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

by Desmond Cory

  ‘Id deed I did. I dook her for eddycushion.’

  ‘Education? What particular form—’

  ‘I shed eddy-kew-shun. Our padents inshist that our gelsh be nishely shpoken. Soddem.’

  ‘Ah,’ Dobie said. She couldn’t have meant that. ‘Of course. Of course.’ Elocution. What else? He couldn’t help wondering, though, how Jackson had fared in his interview with Miss Midwinter. It was difficult to imagine, somehow.

  The mind boddled.

  In fact Jackson had confined his investigative techniques to the interrogation of the blue-eyed Miss Bramble and the information he had gained from that source was now bearing fruit. The blackberries in question were neither abundant in growth nor particularly juicy but he had at least something to show for his horticultural efforts, while the reports from the uniformed branch now accumulating on his desk seemed to reveal, in contrast, nothing at all. Unless (as was the usual practice with the uniformed branch) you assumed negative evidence to be useful. No murderers had, to Jackson’s knowledge, been so far convicted on negative evidence only – though the advent of so desirable a development couldn’t surely now be very long delayed. Meanwhile he leafed through the typewritten reports with increasing despondency.

  Usually with hit-and-run cases, either the vehicle responsible can be identified and located within thirty-six hours or it can’t be identified at all. This, it would appear, wasn’t in fact a hit-and-run case but the same general principle clearly applied and no leads to the vehicle or to its owner had as yet appeared. What the reports did make clear was that recent heavy rains sweeping up the valleys had earlier last week converted what was in any case a notably lonely and desolate stretch of moorland road into what was effectively a cul-de-sac; some five miles beyond that damned school and half a mile short of its conjunction with the main Cardiff-Caerphilly route, a fifty-yard length of the road had been flooded to a depth of three feet, preventing the passage of all vehicles save (conceivably) farm tractors and the like. According to report, the road was still impassable, Saturday’s heavy rains having added a thick wash of muddy slime to the already slithery banks of the dip.

  Since even under normal conditions the road served only the occasional needs of car trippers bent on a country picnic and of people travelling to the school, to the Rehabilitation Centre, or to three small farms at the bottom end of the moorland slope, and since there was in any case shorter and easier access to Cardiff driving down to Tongwynlais in the other direction, nobody (for once) was making much of a fuss and the Traffic Section (as usual) were therefore not too concerned about the obstruction, which seemed anyway to be pretty well of yearly occurrence. All of which helped to explain why the road last Saturday afternoon should have been virtually unused by traffic and completely unpoliced, and the weather conditions probably accounted for the apparent additional total absence of observant (or otherwise) pedestrians. Not only did the flimsies offer no report on the presence on the road of Kate Coyle’s car; they offered no report on the presence on the road of any car at all.

  Which for a Cardiff City cop was a bit of a facer.

  ‘Tell you what, Foxy,’ Jackson said. ‘We’re going to have to go back to that school again. With a new line of enquiries.’

  ‘Trying for the car?’

  ‘Right. A hundred schoolkids with a Saturday afternoon off … Yes, I know, crummy weather, a lot of them playing games and so forth, but some of them have to have been swanning round the place, maybe some of the teachers, too … I can’t credit there was nobody on the road that evening. Well, we know for a fact there was. Dr Coyle and Mr Dobie. And our Charley, too. He must have been. Deliminate the impossible—’

  ‘You know what those kids are like,’ Box said glumly. ‘Tell you anything that comes into their heads, some of ’em will.’

  ‘Maybe, but it’s no good taking a futilistic attitude about it. We’ll question every damned one of them if we have to. Tell you something else.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You’re not going to believe it.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘Know who that Beverley kid’s mother is?’

  ‘Her mother? Lives somewhere away abroad, doesn’t she?’

  ‘She does now. But she didn’t always. One of our locals, she is. They had her maiden name on the school records. Jones.’

  ‘Big help, that is.’

  ‘Ah but … Irene Jones. Remember?’

