Douglas Adams. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
страница №6
...that would easily while away apleasant pre-prandial houror two.
Good.
An excellent plan.
And the best thing about it was that having made it the
horse eould now completely and utterly ignore it. It went
instead for a leisurely stand under the only tree in the field.
From out of its branches the Electric Monk dropped on to
the horse's back, with a cry which sounded suspiciously like
"Geronimo".
Chapter Eighteen...
Dirk Gently briefly ran over the salient facts once more
while Richard MacDuff's world crashed slowly and silently into
a dark, freezing sea which he hadn't even known was there,
waiting inches beneath his feet. When Dirk had finished for the
second time the room fell quiet while Richard stared fixedly at
his face.
"Where did you hear this?" said Richard at last.
"The radio," said Dirk, with a slight shrug, "at least the
main points. It's all over the news of course. The details?
Well. discreet enquiries among contacts here and there. There
are one or two people I got to know at Cambridge police
station, for reasons which may occur to you."
"I don't even know whether to believe you," said Richard
quietly. "May I use the phone?"
Dirk courteously picked a telephone receiver out of the
wastepaper bin and handed it to him. Richard dialled Susan's
number.
The phone was answered almost immediately and a frightened
voice said, "Hello?"
"Susan, it's Ri -"
"Richard! Where are you? For God's sake, where are
you? Are you all right?"
"Don't tell her where you are," said Dirk.
"Susan, what's happened?"
"Don't you -?"
"Somebody told me that something's happened to Gordon,
but..."
"Something's happened -? He's dead, Richard,
he's been murdered- "
"Hang up," said Dirk.
"Susan, listen. I - "
"Hang up," repeated Dirk, and then Ieaned forward to the
phone and cut him off.
"The police will probably have a trace on the line," he
explained. He took the receiver and chucked it back in the bin.
"But I have to go to the police," Richard exclaimed.
"Go to the police?"
"What else can I do? I have to go to the police and tell
them that it wasn't me."
"Tell them that it wasn't you?" said Dirk incredulously.
"Well I expect that will probably make it all right, then. Pity
Dr Crippen didn't think of that. Would have saved him a lot of
bother."
"Yes, but he was guilty!"
"Yes, so it would appear. And so it would appear, at the
moment, are you."
"But I didn't do it, for God's sake!"
"You are talking to someone who has spent time in prison
for something he didn't do, remember. I told you that
coincidences are strange and dangerous things. Believe me, it
is a great deal better to find cast-iron proof that you're
innocent, than to languish in a cell hoping that the police
-who already think you're guilty= will find it for you."
"I can't think straight," said Richard, with his hand to
his forehead. "Just stop for a moment and let me think this out
- "
"If I may - "
"Let me think - !"
Dirk shrugged and turned his attention back to his
eigarette, which seemed to be bothering him.
"It's no good," said Richard shaking his head after a few
moments, "I can't take it in. It's like trying to do
trigonometry when someone's kicking your head. OK, tell me what
you think I should do."
"Hypnotism."
"What?"
"It is hardly surprising in the circumstances that you
should be unable to gather your thoughts clearly. However, it
is vital that somebody gathers them. It will be much simpler
for both of us if you will allow me to hypnotise you. I
strongly suspect that there is a very great deal of information
jumbled up in your head that will not emerge while you are
shaking it up so - that might not emerge at all because you do
not realise its significance. With your permission we can
short-cut all that."
"Well, that's decided then," said Richard, standing up,
"I'm going to the police."
"Very well," said Dirk, leaning back and spreading his
palms on the desk, "I wish you the very best of luck. Perhaps
on your way out you would be kind enough to ask my secretary to
get me some matches."
"You haven't got a secretary," said Richard, and left.
Dirk sat and brooded for a few seconds, made a valiant but
vain attempt to fold the sadly empty pizza box into the
wastepaper bin, and then went to look in the cupboard for a
metronome.
