The Dobie Paradox: british mystery novel: where nothing is as it seems

by Desmond Cory

  ‘He’s not in it, is he? Except as a witness to the finding of the body. And at that time it wasn’t even properly speaking a body, the way you tell it.’

  ‘Exactly. But if there’s any way he can get sucked further into it he’s bound to find it, because he’s … Well, I don’t know why, but I’m sure that he will.’

  ‘Look,’ Jackson said. ‘OK. There are suspicious circumstances, yes, I’ll grant you that. But we’re very far from sure as yet that we’re talking about a murder. If we are, I repeat if we are, then the last thing I’ll want is to have Mr Dobie running in and out between my feet again and you needn’t have any fears on that score. Whenever I think of … Hey. Just a minute. Where is he this morning, anyway?’

  ‘He’s gone up to that Rehabilitation Centre place again. In fact he’s only seeing one of those doctors about one of the nut cases there but … you see what I mean?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Jackson said. ‘Or I think I do. Oh dear. Oh lumme.’

  By ten o’clock the clouds had lifted considerably; it was difficult, Dobie thought, to relate this morning’s panorama of sweeping moorland to the gloomy rainswept darkness of the previous night. The scenery was rather too bare to be thought in any way hospitable, but with the weak sunlight gleaming on the pools of water retained by the rock furrows and off the drops still clinging to the heath and furze it wasn’t without a certain beauty, either. Certainly Dobie wasn’t driving across an almost uninhabited patch of desert, as last night he might have suspected. There were slate-roofed farmhouses dotted about the fields in the lower valley; in the distance to the right he could see the sun blinking on the metal roofs of cars scurrying like files of ants along the Caerphilly Road, and the rear-view mirror gave him occasional glimpses of the high-rise blocks of Cardiff itself, of the grey sea beyond, and of the low dark hills on the far side of the Severn estuary. It wasn’t, as Carter had said, a bad view; not a bad view at all. And the Centre itself was clearly visible beyond the left-hand curve directly in front – perhaps not clearly, because of the twelve-foot stone wall topped with glittering jags of glass surrounding it; this hid from view most of the small staff houses but not the main building itself, red-roofed and three storeys high, rising from the clusters of tall trees, well into leaf, that shadowed the parkland around it. Dobie slowed down. Braked more sharply. Stopped the car. Got out. It was indeed still a fresh and windy morning and the air felt damp against his face.

  The police signs were still there, otherwise he wouldn’t have recognized the spot at all. Nothing seemed to distinguish it from any other point along the last couple of miles of road. Seen by daylight, it seemed to be quite extraordinarily open for any such sexual shenannigans as Kate had hypothesized, a totally inapt site for a spot of slap-and-tickle, let alone a … Nothing but open moorland for at least half a mile all around, though a few gorse bushes over to the left might have … But no, not gorse bushes surely. Even Dobie, inexpert in these matters, would have known better than to elect upon a clump of gorse bushes; the prickles aren’t just on the branches, they get everywhere. With embarrassing and extremely painful results … However. What he had failed to notice last night was that the girl had in fact been lying at the bottom of a slight declivity at the side of the road, not nearly deep enough to be called a ditch but deep enough, certainly, to account for her clothes and hair having been so extremely wet. The rainwater would have drained into it. It might even be deep enough to account for the failure of the drivers of any other passing cars to have spotted her rather earlier … especially if you considered the miserable driving conditions prevailing at that time …

  Dobie frowned. There was something odd about that part of it, something that he’d noticed but couldn’t now seem to remember. He moved a few paces to his left, staring moodily down into the declivity. Yes, it was odd that if it had happened the way Kate thought … not the slightest attempt had been made to hide the body, you’d have thought that would be a fairly obvious … But no, that wasn’t it, there was some at least equally obvious fact that he was missing out on …

  ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to move along, sir, as you can see this is a … Oh my God. It’s Mr Dobie.’

  ‘Oh hullo, Foxy. Sorry about that, I didn’t hear you coming.’ Dobie’s leap of startled surprise had carried him some three feet up into the air and terminated in a particularly splashy puddle. Box stooped patiently to brush at the dollops of wet mud now decorating the legs of his neatly creased grey trousers and then, recognizing this procedure to be ineffective, straightened up again. ‘Oh well. It doesn’t much matter. The boys’ll be coming back in a few minutes’ time to clear this lot away so I reckon there’s no harm in your having a bit of a shufti, if that’s what you want.’

