Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

CHAPTER 16

The following morning Richard woke up twice.

The first time he assumed he had made a mistake and turned over for a fitful few minutes more. The second time he sat up with a jolt as the events of the previous night insisted themselves upon him.

He went downstairs and had a moody and unsettled breakfast, during which nothing went right. He burned the toast, spilled the coffee, and realised that though he'd meant to buy some more marmalade yesterday, he hadn't. He surveyed his feeble attempt at feeding himself and thought that maybe he could at least allow himself the time to take Susan out for an amazing meal tonight, to make up for last night.

If he could persuade her to come.

There was a restaurant that Gordon had been enthusing about at great length and recommending that they try. Gordon was pretty good on restaurants — he certainly seemed to spend enough time in them. He sat and tapped his teeth with a pencil for a couple of minutes, and then went up to his workroom and lugged a telephone directory out from under a pile of computer magazines.

L'Esprit d'Escalier.

He phoned the restaurant and tried to book a table, but when he said when he wanted it for this seemed to cause a little amusement.

“Ah, non, m'sieur,” said the maître d', “I regret that it is impossible. At this moment it is necessary to make reservations at least three weeks in advance. Pardon, m'sieur.”

Richard marvelled at the idea that there were people who actually knew what they wanted to do three weeks in advance, thanked the maître d' and rang off. Well, maybe a pizza again instead. This thought connected back to the appointment he had failed to keep last night, and after a moment curiosity overcame him and he reached for the phone book again.

Gentleman…

Gentles…

Gentry.

There was no Gently at all. Not a single one. He found the other directories, except for the S-Z book which his cleaning lady continually threw away for reasons he had never yet fathomed.

There was certainly no Cjelli, or anything like it. There was no Jently, no Dgently, no Djently, no Dzently, nor anything remotely similar. He wondered about Tjently, Tsentli or Tzentli and tried Directory Enquiries, but they were out. He sat and tapped his teeth with a pencil again and watched his sofa slowly revolving on the screen of his computer.

How very peculiar it had been that it had only been hours earlier that Reg had asked after Dirk with such urgency.

If you really wanted to find someone, how would you set about it, what would you do?

He tried phoning the police, but they were out too. Well, that was that. He had done all he could do for the moment short of hiring a private detective, and he had better ways of wasting his time and money. He would run into Dirk again, as he did every few years or so.

He found it hard to believe there were really such people, anyway, as private detectives.

What sort of people were they? What did they look like, where did they work? What sort of tie would you wear if you were a private detective? Presumably it would have to be exactly the sort of tie that people wouldn't expect private detectives to wear. Imagine having to sort out a problem like that when you'd just got up.

Just out of curiosity as much as anything else, and because the only alternative was settling down to Anthem coding, he found himself leafing through the Yellow Pages.

Private Detectives — see Detective Agencies.

The words looked almost odd in such a solid and businesslike context. He flipped back through the book. Dry Cleaners, Dog Breeders, Dental Technicians, Detective Agencies…

At that moment the phone rang and he answered it, a little curtly. He didn't like being interrupted.

“Something wrong, Richard?”

“Oh, hi, Kate, sorry, no. I was… my mind was elsewhere.”

Kate Anselm was another star programmer at WayForward Technologies. She was working on a long-term Artificial Intelligence project, the sort of thing that sounded like an absurd pipe dream until you heard her talking about it. Gordon needed to hear her talking about it quite regularly, partly because he was nervous about the money it was costing and partly because, well, there was little doubt that Gordon liked to hear Kate talking anyway.

“I didn't want to disturb you,” she said. “It's just I was trying to contact Gordon and can't. There's no reply from London or the cottage, or his car or his bleeper. It's just that for someone as obsessively in contact as Gordon it's a bit odd. You heard he's had a phone put in his isolation tank? True.”

“I haven't spoken to him since yesterday,” said Richard. He suddenly remembered the tape he had taken from Susan's answering machine, and hoped to God there wasn't anything more important in Gordon's message than ravings about rabbits. He said, “I know he was going to the cottage. Er, I don't know where he is. Have you tried —” Richard couldn't think of anywhere else to try — “…er. Good God.”

“Richard?”

“How extraordinary…”

“Richard, what's the matter?”

“Nothing, Kate. Er, I've just read the most astounding thing.”

“Really, what are you reading?”

“Well, the telephone directory, in fact…”

“Really? I must rush out and buy one. Have the film rights gone?”

