by Desmond Cory
“I meet a lot of people,” Olly said. “So does Dot, one way or another. A lot of men, anyway. But she hasn’t met that Kate Coyle or ever even seen her so what are we doing, sodding around in here? I mean, we are trying to find her, aren’t we? Or aren’t we?”
“Oh, certainly.” That morning Dobie was missing Kate rather badly. It was annoying, at this present juncture, having no one around he could really talk to. Olly doubtless had her points, but it wasn’t the same, not at all; indeed her role in the whole affair remained, to him at least, in some ways obscure. “What did she mean about having been on the crime page?”
“Who?”
“That girl. Your friend. She said—”
“Oh, that. Pushing crack to the johns on the side. No big deal. Well, they all do that. Primrose’s girls, I mean. Dot was just unlucky. And pretty damned stupid, like I said. She got off, of course. Suspended sentence.”
Pushing crack to … Ah. Dobie got it. “She sells drugs?”
“Sure. Why not? She gets the juice for free. And it all helps to keep the trade moving. You got to move with the times in the call-in market, same like in journalism. Maybe not such a lot of difference when it comes to the crunch.” Dobie wasn’t sure if her tone was abstracted or regretful, but it didn’t matter much either way as he wasn’t sure if he understood what she was talking about, either. “You have,” he complained, “this extremely esoteric way of expressing yourself. Perhaps it’s endemic to your profession. But if you could confine yourself to the range of ordinary English—”
Melanie, very fortunately, elected upon that moment to return, just as Olly’s hand was closing murderously around a conveniently-placed flower-vase. “Earwig-go, then. Anyone for milk and sugar?”
“Just one lump, please,” Dobie said. “Ta.”
“Mind if I use your phone?” Olly asked.
It was in the bedroom. Where else? … Olly dialled the relevant number, staring at Melanie’s blue teddy bear with immediate disfavour. Almost at once, Crumb answered. “… Crumb,” Crumb said.
“Lissen,” Olly said, reverting for his benefit to Whitechapelese. “It ain’t working.”
“Oh? … Oh, it’s you. What ain’t working?”
“The Dobie thing isn’t. We should’ve known better. He’s stringin’ me along, the bastard. Stands to reason he’d know how to throw us off the scent, an old pro like him.”
“Why, what’s he doing?”
“I’ll tell you wot he’s doing. He’s wasting my bloody time, that’s wot.” Olly’s voice rising to an agitated squeal. “And drivin’ me arfway bonkers into the bargain. He’s doing nothing, that’s what he’s doing. Nothing at all.”
“He can’t do that. I’m doing nothing. Where are you, anyway?”
“We’re with one of Primrose’s girls, that’s where, and she’s feeding him cups of coffee like she’s besotted, how does he do it? is what I want to know … Melanie, you remember that Melanie? Used to be a groupie? That one?”
“She’s on the Bayswater kick.”
“Not any more she isn’t. She’s ’ere right now.”
“So what does she know?”
“What’s she going to know?” Olly wailed. “A dumb klutz like that one? Sweet eff A, right? So what we doing here drinking her goddam awful coffee? He’s playing me up, that’s what the bastard’s doing. Him and his van den Buggers. I got a story to file and it won’t wait for ever and all he does is sit round and talk. Just now I near-as-nothing let him have a bunch of tulips right in the gob, see what I mean?”
“Not quite. How’s this van den Bugger come into it?”
“He doesn’t. They don’t. I don’t know who or what they are but he goes on and on about them.”
“Well,” Crumb said. “We got nothing new coming in this end either.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
“Gawd,” Olly said. She hung up, breathing heavily through her nose.
… And now the Man appeared to be giving some kind of a lecture. Quite incredible. To an enthralled audience of one. Inconceivable. “You see, it doesn’t really matter which way you go round the board,” Dobie was eagerly waffling, his coffee-cup and saucer perilously balanced on one knee. “That won’t affect the degree of entropic disorder within the system provided, of course, you collect two hundred quid from the bank every time you move past the GO square. If you don’t, then the second law of thermodynamics will naturally apply and the system will inevitably disintegrate. In other words, you’ll lose all your money. That’s because the bank, you see, constitutes another closed system linked to the other and so the entropy of the two combined systems must be greater than the sum of the two individual systems. It’s clear as daylight, really.”
