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

by Desmond Cory

  ‘All very well to talk about following normal routine but this sort of thing is disturbing. Damned disturbing. Another little snort?’

  ‘Oh. Right. Certainly,’ Dobie said.

  Carter refilled Dobie’s tumbler and added a good three fingers to the content of his own. His hand appeared to be perfectly steady, but there was that in his facial expression which suggested him to be badly shaken up by the morning’s events, as well he might be. ‘We had a suicide here last year. Someone hanged himself. But we’ve never had a murder. And it can’t be anything else, can it? Someone shot him. Deliberately. But why?’

  ‘I expect Inspector Jackson will soon establish the facts,’ Dobie said a little dreamily. ‘I understand it may turn out to be a gangland killing.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘As they call it.’

  ‘But that’s absurd.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. This place is full of former drug addicts, after all. People with contacts with what used to be called the underworld – only of course it’s the overworld, these days. Financially speaking, anyway. Lots of money to be made from drugs. Everybody says so. At any rate I imagine Jackson’s thinking along some such lines.’

  ‘But the whole idea of this place is to keep them away from those contacts.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Dobie’s voice had become dreamier than ever, to the point of seeming almost somnambulistic. ‘But one makes them unexpectedly. One goes out into the country for a gentle jog, a little healthy exercise, and then … I take it that is how you met her?’

  ‘Met her?’

  ‘Beverley Sutro. In the first place, that’s to say.’

  ‘I never …’

  Carter stopped rather abruptly. His face had become darkly flushed, possibly as a result of his having drunk the whisky in his tumbler rather too quickly and possibly not. Dobie’s expression, on the other hand, was as palely vacant as ever. ‘Later on, of course,’ he said, ‘you met her here. You’re the gentleman she was seeing on Saturday afternoons. I could see how she worked it getting in and out of here, I mean – but I couldn’t see how you worked it. Not until just now. So I don’t suppose Jackson’s tumbled to it yet. He’ll be a bit annoyed with you when he does, though, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘He knows perfectly well where I am on Saturday afternoons. Invariably.’ Carter made what was intended to be a gesture of impatience but which somehow lacked sufficient resolution to pass for such. ‘So does everybody else. I’m here all right. With—’

  ‘With Adrian Seymour. Wednesdays and Saturdays.’

  ‘Exactly. It’s all on the treatment schedule.’

  ‘Exactly. And the treatment schedule includes hypnotherapy.’

  ‘But that doesn’t mean—’

  ‘It means the inducement of a state of hypnosis,’ Dobie said patiently. ‘You don’t have to be a psychiatrist to know that.’

  ‘Look, just because …’

  Carter stopped again, abruptly as before.

  ‘He remembers her, you see,’ Dobie said. ‘Not consciously, of course. But in his dreams. And you don’t have to be a psychiatrist to see how that might happen, too. Of course it was seeing her photograph in the newspaper that triggered off his recollection, so to speak … so if Beverley hadn’t been killed, everything might have been all right in that respect. Except that you couldn’t have hoped to keep up those assignations for very much longer, could you? She’d’ve been rumbled sooner or later. And so would you. Simple in one way, I grant you … but much too complicated in others. Don’t you agree?’

  ‘But she liked complications. She thought it was … I don’t know … more fun doing it like that and fooling everybody. Oh God,’ Carter said. ‘She was a weird kid. You’ve got to realize that.’

  ‘I do. I also realize you probably have a weakness for weird people. Otherwise, you’d hardly be in your profession.’

