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.
