The Strange Attractor

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.