by Desmond Cory
The girl leaned forwards across the table. In the process, as he noted, all very nearly was. She seemed nonetheless to be enthralled by his narrative. “Wot’s ’e bin up to, then?”
“I don’t even know that. You know how it is when you’re working on information received.”
But with this she was clearly dissatisfied. Well, she wasn’t an easy girl to satisfy. You could tell that just by looking at her. “You ’ave to give me a bit more than that, Crumbo.”
A policeman’s lot isn’t always a happy one. Crumb had found that out already on numerous occasions. And she had, of course, means of making him talk. He’d just been afforded a glimpse of two of them. “Primrose,” he said. With a sigh. “Rodney Primrose. Name ring a bell?”
“Not reelly.”
“We got a tip-off someone’s bringing him in a consignment. But there may be nothing to it. There usually isn’t.”
“Well, if you don’t know the geezer who’s running it …”
“That’s the point. But we think there’s a Middle East connection.”
“An Arab, izzy like?”
“No. The runner’s English all right. But he could be a middleman for Gadaffi, I suppose. Whole trouble is, we got nothing to act on, and that’s why we got to run this bloody surveillance. Then maybe when he drops in on Primrose for a friendly chat—”
“Ow long’s ’e bin in the country, then?”
“A couple of weeks. Flew in to Rhoose from Paris, been holed up in Cardiff ever since. Waiting for his contact, probably. Could be Connors or Lenehan … Someone like that … Or someone else we don’t know about. I mean, it’s all very up in the air, see?”
She was silent for a few moments, pouting sulkily, while the broken-nosed plug-ugly doubling as a part-time waiter removed their soup plates with considerable clatter. She took a cigarette from the packet conveniently to hand on the tablecloth and Crumb made haste to offer her his lighter. An incautious remark he had once made on the topic of smoking between courses had once caused a total close-down of privileges over a ten-day period and he was well aware that the traffic signals, though seemingly set at the moment to green, could be switched on him at any given moment. He knew that he would do well, therefore, to be assiduous in his attentions if he wanted to get the old T-bird into gear tonight. Which he certainly did. Meantime any further Crumbs of information, ha ha ha, might be withheld until, until … Yes. Quite so.
Of course the kid had a healthy appetite for food, as well, and no doubt the noix de veau à la provençale she had ordered would soon be making their appearance, only to be disposed of in record time. At the end of the meal Crumb would be picking up the bill, this despite the fact that the bloody girl had to be pulling in something like twenty times his present annual salary. Not in the way you might have supposed, either. Pay scales in the Metropolitan being what they sadly were, he could hardly have afforded to indulge her in this way, and indeed in others, were he not able substantially to augment his salary by various admittedly dubious means. Indeed the girl-friend herself was on occasion instrumental in putting him conveniently in the way of such trifles of crinkly stuff as might otherwise have escaped his clutching paws, this through her connection with one of the more salubrious Fleet Street tabloids, the Daily Snipe. Theirs might, in fact, have been described as a symbiotic relationship, though Crumb would have preferred to put it in another way and as often as possible. In furtherance of that end,
“Don’t suppose you’ll be headed for Cardiff yourself? In the immediate future?”
“I don’t fink so. Not on what you’ve told me so far. I mean, runnin’ drugs an’ all that, well, who doesn’t? … Nuffin there for me, I wouldn’t’ve thought.”
“You never can tell,” Crumb said sagely, pinging the prongs of his fork with his fingernail. “These things sometimes take off,” he said, allowing his eyes to wander wistfully. “The word is that Rodney has been making the wrong sort of waves out there in the boondocks. So maybe this geezer we’re looking out for had better make his delivery pretty quick.”
“Wot’s this geezer got then, a British passport?”
“So I’ve been led to believe.”
“An’ you’ve also bin led to believe you know the name he’s got on it?”
“Oh yes. Certainly. Certainly. But,” Crumb said, “why don’t we enjoy the meal and discuss these matters later in the evening? At your place, maybe?”
“Y’know somefing, Crumbo? You’re becomin’ a bit of a smoothie in your old age.”
“It was only a suggestion.”
“I might go along with it,” the girl friend said. “At that.”
2
When Dobie got back from work he found rather a large dark-haired man sitting in the kitchen.
“This is my husband,” Kate said.
“Ooo-er,” said Dobie.
… Not that he’d had much work to do that morning, strictly speaking. Since the consequences of an unfortunate traffic accident had compelled him to shave off his hideously unbecoming moustache and had left him instead with an even less becoming Bruderschaft-type duelling scar across his upper lip, the powers-that-were at the University had considerately relieved him of his teaching duties and indeed of all other tasks, however menial, that they could think of; this was not because the student body, less considerately, had begun to refer to Dobie as “Frankenstein” but because the unusual circumstances of his accident, as inaccurately reported by the London and (worse) by the local tabloids, had made him an object of curiosity and concern, if not of hilarity, to staff and students alike, not to mention certain members of the Board of Trustees. Who had pointed out that this wasn’t the first time Professor Dobie had attracted the attention of unsavoury elements of the local and national press and that if he was going to fall into the habit of bumping off, as opposed to bonking, his lady friends, then at least the Rector should ensure that he didn’t do it during full term. This the Rector had at once arranged accordingly. Which was why Dobie hadn’t had much work to do that morning, strictly speaking.
