The Strange Attractor (12 page)

Though here Dobie was doing the bogeys rather less than justice. Foxy Boxy?… No mathematician, he. But the nickname implied, at least, the possession of a certain imagination, if of a limited kind. Low cunning, some might call it.

“…
Strangers on a Train
,” Box was, at that very moment, saying. “Good film, that. Jevver see it?”

Jackson wasn’t much of a one for film-going and levelled on his subordinate a stare of disfavour. His eyes were now so inflamed from continuous concentration upon reading matter that his expression in itself might have guaranteed him a starring role in a Hammer horror movie; hairs seemed to be about to sprout from his otherwise unremarkable features at any moment. “Save the chitchat for later, Foxy, or we”ll never get through.”

“No, look, there’s these two geezers, see? and they fix it so each one of them does the other one’s murder for him. ’Cause that way they both have alibis. It’s clever. Suppose this Dobie feller was to knock off another bloke’s old lady while the other bloke got rid of
his
wife for him… See what I mean?”

Jackson thought that he did, but wasn’t impressed. “A bit far-fetched, though, innit?”

“I dunno. It says here that Dobie and the Corder woman’s husband were college students together. And it all seems to me like the kind of thing a couple of college kids might dream up, being that way inclined. Ingenious, like. Mind you, that was another one.
Rope
. They put the body in a chest and sat on it.”

Jackson looked at his wrist-watch. “Well, you’re due to meet Mr Corder at the city morgue in half an hour’s time. Keep an eye on him when he does the ID and if he tries to sit on top of the corpse, let’s know about it.”

“You will have your little joke,” Box said unresentfully.

He himself had thought his suggestion to be a bit far out. Jackson, however, pushed back his chair and didn’t resume his reading until some time after Box had gone.

Once you’d met Alec Corder, the suggestion seemed further out than ever. Corder wasn’t the kind of man who would readily delegate responsibility, certainly not for so simple a matter as bumping off an unwanted wife or two. As for identifying the victim once the deed was performed, that was like stealing an infant’s sucker. Corder marched unhesitantly up to the besheeted figure on the trolley, the morgue assistant expertly flicked the sheet back, Corder gave a brief but emphatic nod of acknowledgement, the assistant flicked the sheet back again and that was it. Box was fully prepared to wait respectfully for a few moments while Corder turned his face to the wall in manly sorrow, but Corder instead swung abruptly around and was on to him like a rabbit on to a parsnip. “… Right. Who’s in charge of this case? Pontin?”

“Detective-Superintendent Pontin, yes, sir.”

“I want to know a great deal more about it than I do right now,” Corder said, snapping an elbow lock on to Box’s right arm and marching him relentlessly out into the hollowly echoing corridor. “And if he’s not prepared to talk to me about it, then I know just the fellow to see and it
is
the Chief Constable I have in mind. I’d be obliged if you’d make that clear to him.”

“I’m sure the Superintendent will be pleased to see you, sir, as soon as we’ve received the autopsy report. And if in the meantime you’d care to come round to the station and make a short statement—”

“One thing I can tell you for a start,” Corder said, steering Box effortlessly round a corner. “There’s no way at all she could have fallen in. She was always scared of the sea. Couldn’t swim a stroke.”

“We don’t think she was drowned, sir. We’ve every reason to suppose her death wasn’t natural. I don’t think I should say any more than that, at this stage.”

Corder’s grip on his elbow tightened, though no more than momentarily. “What are you implying, exactly?”

“All we want at the moment is to establish an identification, sir. I don’t wish to imply
anything
.”

“Not your place to do so, no doubt.”

“That’s it, sir.”

“Then we’ll see what your Superintendent has to say. You’ve got your identification. That was Jane all right.”

They left the side entrance and headed for the car park, in this way crossing the path of Dr Caitlin Coyle who was moving in some haste in the obverse direction. Her immediate destination was the autopsy room, where the dissection trolley had already arrived and old Hunter-Poke was already walking abstractedly up and down with his hands interlaced behind his back, a style of locomotion which in his (totally mistaken) opinion accentuated his overall resemblance to the Duke of Edinburgh. “Ah, so here you are. Never a dull moment, eh, m’dear?”

“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.”