Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

CHAPTER 20

The blind rolled up with a sharp rattle and Richard blinked.

“A fascinating evening you appear to have spent,” said Dirk Gently, “even though the most interesting aspects of it seem to have escaped your curiosity entirely.”

He returned to his seat and lounged back in it pressing his fingertips together.

“Please,” he said, “do not disappoint me by saying ‘where am I?’ A glance will suffice.”

Richard looked around him in slow puzzlement and felt as if he were returning unexpectedly from a long sojourn on another planet where all was peace and light and music that went on for ever and ever. He felt so relaxed he could hardly be bothered to breathe.

The wooden toggle on the end of the blind cord knocked a few times against the window, but otherwise all was now silent. The metronome was still. He glanced at his watch. It was just after one o'clock.

“You have been under hypnosis for a little less than an hour,” said Dirk, “during which I have learned many interesting things and been puzzled by some others which I would now like to discuss with you. A little fresh air will probably help revive you and I suggest a bracing stroll along the canal. No one will be looking for you there. Janice!”

Silence.

A lot of things were still not clear to Richard, and he frowned to himself. When his immediate memory returned a moment later, it was like an elephant suddenly barging through the door and he sat up with a startled jolt.

“Janice!” shouted Dirk again. “Miss Pearce! Damn the girl.”

He yanked the telephone receivers out of the wastepaper basket and replaced them. An old and battered leather briefcase stood by the desk, and he picked this up, retrieved his hat from the floor and stood up, screwing his hat absurdly on his head.

“Come,” he said, sweeping through the door to where Miss Janice Pearce sat glaring at a pencil, “let us go. Let us leave this festering hellhole. Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all. Now, Janice —”

“Shut up.”

Dirk shrugged, and then picked off her desk the book which earlier she had mutilated when trying to slam her drawer. He leafed through it, frowning, and then replaced it with a sigh. Janice returned to what she had clearly been doing a moment or two earlier, which was writing a long note with the pencil.

Richard regarded all this in silence, still feeling only semipresent. He shook his head.

Dirk said to him, “Events may seem to you to be a tangled mass of confusion at the moment. And yet we have some interesting threads to pull on. For of all the things you have told me that have happened, only two are actually physically impossible.”

Richard spoke at last. “Impossible?” he said with a frown.

“Yes,” said Dirk, “completely and utterly impossible.”

He smiled.

“Luckily,” he went on, “you have come to exactly the right place with your interesting problem, for there is no such word as ‘impossible’ in my dictionary. In fact,” he added, brandishing the abused book, “everything between ‘herring’ and ‘marmalade’ appears to be missing. Thank you, Miss Pearce, you have once again rendered me sterling service, for which I thank you and will, in the event of a successful outcome to this endeavour, even attempt to pay you. In the meantime we have much to think on, and I leave the office in your very capable hands.”

The phone rang and Janice answered it.

“Good afternoon,” she said, “Wainwright's Fruit Emporium. Mr Wainwright is not able to take calls at this time since he is not right in the head and thinks he is a cucumber. Thank you for calling.”

She slammed the phone down. She looked up again to see the door closing softly behind her ex-employer and his befuddled client.

“Impossible?” said Richard again, in surprise.

“Everything about it,” insisted Dirk, “completely and utterly — well, let us say inexplicable. There is no point in using the word ‘impossible’ to describe something that has clearly happened. But it cannot be explained by anything we know.”

The briskness of the air along the Grand Union Canal got in among Richard's senses and sharpened them up again. He was restored to his normal faculties, and though the fact of Gordon's death kept jumping at him all over again every few seconds, he was at least now able to think more clearly about it. Oddly enough, though, that seemed for the moment to be the last thing on Dirk's mind. Dirk was instead picking on the most trivial of the night's sequence of bizarre incidents on which to cross-examine him.

A jogger going one way and a cyclist going the other both shouted at each other to get out of the way, and narrowly avoided hurling each other into the murky, slow-moving waters of the canal. They were watched carefully by a very slow-moving old lady who was dragging an even slower-moving old dog.

On the other bank large empty warehouses stood startled, every window shattered and glinting. A burned-out barge lolled brokenly in the water. Within it a couple of detergent bottles floated on the brackish water. Over the nearest bridge heavy-goods lorries thundered, shaking the foundations of the houses, belching petrol fumes into the air and frightening a mother trying to cross the road with her pram.

Dirk and Richard were walking along from the fringes of South Hackney, a mile from Dirk's office, back towards the heart of Islington, where Dirk knew the nearest lifebelts were positioned.