And now there was this large dark-haired fellow sitting in the kitchen.
“This is my husband,” Kate said.
“Ooo-er,” said Dobie.
This was more or less the sound that he had seen many times thus phonetically represented in the children’s comics of his early youth, where it had been widely employed by the masters of the genre to suggest emotions of dismay, trepidation and outright alarm. These were the sensations that he was experiencing on this present occasion. Therefore,
“Ooo-er,” he remarked.
He had, of course, his reasons.
Being, however, no longer an assiduous reader of the Gem and the Magnet but a University professor and all, a civilised adult unaccustomed to bashings on the boko and sockings on the snoot, he fixed, as he imagined, a winning smile on his face and advanced into the kitchen. “Hullo there,” he added.
“And this,” the husband said, “must be Roger, the lodger. Welcome, friend.”
He didn’t look particularly friendly but then he didn’t look actively hostile, either. Dobie had in fact little enough cause to fear any form of your actual physical violence since if the newcomer was large, he himself was larger, being just over six feet tall and built on the unacademic lines generally associated with hewers of wood, drawers of water and drivers of trans-continental articulated trucks; moreover, he had at once observed that something rather nasty had to have recently happened to the newcomer’s right hand, this being swathed in a huge white bandage that would certainly have proved an inhibitory factor in any bout of fisticuffs. For this reason also, no doubt, he didn’t extend it and Dobie didn’t offer the old five skins, either. A certain manly reticence was perhaps in the circumstances to be expected from both parties concerned.
“In fact my name’s John. John Dobie. And I’m not really a lodger. More of a sitting tenant.”
“No part of my concern,” the newcomer said, “what positions the two of you get int
o. I don’t care if it’s sitting, standing or hanging from the chandelier. The thing is Kate and I are having a private discussion, sport, so I’d be very much obliged if you’d nip along and take the Beaver Patrol out on a long country hike or find some other way of passing an agreeable summer evening. Pleased to have made your acquaintance and all that.”
He seemed to be labouring under all kinds of misapprehension. Dobie, looking around him bemusedly, hardly knew where to begin. “What chandelier?”
“He’s going a bit too fast for you, isn’t he?” Kate said kindly. “I know you professors of mathematics like to deal with one thing at a time, so why don’t you take this nice cuppa char and deal with it in your room and I’ll explain it all to you later?”
“Oh. Right. Certainly.”
“There’s a good chap.”
The cup of tea in question was reposing on a plastic tray along with a large plate of Dobie’s favourite crunchy biscuits. These munchable delicacies had clearly been prepared against Dobie’s arrival and, while he was normally accustomed to dispose of such repasts at the kitchen table while listening to Kate’s graphic descriptions of the various corpses she had dismembered in the course of the day, this was obviously a pleasure he would have on this occasion to forgo. There was one point, however, that remained to be properly established. “In point of fact I’m not a Scoutmaster. I’m not really much of an outdoors man at all. I’m—”
Kate pushed the tray firmly into his hands. “Run along, buster.”
“Okay.”
He didn’t have to run very far, his own room being some ten paces further down the passageway. Certainly there was no question of his going on cross-country hikes. What an extraordinary … Dobie twisted his body into peculiar convolutions which enabled him to open the door of his room while balancing the tea-tray on one lifted knee and thus further to attain the relatively secure haven of his own armchair, the tray having first been placed on the low table a little to his right. What an extraordinary business, he thought, selecting a sugar-bikky. Of course he had always known that Kate had a husband. Crunch. But then lots of people did. Married women, especially. And Kate’s was supposed to be also a doctor. Crunch. Out in the Middle East somewhere. Crunch. But from all accounts she hadn’t set eyes on him for eight, ten years and now all of a sudden here he was. Hrrrffpphhh. Dobie coughed explosively, dislodging a large number of tickly crumbs from his larynx and discharging them over the carpet. He grabbed the teacup and swallowed most of its content at a gulp. There. That was better.
But not much.
He raised his slightly watering eyes to look vaguely round the room in which he sat. His room. A room very much to his taste, though possibly not very much to anyone else’s. Since he still owned an expensive and commodiously furnished flat in one of the more sought-after residential districts on the outskirts of Cardiff, his tenancy of this fubsy little rabbit-hutch might indeed be thought hard to explain. The trouble with the flat, of course, was that not so very long ago his wife had been murdered in it; Dobie wasn’t a highly imaginative man but he wasn’t totally insensitive, either. Just insensitive enough to make of his marriage, while it had lasted, a pretty spectacular failure. For some while after Jenny’s death, living in this little room had seemed to ease Dobie’s sense of trauma, which was odd because someone else had been murdered in here, too. That was different, though. A friendly ghost, somehow. And these days Dobie was becoming a kind of murder-collector. It wasn’t that he went out to look for them. They came to him. He didn’t know how to account for it.
Just lucky, he guessed.
