by Desmond Cory
Stainer listened to all this with the air of a well-brought-up child hearing an exceptionally boring fairy story for the umpteenth time, but Dobie had the feeling that his succinct explanation was going down no better than his earlier outline of the plot of The Ancient Mariner, and this was to be regretted. “By the same token,” he whimpered, seeking to hold his audience with a glittering eye in the manner of his famous forebear, “you’d get a fearsome keyhole with the little gun because there’d be no lateral spin on the bullet and for the same reason you wouldn’t get much penetration, either, even if it were fired from a range of three or four feet … which I’m assuming it was. Foot-pounds of energy are a product of mass and velocity, as everybody knows, I mean that’s such a simple equation I could work it out for you in my head if you like.”
“Don’t bother.”
No. The old Dobie magic wasn’t working today.
“Where’d you get this three or four feet away stuff? He’d have had to have had someone with him at the time. In this room with him. Of course you may think I’m picking nits and I appreciate that it’s a very minor detail—”
“Well, no. That’s quite right. Firing a bullet doctored like that, you couldn’t really be sure of hitting anyone more than ten feet away. You’d want to get up close. The closer the better.”
Stainer, with a visible effort, forebore to sigh. He picked up his pen instead and put it away in his pocket. “I’m afraid I have to be getting back to town, Professor. It’s been a great pleasure meeting you and enjoying this little chat but I can’t see that it’s getting me anywhere. Because there wasn’t anyone with him at the time and anyway … Rodney was very careful about things like that. He wouldn’t have let anyone come into this office waving a pistol about. Not unless Guffin … Guffin …”
He stopped short, his hands still gripping the arms of his chair.
“If Guffin … Hmmmmmm …”
Now it was Dobie’s turn to find himself at a loss. “Guffing? Who’s been guffing? And why?”
“It was his job to check up on things like that. Make sure that no one came in … But you think he might have been persuaded to neglect his duties? For a consideration?” He shook his head, more vehemently than before. “Nahhhhh. True as steel, is Nicky Guffin. Mainly because he knows he’d be carried out of here in a laundry basket if he wasn’t. No, he wouldn’t want to excite my disapproval, not at all.”
“Is that how you express your disapproval?”
“Let’s say it might be one of the ways.”
Dobie’s manner had now become a little hesitant. “And am I to take it you disapprove of whoever it was who shot Primrose? I mean, equally strongly?”
“Well now, look, professor.” Stainer leaned forwards across the desk with the air of one prepared to lay all his cards on the table. Face upwards. Dobie’s suspicions, naturally, were instantly aroused. “I run an organisation, I think you realise that. The sort of organisation you can only run on a nice old-fashioned basis. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, like it says in the Bible. Otherwise, you say unto the one, go, and the bugger doesn’t go, see what I mean? … Always provided that some urgent and important business matter doesn’t hold things up. Like getting hold of a lot of valuable merchandise that seems to be stashed away some place, by way of example.”
“Yes.” Dobie remained seemingly unperturbed. “So if I wanted to get rid of a member of your organisation by violent means, I’d be wise to make it appear that it was someone else who’d done it. Isn’t that the implication of what you’re saying?”
“No point in denying it. Since we’re talking off the record. But Guffin—”
“No, no. Forget about Guffin. The truth is,” Dobie said, “it was always pretty obvious who shot Primrose. The problem lay in seeing how and why. And now I’ve told you how and why, so the rest is up to you. And the ones who goeth whenever you tell them to. That’s why I’m talking to you and not to the police.”
Stainer stared at him bleakly. “You may think you’ve told me something, professor, but I can’t for the life of me see how I’m any better off. You’ll just have to try and spell it out a bit more clearly.”
It looked as though Dobie had his audience’s full attention at last. “Well, all right,” he said. “I’ll try to do that.”
15
“But she isn’t talking,” the girl said. “Not what you’d call talking. Just floating along on a purple cloud, if you ask me. And goin’ on about … I dunno what. Goblins and such.”
“Goblins?”
If indeed she were seeing goblins, Guffin reflected, the value of her testimony in other directions might be open to serious question. Though it hardly mattered now.
“Just slip her an overdose, like I said.”
“You sure that’s what …?”
“Yes, I’m sure that’s what. She should’ve talked when she had the chance.”
The girl shrugged. “She’s higher’n a kite right now. Shouldn’t take too much to tip her over the edge, seein’ as she ain’t got the habit.”
“An’ when they find her they’ll reckon she did it to herself, in a fit of remorse or whatever. No problems on that score.”
“Yeah, but they’re not going to find her here. I got strong views on dead bodies turning up in my pad.”
“Not to worry. She’ll be moved out real quick.”
“You better move out real quick yourself,” the girl said. “Boy, you stink.”
“Guffin wouldn’t have found the gun,” Dobie said, “because Coyle had it in his hand when he went in.”
“In his hand?”
