Dirk said to him, “Events may seem to you to be a tangled mass of confusion at the moment. And yet we have some interesting threads to pull on. For of all the things you have told me that have happened, only two are actually physically impossible.”
Richard spoke at last. “Impossible?” he said with a frown.
“Yes,” said Dirk, “completely and utterly impossible.”
He smiled.
“Luckily,” he went on, “you have come to exactly the right place with your interesting problem, for there is no such word as ‘impossible’ in my dictionary. In fact,” he added, brandishing the abused book, “everything between ‘herring’ and ‘marmalade’ appears to be missing. Thank you, Miss Pearce, you have once again rendered me sterling service, for which I thank you and will, in the event of a successful outcome to this endeavor, even attempt to pay you. In the meantime we have much to think on, and I leave the office in your very capable hands.”
The phone rang and Janice answered it.
“Good afternoon,” she said, “Wainwright’s Fruit Emporium. Mr Wainwright is not able to take calls at this time since he is not right in the head and thinks he is a cucumber. Thank you for calling.”
She slammed the phone down. She looked up again to see the door closing softly behind her ex-employer and his befuddled client.
“Impossible?” said Richard again, in surprise.
“Everything about it,” insisted Dirk, “completely and utterly—well, let us say inexplicable. There is no point in using the word ‘impossible’ to describe something that has clearly happened. But it cannot be explained by anything we know.”
The briskness of the air along the Grand Union Canal got in among Richard’s senses and sharpened them up again. He was restored to his normal faculties, and though the fact of Gordon’s death kept jumping at him all over again every few seconds, he was at least now able to think more clearly about it. Oddly enough, though, that seemed for the moment to be the last thing on Dirk’s mind. Dirk was instead picking on the most trivial of the night’s sequence of bizarre incidents on which to cross-examine him.
A jogger going one way and a cyclist going the other both shouted at each other to get out of the way, and narrowly avoided hurling each other into the murky, slow-moving waters of the canal. They were watched carefully by a very slow-moving old lady who was dragging an even slower-moving old dog.
On the other bank large empty warehouses stood startled, every window shattered and glinting. A burned-out barge lolled brokenly in the water. Within it a couple of plastic detergent bottles floated on brackish water. Over the nearest bridge heavy-goods lorries thundered, shaking the foundations of the houses, belching petrol fumes into the air and frightening a mother trying to cross the road with her pram.
Dirk and Richard were walking along from the fringes of South Hackney, a mile from Dirk’s office, back toward the heart of Islington, where Dirk knew the nearest life belts were positioned.
“But it was only a conjuring trick, for heaven’s sake,” said Richard. “He does them all the time. It’s just sleight of hand. Looks impossible but I’m sure if you asked any conjurer he’d say it’s easy once you know how these things are done. I once saw a man on the street in New York doing—”
“I know how these things are done,” said Dirk, pulling two lighted cigarettes and a large glazed fig out of his nose. He tossed the fig up into the air, but it somehow failed to land anywhere. “Dexterity, misdirection, suggestion. All things you can learn if you have a little time to waste. Excuse me, dear lady,” he said to the elderly, slow-moving dog owner as they passed her. He bent down to the dog and pulled a long string of brightly colored flags from its bottom. “I think he will move more comfortably now,” he said, tipped his hat courteously to her and moved on.
“These things, you see,” he said to a flummoxed Richard, “are easy. Sawing a lady in half is easy. Sawing a lady in half and then joining her up together again is less easy, but can be done with practice. The trick you described to me with the two-hundred-year-old vase and the college salt cellar is—” he paused for emphasis “—completely, and utterly inexplicable.”
“Well, there was probably some detail of it I missed, but . . .”
“Oh, without question. But the benefit of questioning somebody under hypnosis is that it allows the questioner to see the scene in much greater detail than the subject was even aware of at the time. The girl Sarah, for instance. Do you recall what she was wearing?”
“Er, no—” said Richard, vaguely, “a dress of some kind I suppose—”
“Color? Fabric?”
“Well, I can’t remember, it was dark. She was sitting several places away from me. I hardly glimpsed her.”
“She was wearing a dark blue cotton velvet dress gathered to a dropped waist. It had raglan sleeves gathered to the cuffs, a white Peter Pan collar and six small pearl buttons down the front—the third one down had a small thread hanging off it. She had long dark hair pulled back with a red butterfly hair grip.”
“If you’re going to tell me you know all that from looking at a scuff mark on my shoes, like Sherlock Holmes, then I’m afraid I don’t believe you.”
“No, no,” said Dirk, “it’s much simpler than that. You told me yourself under hypnosis.”
Richard shook his head.
“Not true,” he said, “I don’t even know what a Peter Pan collar is.”
“But I do and you described it to me perfectly accurately. As you did the conjuring trick. And that trick was not possible in the form in which it occurred. Believe me. I know whereof I speak. There are some other things I would like to discover about the Professor, like for instance who wrote the note you discovered on the table and how many questions George the Third actually asked, but—”
“What?”