Richard emerged blinking into the daylight. He stood on
the top step rocking slightly, then plunged off down the street
with an odd kind of dancing walk which reflected the whirling
dance of his mind. On the one hand he simply couldn't believe
that the evidence wouldn't show perfectly clearly that he
couldn't have committed the murder; on the other hand he had to
admit that it all looked remarkably odd.
He found it impossible to think clearly or rationally
about it. The idea that Gordon had been murdered kept blowing
up in his mind and throwing all other thoughts into total
confusion and disruption.
It occurred to him for a moment that whoever did it must
have been a damn fast shot to get the trigger pulled before
being totally overwhelmed by waves of guilt, but instantly he
regretted the thought. In fact he was a little appalled by the
general quality of the thoughts that sprang into his mind. They
seemed inappropriate and unworthy and mostly had to do with how
it would affect his projects in the company.
He looked about inside himself for any feeling of great
sorrow or regret, and assumed that it must be there somewhere,
probably hiding behind the huge wall of shock.
He arrived back within sight of Islington Green, hardly
noticing the distance he had walked. The sudden sight of the
police squad car parked outside his house hit him like a hammer
and he swung on his heel and stared with furious concentration
at the menu displayed in the window of a Greek restaurant.
"Dolmades," he thought, frantically.
"Souvlaki," he thought.
"A small spicy Greek sausage," passed hectically through
his mind. He tried to reconstruct the scene in his mind's eye
without turning round. There had been a policeman standing
watching the street, and as far as he could recall from the
brief glance he had, it looked as if the side door of the
building which led up to his flat was standing open.
The police were in his flat. In his flat. Fassolia
Plaki! A filling bowl of haricot beans cooked in a tomato and
vegetable sauce!
He tried to shift his eyes sideways and back over his
shoulder. The policeman was looking at him. He yanked his eyes
back to the menu and tried to fill his mind with finely ground
meat mixed with potato, breadcrumbs, onions and herbs rolled
into small balls and fried. The policeman must have recognised
him and was at that very moment dashing acruss the road to grab
him and lug him off in a Black Maria just as they had done to
Dirk all those years ago in Cambridge.
He braced his shoulders against the shock, but no hand
came to grab him. He glanced back again, but the policeman was
looking unconcernedly in another direction. Stifado.
It was very apparent to him that his behaviour was not
that of one who was about to go and hand himself in to the
police.
So what else was he to do?
Trying in a stiff, awkward way to walk naturally, he
yanked himself away from the window, strolled tensely down the
road a few yards, and then ducked back down Camden Passage
again, walking fast and breathing hard. Where could he go? To
Susan? No - the police would be there or watching. To the WFT
offices in Primrose Hill? No - same reason. What on earth, he
screamed silently at himself, was he doing suddenly as a
fugitive?
He insisted to himself, as he had insisted to Dirk, that
he should not be running away from the police. The police, he
told himself, as he had been taught when he was a boy, were
there to help and protect the innocent. This thought caused him
instantly to break into a run and he nearly collided with the
proud new owner of an ugly Edwardian floor lamp.
"Sorry," he said, "sorry." He was startled that anyone
should want such a thing, and slowed his pace to a walk,
glancing with sharp hunted looks around him. The very familiar
shop fronts full of old polished brass, old polished wood and
pictures of Japanese fish suddenly seemed very threatening and
aggressive.
Who could possibly have wanted to kill Gordon? This was
the thought that suddenly hammered at him as he turned down
Charlton Place. All that had concerned him so far was that he
hadn't.
But who had?
This was a new thought.
Plenty of people didn't care for him much, but there is a
huge difference between disliking somebody - maybe even
disliking them a lot - and actually shooting them, strangling
them, dragging them through the fields and setting their house
on fire. It was a difference which kept the vast majority of
the population alive from day to day.
Was it just theft? Dirk hadn't mentioned anything being
missing but then he hadn't asked him.
Dirk. The image of his absurd but oddly commanding figure
sitting like a large toad, brooding in his shabby office, kept
insisting itself upon Richard's mind. He realised that he was
retracing the way he had come, and deliberately made himself
turn right instead of left.
That way madness lay.
