Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

CHAPTER 21

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 shall 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 of Richard's sofa slowly twisting and turning on the big Macintosh screen, and he sat down at the keyboard. He explored the program Richard had written for a short while, but quickly realised that in its present form it was less than selfexplanatory and he learned little. He managed at last to get the sofa unstuck and move it back down the stairs, but he realised that he had had to turn part of the wall off in order to do it. With a grunt of irritation he gave up.

Another computer he looked at was displaying a steady sine wave. Around the edges of the screen were the small images of other waveforms which could be selected and added to the main one or used to modify it in other ways. He quickly discovered that this enabled you to build up very complex waveforms from simple ones and he played with this for a while. He added a simple sine wave to itself, which had the effect of doubling the height of the peaks and troughs of the wave. Then he slid one of the waves half a step back with respect to the other, and the peaks and troughs of one simply cancelled out the peaks and troughs of the other, leaving a completely flat line. Then he changed the frequency of one of the sine waves by a small extent. The result of this was that at some positions along the combined waveform the two waves reinforced each other, and at others they cancelled each other out. Adding a third simple wave of yet another frequency resulted in a combined wave in which it was hard to see any pattern at all. The line danced up and down seemingly at random, staying quite low for some periods and then suddenly building into very large peaks and troughs as all three waves came briefly into phase with each other.

Dirk assumed that there must be amongst this array of equipment a means for translating the waveform dancing on the Macintosh screen into an actual musical tone and hunted among the menus available in the program. He found one menu item which invited him to transfer the wave sample into an Emu.

This puzzled him. He glanced around the room in search of a large flightless bird, but was unable to locate any such thing. He activated the process anyway, and then traced the cable which led from the back of the Macintosh, down behind the desk, along the floor, behind a cupboard, under a rug until it fetched up plugged into the back of a large grey keyboard called an Emulator II.

This, he assumed, was where his experimental waveform has just arrived. Tentatively he pushed a key.

The nasty farting noise that surged instantly out of the speakers was so loud that for a moment he didn't hear the words “Svlad Cjelli!” that were barked simultaneously from the doorway.

Richard sat in Dirk's office and threw tiny screwed-up balls of paper at the wastepaper bin which was already full of telephones. He broke pencils. He played major extracts from an old Ginger Baker solo on his knees.

In a word, he fretted.

He had been trying to write down on a piece of Dirk's notepaper all that he could remember of the events of the previous evening and, as far as he could pinpoint them, the times at which each had occurred. He was astonished at how difficult it was, and how feeble his conscious memory seemed to be in comparison with his unconscious memory, as Dirk had demonstrated it to him.

“Damn Dirk,” he thought. He wanted to talk to Susan.

Dirk had told him he must not do so on any account as there would be a trace on the phone lines.

“Damn Dirk,” he said suddenly, and sprang to his feet.

“Have you got any ten-pence pieces?” he said to the resolutely glum Janice.

Dirk turned.

Framed in the doorway stood a tall dark figure.

The tall dark figure appeared to be not at all happy with what it saw, to be rather cross about it, in fact. To be more than cross. It appeared to be a tall dark figure who could very easily yank the heads off half a dozen chickens and still be cross at the end of it.

It stepped forward into the light and revealed itself to be Sergeant Gilks of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary.

“Do you know,” said Sergeant Gilks of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary, blinking with suppressed emotion, “that when I arrive back here to discover one police officer guarding a sofa with a saw and another dismembering an innocent wastepaper basket I have to ask myself certain questions? And I have to ask them with the disquieting sense that I am not going to like the answers when I find them.

“I then find myself mounting the stairs with a horrible premonition, Svlad Cjelli, a very horrible premonition indeed. A premonition, I might add, that I now find horribly justified. I suppose you can't shed any light on a horse discovered in a bathroom as well? That seemed to have an air of you about it.”

“I cannot,” said Dirk, “as yet. Though it interests me strangely.”

“I should think it bloody did. It would have interested you strangely if you'd had to get the bloody thing down a bloody winding staircase at one o'clock in the morning as well. What the hell are you doing here?” said Sergeant Gilks, wearily.

“I am here,” said Dirk, “in pursuit of justice.”

“Well, I wouldn't mix with me then,” said Gilks, “and I certainly wouldn't mix with the Met. What do you know of MacDuff and Way?”

“Of Way? Nothing beyond what is common knowledge. MacDuff I knew at Cambridge.”

“Oh, you did, did you? Describe him.”

“Tall. Tall and absurdly thin. And good-natured. A bit like a preying mantis that doesn't prey — a non-preying mantis if you like. A sort of pleasant genial mantis that's given up preying and taken up tennis instead.”

“Hmm,” said Gilks gruffly, turning away and looking about the room. Dirk pocketed the tape.

“Sounds like the same one,” said Gilks.

“And of course,” said Dirk, “completely incapable of murder.”

“That's for us to decide.”

“And of course a jury.”

“Tchah! Juries!”

