THE STRANGE ATTRACTOR
Desmond Cory
Copyright © Desmond Cory 1991
In the Professor Dobie series:
THE MASK OF ZEUS
THE DOBIE PARADOX
Synopsis
‘Jackson?’
‘Sir?’
‘What’s a pundit?’
‘I think it’s one of them Indian geezers, sir, as comes up and strangles you from behind.’
‘Yes, that sounds very likely.’
With policemen around like Detective-Inspector Michael Jackson (a.k.a. Wacko Jacko), who, you may reasonably ask, needs a detective? Of the many perplexing puzzles here facing the gentle reader, this is almost the only one that permits of a ready answer.
Dobie isn’t an Indian geezer - in fact he’s a professor of mathematics - and he hasn’t strangled anyone from behind, or at least not lately. But when his errant wife and friend are both spectacularly bopped one dark and stormy evening, he is not only a witness to the event but a principal suspect.
His search for the true mastermind behind these BRUTAL SLAYINGS, a sinister figure known to him only as Agatha Christie, leads him to the in-house clinic of Dr Kate Coyle, pathologist extraordinaire, to the hi-tech administrative offices of Corder Acoustics Ltd (where everyone else appears to him to be equally extraordinaire), and finally to the murky depths of an IBM computer, into which he disappears as into a Baskervillean boghole. His mission: to VERIFY the murderer’s identity and CANCEL.
No easy task, with Wacko Jacko hard on his heels and with Agatha Christie spinning an elaborate web of total befuddlement. A previous murder has to be uncovered, and an industrial spinach network (as Jackson would call it) unravelled, and then of course there’s Sinful Susan lurking in the background…
To say nothing of the strange attractor…
CRITICAL ACCLAIM
From Publishers Weekly
This near-perfect puzzler, written with intelligence and laced with wit, features an eminently appealing protagonist. He is Welsh professor of mathematics John Dobie--amiably sexy, decent and honorable, and endearingly vague except when he's discussing an abstruse mathematical concept. When two murdered women turn up in his bed within the space of a few hours, his perceptive intellect transforms him from the most likely suspect into shrewd amateur sleuth. Dobie not only solves the case by developing syllogistic chains on an IBM computer, he also stumbles into an affecting romance with Dr. Kate Coyle, Cardiff's pinch-hitting pathologist.
1
“Too bad about Cantwell, isn’t it?”
“Um,” Dobie said.
He wondered who the hell Cantwell was. Probably someone who’d strained his knee before the Test Match, or developed a blister on his spinning finger. Dobie disliked being forced to admit his ignorance on such topics of universal interest as this, so, “Um,” he said.
“Tragedy, really,” said Merrick, dipping his long nose into a plastic teacup.
Merrick, though, Dobie thought, struggling to emerge from the mood of misty somnolence in which he usually passed the eleven o’clock coffee-break. It wouldn’t be cricket, then. Mervyn Evans was cricket. Merrick didn’t know a bloody thing about cricket. Merrick didn’t know a bloody thing about anything except Macintosh computers. Could Cantwell conceivably be a…? Surely not. Even though they gave them such extraordinary names nowadays. “What exactly, er… happened?”
“I thought you knew,” Merrick said. “He shot himself.”
Dobie felt instantly relieved. Cantwell, then, was definitely not a computer but some form or other of the human species. That still left the field pretty wide open. His demise was, however, at least in Merrick’s view, a tragedy. It really sounded very much like a student. Or a member of the staff. Though in the latter case, one would have expected Merrick to sound a little more pleased about it.
Either way, it seemed the sort of thing about which he, Dobie, should really have been informed by someone or other. It was disgraceful. “No one tells me anything these days,” Dobie said somewhat plaintively. “It’s disgraceful. Shot himself? Good heavens.”
“Well, you wouldn’t want to go round shouting about it from the rooftops.”
“What a peculiar suggestion, Gwyn. Nothing could have been further from my mind.”