  ‘Irene Jones? Can’t say as I—’

  ‘Little blonde bit of crumpet. Used to work the Casino and then went to the Flamingo Club when Mike O’Neill was running it. She was on Big Ivor Halliday’s string for a while but she kept her nose clean enough, right? Till we had to pull her in on a—’

  ‘Oh.’ Box nodded slowly, thoughtfully. ‘That Irene Jones. Yes, the memory lingers on all right, but … Got married, didn’t she?’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying. Sutro, he was the guy with that chain of betting shops over in London. Did all right for herself there, Irene did. Done even better for herself since, from all accounts. Well, she can afford to send her kid home to a posh boarding school, you can draw your own conclusions. But then she was always a tough little bundle.’

  ‘You reckon like mother, like daughter?’

  ‘I’m not drawing any infrarences in that respect.’

  Foxy wasn’t drawing any, either. Rather was he effortfully dredging up distant memories of his early days on the East Bute Street beat. Little blonde bits of crumpet … There’d been so many of them. And all of them tough little bundles, as Jackson had put it. They’d had to be. ‘Irene was always high class, in her way.’ The Jane Fonda type, you might have said. Except that in those days they’d all been trying to look like Jane Fonda. Most of them, unfortunately, hadn’t succeeded. But quite a few had done all right for themselves, all the same. Mary Williams, now. Or Marty, as she’d called herself. Married to a football club director and rolling in pelf. It made you think …

  ‘Pool de lux,’ Jackson said. ‘That’s what they call it in Italy, where she is now. I don’t doubt she’s put all that behind her.’ He paused, wondering for a moment if he hadn’t hit upon an unfortunate choice of idiom. ‘Local girl makes good, that’s the story – as the Super would say. But she’s on the books for all that.’

  ‘Twenty years back.’ Box shrugged. ‘What was she shopped for?’

  ‘She wasn’t. She got off.’

  ‘She would have done.’

  ‘Ancient history, though. It’s the daughter we’re interested in now. Wheel’s gone full circle, so to speak. You know, it all makes me feel a bit too damned old, Foxy? Or let’s say, advanced in years.’ Jackson sighed windily. ‘A tempus fuggit sort of feeling. That’s Italian, too.’

  ‘It’s not fuggit. It’s foo-git.’

  ‘Maybe. But the other way expresses my feelings better. Nothing from Forensic yet, I don’t suppose.’

  ‘No.’ Foxy reluctantly abandoned his journeyings down Memory Lane and reached across his desk for another orange-coloured file. ‘Wouldn’t hope for too much, either. That kid was so wet, they said her clothes might as well’ve been through the laundry.’

  ‘Yes, but the shoes … Funny about the shoes,’ Jackson said thoughtfully. ‘I don’t figure them shoes, somehow.’

  ‘Those shoes. It ain’t right to say—’

  ‘Don’t you come the pederast with me, Foxy bach. You know what a pederast is? One of them clever dicks, that’s what. Comes from the Greek, it does. Pedo, meaning a pedal, and erasto, something what gets up your nose. I hope I know how to speak proper when the occlusion arises.’

  ‘Talking about clever dicks, Duty Desk had Mr Dobie on the phone.’

  ‘They did? Well, you’re right there. He’s a pederast if ever I met one. All the same, he … What did he want?’

  ‘Wanted to speak to you.’

  ‘Why didn’t they put him through?’

  ‘’Cause you weren’t in.’

  ‘Oh.’

&
nbsp; ‘He still wants to talk to you, though. Said, could you come round and see him this afternoon, Dr Coyle’s place.’

  ‘I know where he lives. I ought to.’ Jackson had in fact sustained a nasty flesh wound at Kate’s clinic not so very long ago, endeavouring to apprehend a dangerous criminal. Although Kate had treated it quickly and effectively, the damaged tissue still gave him jiminy in the cold weather. Arthuritis, hell. ‘Did he say what it was about?’

  ‘Just said he’d got something he wants to show you.’

  ‘Oh well. Maybe I’d better go round, then. He may have a funny way of speaking but just now and again it’s worth while listening to what he’s got to say. But for God’s sake … don’t tell the Super.’

  ‘Me? When did we ever tell the Super anything?’