“—but I think I would do better to question the fellow directly. Except—” He frowned deeply to himself in concentration. “Except,” he added, “that being rather vain in these matters I would prefer to know the answers before I asked the questions. And I do not. I absolutely do not.” He gazed abstractedly into the distance, and made a rough calculation of the remaining distance to the nearest life belt.
“And the second impossible thing,” he added, just as Richard was about to get a word in edgewise, “or at least, the next completely inexplicable thing, is of course the matter of your sofa.”
“Dirk,” exclaimed Richard in exasperation, “may I remind you that Gordon Way is dead, and that I appear to be under suspicion of his murder! None of these things have the remotest connection with that, and I—”
“But I am extremely inclined to believe that they are connected.”
“That’s absurd!”
“I believe in the fundamental inter—”
“Oh, yeah, yeah,” said Richard, “the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. Listen, Dirk, I am not a gullible old lady and you won’t be getting any trips to Bermuda out of me. If you’re going to help me, then let’s stick to the point.”
Dirk bridled at this. “I believe that all things are fundamentally interconnected, as anyone who follows the principles of quantum mechanics to their logical extremes cannot, if they are honest, help but accept. But I also believe that some things are a great deal more interconnected than others. And when two apparently impossible events and a sequence of highly peculiar ones all occur to the same person, and when that person suddenly becomes the suspect of a highly peculiar murder, then it seems to me that we should look for the solution in the connection between these events. You are the connection, and you yourself have been behaving in a highly peculiar and eccentric way.”
“I have not,” said Richard. “Yes, some odd things have happened to me, but I—”
“You were last night observed, by me, to climb the outside of a building and break into the flat of your girlfriend, Susan Way.”
“It may have been unusual,” said Richard, “it may not even have been wise. But it was perfectl
y logical and rational. I just wanted to undo something I had done before it caused any damage.”
Dirk thought for a moment, and slightly quickened his pace.
“And what you did was a perfectly reasonable and normal response to the problem of the message you had left on the tape—yes, you told me all about that in our little session—it’s what anyone would have done?”
Richard frowned as if to say that he couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. “I don’t say anyone would have done it,” he said. “I probably have a slightly more logical and literal turn of mind than many people, which is why I can write computer software. It was a logical and literal solution to the problem.”
“Not a little disproportionate, perhaps?”
“It was very important to me not to disappoint Susan yet again.”
“So you are absolutely satisfied with your own reasons for doing what you did?”
“Yes,” insisted Richard angrily.
“Do you know,” said Dirk, “what my old maiden aunt who lived in Winnipeg used to tell me?”
“No,” said Richard. He quickly took off all his clothes and dived into the canal. Dirk leaped for the life belt, with which they had just drawn level, yanked it out of its holder and flung it to Richard, who was floundering in the middle of the canal looking completely lost and disoriented.
“Grab hold of this,” shouted Dirk, “and I’ll haul you in.”
“It’s all right,” spluttered Richard, “I can swim—”
“No, you can’t,” yelled Dirk. “Now grab it.”
Richard tried to strike out for the bank, but quickly gave up in consternation and grabbed hold of the life belt. Dirk pulled on the rope till Richard reached the edge, and then bent down to give him a hand out. Richard came up out of the water puffing and spitting, turned and sat shivering on the edge with his hands in his lap.
“God, it’s foul in there!” he exclaimed and spat again. “It’s absolutely disgusting. Yeuchh. Whew. God. I’m usually a pretty good swimmer. Must have got some kind of cramp. Lucky coincidence we were so close to the life belt. Oh thanks.” This last he said in response to the large towel which Dirk handed him.
He rubbed himself down briskly, almost scraping himself with the towel to get the filthy canal water off him. He stood up and looked about. “Can you find my pants?”
“Young man,” said the old lady with the dog, who had just reached them. She stood looking at them sternly, and was about to rebuke them when Dirk interrupted.
“A thousand apologies, dear lady,” he said, “for any offense my friend may inadvertently have caused you. Please,” he added, drawing a slim bunch of anemones from Richard’s bottom, “accept these with my compliments.”
The lady dashed them out of Dirk’s hand with her stick, and hurried off, horror-struck, yanking her dog after her.
“That wasn’t very nice of you,” said Richard, pulling on his clothes underneath the towel, which was now draped strategically around him.
“I don’t think she’s a very nice woman,” replied Dirk. “She’s always down here, yanking her poor dog around and telling people off. Enjoy your swim?”
“Not much, no,” said Richard, giving his hair a quick rub. “I hadn’t realized how filthy it would be in there. And cold. Here,” he said, handing the towel back to Dirk, “thanks. Do you always carry a towel around in your briefcase?”
“Do you always go swimming in the afternoons?”
“No, I usually go in the mornings, to the swimming pool on Highbury Fields, just to wake myself up, get the brain going. It just occurred to me I hadn’t been this morning.”
“And, er—that was why you just dived into the canal?”
“Well, yes. I just thought that getting a bit of exercise would probably help me deal with all this.”
“Not a little disproportionate, then, to strip off and jump into the canal.”