“Though, of course, it will not come to that, since the facts will speak for themselves long before it comes to a court of law for my client.”

“Your bleeding client, eh? All right, Cjelli, where is he?”

“I haven't the faintest idea.”

“I'll bet you've got a billing address.”

Dirk shrugged.

“Look, Cjelli, this is a perfectly normal, harmless murder enquiry, and I don't want you mucking it up. So consider yourself warned off as of now. If I see a single piece of evidence being levitated I'll hit you so hard you won't know if it's tomorrow or Thursday. Now get out, and give me that tape on the way.” He held out his hand.

Dirk blinked, genuinely surprised. “What tape?”

Gilks sighed. “You're a clever man, Cjelli, I grant you that,” he said, “but you make the same mistake a lot of clever people do of thinking everyone else is stupid. If I turn away it's for a reason, and the reason was to see what you picked up. I didn't need to see you pick it up, I just had to see what was missing afterwards. We are trained you know. We used to get half an hour Observation Training on Tuesday afternoons. Just as a break after four hours solid of Senseless Brutality.”

Dirk hid his anger with himself behind a light smile. He fished in the pocket of his leather overcoat and handed over the tape.

“Play it,” said Gilks, “let's see what you didn't want us to hear.”

“It wasn't that I didn't want you to hear it,” said Dirk, with a shrug. “I just wanted to hear it first.” He went over to the shelf which carried Richard's hi-fi equipment and slipped the tape into the cassette player.

“So do you want to give me a little introduction?”

“It's a tape,” said Dirk, “from Susan Way's telephone answering machine. Way apparently had this habit of leaving long…”

“Yeah, I know about that. And his secretary goes round picking up his prattlings in the morning, poor devil.”

“Well, I believe there may be a message on the tape from Gordon Way's car last night.”

“I see. OK. Play it.”

With a gracious bow Dirk pressed the Play button.

“Oh, Susan, hi, it's Gordon,” said the tape once again. “Just on my way to the cottage —”

“Cottage!” exclaimed Gilks, satirically.

“It's, er, Thursday night, and it's, er… 8.47. Bit misty on the roads. Listen, I have those people from the States coming over this weekend—”

Gilks raised his eyebrows, looked at his watch, and made a note on his pad.

Both Dirk and the police sergeant experienced a chill as the dead man's voice filled the room.

“— it's a wonder I don't end up dead in the ditch, that would be something wouldn't it, leaving your famous last words on somebody's answering machine, there's no reason —”

They listened in a tense silence as the tape played on through the entire message.

“That's the problem with crunch-heads — they have one great idea that actually works and then they expect you to carry on funding them for years while they sit and calculate the topographies of their navels. I'm sorry, I'm going to have to stop and close the boot properly. Won't be a moment.”

Next came the muffled bump of the telephone receiver being dropped on the passenger seat, and a few seconds later the sound of the car door being opened. In the meantime, the music from the car's sound system could be heard burbling away in the background.

A few seconds later still came the distant, muffled, but unmistakable double blam of a shotgun.

“Stop the tape,” said Gilks sharply and glanced at his watch. “Three minutes and twenty-five seconds since he said it was 8.47.” He glanced up at Dirk again. “Stay here. Don't move. Don't touch anything. I've made a note of the position of every particle of air in this room, so I shall know if you've been breathing.”

He turned smartly and left. Dirk heard him saying as he went down the stairs, “Tuckett, get on to WayForward's office, get the details of Way's carphone, what number, which network…”

The voice faded away downstairs.

Quickly Dirk twisted down the volume control on the hi-fi, and resumed playing the tape.

The music continued for a while. Dirk drummed his fingers in frustration. Still the music continued.

He flicked the Fast Forward button for just a moment. Still music. It occurred to him that he was looking for something, but that he didn't know what. That thought stopped him in his tracks.

He was very definitely looking for something.

He very definitely didn't know what.

The realisation that he didn't know exactly why he was doing what he was doing suddenly chilled and electrified him. He turned slowly like a fridge door opening.

There was no one there, at least no one that he could see. But he knew the chill prickling through his skin and detested it above all things.

He said in a low savage whisper, “If anyone can hear me, hear this. My mind is my centre and everything that happens there is my responsibility. Other people may believe what it pleases them to believe, but I will do nothing without I know the reason why and know it clearly. If you want something then let me know, but do not you dare touch my mind.”

He was trembling with a deep and old rage. The chill dropped slowly and almost pathetically from him and seemed to move off into the room.

He tried to follow it with his senses, but was instantly distracted by a sudden voice that seemed to come at him on the edge of his hearing, on a distant howl of wind.

It was a hollow, terrified, bewildered voice, no more than an insubstantial whisper, but it was there, audible, on the telephoneanswering machine tape.

It said, “Susan! Susan, help me! Help me for God's sake. Susan, I'm dead —”

Dirk whirled round and stopped the tape.

“I'm sorry,” he said under his breath, “but I have the welfare of my client to consider.”