“Look, sorry, Kate, can I get back to you? I don't know where Gordon is at the moment and —”

“Don't worry. I know how it is when you can't wait to turn the next page. They always keep you guessing till the end, don't they? It must have been Zbigniew that did it. Have a good weekend.” She hung up.

Richard hung up too, and sat staring at the box advertisement lying open in front of him in the Yellow Pages.

DIRK GENTLY'S

HOLISTIC DETECTIVE AGENCY

We solve the whole crime

We find the whole person

Phone today for the whole solution to your problem

(Missing cats and messy divorces a speciality)

33a Peckender St., London N1 01-359 9112

Peckender Street was only a few minutes' walk away. Richard scribbled down the address, pulled on his coat and trotted downstairs, stopping to make another quick inspection of the sofa. There must, he thought, be something terribly obvious that he was overlooking. The sofa was jammed on a slight turn in the long narrow stairway. At this point the stairs were interrupted for a couple of yards of flat landing, which corresponded with the position of the flat directly beneath Richard's. However, his inspection produced no new insights, and he eventually clambered on over it and out of the front door.

In Islington you can hardly hurl a brick without hitting three antique shops, an estate agent and a bookshop.

Even if you didn't actually hit them you would certainly set off their burglar alarms, which wouldn't be turned off again till after the weekend. A police car played its regular game of dodgems down Upper Street and squealed to a halt just past him. Richard crossed the road behind it.

The day was cold and bright, which he liked. He walked across the top of Islington Green, where winos get beaten up, past the site of the old Collins Music Hall which had got burnt down, and through Camden Passage where American tourists get ripped off. He browsed among the antiques for a while and looked at a pair of earrings that he thought Susan would like, but he wasn't sure. Then he wasn't sure that he liked them, got confused and gave up. He looked in at a bookshop, and on an impulse bought an anthology of Coleridge's poems since it was just lying there.

From here he threaded his way through the winding back streets, over the canal, past the council estates that lined the canal, through a number of smaller and smaller squares, till finally he reached Peckender Street, which had turned out to be a good deal farther than he'd thought.

It was the sort of street where property developers in large Jaguars drive around at the weekend salivating. It was full of end-of-lease shops, Victorian industrial architecture and a short, decaying lateGeorgian terrace, all just itching to be pulled down so that sturdy young concrete boxes could sprout in their places. Estate agents roamed the area in hungry packs, eyeing each other warily, their clipboards on a hair trigger.

Number 33, when he eventually found it neatly sandwiched between 37 and 45, was in a poorish state of repair, but no worse than most of the rest.

The ground floor was a dusty travel agent's whose window was cracked and whose faded BOAC posters were probably now quite valuable. The doorway next to the shop had been painted bright red, not well, but at least recently. A push button next to the door said, in neatly pencilled lettering, “Dominique, French lessons, 3me Floor”.

The most striking feature of the door, however, was the bold and shiny brass plaque fixed in the dead centre of it, on which was engraved the legend “Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency”.

Nothing else. It looked brand new — even the screws that held it in place were still shiny.

The door opened to Richard's push and he peered inside.

He saw a short and musty hallway which contained little but the stairway that led up from it. A door at the back of the hall showed little sign of having been opened in recent years, and had stacks of old metal shelving, a fish tank and the carcass of a bike piled up against it. Everything else, the walls, the floor, the stairs themselves, and as much of the rear door as could be got at, had been painted grey in an attempt to smarten it up cheaply, but it was all now badly scuffed, and little cups of fungus were peeking from a damp stain near the ceiling.

The sounds of angry voices reached him, and as he started up the stairs he was able to disentangle the noises of two entirely separate but heated arguments that were going on somewhere above him.

One ended abruptly — or at least half of it did — as an angry overweight man came clattering down the stairs pulling his raincoat collar straight. The other half of the argument continued in a torrent of aggrieved French from high above them. The man pushed past Richard, said, “Save your money, mate, it's a complete washout,” and disappeared out into the chilly morning.

The other argument was more muffled. As Richard reached the first corridor a door slammed somewhere and brought that too to an end. He looked into the nearest open doorway.

It led into a small ante-office. The other, inner door leading from it was firmly closed. A youngish plump-faced girl in a cheap blue coat was pulling sticks of make-up and boxes of Kleenex out of her desk drawer and thrusting them into her bag.

“Is this the detective agency?” Richard asked her tentatively.