  The sound of Carter’s breathing, Dobie realized, had now become clearly audible. Odd, for a man who liked to keep himself in peak condition. But then the little office was extremely quiet. Very soon Jackson’s colleagues would arrive, baying no doubt like foxhounds and trampling round in circles, but meantime the passageways were silent, except for the occasional sounds of hurried footsteps outside the door; minions being summoned, perhaps, to the Director’s office. It was also odd that no one, apparently, had heard the sound of a shot that morning. But that had been outside the building … and besides, there were silencers, things like that …

  ‘You’re right. That’s how it started off. But it’s not going to be my profession for very much longer. You know,’ Carter said, ‘I wrote out my resignation last weekend. I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to hand it in, but what with the police buzzing round the place like bees round a hive and putting everyone in a tizzy … Maybe it’s just as well you’ve decided to force my hand, if that’s what you’re doing. I don’t know how the hell you found out about it but I’m almost glad that you have. That someone has. Yesterday I was talking to Ram about it and I as near as a toucher came out with the whole thing. But … Shit, I don’t want to talk to a psychiatrist. I am a psychiatrist. That’s half of the problem.’

  ‘The other half of the problem is dead,’ Dobie said.

  ‘Indeed. Which makes the whole thing seem all the more inexplicable. Even more crazy. Because …’ Carter threw up his hands again, this time in a rather more convincing gesture of despair – or maybe of futility. ‘Crazy about a girl, that’s a figure of speech, we just don’t use the word in that way, and yet the way I was behaving, what else can you call it? And now she’s dead it’s still the same, only a different kind of crazy, you know what I mean? I just can’t understand now what I thought I was doing. What we were doing. I mean, there’s no way I can make you understand this, either, but it wasn’t really the sex bit. I don’t think she ever enjoyed the sex bit at all and I’m not sure that I did, either. That was just the excuse. For all the rest of it.’

  ‘Yes,’ Dobie said. ‘I can understand that perfectly.’

  ‘You can?’

  ‘Yes. In a place like this, you naturally think in terms of sexual repression, just as you would in that girls’ school round the corner. You are repressed, and so was she. But not sexually. That’s the excuse. The let-out. Just as it is for everyone else. But of course the real trouble isn’t sex at all. It’s boredom.’

  ‘Oh, my God,’ Carter said again. ‘You are so right.’

  ‘And as sex is obviously just as boring as everything else … naturally you have to make it seem exciting somehow. I imagine Beverley would have been good at that. She wasn’t any good at hockey, but she was good at other kinds of games. At fooling people. I understand all that because my wife was just the same. And someone killed her, too. That’s the trouble with games of that kind. They can be dangerous.’

  ‘Is that why you …?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Or is it a game for you, too?’

  Dobie had to suppose that the habit of asking questions was engrained in those of the psychiatric persuasion. As indeed in his own profession also, where – however – the important thing is to ask the right ones. From Carter’s viewpoint, it could hardly matter whether he viewed it as a game or not; the question could only be designed as another means of packing up the board as unobtrusively as possible, of shovelling all those nasty red hotels away out of sight. He sighed, and shook his head.

  ‘Actually,’ Dobie said, ‘I’m never bored. I don’t know why not. Some flaw in my nature, I suppose. It makes it hard for people to understand me, sometimes. They think I’m absent-minded, when really I’m thinking about something that interests me more than the things that they’re thinking about. Of course I don’t mind that. Though sometimes I think that maybe I should.’

  ‘I remember reading about your wife,’ Carter said, ‘in the papers.’

  ‘They gave it quite a splash.’

  ‘When I saw Bev’s picture in the papers, my reaction was … different. All I w
anted to do was to look the other way. I’ve been doing that ever since. As though the whole thing was really … I suppose I was afraid that someone might assume that I … did it. I mean …’

  ‘You had a good enough motive, certainly.’

  ‘And quite a … responsibility. You might say that if it weren’t for me, she’d still be alive.’

  ‘That’s undeniable.’

  ‘But I didn’t kill her.’

  And that, Dobie thought, had always been obvious. What Carter had done was confuse the issue, which – at least to a mathematical intellect – was considerably worse. Quite unforgiveable, in fact. ‘And,’ he said, with some severity, ‘you don’t even know who did.’

