The Strange Attractor (4 page)

Dobie continued to drive in silence for the next five minutes or so, during which time, as he noticed, his passenger appeared to be gripping the handle of the car door with unnecessary tenacity. Bird, breaking the silence, then said. Take a right here, if you’d be so good.”

“Pentyrch Road, isn’t it?”

“That
is
Pentyrch Road. On the right there.”

“Ah yes. It’s a little while since I’ve been this way.”

The turning having been successfully executed, Bird appeared to relax very slightly. “Visited us before, have you?”

“Just the once, I think. About five years ago. Of course you’ve expanded quite a lot since then.”

“Indeed we have. Five years ago? That’s before my time, actually. You’ll probably hardly recognise the place now. With the new extensions.”

Dobie in fact didn’t recognise it, but it wasn’t the sort of place you could easily drive past without noticing. Not even Dobie, who was good at that sort of thing. There were considerable expanses of plate glass and laminated concrete, a very large sign that said CORDER ACOUSTICS LTD above a logo design, high iron fencing and a driveway only slightly smaller than that which conducts casual visitors to the front steps of Buckingham Palace. Dobie got the message. “Here, is it?”

“Nowhere else.”

There was even a security guard at the main gate who, however, waved them through as soon as Bird had wound down the window and advanced his visage through the gap thus provided. Dobie was then directed through an alarming proliferation of white-painted signboards and finally parked the car adjacent to yet another signboard that said ADMIN OFFICES. “I thought you were in charge of the research section.”

“So I am,” Bird said, dismounting. “But I can’t take you in there, I’m afraid, lot of nonsense no doubt but there it is. We’ll go up to my office here and have our little chat. Come along.”

The admin offices, unlike the college buildings, were provided with an efficient lift which whizzed them silently and speedily up to the top floor. Dobie was impressed. “How many employees do you have working here?”

“You mean in my section? Or overall?”

“All together.”

“Sixty-three on the staff, not counting the cleaners and other odd sods.”

“Good heavens. Five years ago it was Alec Corder and maybe a dozen others.”

“Well, there you are. You
know
Alec then?”

“I used to see more of him than I do now but we haven’t altogether lost touch.”

“Yes, that figures. He’s pretty busy these days. Okay, come into my parlour.”

Bird’s parlour (or cage) had, as Dobie at once acutely observed, all the doings. Plate glass windows, fitted carpet, football-pitch-sized desk and a very youthful secretary whose desk was only very slightly smaller and carried an imposing array of communications equipment. “Any calls, Wendy?” asked Bird, proceeding as he spoke to his own relatively unimpeded sphere of operations and plumping himself down in the commodious armchair located somewhere in the middle distance behind it.

“Oh yes. Quite a few. On your pad. Hello, Mr Dobie.”

Dobie had heard of secretarial efficiency but this was ridiculous. He turned his head incredulously. “How did you… Oh, it’s
Wendy
. I didn’t know you worked here.” You couldn’t get used to the way these kids sprouted up nowadays. “Of course it’s been some little while…”

“Well, I’ve been here nearly a year now. Dad was keen for me to get to know the ropes sort of thing. So…”

“So here you are. How
is
Alec these days?”

“Fine. And Jenny?”

“Yes. I mean, all right. Okay.”

“Wendy, my love,” Bird said, breaking into this cordial exchange of civilities, “we’ve had a tedious afternoon and we could use some nice hot coffee. Can do?”

“I think we might manage that,” Wendy said, getting up and heading for the door. Good God, she was as tall as her mother now. Not far short of six feet. But agile with it. Or lissom might be the word. “So,” Bird said, as the closing door deprived Dobie of this pleasing spectacle, “you know our little Wendy, then?”

“Not so little now.”

“Indeed she isn’t. Take a seat, why don’t you?… Flits from flower to flower a bit, Wendy does. I don’t mind it when she settles in here, but it’s a bit of a strain having the boss’s daughter typing your letters for you. You always wonder if… However. Yes, Cantwell.” Spinning expertly round in his chair, he extracted a green cardboard folder from a filing cabinet. “Should be all in here. What was it you wanted to know, exactly?”

“I don’t quite know what I want to know. That’s the trouble. Basically I’m curious as to why he did it.”

“Ah well.” Bird ran his finger cautiously up and down the edge of the folder. “I don’t think I can help you there. Puzzles us all.”

“Would you agree with what that doctor said? That he didn’t have any close friends?”

“I wouldn’t know what he got up to in his free time, of course. But if you mean here at Corders… No, I don’t think he did. Most of the people in the section are a good deal older than he was, of course. But he got on with them all right. No friction. I’d know if there was.”

“Why did they put him in R and D in the first place?”

“I expect Alec thought we needed some young blood.” Bird looked up and giggled reflectively. “Sorry. I should have chosen my words a bit more carefully there. But he was up to the work all right. I’d soon have had him transferred if he wasn’t. Ah, here’s the coffee.”

In proper cups and saucers, Dobie noted gratefully; no plastic horrors here. Wendy placed these items on the desk and then retired undulatingly to her own demesne, Dobie’s appreciative attention, however, being this time focused on the whisky bottle that Bird had produced from some hidden recess under the football pitch. “A snifter with it?”

“Please,” Dobie said. Offers of this kind he rarely felt able to refuse.

“I reckon we’ve earned it.”

“The workman is worthy of his hire. What was the nature of his work?”

“In broad terms?”

“Yes.”

“Can’t give you a detailed answer because we’re getting very hot on security these days. But there’s nothing very secret about it. What we’re doing, we’re using laser beams to burn information on to a newly developed kind of magnetic ferrite film, same like in information storage systems. We get the data out again by lower-power laser projection through the film on to a photo-sensing device. Electronic focusing, naturally. Nothing much to it.”