The girl nodded, biting her lip and keeping her head down.

“And is Mr Gently in?”

“He may be,” she said, throwing back her hair, which was too curly for throwing back properly, “and then again he may not be. I am not in a position to tell. It is not my business to know of his whereabouts. His whereabouts are, as of now, entirely his own business.”

She retrieved her last pot of nail varnish and tried to slam the drawer shut. A fat book sitting upright in the drawer prevented it from closing. She tried to slam the drawer again, without success. She picked up the book, ripped out a clump of pages and replaced it. This time she was able to slam the drawer with ease.

“Are you his secretary?” asked Richard.

“I am his ex-secretary and I intend to stay that way,” she said, firmly snapping her bag shut. “If he intends to spend his money on stupid expensive brass plaques rather than on paying me, then let him. But I won't stay to stand for it, thank you very much. Good for business, my foot. Answering the phones properly is good for business and I'd like to see his fancy brass plaque do that. If you'll excuse me I'd like to storm out, please.”

Richard stood aside, and out she stormed.

“And good riddance!” shouted a voice from the inner office. A phone rang and was picked up immediately.

“Yes?” answered the voice from the inner office, testly. The girl popped back for her scarf, but quietly, so her ex-employer wouldn't hear. Then she was finally gone.

“Yes, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. How can we be of help to you?”

The torrent of French from upstairs had ceased. A kind of tense calm descended.

Inside, the voice said, “That's right, Mrs Sunderland, messy divorces are our particular speciality.”

There was a pause.

“Yes, thank you, Mrs Sunderland, not quite that messy.” Down went the phone again, to be replaced instantly by the ringing of another one.

Richard looked around the grim little office. There was very little in it. A battered chipboard veneer desk, an old grey filing cabinet and a dark green tin wastepaper bin. On the wall was a Duran Duran poster on which someone had scrawled in fat red felt tip, “Take this down please”.

Beneath that another hand had scrawled, “No.”

Beneath that again the first hand had written, “I insist that you take it down.”

Beneath that the second hand had written, “Won't!”

Beneath that — “You're fired.”

Beneath that — “Good!”

And there the matter appeared to have rested.

He knocked on the inner door, but was not answered. Instead the voice continued, “I'm very glad you asked me that, Mrs Rawlinson. The term ‘holistic’ refers to my conviction that what we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. I do not concern myself with such petty things as fingerprint powder, telltale pieces of pocket fluff and inane footprints. I see the solution to each problem as being detectable in the pattern and web of the whole. The connections between causes and effects are often much more subtle and complex than we with our rough and ready understanding of the physical world might naturally suppose, Mrs Rawlinson.

“Let me give you an example. If you go to an acupuncturist with toothache he sticks a needle instead into your thigh. Do you know why he does that, Mrs Rawlinson?

“No, neither do I, Mrs Rawlinson, but we intend to find out. A pleasure talking to you, Mrs Rawlinson. Goodbye.”

Another phone was ringing as he put this one down.

Richard eased the door open and looked in.

It was the same Svlad, or Dirk, Cjelli. Looking a little rounder about the middle, a little looser and redder about the eyes and the neck, but it was still essentially the same face that he remembered most vividly smiling a grim smile as its owner climbed into the back of one of the Black Marias of the Cambridgeshire constabulary, eight years previously.

He wore a heavy old light brown suit which looked as if it has been worn extensively for bramble hacking expeditions in some distant and better past, a red checked shirt which failed entirely to harmonise with the suit, and a green striped tie which refused to speak to either of them. He also wore thick metal-rimmed spectacles, which probably accounted at least in part for his dress sense.

“Ah, Mrs Bluthall, how thoroughly uplifting to hear from you,” he was saying. “I was so distressed to learn that Miss Tiddles has passed over. This is desperate news indeed. And yet, and yet… Should we allow black despair to hide from us the fairer light in which your blessed moggy now forever dwells?

“I think not. Hark. I think I hear Miss Tiddles miaowing even now. She calls to you, Mrs Bluthall. She says she is content, she is at peace. She says she'll be even more at peace when you've paid some bill or other. Does that ring a bell with you at all, Mrs Bluthall? Come to think of it I think I sent you one myself not three months ago. I wonder if it can be that which is disturbing her eternal rest.”

Dirk beckoned Richard in with a brisk wave and then motioned him to pass the crumpled pack of French cigarettes that was sitting just out of his reach.

