The Strange Attractor (18 page)

Jackson had turned his head to stare at Kate. “What’s he mean,
lend his room
? You never told me anything about that, doctor.”

“Because he never told
me
. I didn’t know.” Kate, in turn, was staring towards Dobie. “This is the first I’ve heard about it.”

“Either he lent his keys to someone who had them copied, or he had them copied himself. Someone else has the keys – that’s the important point. So as to use the room when he wasn’t there. Which is of course how someone else found out where he kept the gun.”

“Why,” Jackson asked, “would anyone want to borrow his room?”

“Because being a bed-sitter, it’s got a bed in it. Quite a comfortable one, in fact.”

Jackson stared uncomfortably at what he had written in his notebook, and chewed the end of his pencil.
Borrowed
or
burrowed
?… Bit of a puzzler, that one.

“You mean it was used for purposes of sexual assignation?”

“Yes.”

“Ah,” Jackson said.

For purposes of sexual assassination
, he wrote.

After a while, he asked, “Why?”

“It’s a universal human urge. Or so they tell me.”

“No, I mean… why
that
room? It’s not what I’d call a very syphilitic apartment.”

“I think
sybaritic
is the word you want.”

“Well, is it?”

“No. But it’s convenient. Or the location is. With a doctor’s clinic right beneath and with the same entrance door.”

“Aha. So I had the right word after all.”

“You miss the point,” Dobie said testily. “It’s convenient because you’ve got people going in and out of that door all day, or at least from ten to twelve-thirty and from five till seven. And you’ve even got a reasonable excuse if by ill luck you should bump into somebody you know. You picked up this nasty cough from somewhere—”

“Did your wife have a nasty cough, Mr Dobie?… Because those are her prints on the peanut butter jars, as I’m sure you know very well.”

A rather unmannerly interruption, Dobie thought, but he took it none the less in his stride. “I don’t think she really meant to leave them here. She just put them away and forgot about them.”

“But what was she
doing
here?”

“I thought I explained all that. She was, er… having a little bit on the side. I’m told that’s the phrase that’s currently in vogue.”

“But—”

“You’ve seen our flat. It wouldn’t have done at all for that sort of thing, not on any kind of a regular basis. What with all those other flats around us and people always peering out through the windows. Same would apply to a hotel, anywhere in Cardiff. Besides,” Dobie said, considering a further interesting possibility, “she might have quite
liked
that room. I know I do. It’s so different to the flat, you see. So warm and dark. And sordid. You often get that with rather finicky girls, don’t you think?… A sort of
nostalgie de la boue
?…”

“Oh indeed,” Jackson said. He started to write in his notebook
Noss
and then crossed it out. “A back-to-the-womb complex, as like as not.” He then chewed the end of his pencil some more, gazing meditatively at Dobie the while. “Is that all you’ve got to say on the matter, Mr Dobie?”

“Well—”

“Or are you going on to tell me your wife killed Mr Cantwell?”

“I can’t say for certain that she didn’t. But I’m reasonably confident she didn’t kill Jane Corder and then hit herself on the back of the head. I doubt very much if she even
knew
Sammy. But of course it takes two people to make an assignation. I don’t think
she
was the one Sammy was helping out – as he puts it. Or the one he was expecting to see the morning he died.”

“So who was it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ve no idea at all?”

“None at all. At one time I thought I had, but I was wrong.”

“You were wrong but you still had some reason to suppose…?”

“Some reason, yes. But nothing definite.”

“Did you
do
anything about it?”

“Such as what?”

“
Duw
, I don’t know. Any of the things you’d
expect
a husband to do… Ask her about it? Smack her on the hooter? Even
try
and find out who it was she was seeing?”

“No,” Dobie said. “I didn’t do anything like that.”

“And you didn’t say anything about it to
us
. When you made your statement.”

“No,” Dobie said. “I didn’t have any facts. Besides, it would have been embarrassing.”

“
Embarrassing
?… Yes, I can see
that
.”

“I suppose at the time I thought it would all blow over pretty quickly,” Dobie said. “Or if it didn’t, that’d be all right, too, because things weren’t going all that well between us anyway. In any case—”

“In any case the boy friend wasn’t who you thought it was.”

“No. It wasn’t.”

“So maybe you’d best leave all that side of things to the police.”

“Is that what most people do in these cases? I wouldn’t have thought —”

“I didn’t mean
that
, exactly.” Jackson in fact wasn’t at all sure what he
had
meant and decided that that particular issue need be argued no further. What he chiefly wanted to do now was go away and wrap his brains for a while in embrocation-soaked cotton wool; the trouble with Dobie was that, whatever it was he had, it seemed to be catching. “… Well, the boys may be working in the other room for a little while longer but if it’s all the same to you I’ll be off. It looks like being another busy day.”

“And,” Dobie said, “if you
should
chance to find any prints there whose presence you can’t account for—”

“Confidential information, that is,” Jackson said severely. “You’ve stuck your oar in quite far enough, Mr Dobie. From now on, leave everything to us.”

After he had gone Kate began to collect the breakfast things and pile them in the sink, making, Dobie thought, an unnecessary clatter in the process. He stationed himself in his customary washing-up position and was about to twiddle the hot water tap when Kate pushed his hand away. “No, don’t do that. I’ll manage.”