  ‘Everything’s completely different to last night,’ Dobie complained.

  ‘It’s stopped raining, you see. Quite nice and dry here. Until you arrived.’

  ‘I just wanted to make quite sure there was nothing here.’

  ‘Nothing here?’

  ‘Nothing that she could have hit her head on.’

  ‘Ah,’ Foxy Boxy said. ‘I think I can say that painstaking police procedures have established that as a fact. Might have broke her arm all right, being hit by a car or falling out of one. But a split head like that one had, no.’

  ‘Unless it was the car hit her on the head.’

  ‘Wasn’t an Irish dog, was she?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Irish dogs,’ Box explained, ‘have all got bumps on their heads from chasing parked cars.’ His Sunday-morning laugh was quite different to Jackson’s, rather resembling a soda-water syphon abruptly exploding. ‘Sorry, sir. Joke in bad taste, really. But it’s a possibility, of course. Fell and hit her head on the bumper or something when the car was stationary. Well, we have to pursue every avenue, so to speak, but I don’t say it’s likely.’

  ‘You saw the Headmistress last night, didn’t you? What do they say about it all at the school?’

  ‘What you’d expect. Surprised ’n’ horrified. The usual thing. But I reckon they were at that. In fact I didn’t get to see the Headbeak ’cos she was incapacitated with toothache, or so they said and I got no reason to doubt it. Saw the School Secretary instead. May be a bit of a problem notifying the parents but I was able to ease her mind on that one. Our job as much as theirs an’ we have our methods.’

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘Divorced and living abroad, the both of them. Mother remarried and in Italy some place, father gone to Canada. Managerial consultant, whatever that means. Sounds a bit niffy. What’s your concern in all this, Mr Dobie?’

  ‘Well, I’ve … certain information I should give the police.’

  ‘You have?’ Box delved in his inside pocket and whipped out a notebook. He, too, was an old-fashioned cop; otherwise he would have sent Dobie packing long before. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, what is it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Dobie said. ‘I mean … I’ve sort of forgotten.’

  Jackson, habituated like all policemen to the solitary boredom of endless hours on the beat, was never averse to edifying conversation and Kate had some minutes earlier drawn up a chair up to the telephone in recognition of the fact that whatever it was she hadn’t been doing that morning wasn’t going to get done anyway.

  God knows (she thought) why women are notoriously supposed to over-indulge in idle gossip; men are far worse than we are, and policemen are the worst of the lot. Though Jacko did seem to be a little off-colour this morning, lacking in his usual verve and brio. His account of a recent run-in with (of all people) Dr Emrys Williams Williams, the police MO, who had wrongly diagnosed a disagreeable stiffness of his (Jackson’s) triceps muscles as being due to a niggling attack of arthritis rather than to a serious flesh wound which, having been incurred in the line of duty, might reflect beneficially upon an eventual pension award was, though superficially moving, notably deficient in fervour and zip, especially
when you took into account the disagreeable nature of the said Dr Williams Williams, a blight (in Kate’s opinion) on the medical profession and a crumb of the first water. ‘You do sound a bit under the weather, Jacko. But you don’t want to let these things get on top of you.’

  ‘I know, I know.’ Jackson seemed to be slightly mollified by this sympathetic comment but still very much less than gratified. ‘It’s been a troublifying week, though, apart from all that nonsense, and now this hit-and-run thing … if that’s what it is … Still, at least we went and won a case for a change. Warms the cockles, it does, when that happens. Of course,’ returning to the elegiac mode, ‘it doesn’t happen very often.’

  ‘A big one?’

  ‘About as big as they come round here. Dai Dymond. Gone down for a good old stretch at last.’

  ‘That bastard? About time, too.’

  ‘That’s just what he’ll be doing. Time. Seven years of it. Went down heavy and not many people are shedding tears about it, I’ll tell you that. Didn’t you read about it in the papers?’