He just needed a space, a bit of time to think and collect
his thoughts together.
All right - so where was he going? He stopped for a
moment, turned around and then stopped again. The idea of
dolmades suddenly seemed very attractive and it occurred to him
that the cool, calm and collected course of action would have
been simply to walk in and have some. That would have shown
Fate who was boss.
Instead, Fate was engaged on exactly the same course of
action. It wasn't actually sitting in a Greek restaurant eating
dolmades, but it might as well have been, because it was
clearly in charge. Richard's footsteps drew him inexorably back
through the winding streets, over the canal.
He stopped, briefly, at a corner shop, and then hurried on
past the council estates, and into developer territory again
until he was standing once more outside 33, Peckender Street.
At about the same time as Fate would have been pouring itself
the last of the retsina, wiping its mouth and wondering if it
had any room left for baklavas, Richard gazed up at the tall
ruddy Victorian building with its soot-darkened brickwork and
its heavy, forbidding windows. A gust of wind whipped along the
street and a small boy bounded up to him.
"Fuck off," chirped the little boy, then paused and looked
at him again.
"'Ere, mister," he added, "can I have your jacket?"
"No," said Richard.
"Why not?" said the boy.
"Er, because I like it," said Richard.
"Can't see why," muttered the boy. "Fuck off." He slouched
off moodily down the street, kicking a stone at a cat.
Richard entered the building once more, mounted the stairs
uneasily and looked again into the office.
Dirk's secretary was sitting at her desk, head down, arms
folded.
"I'm not here," she said.
"I see," said Richard.
"I only came back," she said, without looking up from the
spot on her desk at which she was staring angrily, "to make
sure he notices that I've gone. Otherwise he might just
forget."
"Is he in?" asked Richard.
"Who knows? Who cares? Better ask someone who works for
him, because I don't."
"Show him in!" boomed Dirk's voice.
She glowered for a moment, stood up, went to the inner
door, wrenched it open, said "Show him in yourself," slammed
the door once more and returned to her seat.
"Er, why don't I just show myself in?" said Richard.
"I can't even hear you," said Dirk's ex-secretary, staring
resolutely at her desk. "How do you expect me to hear you if
I'm not even here?"
Richard made a placatory gesture, which was ignored, and
walked through and opened the door to Dirk's office himself. He
was startled to find the room in semi-darkness. A blind was
drawn down over the window, and Dirk was lounging back in his
seat, his face bizarrely lit by the strange arrangement of
objects sitting on the desk. At the forward edge of the desk
sat an old grey bicycle lamp, facing backwards and shining a
feeble light on a metronome which was ticking softly back and
forth, with a highly polished silver teaspoon strapped to its
metal rod.
Richard tossed a couple of boxes of matches on to the
desk.
"Sit down, relax, and keep looking at the spoon," said
Dirk, "you are already feeling sleepy..."
Another police car pulled itself up to a screeching halt
outside Richard's flat, and a grim-faced man climbed out and
strode over to one of the constables on duty outside, flashing
an identity card.
"Detective Inspector Mason, Cambridgeshire CID," he said.
"'This the MacDuff place?"
The constable nodded and showed him to the side-door
entrance which opened on to the long narrow staircase leading
up to the top flat. Mason bustled in and then bustled straight
out again.
"There's a sofa halfway up the stairs," he told the
constable. "Get it moved."
"Some of the lads have already tried, sir," the constable
replied anxiously. "It seems to be stuck. Everyone's having to
climb over it for the moment, sir. Sorry, sir."
Mason gave him another grim look from a vast repertoire he
had developed which ranged from very, very blackly grim indeed
at the bottom of the scale, all the way up to tiredly resigned
and only faintly grim, which he reserved for his children's
birthdays.
"Get it moved," he repeated grimly, and bustled grimly
back through the door grimly hauling up his trousers and coat
in preparation for the grim ascent ahead.
"No sign of him yet?" asked the driver of the car, coming
over himself. "Sergeant Gilks," he introduced himself. He
looked tired.