“Yes. A very, very small gun, remember. With a very thick roll of bandage around it. Of course, Kate had the key to the problem all the time. Or to be exact, she was carrying it round in a bag. The other gun. The Uzi.”
“But—”
“The bullet had to have been fired before, naturally, and by the Uzi, so that it would have the Uzi’s rifling marks on its casing. And presumably it would have been fired by the man who gave her the Uzi, though she didn’t know he was giving it to her at the time. She thought she was just looking after a bag for him. Then the old used cartridge-case … That would have to be planted more or less at the spot where she might be supposed to have fired the shot, again presumably by someone who was expecting her arrival and knew which way she’d be coming. Really he might as well have laid down a paper trail, it was all so obvious.”
“I still don’t see—”
“Oh, nor did I. Not for a long time. Because the wound didn’t have any scorch marks around it, according to the police. And if you fire a shot from a range of under ten feet you’ll get scorch marks, whether the bullet keyholes or not. That was what had me flummoxed, until I thought of the bandage. You wouldn’t get any marks if the bullet was fired through three or four thicknesses of lint. And that also explains why no one heard the shot at the time it was fired. The bandage would have muffled the sound and in a soundproofed room …” Dobie waved his hand vaguely in the air, presumably to indicate the surrounding walls. “And anyway the noise of the car would have drowned the sound of the shot, at least to anyone outside.”
“What car?”
“Kate’s car. The one she was driving up the road to park outside the garage. It’s a bit of an old rattler, to tell you the truth. Coyle had to wait for her to get here, of course, before firing the shot, and it gave him an excuse to call Primrose over to the window.”
He had at last corrected the set of his glasses but had failed to adjust the stem of the earpiece over his right ear, so that he now somewhat resembled a racehorse in blinkers. And a twenty-to-one no-hoper at that.
“But they did hear a shot. The police did. Everyone did. There’s no disputing it.”
“Oh, I heard it myself, though I didn’t pay it very much attention at the time, my mind being occupied with … But that was two or three minutes later, when Kate was walking along that path through the park on her way to this building and when Co
yle had come down from this office and was walking down the street. He still had the gun tucked away under the bandage, of course, and so all he had to do was press the trigger … and everyone heard that shot all right. But when you hear a shot it isn’t always easy to tell exactly where the sound comes from, and there wouldn’t have been a lot of difference in the quality of the sound itself because an Uzi’s a machine-pistol after all, it doesn’t go whang like a high-velocity rifle, it sort of pops. And there’d have been the sound of the ricochet as well, of course, with the bullet going off the wall of the building and heading heaven knows where.” Dobie demonstrated a little over-demonstratively. Stainer ducked. “And there’d have been an echo effect as well … Confusing, in short. And everybody was. Confused, I mean. Including myself. But then, I’m more used to being confused than most people are.”
Stainer was getting more than a little pissed off by this interminable monologue and reckoned it was time he got a word in, if only edgeways. “And that mark over there on the brickwork by the window? The ricochet mark?”
Dobie got to his feet and ambled across to the window to survey it. “A good wallop with the end of the pistol barrel could have done that. He wouldn’t have hurt his hand because there was never anything wrong with his hand in the first place. He wouldn’t let Kate check on it when she wanted to, and as he was a doctor himself … or perhaps I should say since he’d once been a doctor himself … she didn’t insist. No, he was just establishing his cover, so to speak.”
Jackson had no need to establish his cover and certainly had no need to come swinging in through the window on the end of a rope with a loud baritone bellow. Nothing of the sort. He pressed the bell-button beside the door and after a longish pause was duly admitted to the flat by a dark-haired young lady in a blue satin house-robe. Fox and Wallace followed him in. Also among those present on this occasion was Mr Nicholas Guffin, the well-known man-about-town and part-time ponce, who was sitting in an armchair and reading a newspaper with a studied air of about-to-be-injured innocence.
“Evenin’ all,” Jacko said.
Stainer felt that he still hadn’t played a sufficiently effective part in this little exchange of conversation and, taking advantage of a brief lull in Dobie’s excursion into the stream of consciousness, attempted to set matters right. This while Dobie, still standing by the window, was staring out of it in a vacant and distinctively cross-eyed manner.
“Look,” Stainer said, ignoring the fact that Dobie was already doing precisely this, though to no apparent purpose. “I don’t say you haven’t given me a certain amount of food for thought, of a far-fetched kind. But then I already had you weighed off as a smart cookie. Trouble is you’re also a bit of an innocent, if you don’t mind my saying so, I suppose it’s all this academic work you do that … leads you to suppose that all this stuff about how Rodney came to be killed is of any interest to me. Well, it isn’t. It’s all a bit too theoretical. If this Coyle character did it the way you say, and I’ll grant you that it does strike me as being a possibility … Okay, then something’ll have to be done about it, for reasons I’ve already made clear to you. But that’s not the nature of my real interest in the boyo. Whatever he may have been once, he’s a dealer in merchandise now, in fact he’s … what you might call a trafficker, if that isn’t speaking too plainly. It’s what he’s got to sell that interests me. That’s why I want to find him. And quick.” He stared again at Dobie, who was shaking his head. “Something worrying you, professor?”
