course I can’t see Agatha. Not properly. Not until Agatha gets up and exits stage right, and even then I can’t register much more than the hat and the raincoat and dark trouser-legs. All I really have is a general impression of a male figure moving quickly out of sight and into the dressing-room.”

  “The dressing-room?”

  “The kitchen. It’s more of an un-dressing-room, really. Because that’s where the hat and coat come off and underneath them Agatha’s wearing Jane Corder’s clothes. Red blouse and dark trousers. It’s all a bit like a Feydeau farce, one of those things where people are always whizzing in and out of each other’s bedrooms disguised as Charley’s Aunt. That’s what Agatha does. Pops on Jane’s raincoat instead of the other, puts on a blonde wig instead of the hat, goes out by the back door and comes in by the front, so that I think it’s Jane just arriving. In the ordinary way I might have expected to have heard her car arriving, but what with the noise of that damned aeroplane… Oh, Jane’s car was there all right, Agatha had driven it over from my place but of course she’d arrived much earlier, just left it in the garage. Anyway, like I said… I was deceived.”

  “But how could you have been? You saw her all right.”

  “Yes, I did. And heard her. She was calling my name. Of course I only saw her for a few seconds and I didn’t have my glasses on… and because I was expecting to see Jane it never even occurred to me that it might be someone else. Even so, yes, it was a very good impersonation. Very good indeed. It must have been. After all, Agatha must have felt pretty confident about it. But the audience was a convenient distance away and it only had to be for a very short space of time. Just long enough for Agatha to move stage right again, out of sight of the audience, hit the door a bonk with her hand and make a gasping noise, grab the original hat and raincoat and skedaddle. All pretty simple, if you’ve got the nerve. Agatha has. And to spare.”

  Jackson shook his head, like a horse ridding himself of a troublesome fly, and got up from the sofa. Moving with slow and measured paces he walked over to the hallway entrance, turned and walked to the kitchen door, opened it, closed it, came back and sat down once more on the sofa. “For the life of me I still don’t see—”

  “Agatha likes playing games. Agatha’s good at them. But this one isn’t over yet, not by a long way. Because Jane’s still on the bed in my flat. She has to be picked up and put in the sea if the whole charade’s going to be convincing. So Agatha has to drive back there in her own car, return my wife’s wig, put Jane’s clothes back on her again, take her out to some lonely beach and dump her. And also take the raincoat and hat back to where they came from, because there’s just the remotest chance they might be missed and Agatha doesn’t leave anything to chance. The only trouble is, life isn’t like that. Things do happen by chance. Like my wife getting back from Paris a day before she was expected. Agatha hadn’t planned on killing Jenny. It was just a disagreeable necessity, when Jenny walked into the bedroom and found Jane’s body there. Luckily Agatha had got back by then and was able to do something about it with the nearest thing to come to hand, which happened to be Jenny’s typewriter. A case of panic stations, I rather fancy. And it put the timing all wrong. Agatha had counted on getting Jane away from my place long before I got back but it didn’t work out that way. There was I, parking my car outside, and there was Agatha with two bodies in the bedroom. Logical thing to do would have been to set me out in the chorus line as soon as I came in through the door but Agatha didn’t want to do that after setting me up as the witness to the other thing. No, I was just plain lucky there.”

  “Be going a bit over the top, wouldn’t it? With two corpses there already…”

  “Oh well.” Dobie took off his glasses and wiped the lenses with the end of his tie. Devoid of their protection, his eyes looked tired and faded. “You’ve got to understand we’re dealing with someone who kills people without any compunction whatsoever. A moral imbecile, if you like. Over the top was your own expression, wasn’t it? You go over the crest of a hill and the slope runs downwards. So you were right… Sammy Cantwell was the hilltop and the others just part of a syllogistic series. You were right and I was lucky. Agatha’s very dangerous indeed.”

  “Ah.” Jackson was gifted with a sudden acumen. “Is that why you’re telling me all this?”

  “Of course. Because I still don’t really know who Agatha is. I only know what Agatha does. And it scares me.”

  “As well it might.”

  “As well it might. Because what in fact Agatha does when I arrive is hide Jenny’s body under the bed and then just step outside into the bathroom. And wait. So that when I walk into the bedroom, there’s Jane stretched out on the bed, still without her blouse and slacks because Agatha’s still wearing them, and what I do then, naturally, is rush off to the sitting-room to telephone the police. And while I’m doing that Agatha puts Jenny on the bed, carries Jane out through the French windows to her car and loads her into the boot, gets in and drives quietly off to that lonely beach I mentioned. Again, it was simple but it was improvised. That’s the scary part. Don’t you think?”

  “Yes. Well, I see what you mean. It’s often hard to pin anything down on a criminal who keeps his head.”

  Dobie put his glasses back on.

  “That’s right. There isn’t very much in the way of proof. It happened like that because it couldn’t have happened any other way. I’ve run every other conceivable sequence through the computer but it’s no good. Nothing else works out.”

  “There’s one little detail that you haven’t made quite clear.”

  “Oh?”

  “… Like what’s behind all this shemozzle.”

  “You mean the motive?”

  “Yes.”

  “For killing Jane?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s what I’d like to find out,” Dobie said. “Because I have to go at this one back to front. I mean, if I can discover the motive, then I should be able to tell you who Agatha is. The trouble is I don’t really know very much about homosexuality.”

  “Homo—”

  Jackson stopped with his mouth open, in the attitude of a soldier stricken with shell-shock. The telephone on the far side of the room had started to ring. Seeing that Jackson was making no move to answer it, Dobie got up and shambled wearily across. “Hello… ? Dobie here.”

  “Dobie? Oh.” The voice at the other end sounded familiar. “Oh hello. Dickie Bird. Could I speak to Wendy?”

  “She left about half an hour ago. She said she was going to work.”

  “Oh, I see. Well, she hasn’t got here yet. That’s why I rang. To see if anything was wrong. I mean, there’s a lot of work here and if she isn’t coming in—”

  Dobie put the phone down and turned towards Jackson. “I think we’d better go,” he said.

  “Go where?”

  “In my car. I’ll drive. Because we’re going to break the speed limit. Better a
civilian than a police inspector, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Break the…? What for? Look, Mr Dobie—”

  “Oh, come on,” Dobie said impatiently. “It’s that bloody time factor. It’s gone crucial again.”

  Twenty minutes to one.

  He might have done better to have used the telephone.

  But he didn’t know that and, in any case, there wouldn’t have been anybody there to answer it.

  Dr Coyle’s clinic was now closed.

  Grimwade climbed stolidly up the staircase.

  He could hear no sound from the upstairs flat. Only the creak of the stair treads under his booted feet. It was quite dark in the old house and his eyes, accustomed to the sharpness of the sunlight outside, weren’t yet adjusted to the pervading dimness. They didn’t detect the slim and shadowy figure waiting for him at the head of the stairs. When they did, he had time only to open his mouth in mild surprise.

  “Doctor—”

  The long knife blade came at him out of the darkness, striking with a terrifying speed at the base of his throat. But he didn’t see that, either. He stood quite still, making a peculiar gargling sound, not very loud. That was all.

  “Agatha,” Jackson said.

  “Yes?” Dobie slammed the car door shut.

  “He’s the one who used Cantwell’s room? Who used to meet your wife there, the way you said?”