The Strange Attractor (22 page)

KILL

and pressed the button. The letters flickered into nothingness and the graphic mode returned. The pattern of the Chinese box had shifted. It looked very like a fluctuation. Dobie stared at the screen, not liking what he saw.

Seven fifteen a.m.

Kate came in, wearing a bright red flannel dressing-gown and carrying a teapot on a tray. This she almost dropped when she saw Dobie hunched up in his chair, still navigating the computer. “My God, Dobie, haven’t you been to bed
at all
?”

“Bed at all?” Dobie said dozily. “No, I haven’t been to bed at all, I’ve been… Don’t worry about it. I’m used to staying up all night.”

“You’d better tickle your tastebuds with this lot,” Kate said crossly, plonking the tray down beside him on the work-table. “And then come and have some breakfast. And then get some sleep. This is bloody ridiculous.”

“Don’t want breakfast.” Dobie levered his eyes away from the monitor screen and peered vaguely round about him. “Can’t stop now we’re on a roll.”

“On a
roll
? That thing’s going to curl up and die on you if you work it like that. I’ll report you to the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Computers.”

“There isn’t one.”

“There ought to be.” In fact he looked pretty much the same as when she’d left him last night. Somewhat distrait, but not noticeably the worse for wear. The room was full of tobacco smoke, though; he had to have got through a whole packet. She went to draw the curtains and open the window; another clear bright morning, with a few early starters scurrying earnestly along the pavements. “Don’t you ever get tired?”

“You get tired around the twelve-to-fourteen hour mark.” Dobie was prepared to be factual about this. “You keep on working and then it’s all right. It’s a bit like the pain barrier for a distance runner. But I’m going to run into another one about two hours from now. Do you have anything that’d help to get me through it?”

“Breakfast would help,” Kate said firmly.

“I’ll need something with a bit more kick to it than eggs and bacon.”

“I suppose you could shoot some Bennies if you wanted to. But
why
do you want to? What’s the
hurry
?”

“I don’t want to,” Dobie said. “I
have
to.”

There are some patients it’s no good arguing with. It does more harm than good. Kate went to fetch the Benzedrine tablets from the refrigerated medicine cabinet at the back of her pantry and on her way through the kitchen clicked the switch to boil up another kettleful of water. When she got back Dobie was talking to the computer again, his lips moving as he fed it more mouthfuls of delicious information. The computer was getting breakfast all right. “You’d better take them now if you’re going to take them at all. Let me feel your pulse first.”

Nothing wrong there. Slow and steady.

Dobie said, “What would have the opposite effect to these?”

“Depressant, you mean?”

“Narcotic. Something that’d send me off to sleep.”

“Valium. Or one of the derivatives. But I’m not giving you anything like that on top of the other. Let me know when you’re on a down and I’ll come and hit you on the head with a hammer.” No. Not funny. “… What
is
it, Dobie?”

“I don’t like some of the results that I’ve been getting” Dobie said, popping a couple of the little blue pills with effortless ease. “One of the sequences I’ve been running… I don’t like it at all.”

“What do you mean, you don’t
like
it?”

“It looks as though another termination situation is going to arise. It looks as though that situation is imminent.”

“If you mean what I
think
you mean—”

“Then somebody’s in danger,” Dobie said. “Somebody else is due to go and there’s not an awful lot I can do about it.”

“Because you don’t know who it is?”

“Exactly. I can’t tell who it is.”

“And when you say
go
…?”

“Yes,” Dobie said.

Kate turned her attention towards the screen, where a small green circle was spinning on its axis. Spinning very slowly. But spinning. “Bloody hell,” Kate said. “You can’t
know
that. You said yourself it couldn’t predict.”

“It’s not a prediction. It’s a probability estimate. But ranking very high on the scale.”

“
How
high?”

“Almost as high as it’ll go. It’s the time factor that’s, well… crucial.”

“So what
can
you do?”

“Go on working,” Dobie said. “Trying to clear up a little point here, a little point there. Like what happened to Jane Corder’s clothes.”

“Jane Corder’s
clothes
? She was wearing them.”

“Not when
I
saw her she wasn’t.”

Kate gave it up. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“You can help the cause of suffering humanity down there in the clinic. While I go on fighting this many-headed hydra here.”

“A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”

“Yup,” Dobie said.

Of course it wasn’t really a fight. Or even a race, because once inside the computer time had no meaning. The computer didn’t understand about death, the enemy with no face at all; it had no sense of urgency. But Dobie did, and when around half-past nine the fatigue hit him it was that alone which kept him going; the Benzedrine helped only a little and the taped music no longer helped him at all, was lost in the thrumming roar of the traffic going by outside which impacted upon Dobie’s eardrums with the thundering force of Pacific breakers. When he got up to close the window he found himself barely able to stand upright; when he went back to his chair his hands were trembling so wildly he could no longer control the computer keys. Luckily he’d been through all this before and had the computer self-programmed against this eventuality; it went on working busily as he sat there in a semi-blinded haze, waiting for the cloudiness that affected his vision and the jerkiness that affected his movements to go away, to yield to the inexorable pressure of his will-power and once again recede. While in the computer’s unbefuddled brain the patterns kept forming and re-forming.

Until in the end the noisy traffic’s boom was quietened and the ache at the base of his skull was eased and Dobie’s fingers moved to the keyboard again; day and night, night and day were all the same to him now. His mind was at last free of all thought, of all speculation, of hatred and of anger; he was back inside the computer again, part of its millionfold function, and there was no longer any hurry, and cause for alarm or need for regret…

He was through.

4

Pontin was engaged the while in one of his favourite pursuits. Reading the morning papers. As a concession to the varied pressures exerted upon him in consequence of the recent stirring events in his manor he had spent little more than five minutes on the sports pages and various other third-page allurements before turning briskly to what quite a number of the tabloid editors clearly considered to be the meat of the day’s matter. Headlines that seemed, however vaguely, to relate to the affair of the Cardiff Multiple Murderer were at any rate prominent; their tone varied from the mildly speculative (as with the
Spook’s
wistful inquiry, IS JACK BACK?) to the altogether more boisterous (MANIAC SEX KILLER STILL ON THE PROWL, according to the
Daily Strip
). Pontin was most displeased to observe that despite the lengthy interview he had afforded yesterday to the gentlemen of the press his photograph did not appear in any of these influential organs of opinion; an unflattering likeness, however, of That Man Dobie (as Pontin thought of him) had been reproduced in several (COLLEGE PUNDIT MYSTERY WITNESS TO BRUTAL SLAYINGS). Well, Pontin was well accustomed to this sort of thing. He was after all the Strategist, the Seasoned Hand, the Man behind the Scenes. Not for him the nerve-tautening tension of the scraped matchflame illuminating the face of the pockmarked gentleman in the slouch hat, the shots ringing out in the night as the Bugatti spins out of control, whizzing off the topmost bend of the Grande Corniche. No. For him, the telephone buzzer, the piled folders of the office desk. And, of course, page three of the
Daily Strip
. Immersed in awestruck contemplation, he came to himself abruptly as someone rapped sharply on the office door. “Come in,” he said. “Oh, it’s you, Jackson.”

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.