The Strange Attractor (13 page)

“Maybe. But that was where it seemed 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.

Someone else, he thought, was making patterns in his mind. Creating them out of nothing. Someone was being very creative indeed.

3

Church bells ringing. Ding dong bell. On the pavement leading up to St Joseph’s the Sunday cohorts were walking, soberly dressed, wearing industrious expressions. The morning sun shone brightly on grey stone, yew trees, well-trimmed green lawns. The rains had had a freshening effect on the grass, the summer leaves, even on the granite gravestones outside the church, which had a freshly-washed look about them. Dobie was freshly washed and shaved but not noticeably freshened. He drove on down the street, cautiously slowing down for the road junction and the little cluster of shops around it where incautious pedestrians, emerging from the newsagents with their noses in the
News of the World
and their heads as often as not still aching from the sociable excesses of Saturday night, were wont to step blithely off the pavement and vanish between the wheels of intemperately-conducted vehicles. All these disco places, Dobie thought crossly. They have a mind-numbing effect. Glancing sideways as he passed the shops, he perceived outside the newspaper emporium a very large placard bearing the announcement,

CARDIFF WOMEN VICTIMS IN DOUBLE SEX MURDER

The wording of this message had an even more spectacularly mind-numbing effect on him and on entering the main road he only narrowly avoided running over a middle-aged lady pushing a perambulator who, having emitted a penetrating squeak, was just able to seek refuge on the central island in the nick of time. Dobie, shaken by this encounter and redoubling his concentration, continued on his journey. The Corder residence, when he arrived there some fifteen minutes later, seemed to be doing even better business than St Joseph’s; a considerable crowd of some thirty or forty loiterers had apparently taken root on the strip of pavement outside the front gate, a TV-news van was prominently parked some ten feet distant and a uniformed policeman was providing a non-nuclear but determined deterrent to those avid sensation-seekers who were attempting to gain admission to the property itself. Dobie was relieved to find himself recognised at once and waved benignly through; the three-and-a-quarter hours he had spent at the police station the day before had clearly not been altogether in vain. What with one thing and another, though, it had been a nerve-racking drive and, once safely within the house and seated once again in the front room, he was even more relieved to be greeted with the sweetest words of thought or pen or with what might, anyway in the circumstances, be so regarded.