  ‘No, I don’t. But … Do you?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I do,’ Dobie said. ‘But that isn’t to the present point. I mean, that’s one of the things that might very well interest other people but doesn’t really interest me, or not in the way I’m quite certain you mean. After all, it’s just another let-out, isn’t it? Killing people? Crime is just another sociocultural phenomenon – or at least, that’s what you lot seem to be telling all your patients. It’s not surprising if now and then one of them believes you.’

  Carter stared at him for a few moments before reaching again for his whisky glass. Outside, other footsteps rapped quickly down the corridor; a woman’s high heels; Miss Daly, summoned to the presence. ‘What we claim is that the root causes of any specific crime can be heuristically established. Can be. But nobody claims that the whole chain of effective factors in any given case can be elucidated in such a way as to … Look, a let-out, I don’t think that’s the right way to look at it. It’s hardly instrumentally useful to say … In fact it’s definitely retrogressive. Crime as the easy way out, that’s a typical policeman’s view, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

  ‘Well, then let’s say the greedy way out.’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t agree to that, either.’

  ‘But she was greedy,’ Dobie said. ‘Wasn’t she?’

  Kate, also, had had a tiring morning and was inclined to be snappish. Although as a doctor she was hardly in a position to disapprove of death on a point of principle, she didn’t like being obliged to deal with its more obvious manifestations at times when she should normally have been running her clinic and when, moreover, that old layabout Paddy Oates should have been at hand to deal with them. ‘So where is Paddy?’

  ‘Gone to a funeral, I understand,’ Foxy Boxy said. ‘A relative of his. As I believe.’ Kate made a snorting sound through her nostrils and gave the recumbent corpse beside which she knelt a savage Kung Fu prod with her stiffened fingers. ‘So what does Jacko expect me to tell him? This man’s been shot. Cause of death, a bullet. What else?’

  ‘Yes. We’ve got it. A nine millimetre, we reckon. It’s being packed off to ballistics right now.’ Foxy, familiar with Kate’s little moods, was being conciliatory. ‘Death would have been instantaneous, I suppose? Going straight through his head like that?’

  ‘In this case, yes. Of course where men’s brains are concerned, you can never be sure. But where a fair amount of them have been spattered over the floor—’

  ‘Very nasty weapon, yes, a nine millimetre. Fired at close range, would you say?’

  ‘From outside that window, anyway. No sign of any powder-burns. I’m not into ballistics, Foxy. The FS crowd should be able to tell you all you need to know about that.’ Kate got to her feet and smoothed her skirt. ‘For the rest, the guy seems to have been in crude good health. Muscular tissue’s in pretty good shape for a man of his age and I don’t see any obvious signs of drug dependency. So what was he doing in here?’

  ‘We’ll be finding that out soon enough, I dare say.’

  ‘They’ll have the medical record on file here. I’d like to see it.’

  ‘I’m sure we can dig that out for you. You, er … Is there anything wrong?’

  ‘Of course there’s something wrong. The man’s dead.’

  ‘But apart from that, you say he’s in pretty good nick?’

  ‘I’d say he’d been in the nick. Done time. Does Jacko know about that?’

  Foxy shook his head admiringly. ‘Oh yes. We know this lad of old. He’s on our own formbook and has been for years. One of our pet nasties, in fact. And you’re right, we did put him away. But not for long enough.’

  ‘Well, he’s been put away this time for good and all,’ Kate said, stripping off her surgical gloves. ‘Get him off to the morgue as soon as you can and I’ll do the PM this afternoon, OK? Now I’d better go and see the Director. Jacko’s with him now, I take it?’

  ‘I believe so, yes. And Mr Dobie.’ Kate stared at him.

  ‘Dobie? What’s Dobie doing here?’

  ‘Well may you ask,’ Foxy said, and shrugged. ‘Always in the thick of things, is your Mr Dobie.’

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ Kate said.