  Kate rarely read the newspapers and when she did, invariably later wished that she hadn’t. Good news of this kind, however, might have come as a welcome variant. ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘They gave us a pretty good spread. Pontin had his photo in an’ all.’

  ‘He’ll be pleased, then.’

  ‘Chirpy as a poodle with two tails. We had a bit of luck, though, no question of it.’

  ‘Someone grassed?’

  ‘Spilt it all over the shop. Haining, it was. Just who you’d have least expected. Funny how it happens that way sometimes.’

  ‘Who’s Haining?’

  ‘Chartered accountant bloke. Used to keep old Dai’s books and fudge up his tax returns.’

  ‘You’re not telling me you sent him down for income tax evasion?’

  ‘No, no, no. We got him on possession of something like half a ton of crack in one of his warehouses and the Customs and Excise boys nabbed the blokes on the other end. All went like a dream. On information received, of course. No names, no pack drill.’

  ‘But how did you get Haining to—’

  ‘Ironies of life, Kate, ironies of life. One of the uniformed branch brought in Haining’s son on a breaking-and-entering charge, pharma-suiticle store, usual story – kid was dying for a fix. Haining had no idea the boy was into drugs, apparently, and when he found out he’d been getting his fixes through one of Dai Dymond’s pushers he went bananas. Walked straight into the CID room with a whole load of papers and talked Dai straight into Strangeways, just about. See what I mean when I say it’s ironical, right?’

  ‘Biter bit.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘What sort of a deal did you give him?’

  ‘Best we could. Indemnity for himself and a spell on probation for the kid, subsequent on proper medical treatment. Protection, no. He didn’t ask for it. I imagine he’ll have dug himself a nice deep hole and buried himself in it by now, because there’ll be quite a few very nasty customers who have to be very cross with him.’

  ‘And maybe quite a few kids who won’t be trying to break into my clinic over the next few years.’

  ‘I wouldn’t rely too much on that, if I were you. Like a hydrant, those people are.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘You know. Cut off one head and they grow another.’

  ‘Ah. Right. I’m with you. Mind you, we do a better job of it in the medical profession.’

  ‘Stay dead, do they, when you’ve finished with ’em? I suppose they do.’ Jackson rumbled obscenely again. ‘Well, I reckon I’d best get off the line and give Paddy Oates a ring. See how he’s getting on.’

  ‘You know Paddy. Slow but sure. You can always drive round to the mortuary and check on his progress, if you want to.’

  ‘A nice quiet Sunday morning I was looking forward to, Kate, till this happened.’

  ‘So was I.’

  The porter replaced the telephone and with his other hand pushed the clipboard across the desk towards Dobie. ‘That’s all in order, sir, if you’ll be good enough to sign in …’

  Dobie did so. He then observed that he had incorrectly entered Time of Arrival as 1145 instead of 1045; it was indeed extraordinary, when you thought about it, that a Professor of Mathematics … He shook his head sadly, crossed out the offending entry and tried again, getting it right this time.

  ‘Main building, sir, main entry, and you’ll find Dr Carter’s office second door on the right.’ The porter had clearly summed him up as a stray lamb in need of all possible assistance, if not indeed as a likely future inmate. ‘I take it you’re carrying no offensive weppings nor nothing that could be used as such.’

  ‘Me? Offensive weapons? Good Heavens, no.’ Dobie was alarmed. ‘Surely I’m not likely to be—’

  ‘Oh no, sir, no, no chance of that, we don’t allow ’em to wander around the place just as they like – this is Her Majesty’s property after all. We take all the proper security precautions, you can be sure.’

  ‘Does everybody have to fill in that form?’ Dobie stared down resentfully at the clipboard before handing it back.

  ‘All visitors do, yes sir. Certainly.’

  ‘I didn’t last night.’

  ‘Ah well, that was an emergency now, wasn’t it? But I made a note of the number of your car, don’t you worry about that.’ The porter nodded towards the television monitor on the right-hand side of his desk, which indeed showed a full-frontal black and white view of Dobie’s mud-splashed Fiesta parked before the closed iron gates of the Centre. ‘No, the people here never give us any trouble but that’s because we make sure that they don’t. They’ve put in these monitor camera things all over the main building so the staff can keep an eye on them. And some of the things they get up to … Well, you wouldn’t believe me if I was to tell you. Real screwballs, some of ’em. But harmless enough.’