"Not as far as I know," said the constable, "but no one
tells me anything."
"Know how you feel," agreed Gilks. "Once the CID gets
involved you just get relegated to driving them about. And I'm
the only one who knows what he looked like. Stopped him in the
road last night. We just came from Way's house. Right mess."
"Bad night, eh?"
"Varied. Everything from murder to hauling horses out of
bathrooms. No, don't even ask. Do you have the same cars as
these?" he added, pointing at his own. "This one's been driving
me crazy all the way up. Cold even with the heater on full
blast, and the radio keeps turning itself on and off."
Chapter Nineteen...
The same morning found Michael Wenton-Weakes in something
of an odd mood.
You would need to know him fairly well to know that it was
an especially odd mood, because most people regarded him as
being a little odd to start with. Few people knew him that
well. His mother, perhaps, but there existed between them a
state of cold war and neither had spoken to the other now in
weeks.
He also had an elder brother, Peter, who was now
tremendously senior in the Marines. Apart from at their
father's funeral, Michael had not seen Peter since he came back
from the Falklands, covered in glory, promotion, and contempt
for his younger brother.
Peter had been delighted that their mother had taken over
Magna, and had sent Michael a regimental Christmas card to that
effect. His own greatest satisfaction still remained that of
throwing himself into a muddy ditch and firing a machine gun
for at least a minute, and he didn't think that the British
newspaper and publishing industry, even in its current state of
unrest, was likely to afford him that pleasure, at least until
some more Australians moved into it.
Michael had risen very late after a night of cold savagery
and then of troubled dreams which still disturbed him now in
the late morning daylight.
His dreams had been filled with the familiar sensations of
Ioss, isolation, guilt and so forth, but had also been
inexplicably involved with large quantities of mud. By the
telescopic power of the night, the nightmare of mud and
loneliness had seemed to stretch on for terrifying,
unimaginable lengths of time, and had only concluded with the
appearance of slimy things with legs that had crawled on the
slimy sea. This had been altogether too much and he had woken
with a start in a cold sweat.
Though all the business with the mud had seemed strange to
him, the sense of loss, of isolation, and above all the
aggrievement, the need to undo what had been done, these had
all found an easy home in his spirit.
Even the slimy things with legs seemed oddly familiar and
ticked away irritably at the back of his mind while he made
himself a late breakfast, a piece of grapefruit and some China
tea, allowed his eyes to rest lightly on the arts pages of the
Daily Telegraph for a while, and then rather
clumsily changed the dressing on the cuts on his hand.
These small tasks accomplished, he was then in two minds
as to what to do next.
He was able to view the events of the previous night with
a cool detachment that he would not have expected. It had been
right, it had been proper, it had been correctly done. But it
resolved nothing. All that mattered was yet to be done.
All what? He frowned at the odd way his thoughts ebbed and
flowed.
Normally he would pop along to his club at about this
time. It used to be that he would do this with a luxurious
sense of the fact that there were many other things that he
should be doing. Now there was nothing else to do, which made
time spent there, as anywhere else, hang somewhat heavy on his
hands.
When he went he would do as he always did - indulge in a
gin and tonic and a little light conversation, and then allow
his eyes to rest gently on the pages of the Times Literary
Supplement, Opera, The New Yorker or whatever else
fell easily to hand, but there was no doubt that he did it
these days with less verve and relish than previously.
Then there would be lunch. Today, he had no lunch
date planned - again - and would probably therefore have stayed
at his club, and eaten a lightly grilled Dover sole, with
potatoes garnished with parsley and boiled to bits, followed by
a large heap of trifle. A glass or two of Sancerre. And coffee.
And then the afternoon, with whatever that might bring.
But today he felt oddly impelled not to do that. He flexed
the muscles in his cut hand, poured himself another cup of tea,
looked with curious dispassion at the large kitchen knife that
still lay by the fine bone china teapot, and waited for a
moment to see what he would do next. What he did next, in fact,
was to wal upstairs.