“Oh yeah.” Melanie, fascinated. The little cow.
“So,” Dobie maintained, threatening the stability of his coffee-cup with a sweeping motion of his right hand, “you have the constant cash flow from bank to players which maintains your entropic equilibrium while at the same time there’s an equivalent cash flow sustaining the bank from the players. Which gives you something like a perpetual motion machine. And which, moreover, as I’ve pointed out, operates equally well in reverse, or in other words independently of the so-called psychological arrow of time. There are some rather pretty little equations involved—”
“You mean like a founting?”
“A what?”
“… Using the same wa’er. Over ’n’ over again.”
“Well, no and yes. But chiefly no. Because you see … Well, I haven’t formulated the equations as yet to my complete satisfaction. Indeed I may have to try and get Stephen Hawking and the Cambridge boys in on it. He tells me he went quite deeply into games theory when he was a slip of a lad. You see, where Wittgenstein went wrong—”
“Dobie …”
“Where Wittgenstein—”
“Dobie …”
Dobie paused and blinked. Olly was sounding now more Kate-like than ever. “Er … Yes?”
“Turn it up, will you, Dobie? We got fings to do.”
“We have? Oh yes. By the way, did I say Wittgenstein? … I meant Einstein. Einstein always insisted that God didn’t play dice and that was the reason for his rejection of quantum mech—”
“DO-BEEEEEE!”
Melanie, leaning swiftly forwards, was just able to rescue the coffee cup in time as Dobie leapt springily to his feet. “Well, perhaps some other time—”
“Just one thing I ain’t got quite straight.”
“What’s that?”
“Are you sayin’ I shouldn’t put my doofer in the bank?”
“In a bank? Good heavens, no.”
“Where should I put it, then?”
“That flower-vase is as good a place as any.”
“There,” Melanie said. “Wot I always fort. Yeah, but … how did you know that’s where I keep the lolly?”
“I fear,” Dobie said, “I must ask for an amnesty in that direction.” He cautiously fingered the wallet in his inside coat pocket.
“… Remarkably bright girl, that. Quite a sharp intelligence. I was pleasantly surprised.”
“She’s a good listener, sure,” Olly said ominously. “You get to be, in that line of business.”
“Oh?” Dobie looked up and down the passageway. “Well, now. Let’s see what Dirty Gertie has to say, shall we? I must say this morning is proving to be most instructive.”
Olly was staring at him, open-mouthed. “… Who?”
“Gertie, the name is. An Indonesian lady, as I believe. She lives right opposite.” Dobie raised one hand to depress the doorbell and then paused. Behind the door various subdued squealing sounds could be vaguely heard, punctuated by sharp staccato screams. “On second thoughts, perhaps the moment isn’t opportune.”
“No. Sounds like it isn’t.”
“I can always come back later.” Dobie glanced at his wrist-watch. “I don’t suppose she’ll be able to tell us much of any import, since she was
n’t here at the time of the … incident.”
“And how d’you know that?”
“Melanie’s insistent on the point. It seems that Gertie and the two young ladies downstairs were invited to a rather swish party last night, to entertain some visiting businessmen from Japan.” A notably reverberant female yell from behind the door defeated its soundproofing and echoed down the passageway, suggesting, if imprecisely, what form of entertainment might well have been provided. “The car called for them shortly after seven o’clock. Melanie in fact was invited, too, but decided not to go. Of course, the significance of all this will not have escaped you.”