  ‘Can you get any other programmes?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Watch with Mother? Anything like that? They used to have a really rather amusing programme in which this small animal, I rather think it was a hamster or possibly a gerbil—’

  ‘I don’t think that’s on any more, sir, and anyway no, we couldn’t get it, that’s not the idea at all. It’s just a tool of the trade, so to speak. By the way, those look like your car keys on the desk. Don’t go off without ’em.’

  ‘Right. Yes. So they are.’ Dobie picked them up and put them away in his pocket, where presumably they’d be safer than anywhere else. ‘Splendid. And thanks for your help.’

  ‘Main building, sir. Main entry. Second office—’

  ‘Yes, I’ve got that. I think. But I really meant to say, for your help last night.’

  ‘Did what I could, sir, and I’m sure Dr Mighell did. Sorry things didn’t work out any better. I’m told the young lady didn’t make it.’

  ‘No. She didn’t. It’s a police matter now.’

  ‘And so it should be. Had the boys round earlier this morning, in fact, and having been a cop myself I’d’ve liked to be of help but what could I tell ’em? Had I seen any girls walking down the road yesterday afternoon? You have to be joking, I told ’em, with a girls’ school just round the corner from here they’re going up and down the road all the time. Nice little bits, too, some of ’em, but that’s by the way. But I don’t know any of them to reckernize, how would I? Except young Elspeth, of course. She’s running in and out of here all the time, specially on a Saturday afternoon. As for your young lady, sir, I got no more’n a glimpse of her sitting in the back of your car but from what I saw I didn’t know her from Adam, or Eve rather, and even if they brought me a photograph of her I doubt if I could say if I’d ever seen her before or not. I mean, these kids are much of a muchness when you think about it, some are older than the others is all you can say. And when they’re all in school uniforms or else in them blue jean things, it doesn’t make it any easier.’

  All this garrulity, Dobie deci
ded, had to be attributed to the extreme boredom inherent in the other’s occupation rather than to any desire to communicate information. As this was true of himself also in his role of university lecturer, he was able to sympathize. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘some of my students nowadays … I can’t always tell if they’re girls or boys. It’s embarrassing, sometimes.’

  ‘They seem to know all right.’

  ‘I suppose they do, but they don’t always seem to care.’

  ‘Well, you got to live and let live,’ the porter said broadmindedly, ‘where these kids are concerned. As long as they don’t end up here … but a damned sight too many of them do. Ninety per cent of the blokes that get sent here are under twenty-five, and more than half of them are teenagers. Take it from me. Because it’s a fact.’

  Dobie wasn’t surprised at this second intimation that Jackson and his cohorts were in action, because it was clear that action of one kind or another was likely in any case to be forced on them. Dobie, like Kate, wasn’t a great peruser of the daily press, but he was well enough aware of that broad journalistic dictum which insists that while the violent death of an eighty-year-old grandmother who gets kicked on the head by a group of yobbos after picking up her pension at the Post Office merits three or four lines of comment on page five, the murder of a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl by a (hypothetical) sex fiend deserves very different treatment and invariably gets it and the police will be wise, in such circumstances, to make sure that their own tracks, if not those of the sex fiend in question, are very well covered and can be seen to be so. There was, after all, an element of mystery in this affair.

  To put it mildly.

  As indeed there was about the edifice that now rose up in front of him as he drove sedately in through the entry gate. Toad Hall, viewed at this distance in sombre Welsh daylight, did indeed resemble, nay was, one of those huge castellated monstrosities wherein the local mine owners had, in Victorian times, been wont to incarcerate their families and whole armies of obsequious servants, all forelock-touching and curtsying away like billy-oh. From that point of view, you could say it had been obviously readily adaptable to its present purpose, especially when you considered the twelve-foot stone wall that surrounded the entire establishment and which had been no doubt originally designed to hold at bay footpads, gentlemen of the high toby, and others of hoi polloi; their contemporary equivalents could now with similar ease and efficiency be kept inside, an interesting example (Dobie thought) of the concept of the reversional equation.