“What I mean,” said Merrick patiently, “is that we don’t want to give the impression that our graduates have formed the habit of shooting themselves as soon as they’ve gone into business. It discourages prospective employers.”
“Graduates? There’ve been other cases, then?”
“No, no. Not that I know of. I used the plural form merely to establish my point.”
“I see.” Dobie considered the matter for a moment. “Which was… ?”
“Well, that’s why you mightn’t have been told about it, is all.”
“No question of mightn’t, Gwyn. I wasn’t, I most definitely wasn’t.”
“Neither was I, if it comes to that. There was a bit about it in the paper.”
“Ah. Poor chap.” Cantwell? “Poor chap.” Cantwell?… No. No bell rang. “When did it happen?”
“Day before yesterday. We were talking about it earlier, but you couldn’t have been listening.”
This was highly probable. Dobie glanced at his wrist-watch and hurriedly drank what was left of his tea. It was almost cold. Borrodaile and Wain, he now saw, had left the room already. Annoying. He had wanted to have a word with Wain about something or other. “In business, you said?”
“Eh?”
“Who was he working for?”
“Corder Acoustics,” Merrick said. “Doing well, too, from all accounts.”
“Some private problem, then.”
“One has to suppose so.”
“Ah well. Life must go on. Papers to mark.”
“Back to the grind,” Merrick agreed. Unenthusiastically. “Still, only two more weeks down the tube, thank heaven.”
Dobie, having mentally checked the mathematical verifiability of this assertion and determined it to be correct to four decimal places, nodded, placed his empty cup on the windowsill, picked up his briefcase and made for the door, discovering when halfway there that the briefcase was someone else’s. It wasn’t the first time this had happened. He would have to find out who the other briefcase belonged to and complain about it. Have it painted white, or something. He returned to effect the needed substitution, then wandered through the door obscurely marked
STA F ROOM
DEPT ATH MATI S
and turned to the left down the corridor. Merrick had already disappeared from sight, and a faint but penetrating drone from the rooms to either side indicated that the third teaching session of the morning was under way. In other words, Dobie was late, as usual. He paused and lit a cigarette to show how little he cared. The door to his right was a fraction ajar and a persuasively well-modulated voice, recognisable as Borrodaile’s, emerged from it.
“… now the image or if you prefer it the figure that we have on the board representing our average ratio of persistence it’s evident that developments will be demonstrated by variations or fluctuations ascending or descending the level of our original curve and you’ll also have observed that our average ratio will remain at par in spite of such variations as may take place in the comparative prices of the basic commodities that have been taken into account and this is because of the precisely analogous movement in an opposite direction of the prices of related or residual commodities through which the ascent or descent of our curve must be cancelled out. Therefore, in order to establish an equation expressing the stimulation-depression ratio in the production of a given commodity…”
The voice faded to insignificance as Dobie moved down the corridor. It was
interesting, and sometimes encouraging, to overhear other people’s lectures; Dobie was sincere in his belief that his own expositions came close to establishing what might be called a maximum of incomprehensibility, but the evidence was incontrovertible that others pressed hard on his heels. Certainly the average stimulation-depression ratio strongly favoured the latter. The final equation would thus represent a total ellipse, its centre lying at the point of origin. That, Dobie thought, sighing like a meditative grampus as he turned the corner, is the trouble with me. My major axis is horizontal, and I’m living on a world with an equinox. That has to be why I’m five minutes late for all my lectures.
Eight minutes late, today.
He set his foot on his half-smoked cigarette and entered Room 449. This was one of the pleasanter rooms in the Old Building, overlooking Cathays Park; you could see the lawns from the lecturer’s dais but not from the students’ desks. The desks were currently occupied by Physics III, who were aware of the social injustice of this arrangement and tended rather to shuffle. They became relatively quiet, however, on Dobie’s entrance, and as he sat down converted themselves from fourteen individuals into the usual communal entity, rather as a group of wandering wolves might convert themselves, on scenting a passing elk, into a pack. Dobie opened his briefcase.