Dobie knew what the matter was and felt contrite. “… I sprang it on you, Kate, didn’t I? I really am sorry.”

“Yes, you damn well
did
.”

“But I couldn’t say anything to you until I was sure. How could I?”

She withdrew her hand, seemingly slightly mollified by this apology. “He may have given you good advice at that.”

“You think so?”

“You know what you’ve just
done
, don’t you?… You’ve given him the one thing he didn’t have before. A motive.”

Dobie didn’t get it. “What, for killing Sammy?”

“
No
, you berk. For killing Jenny.”

“What, just because…? I wouldn’t have done that. Even if I’d known for sure, and I made it quite clear to him I didn’t.”

“People don’t always need to know for sure.” She grabbed a coffee-cup as it hurtled from Dobie’s clutching fingers towards the floor. “Look, thanks very much. But you dry.”

“It might be wise. I do seem to manage a rather high breakage rate.” Dobie changed places with her, temporarily assuming command of the dishcloth. “I do need to know for sure. Knowing for sure is my metier, so to speak. Or let’s say establishing parabolas of reasonable certainty.”

“It’s just as well you didn’t tell Jackson that. It hurt a lot, didn’t it? It must have.”

“You mean Jenny’s being unfaithful? Oh well, I’m sure people don’t use that expression any more, either.”

“Perhaps they don’t. But that doesn’t affect the way they feel about it. What I really meant, though, was
telling
him about it. After all… you didn’t have to.”

“I did,” Dobie said. “That’s the thing about syllogistic chains.” He stooped to retrieve the shattered remnants of a saucer from the floor. “They’re so beautiful you just can’t keep it to yourself if you hit upon one. You could almost call it a crime. Sorry about that, it was sort of
soapy
.”

“That was the natural result of its having been immersed in detergent liquid. Look, Dobie, why don’t you sit down and let the plates get nice and dry all by themselves? And what’s a sillo what-you-said? I forgot to swallow my after-breakfast dictionary this morning.”

Dobie accepted this demotion resignedly and sat down once again at the kitchen table. “It’s a way of explaining something that’s happened when the odds against it happening seem to be astronomical. Like those jars of peanut butter in the wardrobe. If you or Jackson or anyone else had found them there, they wouldn’t have meant anything at all. In fact they were found by maybe the only person in the world who might realise their significance, so to speak. And yet the sequence is perfectly syllogistic, once you follow the pattern. It could hardly have happened any other way.”

Kate sloshed hot water around the inside of a frying-pan. “I still don’t understand.
What
pattern?”

“Simple cause and effect. If Sammy hadn’t lent his room to someone, he wouldn’t have been killed. If he hadn’t been killed, I wouldn’t have gone to the inquest. If I hadn’t gone to the inquest, I wouldn’t have met you. If I hadn’t met you, you wouldn’t have brought me here when I was in a bit of a jam. If you hadn’t brought me here, I wouldn’t have found the peanut butter. It all links up.”

“Like that for-want-of-a-nail thing.”

“Exactly.”

Kate stacked the frying-pan on the dripboard and began to wipe her hands. “It’s certainly what Sherlock Holmes would have called a singular train of events.”

“Who?… Oh, Sherlock
Holmes
…” Dobie’s forehead unfurrowed in recollection. “I don’t think I’ve read those stories since I was at school. How does it go?
You know my methods, Watson
?”

“That’s it. Not that yours are even remotely similar.”

“They are in a way. Syllogistic chains go on for ever and ever.
They
don’t change according to social fads and fancies. You can work them out forwards, backwards, sideways. The problem is establishing a few links to work from in the first place, but once you’ve done that you should be able to find the provenance of any other event on the same chain if you go on long enough. Any event or any agent. Like who it was Sammy lent his room to.”

“You know,” Kate said, “I think I can add just one little silly wotsit.”

“What’s that?”

“Jane Corder. You know, when I saw her in the autopsy room I was sure I’d seen her before but I couldn’t remember where?” She moved across to the kitchen window, looked fixedly out of it. “I remember now.
She
was here, too.”

“
Here
?”

“Outside. Down in the street. I saw her there once. I was looking down… No, I wasn’t. I was downstairs, in the clinic. Looking out the window. That’s how it was.”

“What was she doing?”

“Nothing. Just standing there. Looking back towards me. I thought she might have been waiting for somebody, for one of the patients. It would have been about a fortnight ago.”

Dobie rubbed his chin. “A three-pipe problem, I would say.”

“An evening session. Round about half-past six.”

“… Unless she was doing exactly that.”

“Waiting for one of the patients?”

“Yes.”

“She could have been.”

“Yes. It’s a nice little chain,” Dobie said, “but there’s a link missing somewhere. I’ll have to find it.”

In any case, it was a beautiful morning. The lark was on the wing, the snail was on the thorn, the fingerprint team was busily at work and only Detective-Inspector Jackson was notably pissed off, though possibly even he was feeling better now. Dobie drove down the long chasms of the Cardiff side streets, their murky depths illuminated by brilliant patches of sunlight, and finally emerged into the full glare of the open spaces round Roath Park. Pentycoed Road ran the length of the rise to the east of the lake and it was still a beautiful morning when Dobie got there.