  Dobie, who – being deep in thought at the time – had turned in the wrong direction on leaving the school, was at that very moment discovering for himself the precise position of the watersplash barring the road and would probably have vanished for ever into its muddy depths had not the car very intelligently stalled while still only axle-deep. ‘T’ck t’ck,’ Dobie said to himself. ‘How provoking.’ Extrication, however, proved to be no very serious problem; having worked out on the back of an envelope the exact figures relating to reverse engine torque, inertia, centrifugal force, gravitational factors, et cetera, and having established a directional vector integer correct to five decimal places, Dobie was able to reverse successfully out of his present predicament and end up on dry land again, having taken in the process only five or six minutes more than a non-pederast would have done. Panting slightly from his exertions, he effected a neat three-point turn and drove the car up to the top of the slope, stopping there and alighting (with a wet squelchy noise) to inspect the vehicle for signs of imminent deterioration.

  Apart from being thickly sploshed with mud to door-handle level, the Fiesta seemed to have survived the ordeal well enough. Dobie walked around it once (squelch, squelch, squelch) and then resumed his seat. He was relieved. His relief, however, was immediately tempered by the realization that he had inadvertently taken the passenger seat instead of the driver’s. T’ck t’ck. He got out and wearily plodded round the car again, like something out of an Elegy in a Country Churchyard; he was beginning to feel that way, too.

  Certainly all the world had seemingly been left to darkness and to him; or if not to darkness, then to the prevailing cloud-streaked gloom of a Welsh spring morning. The weather forecast had hinted strongly at more rain to come and at deep depressions marching steadily in from the mid-Atlantic trough, whatever that was. In other words, more of the usual. Dobie paused before re-entering the car to look around him. Take me home, he thought, country roads. This had to be one of the loneliest country roads he’d ever seen. The moorland stretching out all around him, bleak and bare; the road a narrow grey ribbon, shiny with moisture, running downhill across it. In the distance and beside it, the grey slate roofs of the school; further yet, the trees and high stone walls of the Rehabilitation Centre. Looking down upon them from this height, they might have been a scatter of historic ruins, centred around the broken statue of Ozymandias, King of Kings.

  In fact, of course, they weren’t. He was looking at an expensive private boarding school and at a luxuriously equipped and high-tech correctional establishment, a model institute (as he was assured) of its kind. The first, dedicated to the outmoded nineteenth-century principles established by Dr Arnold and taken up with so much enthusiasm by the suffragettes a half-century later, concerned with the efficient production of nicely spoken (and naturally well heeled) young ladies for eventual consumption by ravening yuppies; the other, concerned at least ostensibly with the recuperation of all those varied, yet basically similar, dropouts from the organizational world of the 1990s, all the refinements of modern technology being there called in to repair what the refineries of modern technology and their ingenious chemical products had come more or less close to destroying. It was odd, Dobie thought, that from a distance it was almost impossible to tell the difference between them.

  Of course the brick walls surrounding the school didn’t constitute a very effective barrier. Any reasonably athletic seventeen-year-old bent on nocturnal perambulation would be over them in a trice and on her way. But Beverley Sutro hadn’t done that, or he didn’t think so. There wasn’t any way she could have nipped out during the night without her friends knowing about it, that Midge girl and the others; you didn’t have to be a Rehabilitation Centre trick-cyclist to realize that. OK, so life in a girls’ school isn’t worth living if you don’t have secrets, but murder is a serious matter – serious, and even terrifying at that age; if Midge or Elspeth had known of anything like that, they’d have told him about it when they’d had the chance to do so. If the Beverley girl had had assignments outside the school, sexual or otherwise, it hadn’t been at night.

  Not much point, though, in telling Jackson that. Jackson had to have seen that for himself already, and might therefore be a little more easily convinced of the value of Dobie’s evidence. Or, well … of Midge’s evidence, really. Of course it would be a great deal better if Dobie could put up some explanation of what that damned note meant, but he wasn’t in a position to do that or not yet, anyway. It was all very difficult, Dobie thought, engaging the car gears and urging the Fiesta once again forwards. And he wasn’t looking forward to his imminent interview with Jacko.

  Or not particularly.

  Because Jackson, on occasion, could show a nasty sceptical streak.

  ‘So what’s it mean, then?’

  ‘I was afraid you’d ask me that,’ Dobie said sadly. ‘I don’t know. And the girl who gave it to me doesn’t know, either. But it’s Beverley Sutro’s handwriting – she’s sure about that.’