“Sunday night, then, Mrs Bluthall, Sunday night at eight-thirty. You know the address. Yes, I'm sure Miss Tiddles will appear, as I'm sure will your cheque book. Till then, Mrs Bluthall, till then.”

Another phone was already ringing as he got rid of Mrs Bluthall. He grabbed at it, lighting his crumpled cigarette at the same time.

“Ah, Mrs Sauskind,” he said in answer to the caller, “my oldest and may I say most valued client. Good day to you, Mrs Sauskind, good day. Sadly, no sign as yet of young Roderick, I'm afraid, but the search is intensifying as it moves into what I am confident are its closing stages, and I am sanguine that within mere days from today's date we will have the young rascal permanently restored to your arms and mewing prettily, ah yes the bill, I was wondering if you had received it.”

Dirk's crumpled cigarette turned out to be too crumpled to smoke, so he hooked the phone on his shoulder and poked around in the packet for another, but it was empty.

He rummaged on his desk for a piece of paper and a stub of pencil and wrote a note which he passed to Richard.

“Yes, Mrs Sauskind,” he assured the telephone, “I am listening with the utmost attention.”

The note said “Tell secretary get cigs.”

“Yes,” continued Dirk into the phone, “but as I have endeavoured to explain to you, Mrs Sauskind, over the seven years of our acquaintance, I incline to the quantum mechanical view in this matter. My theory is that your cat is not lost, but that his waveform has temporarily collapsed and must be restored. Schrodinger. Planck. And so on.”

Richard wrote on the note “You haven't got secretary” and pushed it back.

Dirk considered this for a while, then wrote “Damn and blast” on the paper and pushed it to Richard again.

“I grant you, Mrs Sauskind,” continued Dirk blithely, “that nineteen years is, shall we say, a distinguished age for a cat to reach, yet can we allow ourselves to believe that a cat such as Roderick has not reached it?

“And should we now in the autumn of his years abandon him to his fate? This surely is the time that he most needs the support of our continuing investigations. This is the time that we should redouble our efforts, and with your permission, Mrs Sauskind, that is what I intend to do. Imagine, Mrs Sauskind, how you would face him if you had not done this simple thing for him.”

Richard fidgeted with the note, shrugged to himself, and wrote “I'll get them” on it and passed it back once more.

Dirk shook his head in admonition, then wrote “I couldn't possibly that would be most kind”. As soon as Richard had read this, Dirk took the note back and added “Get money from secretary” to it.

Richard looked at the paper thoughtfully, took the pencil and put a tick next to where he had previously written “You haven't got secretary.” He pushed the paper back across the table to Dirk, who merely glanced at it and ticked “I couldn't possibly that would be most kind.”

“Well, perhaps,” continued Dirk to Mrs Sauskind, “you could just run over any of the areas in the bill that cause you difficulty. Just the broader areas.”

Richard let himself out.

Running down the stairs, he passed a young hopeful in a denim jacket and close-cropped hair peering anxiously up the stairwell.

“Any good, mate?” he said to Richard.

“Amazing,” murmured Richard, “just amazing.”

He found a nearby newsagent's and picked up a couple of packets of Disque Bleu for Dirk, and a copy of the new edition of Personal Computer World, which had a picture of Gordon Way on the front.

“Pity about him, isn't it?” said the newsagent.

“What? Oh, er… yes,” said Richard. He often thought the same himself, but was surprised to find his feelings so widely echoed. He picked up a Guardian as well, paid and left.

Dirk was still on the phone with his feet on the table when Richard returned, and it was clear that he was relaxing into his negotiations.

“Yes, expenses were, well, expensive in the Bahamas, Mrs Sauskind, it is in the nature of expenses to be so. Hence the name.” He took the proffered packets of cigarettes, seemed disappointed there were only two, but briefly raised his eyebrows to Richard in acknowledgement of the favour he had done him, and then waved him to a chair.

The sounds of an argument conducted partly in French drifted down from the floor above.

“Of course I will explain to you again why the trip to the Bahamas was so vitally necessary,” said Dirk Gently soothingly. “Nothing could give me greater pleasure. I believe, as you know, Mrs Sauskind, in the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. Furthermore I have plotted and triangulated the vectors of the interconnectedness of all things and traced them to a beach in Bermuda which it is therefore necessary for me to visit from time to time in the course of my investigations. I wish it were not the case, since, sadly, I am allergic to both the sun and rum punches, but then we all have our crosses to bear, do we not, Mrs Sauskind?”