“Oh yes, it will. Look, I’m beginning to fink—”
“It means that apart from whoever was upstairs in that office place at the time, Melanie was alone in the building at the time of the shooting, my having left her a very few moments previously.” Dobie, turning thoughtfully away from the door. “So we can dismiss the possibility, can we not? of any of the young ladies’ johns, as Melanie describes them, having been around here at the time and now finding the circumstances a little too embarrassing for them to admit to it. Nor, of course, could any one of them have taken it into his head himself to go upstairs and shoot that gentleman whose name I’ve temporarily forgotten …”
“Primrose,” Olly said wearily.
“Yes, shoot Mr Primrose …” Dobie stopped short, struck by a sudden recollection. “Good heavens. There’s another extraordinary coincidence. You’ll remember that when we first met —”
“Dobie! …” She’d be saying that name in her sleep before long. “We both know who shot Primrose and we’re trying to find her and none of this is helping us one little bit. I’m starting to believe you’re just not taking our partnership very seriously, see what I mean?”
“That’s,” Dobie said, “the thing about scientific enquiry. You never know when some tiny little item of seemingly incidental information may not come in useful. Sometimes, indeed, it may open up totally unexpected vistas onto wider horizons than you could have anticipated. Then, of course, you wish it hadn’t.”
11
Peter Crumb’s claim that the South Wales Constabulary had spent that morning sitting on their arses was, of course, totally unjustified. Pontin, for one, had been having a whale of a time hamming it up for a gloomy TV crew from Llandaff who had filmed him sitting portentously behind his desk and wearing a snazzy Brigade of Guards tie borrowed hurriedly from the desk sergeant. They had filmed him several times, in fact, Pontin contriving to blow his lines with monotonous regularity. “… G’morning. The police are anxious … are extremely anxious … Oh shit.” “Best to say afternoon, sir, it’ll be two o’clock before this goes out, after the two o’clock news, see.” “Ah. Right. Good afternoon.” A long silence. “Here is a police thingummy. I mean a message.” A longer silence. “Never mind all that, sir,” the interviewer said. Eventually. “They’ll know you won’t be conducting evening prayers, that time of the day. Just say what you got written down on that there card, if you’ll be so good.” Pontin stared at that there card, hypnotised. “It says, the police are obnoxious … I’ll start again, shall I?”
What Crumb had meant, of course, to say was that so far all efforts on the part of the fuzz to trace and apprehend the missing Coyles had been as ineffectual as those of Dobie, if not as inconsequential. Hence, of course, Pontin’s police thingummy, now entering into its fifteenth version. “We’ll just ’ave a little pause yurr, sir, where we can edit in the stills.” “Where you can do what?” “Show the pickchers, sir, of them as you want to ’elp you in your inquiries.” “Ah. That’s important, then, to your way of thinking?”… What was important to Pontin’s way of thinking was that his own unprepossessing features should appear in full-frontal glory throughout the entire broadcast, but then it had to be supposed that these media berks knew what they were doing, more or less, and anyway he had a press photocall (arranged and so described by the Station PR Officer) that very afternoon. All of this unprecedented media attention sufficed to make Pontin as happy as pig in straw and twice as incoherent.
Ah, but not so Dim Smith.
“Arthur, you silly old fraud,” he was screaming vehemently on the line to Central. “Is that reelly all that you can come up with? Honestly, there’s times when I despair, I reelly do.”
“It’s all that Immigration can come up with. You know they’re having to tread a bit careful nowadays, after all that kerfuffle with the Jamaicans.”
“I couldn’t care less about the Rastas, darling, all I’m asking for is a little information about an itsybitsy passport and all I’m hoping for is a little cooperation, do I make myself clear?”
“What?”
Dim Smith rang off in a right old paddy.
“They’re worse than useless, that Heath Row lot. I’ve a good mind to write a letter of protest to the Home Secretary.”
“At least,” Crumb said, “we know he’s been in the UK for nearly a fortnight now. And if he came in on one of the Marseilles flights, maybe Air France can tell us something.”
“That’s hardly the point at issue, old dear. Immigration should have some kind of checking procedure, surely? They can’t just have people—”
“Not if he’d got a British passport. As it seems he has. And we’ve got no reason to suppose he brought the gun in with him, even if we believe his wife’s story. Which personally I don’t.”
