The Strange Attractor (25 page)

Agatha went on down the passageway, not clumping along as Jackson had done but running bouncily, flexibly, with long athletic distance-devouring strides. Dobie, plodding ploughman-like up the stairs with an aching weariness slowing his every step, reached the top just in time to see a tall shadowy figure armed with a fearsome carving-knife bearing down on him like the wrath of God. Giving himself about as much chance as the Three Blind Mice, he squeaked appropriately; it looked like no kind of a match and it wasn’t. He saw, peering apprehensively downwards through the misted lenses of his glasses, the knife commence its long curving approach on a trajectory that would inevitably end in the pit of his stomach, whiplash towards him at a nigh-incredible velocity and then flash past his right hip as Agatha in mid-lunge caught her foot on Grimwade’s outstretched leg and lost her balance again, this time to rather more spectacular effect. If you are going to trip over someone’s leg, it’s not a good idea to do so at the top of a long and narrow flight of stairs. Such had been the vehemence of Agatha’s thrust that she went past the top twelve steps without even touching them; she contacted the thirteenth, however, with a hefty thump that was accompanied by a rather sick-making snapping sound, and made subsequent substantial contact with the sixteenth, twentieth and twenty-second before reaching the bottom. Dobie, whose eyes were now tightly closed, plotted her vertiginous progress by ear alone.

Thunk…

Thunk…

Thunk…

Thunk…

Wallop…

Even that way, it had sounded pretty ominous.

Dobie, after a moment’s consideration, decided that he had better adopt a more conventional method of descending the stairs. He did so, slowly and painfully. Then sat down on the bottom tread, mournfully regarding the body which lay, one foot cocked up against the banisters, contortedly at his feet. Through now sightless baby-blue eyes, Jane Corder stared back at him. It was all very sad, Dobie thought. All very sad and unnecessary.

And hard cheese on Alec.

Heavy footsteps were coming down the stairs behind him. Jackson was clutching his right arm; blood had soaked his coat sleeve and dripped from his dangling hand down to the floor. He had left a trail of nasty wet splashes all the way down the staircase. “You’d better get that seen to,” Dobie said.

“Wow, she was
fast
.” Jackson didn’t say it altogether unadmiringly. Halted beside Dobie and leaking like a tap, he too was staring down at the silent upturned face. The over-heavy make-up on the lips and around the eyes had smeared rather badly and there was blood, too, trickling thickly through the dishevelled blonde hair. It wouldn’t trickle for long, though. She was dead all right.

“Who the hell
is
she?”

“You don’t know her?”

“Never seen her before,” Jackson said.

“Yes, you have. She just looks different. That’s all.”

Dobie reached down and with some reluctance pushed his fingers into the tangled mass of blood-spattered hair. He lifted it away and the hair beneath was dark and short and sleek. “Amazing what a difference a wig makes,” Dobie said, “when the face and the figure are pretty much alike. You know, I saw a photograph of Wendy with a bathing-cap on and I thought it was a photograph of Jane. Wendy looked much younger, of course, but with a bit of heavy make-up like Jane used to wear…”

“Younger?” Jackson seemed still to be partly stupefied. “Of course she would be. She’s the daughter. Of course I know her.”

“Daughters often do look like their mothers. As Susan Strange reminded me. And when it comes to an impersonation… they
know
them so well. No wonder she was confident. And by the way, where’s Kate?”

“Kate?”

Dobie and Jackson looked at each other. Then Dobie went up the stairs almost as fast as Wendy Corder had gone down them. He found Kate standing by the table in Sammy’s room, holding a syringe in her hand and looking at it in a bemused sort of way.

“Kate, are you all right?”

“Of course I’m all right. Let
go
of me, you idiot.”

About a minute later Dobie said, “Oh, I forgot.”

“What?”

“Inspector Jackson. He needs some medical attention.”

“Okay,” Kate said. “That’s what we’re here for.”

“All the same,” Jackson said severely, “you didn’t ought to have done it, Mr Dobie. We’d’ve
caught
her all right. That’s what the police are here for, the appreciation of criminals.”

“Apprehension.”

“We nab the buggers anyway.”

“I didn’t do it,” Dobie said. “If anyone did, it was Grimwade. He tripped her up.”

“There you are, then,” Jackson said contentedly. “Once a copper, always a copper. I only hope—”

“Keep
still
, then,” Kate said, making with the bandages.

Policemen, whatever they are here for, aren’t nearly so impressive when stripped down to their undervests. But then college pundits, Dobie thought, probably aren’t either. Wendy had been more than a match for him in every sense. With that lean pliant body and all that dynamic… well…
virility
. He hadn’t known much about strange attractors and he still didn’t but he thought he could now understand Jenny a little better and that, as he now knew, had been the whole object of the exercise. Once you’ve understood a theorem you can wipe the blackboard clean. But not before.

Jenny, he thought, had probably wanted some excitement. Chiefly that. And so, in a different way, had he.

Twenty years of college punditry is enough for anyone. He’d wanted some excitement but he hadn’t known it. Well, he’d got it. Thanks to her.

“What I want to know,” Jackson said, disturbing him when on the point of merging his musings with the comfortable inchoateness of sleep, “is what I’m going to tell the Superintendent. Just because she can’t very well be taken to court don’t mean I won’t have reports to write and I’ve got to have some idea of what it was she was up to. Right now I haven’t. Not
exact
, like.”

“She was a bloody terrifying woman,” Kate said, stabbing viciously at the roll of bandage with a safety-pin. “And I’m
glad
she’s dead. That beastly knife… Out of my own kitchen was where she got it from. The
bitch
.”