“Today,” he said, “I’m going to explain to you some of the difficulties of expressing complex numbers in trigonometric form.”
Goody, goody. The ethos of the class became miasmic with vague recollection; the pages of textbooks were agitatedly fluttered, and Hywel Morgan opened his large black box of geometrical instruments. “I shall want,” Dobie said, “to refer specifically to de Moivre’s theorem, so first of all let’s refresh our memories. We’ll multiply two complex numbers together and we’ll have them both expressed in trigonometric form…”
Voices were resounding all through the Old Building. Another had been added to their number. That was all.
Dobie in fact had certain memories that didn’t need to be refreshed and which at times affected his concentration if not the flow of his discourse. Most of them concerned his wife Jenny and an ex-student of his called Mike Frascati who ran the BMW agency somewhere down the Newport Road. Mike hadn’t been a very good student but he was probably a very good car salesman and as such pulled in something like three times Dobie’s salary, to say nothing of the odd perks – which spectacularly included one of those low-slung silver-sprayed snarly monstrosities elaborately festooned in exhaust pipes in which, on more than one occasion, Dobie, driving sedately homewards in his unassuming Ford Fiesta, had passed him, though going in the opposite direction, naturally. (The idea of passing a thing like that would in any other circumstances have struck him as both laughable and absurd.) Dobie had been animated at the time by the vague hope that if he kept very still the nasty dog sniffing at his trouser-legs would go away, having first pissed all over his boots, and that was more or less what had happened. Mike, at any rate, had been transferred to Birmingham and had been gone a month now. But things hadn’t changed in the slightest. What things?
Well…
Hard to say. Dobie was not inexperienced in these matters himself, having been involved earlier in his career in a liaison with a married woman. Of course, way back in the swinging Seventies it had hardly been possible to lean out of a window and heave a brick without hitting some fellow or other who was, had been or else was about to be in Dobie’s present position precisely, unless by great good luck you hit his wife instead. Dobie’s lady friend of the time (whose name now momentarily escaped him) had undoubtedly taken up adultery in the way she might have taken up yoga or basket-weaving or flower-arranging; obediently in accordance with l’esprit du temps and the recommendations of the Sunday supplements they had tied themselves into strenuous and complicated knots in the backs of motor-cars, in the unfrequented parts of golf courses and so forth, while also feeling themselves free – not to say obscurely compelled – in the privacy of Dobie’s own small flat to do it not only on the bed, in the old-fashioned way, but also on the sofa, on the sitting-room carpet (accompanied by the London Symphony Orchestra playing Mozart’s twenty-ninth) and even, on one memorable occasion, on top of the kitchen table (the occasion being memorable because the legs of the table had proved inadequate to it, the resultant repair bill totalling an exorbitant seven pounds twenty, plus the price of a bottle of iodine and elastoplast). They had even attended the showing of a number of glum Scandinavian films, where Dobie’s desperate efforts simultaneously to absorb the visual content and to read the sub-titles had caused him to leave the cinema cross-eyed, and had together perused a somewhat esoteric book which told you about things to do with electric light bulbs, only you couldn’t because you needed the electric light bulb to read the book by (an interesting application, as Dobie had then noted, of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle). Dobie, in short, had been through all that.
But whatever Jenny was going through, it wasn’t like that at all.
Ceasing to muse sadly upon the dear departed days of his full and entertaining sex life, Dobie pushed open the door of his flat – yes, still the same small flat – and went in. At once he heard his wife’s voice upraised in song, cheerfully trilling some outdated number vaguely to be associated with Fred Astaire and Ginger what’s-her-name. Off key, of course. That was one of the things. She was always singing. This time her voice was emanating from the bedroom. Dobie plonked down his briefcase where it always went, on the small table in the narrow hallway, and peered round the half-open door. “Oh, it’s you,” he said.