And having Kate so near at hand … That made it different, too. Kate was his best friend. It’s very nice, Dobie had discovered, to be able to go to bed with your best friend and to find she’s still your best friend when you wake up in the morning.
His marriage hadn’t been at all like that. Nor, as far as he could make out, had Kate’s. Just because you’re a doctor and a police pathologist doesn’t mean you can’t pick up a few traumas of your own. But Dobie had never asked her any questions about that side of things. He hadn’t needed to. They were friends.
That was why he was sure there wasn’t anything happening in the kitchen that she couldn’t handle. An unexpected development. That was all. There weren’t many situations in life, in Dobie’s opinion, that Kate couldn’t handle. If ever she ran into one, she’d let him know, because that’s what friends are for. So obviously there was nothing to worry about. It was just a bit … odd, when you thought about it …
The window of the room was wide open, admitting an occasional exhalation of warm asphalt-scented air, rich in carbon monoxide fumes and varied carcinogens. Dobie, still munching methodically, wandered towards it and stared vaguely down for a while at the street outside. The (very familiar) view exposed to his gaze was that of a row of dilapidated, indeed virtually derelict slate-roofed houses with the inevitable supermarket frontage planked down directly opposite him; this last appeared nowadays to cater uniquely to the needs of numerous New Age people with dreadlocks and weird lace-up boots who were usually being dragged along the pavements by large hairy dogs on strings. At one time in the not-so-long-ago, Ludlow Road had been located squarely within a solidly respectable working-class area with a boozer strategically placed just round the City Road corner and a car park handily placed right under his window; now, after so many years of Tory misrule, the term “working-class” could hardly be considered appropriate, the entire local populace being subsistent – more or less – on the NHSS and having, therefore, no need at all for those unfit-for-work certificates to which Kate had, in the old days, spent so many happy hours appending her signature; their unfitness for work or for any other form of physical exertion, come to that, was manifest to the most casual observer (and few came more casual than Professor Dobie).
This didn’t prevent them from being, in the overall, disgustingly healthy. Dobie was well aware that Kate, of late, wasn’t being overworked, either, even when her extra duties at the morgue were taken into account. Not many people this year, it seemed, were meeting with sudden, violent and unexpected deaths – considerably less than usual, anyway. Dobie shook his head. It was all most regrettable. Something should be done about it.
But then he was also finding himself with time, as the saying has it, on his hands these days. (A singularly absurd saying, when properly considered, and Dobie as an academic mathematician had indeed given much consideration to the matter, the nature of time being after all one of his things.) The trouble was that, as an academic mathematician precisely, he was in somewhat bad odour. Metaphorically speaking, of course. What with all the financial cutbacks at the University and the mood of suspicion, or indeed of alarm, occasioned in the Senate by his unfortunately over-publicised involvement in just such sudden, violent and unexpected … well, murders, if you wanted to put it bluntly, not just one but several, all in a row … to say nothing of his unwise championing of that aberrant aspect of chaos theory now known as the Dobie Paradox, not so much a lost cause as an abandoned and neglected waif peering through the swirling mists of post-Boolean algebra … Oh bloody hell, (Dobie thought,) let’s not go through all that nonsense again. Just call me Ishmael and leave it at that.
… But not Roger the Lodger. Certainly not. Though, now that he thought about it, Dobie felt reasonably sure that some kind of a joke had been intended. At any rate, this was a possibility to be considered.
He moved away from the window and continued his demolition of the sugar bikkies pile. The more you thought about it, the more … Well … The odder it seemed. You might think it odd, for a start, that throughout their two years (and a bit) of intimate cohabitation, Kate had hardly ever mentioned her husband. Dobie had learnt of his existence at the outset of their relationship, but that was all. Inferring from her reticence on the subject that this early marital adventure hadn’t been notably successful and being, unfortunately, only too able to make the same claim for himself, Dobie had never attempted to
question her on the matter; a tactful person, no, that he wasn’t, but a woman, he felt, should be allowed to keep her own counsel in certain matters, notably in those relating to her sex life … especially when developments may not too complacently be held to have taken a more favourable turn of late. But now that this mysterious but undoubtedly legally wedded consort had unexpectedly turned up like a bolt from the blue, this shortage of vital information might well prove something of a hindrance, so to speak, in one’s cogitations as to how and why and inasmuch as which.
What, after all, would you say to a husband you hadn’t set eyes on in the past ten years or so? Dobie somehow had the idea that a cosy chat about old times wouldn’t be figuring on the agenda. On the other hand, there wouldn’t be any real unpleasantness, surely? Among civilised people? … Perhaps there was some legal issue or other that had come up, something that had to be discussed. Not divorce, though. Kate had always been very firm about that, though she was hardly a fervent Catholic believer in other respects.
Dobie pushed the empty plate across the table and gazed at it moodily. Really you could argue that the whole thing was none of his business, unless of course Kate chose to make it so by telling him about it. Perhaps, Dobie thought, I will go for a walk. The heat was getting to be rather oppressive. Outside, there might be at least a bit of a breeze. If he walked towards the park …
What were they talking about, though?
You couldn’t help wondering …
“So, you’ve been in the wars again,” Kate said, “by the look of it.”