“That’s as may be and I can understand your strength of feeling. But,” Jackson said, “that doesn’t tell me quite what I—”

“You’ve got that letter, haven’t you?” Dobie said. “You’ve read it?”

“Yes, but that’s not… I mean it’s a fake. Not a real confession.”

“She had to tell a lot of the truth, though, in order to make it convincing. They were stealing the stuff from Corder all right, she and Sammy between them. And Jenny was running it out to France and selling it there. Sammy
did
get cold feet when he got caught and so Wendy killed him. Jenny didn’t know about that, in fact I doubt if she knew that Sammy was involved at all. She thought Wendy was getting all this material off her own bat. Wendy was working there, after all, and what’s more was the boss’s daughter. Jane’s daughter as well, of course. As we’ve noticed.”

“Yes,” Jackson said, surveying Kate’s handiwork and moving his arm experimentally up and down. “Nice job, doctor. Thanks very much. But killing your own mother, now, that’s a real nasty thing to do.
That
’s the part as I don’t seem to be quite able to grasp.”

“Oh well, she
hated
her mother. And as far as I can see the feeling was just about mutual.” Discreet bumping noises could be heard from the passageway outside, where other of the boys in blue were supervising the carting away of Agatha’s mortal body. Dobie listened drowsily to the oddly comforting sound of receding footsteps… Bump. Bump. Bump. Bump. Bump… and woke to find Inspector Jackson’s better hand on his shoulder, shaking him quite roughly. “Don’t go to sleep
now
, Mr Dobie.”

“Oh yes. Sorry. Take the point.” Heavy weights now seemed to be glued to Dobie’s eyelids but he struggled gamely to continue. He took the point. What was it?… Ah yes. “The point is that Jane didn’t know a thing about the industrial espionage business but she
did
find out that Sammy was lending his room to Jenny and Wendy two or three evenings a week, for purposes she could guess at all too easily, and she was pretty furious. Jane was rather a jealous sort of person, after all. Jealous of her friends. She must have suspected that Jenny had made friends with her in the first place just to have a chance of speaking to Wendy and
I
suspect that was probably quite true. So she thought of it as some kind of a betrayal, I suppose. She was going to let me know all about it and she spoke to Sammy about it, too. She told him to stop lending Wendy the room and that was a mistake because Sammy of course told Wendy so Wendy knew that Jane knew…”

Oh God, Dobie thought, I feel so
tired
…

“And so of course Jane had to be stopped from talking in the same way as Sammy. Wendy wouldn’t have been worried about the lesbianism thing because in this day and age who cares a damn? – but if the security people at Corders ever got to make a connection between her and Jenny and Sammy, then the whole thing would be finished and that’s why they were so concerned to keep their meetings here a secret, Jenny even wearing that blonde wig and all. I don’t know if you follow what I’m saying?” His voice seemed to be wandering all over the place, going up and down and sideways in a most disconcerting way. He was on the down phase now from the Benzedrine, as was obvious. “… Because the crazy thing is that Wendy wasn’t really in it for the money. Those trips to Paris were just to keep Jenny excited and interested and feeling she was in on something naughty. Sammy was the only one who wanted money. Wendy didn’t. All she wanted, at any rate to start with, was her own back.”

Jackson’s voice came to him from a long long way away. “Who on?”

On whom
, a small answering voice said from the back of Dobie’s brain. The voice, which was that of a former college pundit, had also gone a long long way away and could now be ignored. “On Alec. I can’t help feeling that if you give that letter to one of your police psychoanalyst blokes he’ll be a whole lot more than mildly interested. She hated her mother and conversely, she felt herself drawn towards her father but she knew that what he’d really wanted was a son and though she tried her very hardest she knew she’d never be able to live up to his expectations in that respect. I wouldn’t be surprised if that isn’t what got her into that lesbian kick, sex role confusion or something like that. But Wendy was a very jealous person, too. Just like Jane, in fact. Daughters are often like their mothers mentally as well as physically… which is something else that Susan Strange told me.”

“Who is Susan Strange? You mentioned her before.”

“Oh, she’s Alec’s
other
daughter. Illegitimate, apparently. You could say that Susan started the whole affair when she came to live in Cardiff… in the same way you could say that Grimwade finished it. Without knowing anything at all about it. Because Alec started visiting her often and spending his free time in her house, I think he enjoyed her company and that isn’t hard to understand because she seems to be a very nice person. Uncomplicated. Straightforward. Which, whatever else you can say of her, Wendy isn’t. Or wasn’t. She was like I said – jealous. Really badly miffed about it all. She knew Alec was in line for a peerage if his new hearing-aid devices got off the ground and she reckoned that if she could put a spoke in
that
little wheel it’d just about serve him right. So she set about doing just that. Childish, I suppose you could call it. But then she
was
childish. She liked playing games. Dressing up. Acting rôles. All that kind of thing.”

Outside the door now there was only silence. Jackson grunted and pushed his chair back a little. “I doubt if they’ll get that much out of the letter. You’re going to have to get it all down in a statement, Mr Dobie. But you know that already.”

“Yes,
that
was childish, too. The confession, I mean. No way it could have been Kate, I’m not
that
short-sighted.”

“No,” Kate said, returning from the washbasin where she’d been scrubbing the blood off her hands. “He’s quite accurate at close range, I can vouch for that.”

“But then Wendy didn’t know I’d rumbled her great impersonation act. Or more exactly, that the computer had. I’m glad,” Dobie said, “it was Sammy who worked it all out and not me. It makes me feel he’s evened the score a bit. I don’t know why.”

He was aware that both Jackson and Kate were regarding him now with a certain curiosity. Or maybe it was concern.

“I think I’ll go to bed now,” Dobie said.