A babble seemed to break out from the telephone.

“You sadden me, Mrs Sauskind. I wish I could find it in my heart to tell you that I find your scepticism rewarding and invigorating, but with the best will in the world I cannot. I am drained by it, Mrs Sauskind, drained. I think you will find an item in the bill to that effect. Let me see.”

He picked up a flimsy carbon copy lying near him.

“‘Detecting and triangulating the vectors of interconnectedness of all things, one hundred and fifty pounds.’ We've dealt with that.

“‘Tracing same to beach on Bahamas, fare and accommodation.’ A mere fifteen hundred. The accommodation was, of course, distressingly modest.

“Ah yes, here we are, ‘Struggling on in the face of draining scepticism from client, drinks — three hundred and twenty-seven pounds fifty.’

“Would that I did not have to make such charges, my dear Mrs Sauskind, would that the occasion did not continually arise. Not believing in my methods only makes my job more difficult, Mrs Sauskind, and hence, regrettably, more expensive.”

Upstairs, the sounds of argument were becoming more heated by the moment. The French voice seemed to be verging on hysteria.

“I do appreciate, Mrs Sauskind,” continued Dirk, “that the cost of the investigation has strayed somewhat from the original estimate, but I am sure that you will in your turn appreciate that a job which takes seven years to do must clearly be more difficult than one that can be pulled off in an afternoon and must therefore be charged at a higher rate. I have continually to revise my estimate of how difficult the task is in the light of how difficult it has so far proved to be.”

The babble from the phone became more frantic.

“My dear Mrs Sauskind — or may I call you Joyce? Very well then. My dear Mrs Sauskind, let me say this. Do not worry yourself about this bill, do not let it alarm or discomfit you. Do not, I beg you, let it become a source of anxiety to you. Just grit your teeth and pay it.”

He pulled his feet down off the table and leaned forward over the desk, inching the telephone receiver inexorably back towards its cradle.

“As always, the very greatest pleasure to speak with you, Mrs Sauskind. For now, goodbye.”

He at last put down the receiver, picked it up again, and dropped it for the moment into the waste basket.

“My dear Richard MacDuff,” he said, producing a large flat box from under his desk and pushing it across the table at him, “your pizza.”

Richard started back in astonishment.

“Er, no thanks,” he said, “I had breakfast. Please. You have it.”

Dirk shrugged. “I told them you'd pop in and settle up over the weekend,” he said. “Welcome, by the way, to my offices.”

He waved a vague hand around the tatty surroundings.

“The light works,” he said, indicating the window, “the gravity works,” he said, dropping a pencil on the floor. “Anything else we have to take our chances with.”

Richard cleared his throat. “What,” he said, “is this?”

“What is what?”

“This,” exclaimed Richard, “all this. You appear to have a Holistic Detective Agency and I don't even know what one is.”

“I provide a service that is unique in this world,” said Dirk. “The term ‘holistic’ refers to my conviction that what we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all —”

“Yes, I got that bit earlier,” said Richard. “I have to say that it sounded a bit like an excuse for exploiting gullible old ladies.”

“Exploiting?” asked Dirk. “Well, I suppose it would be if anybody ever paid me, but I do assure you, my dear Richard, that there never seems to be the remotest danger of that. I live in what are known as hopes. I hope for fascinating and remunerative cases, my secretary hopes that I will pay her, her landlord hopes that she will produce some rent, the Electricity Board hopes that he will settle their bill, and so on. I find it a wonderfully optimistic way of life.

“Meanwhile I give a lot of charming and silly old ladies something to be happily cross about and virtually guarantee the freedom of their cats. Is there, you ask — and I put the question for you because I know you know I hate to be interrupted — is there a single case that exercises the tiniest part of my intellect, which, as you hardly need me to tell you, is prodigious? No. But do I despair? Am I downcast? Yes. Until,” he added, “today.”

“Oh, well, I'm glad of that,” said Richard, “but what was all that rubbish about cats and quantum mechanics?”

With a sigh Dirk flipped up the lid of the pizza with a single flick of practised fingers. He surveyed the cold round thing with a kind of sadness and then tore off a hunk of it. Pieces of pepperoni and anchovy scattered over his desk.

“I am sure, Richard,” he said, “that you are familiar with the notion of Schrödinger's Cat,” and he stuffed the larger part of the hunk into his mouth.

“Of course,” said Richard. “Well, reasonably familiar.”

