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

by Desmond Cory

  ‘Nothing,’ Dobie said. ‘I mean, I’ve finished.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ Miss Daly said, taking the folder from him and tossing it contemptuously on to a wire tray standing on a side table. ‘Did you find what you wanted?’

  ‘Well, not really. But then I’m not quite sure what it was I wanted to find in the first place. Do you always work Sundays?’

  ‘When I’m running behind schedule I do. In other words, yes, I always work Sundays. But no one else seems to, that’s for sure. So sometimes I don’t know why I bother.’

  ‘There’s a problem?’

  ‘There is indeed. So if you’re quite sure you’ve finished doing whatever—’

  ‘Oh yes. I have. But if I can be of use to you in your hour of need—’

  ‘I regard that as highly unlikely,’ Miss Daly said. ‘Unless you know something about computers.’

  ‘I know everything that there is to know,’ Dobie said, ‘about computers. What you do is, you press that little button at the side and then when the doodah thing lights up—’

  Miss Daly sighed deeply, causing interesting convulsions in the inner configurations of the blouse. ‘The computer, as such, is working perfectly. But the link doesn’t seem to be operating properly. Or, in fact, at all.’

  ‘The link?’

  ‘To the main computer in the Records Office.’

  ‘Ah.’ Dobie considered the problem for a moment. ‘Well, I can see where the trouble lies. It’s all buggered up.’

  ‘You put it in a nutshell.’

  ‘Have you tried reprogramming the access code?’

  ‘Have I what?’

  ‘That should do it.’

  ‘I’m sure it should, if you say so. But I haven’t the least idea how to set about it.’

  ‘Well, would you like me to try?’

  Dobie, anxious to impress, sat down beside her and tried. It took him a little less than three minutes. ‘There you are,’ he said.

  Miss Daly stared at him in disbelief. ‘But that’s miraculous.’

  ‘No, no. All these government offices use very simple access acronyms, I mean they have to, you see, or this sort of thing would be happening all the time and no one could put it right. Or not very easily. If you like, we’ll run a printout to check but you’ve got your linkage all right.’ Dobie stood up, his eyes still fixed on the lines of outwardly impenetrable jargon running across the monitor screen. ‘It’s quite an efficient system in the ordinary way. I take it they transmit the medical history sheets to you direct and you update them every so often – is that how it goes?’

  ‘Once a week,’ Miss Daly said. ‘The staff hand in their report sheets and I record them. So the CRO have access to up-to-date information on the progress of all our clients and can advise the Parole Board accordingly. That’s how it goes in theory, anyway.’ She appeared to have melted considerably. Dobie for once had clearly scored some useful Brownie points. Splendid.

  ‘And in practice?’

  ‘All I do is record and file the information. It’s no business of mine who acts on it.’

  ‘Have you had any hiccups before?’

  ‘Not since I’ve been here. Just on a year now.’

  ‘And you like the job?’

  ‘I dunno. It’s interesting. Sometimes. I mean, some of the people here … They’re a bit bizarre …’

  ‘The inmates? Or the staff?’

  The faintest flicker of a smile momentarily disturbed the smooth impassivity of Miss Daly’s countenance. ‘I don’t get to file reports on the staff. Maybe it’s just as well.’

  ‘It’s rather a male-orientated community, isn’t it? Are you the only woman in the place?’

  ‘Apart from the kitchen staff, yes. But I don’t mind that particularly. Why should I?’

  Paddy Oates had been cutting up other people’s bodies for some thirty years now, though not, of course, all the time; he had, unlike Miss Daly, the weekends off and sometimes when the supply of corpses ran regrettably short he was even able to take a short holiday, usually in Majorca. Having very recently returned from just such a jaunt he was looking brown and healthy, if a little bleary-eyed, and this did something, Jackson thought, to relieve the overall cheesed-offness of his expression. If he had on this occasion to relieve the monotony of a Sunday morning by dissecting a cadaver he didn’t, his expression suggested, have to like it.

  ‘I know what you’re going to say,’ Jackson said tiredly. ‘But as you’re going to say it anyway, you may as well go ahead.’

  ‘Ah, what’s the point of it all if you’re not prepared to listen?’