“About its being in his bag?”
“She wouldn’t let me look at the bag, you’ll remember. That’s highly suspicious.”
“Yes. But not our concern. It’s those goddam drugs we’re after, Crumbo, all that great pile of chicken-chaser they’ve got stacked up somewhere. You’re obsessed with that doctor woman, if you don’t mind my saying so. Kevin Coyle – he’s the lad we got to find.”
“And what’s more, we got to find him first.”
“A valid point, my love. A very valid point.”
Jackson wasn’t in any way obsessed with that doctor woman, but he was worried about her and was getting progressively more worried as the morning went by and no definite information came in as to Kate’s whereabouts. There were, of course, several hundred phone calls, inspired by the blurred photographs in the Daily Snipe and duly fielded by the switchboard; doubtless there’d be several hundred more when Pontin’s police thingummy had been duly broadcast and assimilated by an avid public. Dobie himself had already been observed in Leeds, several times in Manchester, in Plymouth and in several unlikely places dotted around the Midlands; this although Jacko knew perfectly well where Dobie was and what he was doing. He knew this because Foxy had conscientiously called in a half-hour or so ago. “… Got a journalist lady with him, nice little bit of crumpet she is, too. They’re chatting up that other one, that Melanie. Don’t ask me why.” Jackson hadn’t been about to. Knowing what Dobie was doing and knowing what he was up to were very different things, as in the past Jacko had learnt to his cost.
“… Unless he’s laying some kind of a false trail, like. Even if he does know where Kate Coyle’s hiding out, he’s not likely to go there while he’s got that other bint stringing along with him. I suppose there’s no news of …?”
“Nothing,” Jacko said. Echoing Peter Crumb exactly. “Just the usual rubbish. The question is, does she know where her husband’s gone? And is she with him? … Because if so, it ain’t exactly the safest place for her to be. Least of all now George Stainer’s in town.”
“George’ll have her on the list, you reckon?”
“It’s the way they work, Foxy, you know that. And the Specials’ll be trying to get to her first because that’s the way they work. There’s a whole load of horse still going spare and Kevin Coyle’s the only guy who knows where it’s cached … but we can’t be totally sure about that and Stainer can’t be, either.”
“I’m not sure that I like that line of thought,” Foxy said.
“No. No more do I.”
With Nicky Guffin, that made
three of them.
“It wasn’t my fault,” Guffin said, affecting with an effort the sort of glassy grin one normally sees only on the faces of the presenters of TV chat shows, a form of entertainment in which Guffin himself had never participated; there appeared to be a distinct possibility now that he never would. “I mean, I hope no one’s going to shoot me. I’m only his secretary when all’s said and done.”
“Shoot you?” Stainer seemed to be quite alarmed at this idea. “Good heavens, no. Out of the question. We don’t go in for that sort of thing. This is England, after all. No, I should think I’ll most probably have you garotted.”
“Wales, sir,” the Arab-looking character said, having first nervously cleared his throat.
“What?”
“This yurr is Wales, sir. Not England. Cwm Rhondda like.”
“Well, you may be right, but that’s hardly to the point.” Stainer, fixing once more his gaze severely upon Guffin, who seemed to be very little consoled by his earlier reassurance. “No one’s suggesting that this unfortunate little accident was in any way your fault, Guffin, but it’s a hard old world is what I’m saying.”
“Okay, I s’pose you could say I was his minder, me havin’ a Black Belt and all, but that’d be in the case of anyone cuttin’ up rough, see? as sometimes happens, what you might call a spot of botheration, so to speak. Yeah, I can handle that all right, but I don’t see as there’s much I can do about it if some geezer takes a shot at you through the window and blows your block off, me or anyone else for that matter.”
“And indeed you weren’t even there.”
“That’s right, I wasn’t. His Nibs ’aving told me to piss off way before it ’appened.”