“What is it?” said Dirk through a mouthful.

Richard shifted irritably in his seat. “It's an illustration,” he said, “of the principle that at a quantum level all events are governed by probabilities…”

“At a quantum level, and therefore at all levels,” interrupted Dirk. “Though at any level higher than the subatomic the cumulative effect of those probabilities is, in the normal course of events, indistinguishable from the effect of hard and fast physical laws. Continue.”

He put some more cold pizza into his face.

Richard reflected that Dirk's was a face into which too much had already been put. What with that and the amount he talked, the traffic through his mouth was almost incessant. His ears, on the other hand, remained almost totally unused in normal conversation.

It occurred to Richard that if Lamarck had been right and you were to take a line through this behaviour for several generations, the chances were that some radical replumbing of the interior of the skull would eventually take place.

Richard continued, “Not only are quantum level events governed by probabilities, but those probabilities aren't even resolved into actual events until they are measured. Or to use a phrase that I just heard you use in a rather bizarre context, the act of measurement collapses the probability waveform. Up until that point all the possible courses of action open to, say, an electron, coexist as probability waveforms. Nothing is decided. Until it's measured.”

Dirk nodded. “More or less,” he said, taking another mouthful. “But what of the cat?”

Richard decided that there was only one way to avoid having to watch Dirk eat his way through all the rest of the pizza, and that was to eat the rest himself. He rolled it up and took a token nibble off the end.

It was rather good. He took another bite. Dirk watched this with startled dismay.

“So,” said Richard, “the idea behind Schrödinger's Cat was to try and imagine a way in which the effects of probabilistic behaviour at a quantum level could be considered at a macroscopic level. Or let's say an everyday level.”

“Yes, let's,” said Dirk, regarding the rest of the pizza with a stricken look. Richard took another bite and continued cheerfully.

“So you imagine that you take a cat and put it in a box that you can seal completely. Also in the box you put a small lump of radioactive material, and a phial of poison gas. You arrange it so that within a given period of time there is an exactly fifty-fifty chance that an atom in the radioactive lump will decay and emit an electron. If it does decay then it triggers the release of the gas and kills the cat. If it doesn't, the cat lives. Fifty-fifty. Depending on the fifty-fifty chance that a single atom does or does not decay.

“The point as I understand it is this: since the decay of a single atom is a quantum level event that wouldn't be resolved either way until it was observed, and since you don't make the observation until you open the box and see whether the cat is alive or dead, then there's a rather extraordinary consequence.

“Until you do open the box the cat itself exists in an indeterminate state. The possibility that it is alive, and the possibility that it is dead, are two different waveforms superimposed on each other inside the box. Schrödinger put forward this idea to illustrate what he thought was absurd about quantum theory.”

Dirk got up and padded over to the window, probably not so much for the meagre view it afforded over an old warehouse on which an alternative comedian was lavishing his vast lager commercial fees developing into luxury apartments, as for the lack of view it afforded of the last piece of pizza disappearing.

“Exactly,” said Dirk, “bravo!”

“But what's all that got to do with this — this Detective Agency?”

“Oh, that. Well, some researchers were once conducting such an experiment, but when they opened up the box, the cat was neither alive nor dead but was in fact completely missing, and they called me in to investigate. I was able to deduce that nothing very dramatic had happened. The cat had merely got fed up with being repeatedly locked up in a box and occasionally gassed and had taken the first opportunity to hoof it through the window. It was for me the work of a moment to set a saucer of milk by the window and call ‘Bernice’ in an enticing voice — the cat's name was Bernice, you understand —”

“Now, wait a minute —” said Richard.

“ — and the cat was soon restored. A simple enough matter, but it seemed to create quite an impression in certain circles, and soon one thing led to another as they do and it all culminated in the thriving career you see before you.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” insisted Richard, slapping the table.

“Yes?” enquired Dirk innocently.

“Now, what are you talking about, Dirk?”

“You have a problem with what I have told you?”

“Well, I hardly know where to begin,” protested Richard. “All right. You said that some people were performing the experiment. That's nonsense. Schrödinger's Cat isn't a real experiment. It's just an illustration for arguing about the idea. It's not something you'd actually do.”

Dirk was watching him with odd attention.

“Oh, really?” he said at last. “And why not?”

“Well, there's nothing you can test. The whole point of the idea is to think about what happens before you make your observation. You can't know what's going on inside the box without looking, and the very instant you look the wave packet collapses and the probabilities resolve. It's self-defeating. It's completely purposeless.”