  The door of the office next to Carter’s stood ajar and Dobie pushed it open and went inside. He wasn’t surprised to find the Registry empty; he had already heard the sound of voices coming from the Director’s office almost opposite and Kathleen Daly’s had been among them, a firm and resonant contralto raised in counter to Jackson’s modest tenor and the Director’s rather wobbly basso profundo. For a moment he had been reminded of that scene from Don Giovanni from which, in a sense, the whole of this present imbroglio had originated, the cassette tape unwinding on the car stereo system, the rain beating mercilessly down against the windscreen; now he, perhaps in the role of Uninvited Guest, made his way past Miss Daly’s desk towards the inner sanctum of the computer console and paused there, a little uncertainly. He wasn’t good at searching for things and he knew it. Perhaps … He looked for a moment at the telephone but didn’t pick it up. Jackson was good at searching for things, if he had someone to tell him what to look for and to show him where to look for it. That was Jackson’s job. But Jackson, clearly, was right now very busy. Maybe if …

  The key of the filing cabinet was in the cabinet lock, on a ring from which other keys, efficiently colour-coded, dangled. Dobie turned the key, pulling open the topmost drawer, and commenced his search. He wasn’t good at looking for things but now and again he got lucky. That morning he had found, for instance, a hockey stick. Carter, on the other hand, had found a corpse, a considerably more spectacular achievement. The topmost drawer of the cabinet contained only tape cassettes, neatly stacked and carefully labelled. Not, of course, of Mozartean opera, but of Drs Carter and Ram and Mighell and Hudson, all holding self-consciously cheery converse with their various patients. One such tape had been put consistently to good use on those wet Saturday afternoons, the voices on it – like those of Jackson and Morris Train and Kathleen Daly – audible in the passageway outside the closed office door, while inside the office Adrian Seymour sat peaceably in hypnotic stupor and Carter entertained a naked Beverley Sutro within his own inner sanctum, games, yes, games people play, games of a ludicrousness almost akin to that of grand opera but nevertheless to be taken very seriously by those concerned, their pleasurableness being indeed directly related to their degree of complexity, a board game like Monopoly but being played on a hard-cushioned couch with the stakes getting higher and higher as the greed of the two competitors increased and the rental fees went up and up, the girl had been greedy, yes, but so had Carter, though being a highly trained psychiatrist he naturally hadn’t had sense enough to realize it, the implicit threat of the square that said GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL being in itself enough to keep the rental payments rolling in, fifty pounds for each throw of the dice, motivation there all right …

  But he hadn’t done it, no. He was responsible for what had happened. That was all.

  So was she.

  Because there’d been another occasion when the door of this office had been ajar and padding on her sneakered feet down the passageway outside, hockey stick in hand, little Greedyguts Sutro had heard another voice speaking on the telephone and had pushed the do
or gently open and had gone in and the voice on the telephone had gone on speaking, had mentioned a name that Greedyguts had recognized and a seemingly colossal sum of money and the stakes had suddenly gone up again, from fifty a throw to five thousand, because this was still a game, yes, but a game of a different kind with a new player … and much more fun …

  … because a lot more dangerous, she’d have to have realized that, but even so … Nothing. Dobie slid open the bottommost drawer and lowered his head to peer inside. More tapes, discs, a few unlabelled files. A box file might … But these weren’t box files. No. Just folders.

  ‘Is this what you’re looking for?’

  Dobie raised his head, blinking nervously.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Yes. That’s it.’

  ‘It’s Ivor’s, really. Ivor Halliday’s. But he won’t be wanting it any more.’

  ‘Yes. I mean, no. I imagine not. It’s rather a … It’s a bit heavy for you, isn’t it?’

  ‘I think you’ll find it’s accurate, all the same. Though you won’t be so stupid as to … But you’re not a stupid man. Anything but. And now you’re going to demonstrate your undoubted intelligence by stepping outside with me. Very quietly.’

  ‘Oh, come now,’ Dobie said. ‘It’s too late for that. You know it is.’

  ‘Maybe. And maybe not. We’ll see.’

  ‘Medical records? Yes. Of course. Our Miss Daly will look them out for you. She’s in the Registry, right across the passageway.’

  ‘In fact she isn’t,’ Kate said. ‘We’ve just been in there. The place is empty.’