Jenny had short black hair and she was sitting in front of the dressing-table mirror, brushing it. She seemed disposed to treat this remark with a merited contempt. “Who else would it be?”
“I mean, you’re not out,” Dobie explained. “You’re in.”
“Looks like it,” Jenny said. “How’d the exams go?”
“I was lecturing today.”
“Ah.”
Dobie found her quite often in the bedroom. It was arguably the nicest room in the flat, or anyway the only one with any kind of a view. The view was of the carport outside and of a few sheltering trees, but it was better than nothing. And there were French windows, open now to the summer air, giving on to a balcony from where you got exactly the same view, this being a ground-floor flat. “Well, I’m going out this evening,” Jenny said. “Jane phoned. So you can get on with your marking.”
“Ah,” Dobie said.
Papers to mark. Quite so. He went back to pick up his briefcase and went through the sitting-room to his study. So-called. Not a sparkling conversation, that, but characteristic.
To be fair, he hadn’t married Jenny because of her conversational prowess. These days it was difficult to remember why he had married her, really. Or why she’d married him. Though in his case no doubt a normal concupiscence had played its part. A holiday affair, you could say, that had got out of hand. Dobie wasn’t very good at taking holidays and there it was. Last year he’d tried one of those package things on the Côte d’Azur and after the usual never-agains he’d run into Jenny or more exactly into Jenny’s bikini and had changed his mind. Jenny had been the travel agency courier and, Dobie’s French being rudimentary, had been useful to him in all kinds of ways. Of course nearly all the women at the hotel had worn bikinis round the pool but Jenny had been twenty years younger than they were and you couldn’t really… Quite. She was also twenty years younger than he was but that hadn’t seemed to matter at the time. Or now, for that matter. That wasn’t the problem. Or he didn’t think so.
Dobie seated himself in his revolving chair and stared for a while at Eddie. Eddie was good at problems. Some private problem, then? One has to suppose so. Obviously Cantwell had had a few. Dobie found it difficult, though, to imagine the kind of problems that might cause a promising young lad of twenty-something to pick up a gun and fire it the wrong way round. Smith and Wesson’s cure for insomnia. Yes. Most amusing.
He still
couldn’t remember what Cantwell looked like. Or had looked like. And that was annoying. He addressed himself to Eddie’s keyboard and rattled out the necessary instructions. Eddie hurriedly searched for Cantwell and found him almost at once.
CANTWELL SJ 21043
ELEC ENG 1986
SUPERVISOR DJ MARRYAT
The record was on file, anyway. Dobie typed
CHECK FINAL C/A FIGURES
and waited for Eddie to come up with the goods. Eddie barely hesitated.
MATHS 92
ENG DRAWING 74
MECH TECH 70
PHYSICS 84
ELEC ENG 68
APP THERMO 65
ELEC MACHINERY 71
Eddie didn’t need to supply the average figure; Dobie could work that out in his head and almost as fast. It was pretty commendable. That 92 for Maths would have been on Wain’s marking but even so. Anyone coming up with a final year 92 had to be a mathematician of a kind; someone whose cerebral processes might be different to Dobie’s own but in no way radically dissimilar. Of course, they were now. It was puzzling.
Feeling the need for a caffeine stimulant, Dobie switched off Eddie and switched on the electric kettle in the kitchen instead. Jenny, as was evident, had taken her lunch in the kitchen and the table was strewn with cracker crumbs and liberally anointed with smears of peanut butter. Jenny was addicted to peanut butter. Dobie, who was fast becoming addicted to clearing up after her, did so while the kettle boiled. Afterwards and bearing his steaming mug he wandered back into the bedroom, where Jenny was donning various of her glad rags preparatory to going out. Somewhere.
“It seems,” Dobie said, “one of my ex-students has committed suicide.”
The Strange Attractor Page 1