His house was rather chill in its formal perfection, and
looked nuch as people who buy reproduction furniture
would like their houses to look. Except of course that
everything here was genuine - crystal, mahogany and Wilton -
and only looked as if it might be fake because there was no
life to any of it.
He walked up into his workroom, which was the only room
i the house that was not sterile with order, but here the
disorder of books and papers was instead sterile with neglect.
A thin film of dust had settled over everything. Michael had
not been into it in weeks, and the cleaner was under strict
instructions to leave it well alone. He had not worked hene
since he edited the last edition of Fathom. Not, of
course, the actual last edition, but the last proper edition.
The last edition as far as he was concerned.
He set his chma cup down in the fine dust and went to
inspect his elderly record player. On it he found an elderly
recording of some Vivaldi wind concertos, set it to play and
sat down.
He waited again to see what he would do next and
suddenl found to his surprise that he was already doing
it, and it was this: he was listening to the music.
A bewildered look crept slowly across his face as he
realised that he had never done this before. He had
heard it many, many times and thought that it made a
very pleasant noise. Indeed, he found that it made a pleasant
background against which to discuss the concert season, but it
had never before occurred to him that there was anything
actually to listen to.
He sat thunderstruck by the interplay of melody and
counterpoint which suddenly stood revealed to him with a
clarity that owed nothing to the dust-ridden surface of the
record or the fourteen-year-old stylus.
But with this revelation came an almost immediate sense of
disappointment, which confused him all the more. The music
suddenly revealed to him was oddly unfulfilling. It was as if
his capacity to understand the music had suddenly increased up
to and far beyond the music's ability to satisfy it, all in one
dramatic moment.
He strained to listen for what was missing, and felt that
the music was like a flightless bird that didn't even know what
capacity it had lost. It walked very well, but it walked where
it should soar, it walked where it should swoop, it walked
where it should climb and bank and dive, it walked where it
should thrill with the giddiness of flight. It never even
looked up.
He looked up.
After a while he became aware that all he was doing was
simply staring stupidly at the ceiling. He shook his head, and
discovered that the perception had faded, leaving him feeling
slightly sick and dizzy. It had not vanished entirely, but had
dropped deep inside him, deeper than he could reach.
The music continued. It was an agreeable enough assortment
of pleasant sounds in the background, but it no longer stirred
him.
He needed some clues as to what it was he had just
experienced, and a thought flicked momentarily at the back of
tris mind as to where he might find them. He let go of the
thought in anger, but it flicked at him again, and kept on
Hicking at him until at last he acted upon it.
From under his desk he pulled out the large tin wastepaper
bin. Since he had barred his cleaning lady from even coming in
here for the moment, the bin had remained unemptied and he
found in it the tattered shreds of what he was looking for with
the contents of an ashtray emptied over them.
He overcame his distaste with grim determination and
slowly iggled around the bits of the hated object on his
desk, clumsily sticking them together with bits of sticky tape
that curled around and stuck the wrong bit to the wrong bit and
stuck the right bit to his pudgy fingers and then to the desk,
until at last there lay before him, crudely reassembled, a copy
of Fathom. As edited by the execrable creature A. K.
Ross.
Appalling.
He turned the sticky lumpish pages as if he was picking
over chicken giblets. Not a single line drawing of Joan
Sutherland or Marilyn Horne anywhere. No profiles of any of the
major Cork Street art dealers, not a one.
His series on the Rossettis: discontinued.
"Green Room Gossip": discontinued.
He shook his head in incredulity and then he found the
article he was after.
"Music and Fractal Landscapes" by Richard MacDuff.
He skipped over the first couple of paragraphs of
introduction and picked it up further on:
Mathematical analysis and computer modelling are
revealing to us that the shapes and processes we
encounter in nature - the way that plants grow, the way
that mountains erode or rivers flow, the way that
snowflakes or islands achieve their shapes, the way that
light plays on a surface, the way the milk folds and
spins into your coffee as you stir it, the way that
laughter sweeps through a crowd of people - all these
things in their seemingly magical complexity can be
described by the interaction of mathematical processes
that are, if anything, even more magical irt their
simplicity.