  ‘I didn’t say I wouldn’t listen. What I said was—’

  ‘You’ll get my report tomorrow morning without fail, Jacko. That’s my usual custom and I see no reason to diverge from it because it happens to be Sunday morning.’

  Paddy took his lab jacket off and stabbed it into the waiting laundry basket. It did seem to have got a bit … Yes. Not a nice job, Jackson thought, even on a weekday, though some kind of satisfaction might be derived from being extremely good at it, as Paddy Oates was. ‘The trouble is,’ he said, ‘this is one of those bastards where I need something to go on if I’m to take the appropriate action. Otherwise I wouldn’t push you. Hell, you should know that by now.’

  ‘And you should know that I won’t commit myself to any definite statements until I’m sure of the medical facts. What was it exactly that you wished to know?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Paddy.’

  ‘The girl was killed, no question of natural causes. Severe cranial trauma and contributory hypothermia. As to how she was killed …’ Paddy drew a cigarette from its shoulder holster with notably tremorless fingers and, seemingly with the same movement, lit it and exhaled an enormous streamer of smoke across the preparations room. ‘That’s what at the present stage I’m not prepared to say. But I agree with Kate that the hit-and-run theory can be discarded – unless she was trying to butt a moving motorcar like a goat, which is hardly credible behaviour by any standards. The minor contusions – which aren’t so very minor, by the way – aren’t consistent with that theory, either. What they suggest is that she got beaten up, and very badly. The fractured ulna, now … She might have been holding up her arm to ward off a blow. That kind of an injury very often occurs in just such a way. But of course there are alternative explanations.’

  Jackson nodded. ‘Right. That gives me a GBH charge to work on, at least. With a strong premonition, wouldn’t you say, of an eventual committal for murder?’

  ‘I would say a strong presumption, but that’s all. There’s no indication of considerable blood loss, but that’s not very significant either way.’ Jackson crossed something out in his black notebook and made a hurried correction. ‘The girl was struck repeatedly and with vicious intent. I can’t say what she was struck with, but it wasn’t a cutting instrument. An edge, but a blunt edge. You say Kate suggested a brick, or something like that … OK, but it could as easily have been a mallet or a heavy spanner. Swinging blows, anyway. Not thrusts.’

  Jackson continued to scribble busily. ‘She got bashed about, then. Was she raped?’

  Paddy made a clicking noise with his tongue, indicative of irritation and impatience. ‘You know as well as I do that I can’t say yes or no to that one. She had intercourse, certainly, shortly before she died – maybe immediately before, maybe an hour or so previously. Not more. But rape, I mean, what are you asking me? The girl says yes and it isn’t. The girl says no and it is. I can’t tell you what the girl said, for God’s sake. What I can tell you is that she bit her fingernails – as you probably noticed for yourself. Right down to the quick. Therefore, no skin tissue caught up in them. Not that it would of itself be completely convincing, even if there were.’

  ‘It’d indicate some kind of a struggle, wouldn’t it? It’d show that she put up a bit of a fight.’

  ‘Yes, but perfectly ordinary acts of intercourse can be pretty violent, you know. There are quite a few bite marks
on the shoulders and breasts, if it comes to that, and they show up pretty well on the photographs. But the contusions are too ragged to be useful. I know Simpson once got a conviction on the strength of a bite mark, but that was in the old days. Juries aren’t impressed by odontological forensics and judges aren’t, either – as you very well know.’

  ‘But isn’t it indicative of sado-whatsit? I mean—’

  ‘Not even that. Not really. Especially not when girls are as young as this one was and there’s a certain amount of purely nominal resistance.’

  ‘She’d have been a bit tight, you reckon?’

  ‘You put it cogently for once, Jacko.’

  ‘But Kate seemed to think it wasn’t her first time out.’

  ‘Oh no. It wasn’t. Definitely not. And the answer to the next question is negative. She wasn’t pregnant. No.’

  ‘Even so.’ Jackson closed his notebook. ‘It looks as though the next step is chair-shay le boyfriend. As usual.’