“You are, of course, perfectly correct as far as you go,” replied Dirk, returning to his seat. He drew a cigarette out of the packet, tapped it several times on the desk, and leant across the desk and pointed the filter at Richard.

“But think about this,” he continued. “Supposing you were to introduce a psychic, someone with clairvoyant powers, into the experiment — someone who is able to divine what state of health the cat is in without opening the box. Someone who has, perhaps, a certain eerie sympathy with cats. What then? Might that furnish us with an additional insight into the problem of quantum physics?”

“Is that what they wanted to do?”

“It's what they did.”

“Dirk, this is complete nonsense.”

Dirk raised his eyebrows challengingly.

“All right, all right,” said Richard, holding up his palms, “let's just follow it through. Even if I accepted — which I don't for one second — that there was any basis at all for clairvoyance, it wouldn't alter the fundamental undoableness of the experiment. As I said, the whole thing turns on what happens inside the box before it's observed. It doesn't matter how you observe it, whether you look into the box with your eyes or — well, with your mind, if you insist. If clairvoyance works, then it's just another way of looking into the box, and if it doesn't then of course it's irrelevant.”

“It might depend, of course, on the view you take of clairvoyance…”

“Oh yes? And what view do you take of clairvoyance? I should be very interested to know, given your history.”

Dirk tapped the cigarette on the desk again and looked narrowly at Richard.

There was a deep and prolonged silence, disturbed only by the sound of distant crying in French.

“I take the view I have always taken,” said Dirk eventually.

“Which is?”

“That I am not clairvoyant.”

“Really,” said Richard. “Then what about the exam papers?”

The eyes of Dirk Gently darkened at the mention of this subject.

“A coincidence,” he said, in a low, savage voice, “a strange and chilling coincidence, but none the less a coincidence. One, I might add, which caused me to spend a considerable time in prison. Coincidences can be frightening and dangerous things.”

Dirk gave Richard another of his long appraising looks.

“I have been watching you carefully,” he said. “You seem to be extremely relaxed for a man in your position.”

This seemed to Richard to be an odd remark, and he tried to make sense of it for a moment. Then the light dawned, and it was an aggravating light.

“Good heavens,” he said, “he hasn't got to you as well, has he?”

This remark seemed to puzzle Dirk in return.

“Who hasn't got to me?” he said.

“Gordon. No, obviously not. Gordon Way. He has this habit of trying to get other people to bring pressure on me to get on with what he sees as important work. I thought for a moment — oh, never mind. What did you mean, then?”

“Ah. Gordon Way has this habit, has he?”

“Yes. I don't like it. Why?”

Dirk looked long and hard at Richard, tapping a pencil lightly on the desk.

Then he leaned back in his chair and said as follows: “The body of Gordon Way was discovered before dawn this morning. He had been shot, strangled, and then his house was set on fire. Police are working on the theory that he was not actually shot in the house because no shotgun pellets were discovered there other than those in the body.

“However, pellets were found near to Mr Way's Mercedes 500 SEC, which was found abandoned about three miles from his house. This suggests that the body was moved after the murder. Furthermore the doctor who examined the body is of the opinion that Mr Way was in fact strangled after he was shot, which seems to suggest a certain confusion in the mind of the killer.

“By a startling coincidence it appears that the police last night had occasion to interview a very confused-seeming gentleman who said that he was suffering from some kind of guilt complex about having just run over his employer.

“That man was a Mr Richard MacDuff, and his employer was the deceased, Mr Gordon Way. It has further been suggested that Mr Richard MacDuff is one of the two people most likely to benefit from Mr Way's death, since WayForward Technologies would almost certainly pass at least partly into his hands. The other person is his only living relative, Miss Susan Way, into whose flat Mr Richard MacDuff was observed to break last night. The police don't know that bit, of course. Nor, if we can help it, will they. However, any relationship between the two of them will naturally come under close scrutiny. The news reports on the radio say that they are urgently seeking Mr MacDuff, who they believe will be able to help them with their enquiries, but the tone of voice says that he's clearly guilty as hell.

“My scale of charges is as follows: two hundred pounds a day, plus expenses. Expenses are not negotiable and will sometimes strike those who do not understand these matters as somewhat tangential. They are all necessary and are, as I say, not negotiable. Am I hired?”

“Sorry,” said Richard, nodding slightly. “Would you start that again?”