Shapes that we think of as random are in fact the
products of complex shifting webs of numbers obeying
simple rules. The very word "natural" that we have
often taken to man "unstructured" in fact describes
shapes and processes that appear so unfathomably
complex that we cannot consciously perceive the simple
natural laws at work.
They can all be described by numbers.
Oddly, this idea seemed less revolting now to Michael than
it had done on his first, scant reading.
He read on with increasing concentration.
We know, however, that the mind is capable of
understanding these matters in all their complexity and
in all their simplicity. A ball flying through the air is
responding to the force and direction with which it was
thrown, the action of gravity, the friction of the air
which it must expend its energy on overcoming, the
turbulence of the air around its surface, and the rate and
direction of the ball's spin.
And yet, someone who might have difficulty
consciously trying to work out what 3 x 4 x 5 comes to
would have no trouble in doing differential calculus and
a whole host of related calculations so astoundingly fast
that they can actually catch a flying ball.
People who call this "instinct" are merely giving the
phenomenon a name, not explaining anything.
I think that the closest that human beings come to
expressing our understanding of these natural
complexities is in music. It is the most abstract of the
arts - it has no meaning or purpose other than to be
itself.
Every single aspect of a piece of music can be
represented by numbers. From the organisation of
movements in a whole symphony, down through the
patterns of pitch and rhythm that make up the melodies
and harmonies, the dynamics that shape the
performance, all the way down to the timbres of the
notes themselves, their harmonics, the way they change
over time, in short, all the elements of a noise that
distinguish between the sound of one person piping on
a piccolo and another one thumping a drum - all of
these things can be expressed by patterns and
hierarchies of numbers.
And in my experience the more internal relationships
there are between the patterns of numbers at different
levels of the hierarchy, however complex and subtle
those relationships may be, the more satisfying and,
well, whole, the music will seem to be.
In fact the more subtle and complex those
relationships, and the further they are beyond the grasp
of the conscious mind, the more the instinctive part of
your mind - by which I mean that part of your mind that
can do differential calculus so astoundingly fast that it
will put your hand in the right place to catch a flying
baIl
- the more that part of your brain revels in it.
Music of any complexity (and even "Three Blind
Mice" is complex in its way by the time someone has
actually performed it on an instrument with its own
individual timbre and articulation) passes beyond your
conscious mind into the arms of your own private
mathematical genius who dwells in your unconscious
responding to all the inner complexities and
relationships and proportions that we think we know
nothing about.
Some people object to such a view of music, saying
that if you reduce music to mathematics, where does the
emotion come into it? I would say that it's never been
out of it.
The things by which our emotions can be moved - the
shape of a flower or a Grecian urn, the way a baby
grows, the way the wind brushes across your face, the
way clouds move, their shapes, the way light dances on
the water, or daffodils flutter in the breeze, the way in
which the person you love moves their head, the way
their hair follows that movement, the curve described by
the dying fall of the last chord of a piece of music - all
these things can be described by the complex flow of
numbers.
That's not a reduction of it, that's the beauty of it.
Ask Newton.
Ask Einstein.
Ask the poet (Keats) who said that what the
imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.
He might also have said that what the hand seizes as a
ball must be truth, but he didn't, because he was a poet
and preferred loafing about under trees with a bottle of
laudanum and a notebook to playing cricket, but it
would have been equally true.
This jogged a thought at the back of Michael's memory, but
he couldn't immediately place it.
Because that is at the heart of the relationship between
on the one hand our "instinctive" understanding of
shape, form, movement, light, and on the other hand
our emotional responses to them.
And that is why I believe that there must be a fom
of
music inherent in nature, in natural objects, in the
pattems of natural processes. A music that would be as
deeply satisfying as any naturally occumng beauty=
and our own deepest emotions are, after all, a form of
naturally occumng beauty...
Michael stopped reading and let his gaze gradually drift
from the page.
He wondered if he knew what such a music would be and
tried to grope in the dark recesses of his mind for it. Each
part of his mind that he visited seemed as if that music had
been playing there only seconds before and all that was left
was the last dying echo of something he was unable to catch at
and hear. He laid the magazine limply aside.