  ‘Maybe. Though if you chair-shay les girlfriends first, they’ll probably be able to tell you who the boyfriend was. You may well get a better line from them than you’ll get from the forensics. She had to have been lying in the rain for quite a while.’ Paddy shook his head sadly. ‘Might as well have been lying in a cold bath from their point of view. And her clothes, such as they were … just about washed clean. Don’t hope for too much from the lab on this one, Jacko.’

  ‘Hope springs internal,’ Jackson said, ‘as my old Dadda used to say.’

  ‘Still at school, wasn’t she?’ Paddy was at the washbasin now, completing his scrubbing-up. ‘Well, we’ve had a good few of ’em in the past, haven’t we, one way or another …? But it still makes you think. If you’ve got kids of your own, that is. Like we have.’

  ‘I’m going to put this boyo away,’ Jackson said. ‘Don’t you worry.’

  ‘Sure you will. But your Charley’s going to be another stupid little kid like she was, had one drink too many or sniffed up something he shouldn’t have … That’s the trouble. But talking about liquid refreshment, they should be open by now if you’d fancy a pint.’

  ‘Ah, well,’ Jackson said. Sunday morning. He wasn’t officially on duty, either. ‘Why not?’

  Dobie wasn’t a highly imaginative and certainly not a superstitious man but the sight of the figure seated at the side of the road gave him a considerable shock. He distinctly felt his hair stand on end, a feat of levitation he had previously imagined only to be attainable in works of fiction of the triter sort; his moustache might also conceivably have stood on end, if most of it hadn’t been in that condition already. He was able, however, a moment later completely to recover his aplomb and to brake the car, get out of it, and approach the seated figure at an appropriately calm, sedate, and professorial gait. ‘Oh hullo, hi, hi,’ Elspeth said.

  From a distance her posture had seemed to be somewhat disconsolate but the smile with which she greeted him was cheerful enough. Indeed, almost radiant. Really, Dobie thought, an attractive child; the navy-blue parka and short sports skirt she was wearing didn’t reflect in any way adequately her personality. ‘You gave me a bit of a turn, sitting there,’ Dobie said.

  ‘I did? Why?’

  ‘Because you’re wearing the same things as—’

  Dobie stopped short. Not quickly enough, but the girl had sensed his meaning at once and didn’t seem to be at all perturbed. ‘As Bev was? We’ve all got these things. It’s the school uniform, sort of. They don’t give us clothes nowadays. Just clobber.’

  ‘Oh, I see. May I …?’ Sitting down beside her. ‘How very odd.’

  ‘No, it isn’t. It’s progressive and democratic and all that jazz. Unless you meant it’s the clobber that’s odd.’ She looked down doubtfully at the long, slightly skinny legs protruding from her skirt. ‘Yum. Maybe. But at least it’s practical. Been visiting the old folks at home?’

  ‘Someone called Carter.’

  ‘Oh. Popeye. He’s a bit of a nerd but he’s all right really. Always tearing round in his underpants and flexing his muscles generally. I wish he wouldn’t.’

  ‘And what have you been doing?’

  ‘Oh, just out for a walk. My Sunday morning stroll. I usually walk best sitting down, as you’ve noticed. Anything to get out of that horrible dump, really. I mean, school’s better. I don’t mind school. But weekends … They’re pretty awful.’

  Dobie could see what she meant. Literally, since the high stone walls of the Centre were clearly visible a half-mile or so down the road, distance in this case failing to lend any kind of enchantment to the view. The barren sweep of moorland to either side of them might well have excited the poet Wordsworth, who would doubtless have sallied immediately forth in search of leech gatherers and such, but held no comparable appeal to Professor Dobie, while Elspeth and her companions in exile would certainly have exchanged the whole bang shoot for a decently appointed bowling alley or even, if it came to the crunch, for the Odeon Cinema, Clapham. ‘No, it can’t be very nice living in a place like that. I’d hate it.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s the house I meant. I really wish I could be a boarder but Dad says there’s no way he can afford it. He probably can’t. Not now. With his alimony payments and all.’

  ‘It seemed like quite a pleasant house to me.’

  ‘The trouble is I’m an inconvenience.’

  ‘Yes.’ Dobie, having considered the matter further, nodded. ‘I can see how you might be.’

