Read Online The Strange Attractor by Desmond Cory - Free Book Online Page B

Incredible. He hadn’t yet had anything to eat, but his head was paining him and he wasn’t hungry.
    What he chiefly needed, he thought, was a cup of black coffee and some aspirin, followed by a restful hour with the Heutling String Quartet. He wended his way, therefore, to the bedroom to get the aspirin bottle, which would, he thought, be reposing in the drawer of Jenny’s night table, where she usually kept it. Switching on the overhead light, he observed with no great sense of surprise that Jane Corder was lying stretched out on top of the bed without very much in the way of clothes on. She appeared to be dead. He felt no great surprise because, naturally, he didn’t believe it. He advanced, nevertheless, upon the bed in order to… you know… investigate.
    His investigation revealed that Jane Corder was lying stretched out on top of the bed without very much in the way of clothes on. She appeared to be dead. She was dead. “Oh my God,” Dobie said. “Oh my God. Oh my God. Whatever next.” Jane Corder didn’t reply, but he wasn’t really talking to her , anyway.
    The pain in his head had suddenly become murderous, as though his brains were leaking slowly out through the back of his skull. It couldn’t be Jane. Clearly it couldn’t. But it was. He couldn’t see her clothes anywhere, apart from the (normally) fetching black bra-and-pantie set that was all she was wearing. A large bath towel, however, was lying on the floor at his feet; he picked it up and drew it carefully over the corpse, shrouding her decently from head to feet. He knew that he shouldn’t really have touched anything, but knew also that he couldn’t let her go on lying there like that . It wasn’t nice.
    He turned and made a bolt for the French window, which fortunately wasn’t locked; he had time, therefore, to get out on to the balcony before being sick. Vomiting had at least the side-effect of seeming, if only temporarily, to ease his headache. When he had finished throwing up he went back to the sitting-room, picked up the telephone and dialled Jane’s number. He thought that with any luck the police would still be there.
    They were.
     
     
     
    Jackson, Box and the hitherto elusive Sergeant Evans were there within twenty minutes. Half an hour later, Detective-Superintendent Pontin arrived. Not, it must be said, in the best of tempers.
    “What we got here then, Jackson?”
    “What you might call complications, sir,” Jackson said.
    “Just what we don’t need. Now I don’t want any nonsense with this boyo, Jackson, I want a straight-forward confession out of him and that’ll be an end to it. I’ve had enough of naked women in bedrooms and all that multi-cultural rubbish. Girl’s on the books, I take it? Done any previous?”
    “Well, no, sir. She’s the wife of a prominent local businessman. Or that’s what I’ve been told.”
    “Oh. Right.” Pontin was in no mood thus to be baulked. “What about him ?”
    “Says he’s a university teacher, sir.”
    “Christ, now. Drugs, then. That’ll be the story. He’s been pushing heroin, for a monkey.”
    “As yet, sir, we’ve no evidence—”
    “Don’t tell me , Jackson. I been there before. Rushed it down the loo he has, the crafty dodger. What about the body? Any signs of actual physical torture?”
    “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, sir, but then we haven’t—”
    “Got the murder weapon?”
    “Yes, I think so, sir. A typewriter.”
    Pontin clicked his tongue. “The murder weapon , Jackson, for God’s sake.”
    “Yes, sir. A typewriter. Significant blood traces.”
    “He hit her over the head with a typewriter ?”
    “That’s my present reading of the case, sir.”
    “Good God. What are we coming to? What’s Paddy Gates got to say about it?”
    “Paddy’s on holiday, sir. So I called Katie Coyle. That sounds like her arriving now.”
     
     
     
    To prevent Dobie from further interfering, however ineffectually, with the progress of police