“It shouldn’t be too difficult to find him. He’s almost certainly somewhere in Cardiff.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Because when I took him to the railway station he told me he was headed some place else.”
“I think I follow your reasoning. Just about. Holed up somewhere in town, then?”
“Yes. And without a bandaged hand, of course. Dai Dymond could certainly tell you where. You know Dai Dymond?”
“Of course I know him. But I’m surprised that you do.”
“Oh, I don’t. Other than by reputation. Dai Dymond’s a smart rookie, too, if I understand the term correctly. The local top gun, anyway. I think the whole scheme was his idea, if only because he took good care to see there were plenty of people around to vouch for Coyle’s alibi. A police surveillance team, no less.”
“Are you telling me that Dymond’s lot have got that merchandise already? Because if Dymond’s fronting for Coyle …”
“I don’t think there is any merchandise,” Dobie said regretfully. “I expect it’s true that Coyle was in with the dealers in the Middle East, but I doubt very much if he was running the stuff in the present instance. Though that, of course, was what Primrose had been led to believe. It’s hard to think of any other way in which Coyle could have got close enough to kill him. He’d have been paid to do it, naturally.”
“… Dymond again?”
“Or Dymond’s suppliers. Whoever they are.”
“Dymond,” Stainer said, coming as close to hissing the word as was humanly possible. “My brother is going to be very angry with Dymond when he hears about this. And I’m none too pleased with him myself. Got no ethical sense at all, some people.”
“Well, he wouldn’t have much appreciated your sending Primrose into his own manor, would he? You know what these Welshmen are like when it comes to a nationalist issue and they’ve been invaded by the English too many times before. That’s what’s made them so crafty. No, I’m afraid there never was any consignment, except in Primrose’s imagination. No merchandise at all. Other than whatever samples Coyle might have sent in as what you might call bait for the trap. So to speak.”
Interesting things were going on down there in the street and Dobie’s tone had become a little abstracted. Jackson was solicitously helping Kate to climb into the passenger seat of a police car drawn up by the pavement, while Wallace and Foxy were in no way solicitously performing a similar service for a young couple eccentrically dressed in handcuffs. Dobie hadn’t seen them before, but he knew who they were, more or less. Kate had been able, as he had noticed, to walk across the pavement without too much difficulty. This, to his relief.
He turned back at last towards the desk. “It must be all a bit embarrassing for you, I quite see that.”
“I’m not easily embarrassed,” Stainer said, stating an obvious fact.
“You see, my friend Kate Coyle—”
“I know nothing about your friend Kate Coyle, nothing at all. Can’t help you there.”
“But that’s the really embarrassing part. The police have gone and arrested her again.”
“How can they have …” Stainer stopped abruptly. “No. I’d know if they had. I’ve got my contacts.”
“Well, then they’ll tell you that they’ve also arrested that … what’s his name? … Mr Guffin, as well as that young lady who lives in the flat downstairs. Not Melanie. The other one. And I imagine the police will have found some drugs there all right. But of course the major charge will be abduction. A very serious charge indeed, Inspector Jackson tells me.”
After quite a long pause Stainer said,
“I know nothing about all this. Nothing whatsoever.”
“Well, there’s certainly no reason why you should be implicated. I’m sure that Guffin will bear what you said about laundry baskets well in mind and will take his punishment with a Stoic indifference when he’s indicted.”
“With a what?”
“He’ll keep his lip buttoned up.”
“Ah. I see.”
There was an even longer pause, during which Stainer looked at Dobie very hard indeed. In the end he said,
“All right. Where’s the catch?”
“The catch?”
“What’s in all this for Number One? … For you, Professor?”
For the first time Dobie hesitated a moment before replying. “Nothing, really. But I imagine that they’ll be getting Coyle out of the country pretty fast and while you and your brother
are running your organisation on severely Biblical lines, he may well feel a certain reluctance about returning to it. Which will suit me just fine. And Kate even better.”
“Absence won’t make the heart grow fonder?”
“No. But it’ll prevent her from succumbing to the temptation of going out and really shooting someone. I mean him.”
“I see what you mean. He certainly managed to get her involved in a very nasty frame-up. Which could indeed,” Stainer said, “have had fatal consequences.” He still wasn’t sure why it hadn’t. Though he supposed that ass Guffin had screwed things up again. “Not a very nice thing to do, in my opinion.”
“No. But from what Kate’s told me about it, I have to suppose he has some kind of a … grudge against her, is that the word? – for not helping him out when they unfrocked him, or whatever it is the BMA does to doctors who get themselves in trouble. And I got the impression he wasn’t too pleased about her relationship with me, either. Being, I would say, of the jealous type. But I hope I can now feel reasonably confident he won’t be bothering her again in the near future … or not, at any rate, in the same way.”