Then he remembered what it was that the mention of Keats
had jogged in his memory.
The slimy things with legs from his dream.
A cold calm came over him as he felt himself coming very
close to something.
Coleridge. That man.
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.
"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."
Dazed, Michael walked over to the bookshelf and pulled
down his Coleridge anthology. He took it back to his seat and
with a certain apprehension he riffled through the pages until
he found the opening lines.
It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
The words were very familiar to him, and yet as he read on
through them they awoke in him strange sensations and fearful
memories that he knew were not his. There reared up inside him
a sense of loss and desolation of terrifying intensity which,
while he knew it was not his own, resonated so perfectly now
with his own aggrievements that he could not but surrender to
it absolutely.
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.
Chapter Twenty...
The blind rolled up with a sharp rattle and Richard
blinked.
"A fascinating evening you appear to have spent," said
Dirk Gently, "even though the most interesting aspects of it
seem to have escaped your curiosity entirely."
He returned to his seat and lounged back in it pressing
his fingertips together.
"Please," he said, "do not disappoint me by saying `where
am I?' A glance will suffice."
Richard looked around him in slow puzzlement and felt as
if he were returning unexpectedly from a long sojourn on
another planet where all was peace and light and music that
went on for ever and ever. He felt so relaxed he could hardly
be bothered to breathe.
The wooden toggle on the end of the blind cord knocked a
few times against the window, but otherwise all was now silent.
The metronome was still. He glanced at his wateh. It was just
after one o'clock.
"You have been under hypnosis for a little less than an
hour " said Dirk, "during which I have learned many interesting
things and been puzzled by some others which I would now like
to discuss with you. A Iittle fresh air will probably help
revive you and I suggest a bracing stroll along the canal. No
one will be looking for you there. Janice!"
Silence.
A lot of things were still not clear to Richard, and he
frowned to himself. When his immediate memory returned a moment
later, it was like an elephant suddenly barging through the
door and he sat up with a startled jolt.
"Janice!" shouted Dirk again. "Miss Pearce! Damn the
girl."
He yanked the telephone receivers out of the wastepaper
basket and replaced them. An old and battered leather briefcase
stood by the desk, and he picked this up, retrieved his hat
from the floor and stood up, screwing his hat absurdly on his
head.
"Come," he said, sweeping through the door to where Miss
Janice Pearce sat glaring at a pencil, "let us go. Let us leave
this festering hellhole. Let us think the unthinkable, let us
do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable
itself, and see if we may not eff it after all. Now, Janice- "
"Shut up."
Dirk shrugged, and then picked off her desk the book which
earlier she had mutilated when trying to slam her drawer. He
Ieafed through it, frowning, and then replaced it with a sigh.
Janice returned to what she had clearly been doing a moment or
two earlier, which was writing a long note with the pencil.
Richard regarded all this in silence, still feeling only
semi= present. He shook his head.
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
endeavour, 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 detergent bottles
floated on the 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 towards the
heart of Islington, where Dirk knew the nearest lifebelts 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 in to 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 coloured 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, o," said Richard, vaguely, "a dress of some
kind, I suppose "
"Colour? 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
hairgrip."
"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 III
actually asked, but -"
"What?"
"- but I think I would do better to question the fellow
directly. Except..." He frowned deeply 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 lifebelt.
"And the second impossible thing," he added; just as
Richard was about to get a word in edgeways, "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 intercon=
nectedness 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.
lf 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 perfectly 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 clone 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 leapt for the lifebelt, 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 lifebelt. 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, then 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 lifebelt. 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
offence 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 that 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 realised 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 usualIy 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 pinbably 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 sing-song
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 lifebelt... "
Dirk stopped the tape and looked round 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."
Chapter Twenty-one...
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 recognise them. Another police car pulled up and
Dirk started to move.
A police officer climbed out of the car carrying a saw and
walked towards 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 round.
"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
shalI 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 o...