Dobie tried the coffee, which was excellent. The additive material wasn’t half bad, either. “So where do acoustics come into it?”

“Well, the information can relate to sound waves as much as to anything else. And since the laser transmits a light wave, of course, you can make the information damned nearly as detailed as you like. In other words—”

“Compact discs.” Dobie nodded. “Hi-fi.”

“About the hi-est bloody fi you ever came across. The problem is getting it back into sonics again without using an amplifier the size of this room. That’s what Cantwell was working on. And I think I can tell you that between us we reckon we’ve got it licked.”

“Did
he
think so? I mean, was he enthusiastic?”

“Oh yes. Very. He had to be. Alec’s got no use for anyone who’s not a hundred and ten per cent behind the job and neither have I.”

Fine. Except it made less sense than ever.

“I saw Wendy this afternoon. My word, she’s grown.”

“Wendy?”

“
You
know. Jane’s Wendy.”

“Oh.” Jenny turned over a page. “At the college, was it?”

“No, she’s working over at Alec’s place.”

“I haven’t seen her for quite a while, either. It’s a pity, really, they don’t get on better.”

“Who, Wendy and Alec?”

“No, no. Wendy and Jane.”

“Don’t they?”

“Well, you know Jane. She does tend to be demanding. She’d boss
me
around if I gave her half a chance. Where
is
Alec’s place, anyway?”

“Pentyrch Road. It’s pretty big now. He must be doing well.”

“What were you doing there?”

“I gave someone a lift back from the inquest.”

“
Inquest?
” This time she actually looked up from her book. “
What
inquest?”

“The one on Sammy Cantwell. I thought I’d go.”

“Whatever for? You’re full of surprises.”

“I just felt like it.”

“You
have
been gadding about.” Setting her book down and swinging her legs off the sofa. “I’m booked to do some travelling myself. The agency rang this morning.”

“Paris again, is it?”

“I have to fly over next Wednesday. For two or three days.”

“Look,” Dobie said. “You know you don’t have to do these jobs if you don’t want to.”

“I do want to.”

“That’s all right, then.”

“When does
your
vacation start?”

“Next week.”

“I may come back with some ideas. I’ll bring the latest brochures.”

“Yes, do that,” Dobie said.

He thought that the earnest-looking lad’s efforts had gone to waste but a more detailed search at length revealed a small entry in the morning paper. There was even a modest one-column headline: UNLICENSED GUNS – CORONER HITS OUT. Dobie had observed no such display of pugilistic activity on the coroner’s part but was familiar enough with contemporary techniques of reportage to feel no particular surprise, even when he further observed that his ex-student’s name had been misspelled in a somewhat embarrassing way. He was now inclined to think that he himself had wasted if not much effort, at any rate a good deal of valuable time the previous day and drove off collegewards in a chastened mood. Leaving Jenny fast asleep, as usual.

But whatever happens, Dobie thought, polluting the mild warmth of the morning with a vast exhalation of tobacco smoke, whatever happens I don’t want to become
der zerstreut Professor
of popular legend. Mathematicians have to stay on the ball. Fall back on these nineteenth-century gimmicks and you might as well retire. And I don’t want to retire. It’s true what Jenny says; I don’t have to go on teaching if I don’t want to. But I
do
want to.

Not because I’m specially good at it. They don’t call me
Drip-Dry
for nothing. There are all kinds of with-it things that other and sprightlier lecturers (such as Wain) might breezily refer to, such as U2 (whatever that was) and Tottenham Hotspur and crack (or was it crash?) and Lenny Henry… One could surely bring such things into the study of Wallis’s Law, for instance, if only one knew the exact meaning of all those extraordinary concepts. And students such as Hywel Morgan, who frequently multiplied his logarithms, would then surely be on to the exponent of x in a flash. Let the graph of y = 5x represent the parabola described by a regulation football that, having been smartly kicked by Alan Rush (of Morecambe United and Scotland) in the general direction of the goal, is about to be deflected by the opposing scrum-half’s forearm… No, it was no good. Hopeless. And moreover offside. “That is why,” Dobie said gloomily, turning away from the long rows of marble and granite plaques, “a complex number may be represented graphically by a vector, that is to say by trigonometrical notation, which inevitably suggests to our minds the idea of
direction
.” What in actual fact it inevitably suggested to
his
mind was a mental picture of Hywel Morgan writing down the word
direction
and staring at it gloomily. Even that wasn’t so bad. But why didn’t he have a mental picture of Sammy Cantwell?
That
was bad.
That
was what rankled.

Raising his head and taking another puff at his Superking, he saw an echoing drift of smoke rise from the chimney of the crematorium, dark smoke sliding away effortlessly downwind.

The sky was otherwise almost free of cloud and the sunlight was etching a gently-moving dapple of tree-leaf shadow around his feet. He had now walked three times the length of the path running from the car park to the cemetery and his shoes, he noticed, had got a little dusty. He turned and looked towards the entrance of the funeral parlour, where a few dark-suited figures were now emerging. Not very many. Only four or five. Dickie Bird was one of them, walking alongside a fatter fair-haired chap; no doubt a colleague. The Corder contingent. Dr Coyle was the last figure to emerge; she stood still for a moment, giving the impression of blinking in the sharp sunlight, then turned away in the opposite direction to the others, walking not towards the car park but down the path upon which Dobie himself was standing. Half-way along it, however, she paused and sat down on a convenient wooden bench. She seemed, as Dobie cautiously approached, to be lost in thought, but looked up sharply enough as he came to a final halt beside her.