“But it was only a conjuring trick, for heaven's sake,” said Richard. “He does them all the time. It's just sleight of hand. Looks impossible but I'm sure if you asked any conjurer he'd say it's easy once you know how these things are done. I once saw a man on the street in New York doing —”

“I know how these things are done,” said Dirk, pulling two lighted cigarettes and a large glazed fig out of his nose. He tossed the fig up in to the air, but it somehow failed to land anywhere. “Dexterity, misdirection, suggestion. All things you can learn if you have a little time to waste. Excuse me, dear lady,” he said to the elderly, slowmoving dog-owner as they passed her. He bent down to the dog and pulled a long string of brightly coloured flags from its bottom. “I think he will move more comfortably now,” he said, tipped his hat courteously to her and moved on.

“These things, you see,” he said to a flummoxed Richard, “are easy. Sawing a lady in half is easy. Sawing a lady in half and then joining her up together again is less easy, but can be done with practice. The trick you described to me with the two-hundred-year-old vase and the college salt cellar is —” he paused for emphasis — “completely and utterly inexplicable.”

“Well there was probably some detail of it I missed, but…”

“Oh, without question. But the benefit of questioning somebody under hypnosis is that it allows the questioner to see the scene in much greater detail than the subject was even aware of at the time. The girl Sarah, for instance. Do you recall what she was wearing?”

“Er, no,” said Richard, vaguely, “a dress of some kind, I suppose —”

“Colour? Fabric?”

“Well, I can't remember, it was dark. She was sitting several places away from me. I hardly glimpsed her.”

“She was wearing a dark blue cotton velvet dress gathered to a dropped waist. It had raglan sleeves gathered to the cuffs, a white Peter Pan collar and six small pearl buttons down the front — the third one down had a small thread hanging off it. She had long dark hair pulled back with a red butterfly hairgrip.”

“If you're going to tell me you know all that from looking at a scuff mark on my shoes, like Sherlock Holmes, then I'm afraid I don't believe you.”

“No, no,” said Dirk, “it's much simpler than that. You told me yourself under hypnosis.”

Richard shook his head.

“Not true,” he said, “I don't even know what a Peter Pan collar is.”

“But I do and you described it to me perfectly accurately. As you did the conjuring trick. And that trick was not possible in the form in which it occurred. Believe me. I know whereof I speak. There are some other things I would like to discover about the Professor, like for instance who wrote the note you discovered on the table and how many questions George III actually asked, but —”

“What?”

“— but I think I would do better to question the fellow directly. Except…” He frowned deeply in concentration. “Except,” he added, “that being rather vain in these matters I would prefer to know the answers before I asked the questions. And I do not. I absolutely do not.” He gazed abstractedly into the distance, and made a rough calculation of the remaining distance to the nearest lifebelt.

“And the second impossible thing,” he added, just as Richard was about to get a word in edgeways, “or at least, the next completely inexplicable thing, is of course the matter of your sofa.”

“Dirk,” exclaimed Richard in exasperation, “may I remind you that Gordon Way is dead, and that I appear to be under suspicion of his murder! None of these things have the remotest connection with that, and I —”

“But I am extremely inclined to believe that they are connected.”

“That's absurd!”

“I believe in the fundamental inter-”

“Oh, yeah, yeah,” said Richard, “the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. Listen, Dirk, I am not a gullible old lady and you won't be getting any trips to Bermuda out of me. If you're going to help me then let's stick to the point.”

Dirk bridled at this. “I believe that all things are fundamentally interconnected, as anyone who follows the principles of quantum mechanics to their logical extremes cannot, if they are honest, help but accept. But I also believe that some things are a great deal more interconnected than others. And when two apparently impossible events and a sequence of highly peculiar ones all occur to the same person, and when that person suddenly becomes the suspect of a highly peculiar murder, then it seems to me that we should look for the solution in the connection between these events. You are the connection, and you yourself have been behaving in a highly peculiar and eccentric way.”

“I have not,” said Richard. “Yes, some odd things have happened to me, but I —”

“You were last night observed, by me, to climb the outside of a building and break into the flat of your girlfriend, Susan Way.”

“It may have been unusual,” said Richard, “it may not even have been wise. But it was perfectly logical and rational. I just wanted to undo something I had done before it caused any damage.”

Dirk thought for a moment, and slightly quickened his pace.

“And what you did was a perfectly reasonable and normal response to the problem of the message you had left on the tape — yes, you told me all about that in our little session — it's what anyone would have done?”