  ‘Bloody awful handwriting, too.’ Jackson leaned forwards to study it. ‘Don’t seem to worry about that sort of thing in the schools nowadays, do they? It’s all computers and calculators and such. You can hardly read a word of my daughter’s handwriting, if it comes to that. No wonder they say illiteracy is rife.’

  ‘It is the girl’s handwriting, though. That’s the point.’

  ‘Mebbe it is.’ Jackson leaned back again. ‘So what? Could be something she scribbled down weeks ago. Or months. I can’t see what it’s got to do with the present case.’

  ‘March 24th. That’s the day she was killed.’

  ‘Grant you that but it’s hardly the same as going on a holiday, is it? If that’s what the note means to say. It’s hard to be sure.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Dobie said, ‘it’s not so much the note I wanted to show you. It’s the paper.’

  ‘The paper?’ Jackson leaned forwards once more. ‘What’s so odd about the paper?’

  ‘It’s the same as this.’ Dobie produced with a dramatic flourish his own annotations of the recent medical history of Adrian Seymour and pushed them across the table. ‘And this comes from the Registrar’s Office at the Rehabilitation Centre. As you can see by the heading.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Mr Dobie.’ Jackson leaned back again; his movements, Dobie thought, were beginning to resemble those of the brightly plumaged toy birds that, constantly dipping their beaks into glasses of water, had enjoyed an inexplicable popularity and substantial sales in the days of Dobie’s childhood. Not, of course, that you could describe Jackson as brightly plumaged, exactly, and glasses of Brain’s Best Bitter would be more in his line. ‘There’s got to be thousands of scraps of paper like that one lying about the place. I’ve got a notebook that same size in my own office. I’ll betcha we could find—’

  ‘You haven’t got a notebook like this one,’ Dobie said, taking the notepad from his jacket pocket and placing it on the table, beside the other items of what his fevered brain imagined to be evidence. ‘Now look. Here we go.’ He used an illegally acquired set of Kate’s forceps to slide the Beverley Sutro note on to the notebook and then to align the roughly torn top edge with one of the notepad stubs. ‘See? A perfect
topographical consistency.’

  ‘A what?’ But Jackson had taken the point and was beginning to show faint signs of interest, though not to the extent of inclining his body forwards yet again. He was a policeman, not a bloody oil derrick. ‘It fits all right, I can see that. Where’d you get that pad from?’

  ‘I told you. The Registrar’s Office at the Centre. I, er … whipped it.’

  This was an excellent opportunity for Jackson to administer the classic reproof. ‘You didn’t ought to have dunnit.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I see what you mean, though. It’s rum.’

  ‘Very rum.’

  ‘And what you’re really trying to tell me is that the girl must’ve been …’

  ‘There. Yes. In the office. Physically there. How else could she have got to tear that sheet of paper out of the pad?’

  A tricky one, that was. Jackson considered the matter. In the end he said, ‘She couldn’t’ve been.’

  ‘That,’ Dobie said, ‘is exactly why it’s rum.’

  ‘Very rum.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That place is a … It’s supposed to be a prison, damn it. Not the ordinary sort of a slammer, I’ll admit. All the same, people don’t just stroll in and out.’

  ‘And in fact they don’t. There’s a guard on the gate, as I’m sure you know.’

  ‘Tell you one thing, though,’ Jackson said. ‘If she was there, if she managed to get in somehow … it might explain why no one seems to have seen hide nor hair of her all that afternoon. We haven’t turned up a single sighting of her so far, nor of the car, neither.’

  Alongside the accumulated evidence on the table the coffee was bubbling cheerfully in the percolator. Dobie reached across to the kitchen shelf to take down two large mugs, each decorated with colourful representatives of very small elephants wearing short red trousers. ‘She was there all right on Saturday,’ he said, making with the milk and sugar. ‘But that wasn’t when she wrote that note, of course. Quite a few sheets have been torn out of the pad since then – you can tell that by looking at the stubs. Thirty-four, by my reckoning. I don’t know how often Miss Daly uses that notepad, but she couldn’t have used up thirty-four sheets in a couple of days. More like a couple of weeks – but of course I’m guessing.’