“No,” he said, “it may not have been wise given the state of the water, but it was perfectly—”
“You were perfectly satisfied with your own reasons for doing what you did.”
“Yes—”
“And it was nothing to do with my aunt, then?”
Richard’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “What on earth are you talking about?” he said.
“I’ll tell you,” said Dirk. He went and sat on a nearby bench and opened his case again. He folded the towel away into it and took out instead a small Sony tape recorder. He beckoned Richard over and then pushed the Play button. Dirk’s own voice floated from the tiny speaker in a lilting singsong voice. It said, “In a minute I will click my fingers and you will wake and forget all of this except for the instructions I shall now give you.
“In a little while we will go for a walk along the canal, and when you hear me say the words ‘my old maiden aunt who lived in Winnipeg—’ ”
Dirk suddenly grabbed Richard’s arm to restrain him.
The tape continued, “You will take off all your clothes and dive into the canal. You will find that you are unable to swim, but you will not panic or sink, you will simply tread water until I throw you the life belt . . .”
Dirk stopped the tape and looked around at Richard’s face, which for the second time that day was pale with shock.
“I would be interested to know exactly what it was that possessed you to climb into Miss Way’s flat last night,” said Dirk, “and why.”
Richard didn’t respond—he was continuing to stare at the tape recorder in some confusion. Then he said in a shaking voice, “There was a message from Gordon on Susan’s tape. He phoned from the car. The tape’s in my flat. Dirk, I’m suddenly very frightened by all this.”
21
DIRK WATCHED THE police officer on duty outside Richard’s house from behind a van parked a few yards away. He had been stopping and questioning everyone who tried to enter the small side alley down which Richard’s door was situated, including, Dirk was pleased to note, other policemen if he didn’t immediately recognize them. Another police car pulled up and Dirk started to move.
A police officer climbed out of the car carrying a saw and walked toward the doorway. Dirk briskly matched his pace with him, a step or two behind, striding authoritatively.
“It’s all right, he’s with me,” said Dirk, sweeping past at the exact moment that the one police officer stopped the other.
And he was inside and climbing the stairs.
The officer with the saw followed him in.
“Er, excuse me, sir,” he called up after Dirk.
Dirk had just reached the point where the sofa obstructed the stairway. He stopped and twisted around.
“Stay here,” he said, “guard this sofa. Do not let anyone touch it, and I mean anyone. Understood?”
The officer seemed flummoxed for a moment.
“I’ve had orders to saw it up,” he said.
“Countermanded,” barked Dirk. “Watch it like a hawk. I shall want a full report.”
He turned back and climbed up over the thing. A moment or two later he emerged into a large open area. This was the lower of the two floors that comprised Richard’s flat.
“Have you searched that?” snapped Dirk at another officer, who was sitting at Richard’s dining table looking through some notes. The officer looked up in surprise and started to stand up. Dirk was pointing at the wastepaper basket.
“Er, yes—”
“Search it again. Keep searching it. Who’s here?”
“Er, well—”
“I haven’t got all day.”
“Detective Inspector Mason just left, with—”
“Good, I’m having him pulled off. I’ll be upstairs if I’m needed, but I don’t want any interruptions unless it’s very important. Understood?”
“Er, who—”
“I don’t see you searching the wastepaper basket.”
“Er, right, sir. I’ll—”
“I want it deep-searched. You understand?”
“Er—”
“Get cracking.” Dirk swept on upstairs and into Richard’s workroom.
The tape was lying exactly where Richard had told him it would be, on the long desk on which the six Macintoshes sat. Dirk was about to pocket it when his curiosity was caught by the image of Richard’s sofa slowly twisting and turning on the big Macintosh screen, and he sat down at the keyboard. He explored the program Richard had written for a short while, but quickly realized that in its present form it was less than self-explanatory and he learned little. He managed at last to get the sofa unstuck and move it back down the stairs, but he realized that he had had to turn part of the wall off in order to do it. With a grunt of irritation he gave up.
Another computer he looked at was displaying a steady sine wave. Around the edges of the screen were the small images of other waveforms which could be selected and added to the main one or used to modify it in other ways. He quickly discovered that this enabled you to build up very complex waveforms from simple ones and he played with this for a while. He added a simple sine wave to itself, which had the effect of doubling the height of the peaks and troughs of the wave. Then he slid one of the waves half a step back with respect to the other, and the peaks and troughs of one simply canceled out the peaks and troughs of the other, leaving a completely flat line. Then he changed the frequency of one of the sine waves by a small extent. The result of this was that at some positions along the combined waveform the two waves reinforced each other, and at others they canceled each other out. Adding a third simple wave of yet another frequency resulted in a combined wave in which it was hard to see any pattern at all. The line danced up and down seemingly at random, staying quite low for some periods and then suddenly building into very large peaks and troughs as all three waves came briefly into phase with each other.
Dirk assumed that there must be among this array of equipment a means for translating the waveform dancing on the Macintosh screen into an actual musical tone and hunted among the menus available in the program. He found one menu item which invited him to transfer the wave sample into an Emu.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Box Set Page 16