Richard frowned as if to say that he couldn't see what all the fuss was about. “I don't say anyone would have done it,” he said, “I probably have a slightly more logical and literal turn of mind than many people, which is why I can write computer software. It was a logical and literal solution to the problem.”

“Not a little disproportionate, perhaps?”

“It was very important to me not to disappoint Susan yet again.”

“So you are absolutely satisfied with your own reasons for doing what you did?”

“Yes,” insisted Richard angrily.

“Do you know,” said Dirk, “what my old maiden aunt who lived in Winnipeg used to tell me?”

“No,” said Richard. He quickly took off all his clothes and dived into the canal. Dirk leapt for the lifebelt, with which they had just drawn level, yanked it out of its holder and flung it to Richard, who was floundering in the middle of the canal looking completely lost and disoriented.

“Grab hold of this,” shouted Dirk, “and I'll haul you in.”

“It's all right,” spluttered Richard, “I can swim —”

“No, you can't,” yelled Dirk, “now grab it.”

Richard tried to strike out for the bank, but quickly gave up in consternation and grabbed hold of the lifebelt. Dirk pulled on the rope till Richard reached the edge, and then bent down to give him a hand out. Richard came up out of the water puffing and spitting, then turned and sat shivering on the edge with his hands in his lap.

“God, it's foul in there!” he exclaimed and spat again. “It's absolutely disgusting. Yeuchh. Whew. God. I'm usually a pretty good swimmer. Must have got some kind of cramp. Lucky coincidence we were so close to the lifebelt. Oh thanks.” This last he said in response to the large towel which Dirk handed him.

He rubbed himself down briskly, almost scraping himself with the towel to get the filthy canal water off him. He stood up and looked about. “Can you find my pants?”

“Young man,” said the old lady with the dog, who had just reached them. She stood looking at them sternly, and was about to rebuke them when Dirk interrupted.

“A thousand apologies, dear lady,” he said, “for any offence my friend may inadvertently have caused you. Please,” he added, drawing a slim bunch of anemones from Richard's bottom, “accept these with my compliments.”

The lady dashed them out of Dirk's hand with her stick, and hurried off, horror-struck, yanking her dog after her.

“That wasn't very nice of you,” said Richard, pulling on his clothes underneath the towel that was now draped strategically around him.

“I don't think she's a very nice woman,” replied Dirk, “she's always down here, yanking her poor dog around and telling people off. Enjoy your swim?”

“Not much, no,” said Richard, giving his hair a quick rub. “I hadn't realised how filthy it would be in there. And cold. Here,” he said, handing the towel back to Dirk, “thanks. Do you always carry a towel around in your briefcase?”

“Do you always go swimming in the afternoons?”

“No, I usually go in the mornings, to the swimming pool on Highbury Fields, just to wake myself up, get the brain going. It just occurred to me I hadn't been this morning.”

“And, er — that was why you just dived into the canal?”

“Well, yes. I just thought that getting a bit of exercise would probably help me deal with all this.”

“Not a little disproportionate, then, to strip off and jump into the canal.”

“No,” he said, “it may not have been wise given the state of the water, but it was perfectly —”

“You were perfectly satisfied with your own reasons for doing what you did.”

“Yes —”

“And it was nothing to do with my aunt, then?”

Richard's eyes narrowed suspiciously. “What on earth are you talking about?” he said.

“I'll tell you,” said Dirk. He went and sat on a nearby bench and opened his case again. He folded the towel away into it and took out instead a small Sony tape recorder. He beckoned Richard over and then pushed the Play button. Dirk's own voice floated from the tiny speaker in a lilting sing-song voice. It said, “In a minute I will click my fingers and you will wake and forget all of this except for the instructions I shall now give you.

“In a little while we will go for a walk along the canal, and when you hear me say the words ‘my old maiden aunt who lived in Winnipeg’ —”

Dirk suddenly grabbed Richard's arm to restrain him.

The tape continued, “You will take off all your clothes and dive into the canal. You will find that you are unable to swim, but you will not panic or sink, you will simply tread water until I throw you the lifebelt…”

Dirk stopped the tape and looked round at Richard's face which for the second time that day was pale with shock.

“I would be interested to know exactly what it was that possessed you to climb into Miss Way's flat last night,” said Dirk, “and why.”

Richard didn't respond — he was continuing to stare at the tape recorder in some confusion. Then he said in a shaking voice, “There was a message from Gordon on Susan's tape. He phoned from the car. The tape's in my flat. Dirk, I'm suddenly very frightened by all this.”