Free The Strange Attractor by Desmond Cory Page A

change. “Yes. Yes,” he said nervously. “I think I’ve got all that. Excuse me one moment.” Keeping his face turned towards Dobie, he trundled himself back towards the door and beckoned hurriedly to the constable outside. “Better keep a pretty close eye on this one, Constable. He could be on to us both at the drop of a hat.”
    “Yessir. I will, sir,” the constable said.
    “He’s been under a bit of a strain lately, I shouldn’t wonder,” Pontin said, returning to his former position and smiling upon Dobie disarmingly. He was a man who knew his duty and only his glazed-over eyeballs betrayed his inward terror.
    “Let’s try again, now, shall we? – from a different angle. At least we know you were on friendly terms with the deceased. You’ve admitted that , anyway.”
    “Yes. Certainly. So was Jenny.”
    “So that gives us a starting point.” Pontin paused. “Who’s Jenny?”
    “My wife. She’s in Paris.”
    “I see. In Paris . So you thought while the cat was away—”
    This was a mistake. “What cat?” Dobie said suspiciously. “I haven’t got a cat. Ah. Maybe you’re thinking of Kate . No, Kate’s got nothing to do with it. Except of course she was at the inquest.”
    Off again, Pontin thought, glancing cautiously round the room to make sure that no hatchets, chain saws, baseball bats or any other death-dealing weapons were to be seen in the immediate vicinity. “We haven’t had an inquest yet. We’ve only just found the body. Who’s this Kate you’re talking about, when she’s at home?”
    “She isn’t at home. She’s here. She just got here.”
    “Ah, she’s here , is she? Not in Paris?”
    “No, no. That was my wife.”
    “Who was?”
    “The other one. Jenny. She’s my wife. The other one isn’t. The one in the bedroom. In fact she’s somebody else’s.”
    “Good. It helps, you see, once you’ve got the background clear. You say your wife has gone to Paris because of this other woman. Now what I want to know—”
    “No, wait, you’ve got that wrong. There isn’t another woman.”
    “Now I understood you quite distinctly to say—”
    “I didn’t say another woman. I said the other woman.”
    “That’s right. Jenny, you called her.”
    “ Now you’ve got it. Jenny, my wife. My wife is the other woman.”
    The sound of Pontin’s slow, heavy breathing became clearly audible. “Perhaps,” he said, “we’d do better to resume this conversation when you’re feeling a little less excited. You seem to have a bit of an attitude problem, if I may say so.”
     
     
     
    Meanwhile, Kate was carrying out her preliminary examination.
    “Fractured skull all right. Death probably instantaneous. Downward blow from the rear, slightly favouring right hand side. A large flat instrument, something like a brick. No cutting edge. Skin’s torn at point of impact but I don’t see any minor abrasions. Some blood loss from ears and nose, but not very much. She died too quickly. Okay so far?”
    “We know what she was hit with, doctor. What about time of death?”
    “Very recent. I’ll be checking the rectal temperature in a moment but I’d say some time between nine and nine thirty. She must have died just after taking a hot shower so the skin surface would have been fairly warm. Her hair’s still damp, as you noticed. And of course the body’s unusually clean, which is rather a pity. From the pathologist’s viewpoint, that’s to say.”
    “We picked up her clothes in the bathroom,” Jackson said. “And a bath towel from over by that wardrobe. You’re not surprising me.”
    “She wasn’t killed on the bed, of course.”
    “No.” Jackson looked down at the scuff marks on the nap of the carpet. “Probably by the door, as she came in. Nine thirty , though?… It couldn’t have been later?”
    He watched Kate take the transparent evidence bags from her medical case and slip them efficiently over the victim’s hands. Not a very nice job, he couldn’t help