  ‘It’s great to meet someone who doesn’t just pat me on the shoulder and say something consoling. I know Dad loves me and all that but it doesn’t help.’

  ‘When I was your age,’ Dobie said, ‘that’s what I used to think about God. As a matter of fact, I sometimes still do.’

  ‘Oh, well, I wouldn’t bring Him into the argument. Or Her, as the case may be. I really loathe all this stupid feminist stuff, don’t you? But I’ll tell you something else that is consoling. About ninety per cent of the kids at the school think just as I do about it. I don’t know what girls’ schools were like all those years ago when you were a boy,’ Elspeth said deflatingly, ‘but nowadays they’re repositories for unwanted female children, that’s what they are. Girls like me who’re inconveniences. And I think it’s a bloody awful state of affairs, I really do.’

  ‘The education can’t be all that bad, though,’ Dobie said. ‘You’ve got a remarkable range of vocabulary for a girl your age.’

  ‘That’s what Dad said the other day when I went and caught my toe under the door. Absolutely shocking, he said it was. I told him a doctor shouldn’t be shocked by references to a perfectly natural human function but that only seemed to make matters worse. Men of his age are so peculiar.’

  ‘I expect he does his best,’ Dobie said.

  ‘Yes, he does. But all this crap they give you about single-parent families being just as good as the other kind, it really is a lot of …’

  ‘Balls?’

  ‘Yes. Thanks. I mean, how can it be a family if there’s only one of you? It’s like one of those para-things you were talking about.’

  ‘A contradiction in terms. Like multi-cultural society.’

  ‘Oh, we got that, too. At school, I mean. Girls from all over. E.g., Bev. She came from Italy, you know. She could speak Italian, or said she could. It must be really glam, living in Italy, gosh.’

  Dobie stared again at the wild Welsh countryside surrounding him and at the skies which once again were clouding over fast. He’d been wise, he thought, to take his raincoat, whoever’s it was. It would certainly be a bit of a change, he thought, for a girl accustomed to the tropical delights of a Mediterranean country to land up in a dismal dump like this. ‘She couldn’t,’ he said, voicing his thought, ‘have fancied the school all that rotten, then.’

  ‘No. Of course, she wasn’t an Italian, I mean she was born in Wales. In Cardiff, I think. But last year her mother married an Italian or something like that … and I suppose Bev got to be an inconvenience
like the rest of us. So they sent her back here. I don’t know the whole story, mind.’

  ‘She hadn’t been at the school very long, then?’

  ‘No, she only came this term. That’s why no one knows her very well. Except maybe Midge. Midge shared a room with her, you see. And so she’s quite cut up about … what happened.’

  ‘Is Midge another inconvenience?’

  ‘Very probably. It seems to be becoming a pretty common cultural phemonnymum.’

  ‘Phenomenon. One of these days,’ Dobie said, ‘I’ll introduce you to my friend Detective Inspector Jackson. You two should get on like a house on fire, improving each other’s vocabulary.’

  ‘I think I’ve met him already. If he’s the one who came round last night asking us questions.’

  ‘Yes, that was probably him. What did he ask you?’

  ‘Just if I’d seen Bev at all that afternoon.’

  ‘And had you?’

  ‘Nope. Couldn’t have. Saturday afternoons I play hockey. I’m in the First Eleven, you see.’

  ‘Really?’ Dobie’s experience of the sport was virtually limited to a single occasion upon which a scratch college team of which he was an (unwilling) member had rashly undertaken to engage one of the women’s colleges on the field of battle; three of his team-mates, he well remembered, had been carried off (groaning) on improvised stretchers and he himself had carried the imprint of a small spiked boot on his tummy for most of the remainder of the term. ‘You must be a good player.’

  ‘Not really. I’m just big for my age and I can run quite fast. When I have to.’

  ‘Ah. A useful accomplishment,’ Dobie said. ‘Nowadays.’

  She was appropriately dressed for it, too, he noticed, in a pair of rather flamboyant Nike trainers, though these didn’t seem to have any spikes and hence could be regarded as defensive rather than offensive weapons. Of course the kids wore those things all the time at the University, all day and every day; they probably went to sleep in them, for all he knew. Plimsolls, they’d once been called. Why?