He wound the tape back a very short distance, to just before where the voice began, twisted the Record Level knob to zero and pressed Record. He left the tape to run, wiping off the voice and anything that might follow it. If the tape was going to establish the time of Gordon Way's death, then Dirk didn't want any embarrassing examples of Gordon speaking to turn up on the tape after that point, even if it was only to confirm that he was, in fact, dead.

There seemed to be a great eruption of emotion in the air near to him. A wave of something surged through the room, causing the furniture to flutter in its wake. Dirk watched where it seemed to go, towards a shelf near the door on which, he suddenly realised, stood Richard's own telephone-answering machine. The machine started to jiggle fitfully where it sat, but then sat still as Dirk approached it. Dirk reached out slowly and calmly and pushed the button which set the machine to Answer.

The disturbance in the air then passed back through the room to Richard's long desk where two old-fashioned rotary-dial telephones nestled among the piles of paper and micro floppy disks. Dirk guessed what would happen, but elected to watch rather than to intervene.

One of the telephone receivers toppled off its cradle. Dirk could hear the dialling tone. Then, slowly and with obvious difficulty, the dial began to turn. It moved unevenly round, further round, slower and slower, and then suddenly slipped back.

There was a moment's pause. Then the receiver rests went down and up again to get a new dialling tone. The dial began to turn again, but creaking even more fitfully than the last time.

Again it slipped back.

There was a longer pause this time, and then the entire process was repeated once more. When the dial slipped back a third time there was a sudden explosion of fury — the whole phone leapt into the air and hurtled across the room. The receiver cord wrapped itself round an Anglepoise lamp on the way and brought it crashing down in a tangle of cables, coffee cups and floppy disks. A pile of books erupted off the desk and on to the floor.

The figure of Sergeant Gilks stood stony-faced in the doorway.

“I'm going to come in again,” he said, “and when I do, I don't want to see anything of that kind going on whatsoever. Is that understood?” He turned and disappeared.

Dirk leapt for the cassette player and hit the Rewind button. Then he turned and hissed at the empty air, “I don't know who you are, but I can guess. If you want my help, don't you ever embarrass me like that again!”

A few moments later, Gilks walked in again. “Ah, there you are,” he said.

He surveyed the wreckage with an even gaze. “I'll pretend I can't see any of this, so that I won't have to ask any questions the answers to which would, I know, only irritate me.”

Dirk glowered.

In the moment or two of silence that followed, a slight ticking whirr could be heard which caused the sergeant to look sharply at the cassette player.

“What's that tape doing?”

“Rewinding.”

“Give it to me.”

The tape reached the beginning and stopped as Dirk reached it. He took it out and handed it to Gilks.

“Irritatingly, this seems to put your client completely in the clear,” said the sergeant. “Cellnet have confirmed that the last call made from the car was at 8.46 pm last night, at which point your client was lightly dozing in front of several hundred witnesses. I say witnesses, in fact they were mostly students, but we will probably be forced to assume that they can't all be lying.”

“Good,” said Dirk, “well, I'm glad that's all cleared up.”

“We never thought he had actually done it, of course. Simply didn't fit. But you know us — we like to get results. Tell him we still want to ask him some questions, though.”

“I shall be sure to mention it if I happen to run into him.”

“You just do that little thing.”

“Well, I shan't detain you any longer, Sergeant,” said Dirk, airily waving at the door.

“No, but I shall bloody detain you if you're not out of here in thirty seconds, Cjelli. I don't know what you're up to, but if I can possibly avoid finding out I shall sleep easier in my office. Out.”

“Then I shall bid you good day, Sergeant. I won't say it's been a pleasure because it hasn't.”

Dirk swept out of the room, and made his way out of the flat, noting with sorrow that where there had been a large chesterfield sofa wedged magnificently in the staircase, there was now just a small, sad pile of sawdust.

With a jerk Michael Wenton-Weakes looked up from his book.

His mind suddenly was alive with purpose. Thoughts, images, memories, intentions, all crowded in upon him, and the more they seemed to contradict each other the more they seemed to fit together, to pair and settle. The match at last was perfect, the teeth of one slowly aligned with the teeth of another.

A pull and they were zipped.

Though the waiting had seemed an eternity of eternities when it was filled with failure, with fading waves of weakness, with feeble groping and lonely impotence, the match once made cancelled it all. Would cancel it all. Would undo what had been so disastrously done.

Who thought that? It did not matter, the match was made, the match was perfect.

Michael gazed out of the window across the well-manicured Chelsea street and did not care whether what he saw were slimy things with legs or whether they were all Mr A. K. Ross. What mattered was what they had stolen and what they would be compelled to return. Ross now lay in the past. What he was now concerned with lay still further in it.

His large soft cowlike eyes returned to the last few lines of “Kubla Khan”, which he had just been reading. The match was made, the zip was pulled.

He closed the book and put it in his pocket.

His path back now was clear. He knew what he must do. It only remained to do a little shopping and then do it.