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Dirk burst into the flat like a small podgy tornado.
"Miss Way," he said, grasping her slightly unwilling hand and doffing his absurd hat, "it is the most inexpressible pleasure to meet you, but also the matter of the deepest regret that the occasion of our meeting should be one of such great sorrow and one which bids me extend to you my most profound sympathy and commiseration. I ask you to believe me that I would not intrude upon your private grief for all the world if it were not on a matter of the gravest moment and magnitude. Richard--I have solved the problem of the conjuring trick and it's extraordinary."
He swept through the room and deposited himself on a spare chair at the small dining table, on which he put his hat.
"You will have to excuse us, Dirk--" said Richard, coldly.
"No, I am afraid you will have to excuse me," returned Dirk. "The puzzle is solved, and the solution is so astounding that it took a seven-year-old child on the street to give it to me. But it is undoubtedly the correct one, absolutely undoubtedly. "What, then, is the solution?" you ask me, or rather would ask me if you could get a word in edgeways, which you can't, so I will save you the bother and ask the question for you, and answer it as well by saying that I will not tell you, because you won't believe me. I shall instead show you, this very afternoon.
"Rest assured, however, that it explains everything. It explains the trick. It explains the note you found--that should have made it perfectly clear to me but I was a fool. And it explains what the missing third question was, or rather--and this is the significant point--it explains what the missing first question was!"
"What missing question?" exclaimed Richard, confused by the sudden pause, and leaping in with the first phrase he could grab.
Dirk blinked as if at an idiot. "The missing question that George III asked, of course," he said.
"Asked who?"
"Well, the Professor," said Dirk impatiently. "Don't you listen to anything you say? The whole thing was obvious!" he exclaimed, thumping the table, "So obvious that the only thing which prevented me from seeing the solution was the trifling fact that it was completely impossible. Sherlock Holmes observed that once you have eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible. Now. Let us go."
"No."
"What?" Dirk glanced up at Susan, from whom this unexpected--or at least, unexpected to him--opposition had come.
"Mr Gently," said Susan in a voice you could notch a stick with, "why did you deliberately mislead Richard into thinking that he was wanted by the police?"
Dirk frowned.
"But he was wanted by the police," he said, "and still is."
"Yes, but just to answer questions! Not because he's a suspected murderer."
Dirk looked down.
"Miss Way," he said, "the police are interested in knowing who murdered your brother. I, with the very greatest respect, am not. It may, I concede, turn out to have a bearing on the case, but it may just as likely turn out to be a casual madman. I wanted to know, still need desperately to know, why Richard climbed into this flat last night."
"I told you..." protested Richard.
"What you told me is immaterial--it only reveals the crucial fact that you do not know the reason yourself! For heaven's sake I thought I had demonstrated that to you clearly enough at the canal!"
Richard simmered.
"It was perfectly clear to me watching you," pursued Dirk, "that you had very little idea what you were doing, and had absolutely no concern about the physical danger you were in. At first I thought, watching, that it was just a brainless thug out on his first and quite possibly last burgle. But then the figure looked back and I realised it was you--and I know you to be an intelligent, rational, and moderate man. Richard MacDuff? Risking his neck carelessly climbing up drainpipes at night? It seemed to me that you would only behave in such a reckless and extreme way if you were desperately worried about something of terrible importance. Is that not true, Miss Way?"
He looked sharply up at Susan, who slowly sat down, looking at him with an alarm in her eyes which said that he had struck home.
"And yet, when you came to see me this morning you seemed perfectly calm and collected. You argued with me perfectly rationally when I talked a lot of nonsense about Schrodinger's Cat. This was not the behaviour of someone who had the previous night been driven to extremes by some desperate purpose. I confess that it was at that moment that I stooped to, well, exaggerating your predicament, simply in order to keep hold of you."
"You didn't. I left."
"With certain ideas in your head. I knew you would be back. I apologise most humbly for having misled you, er, somewhat, but I knew that what I had to find out lay far beyond what the police would concern themselves with. And it was this--if you were not quite yourself when you climbed the wall last night...then who were you,--and why?"
Richard shivered. A silence lengthened.
"What has it got to do with conjuring tricks?" he said at last.
"That is what we must go to Cambridge to find out."
"But what makes you so sure--?"
"It disturbs me," said Dirk, and a dark and heavy look came into his face.
For one so garrulous he seemed suddenly oddly reluctant to speak.
He continued, "It disturbs me very greatly when I find that I know things and do not know why I know them. Maybe it is the same instinctive processing of data that allows you to catch a ball almost before you've seen it. Maybe it is the deeper and less explicable instinct that tells you when someone is watching you. It is a very great offence to my intellect that the very things that I despise other people for being credulous of actually occur to me. You will remember the... unhappiness surrounding certain exam questions."
He seemed suddenly distressed and haggard. He had to dig deep inside himself to continue speaking.
He said, "The ability to put two and two together and come up instantly with four is one thing. The ability to put the square root of five hundred and thirty-nine point seven together with the cosine of twenty-six point four three two and come up with... with whatever the answer to that is, is quite another. And I... well, let me give you an example."
He leant forward intently. "Last night I saw you climbing into this flat. I knew that something was wrong. Today I got you to tell me every last detail you knew about what happened last night, and already, as a result, using my intellect alone, I have uncovered possibly the greatest secret lying hidden on this planet. I swear to you that this is true and that I can prove it. Now you must believe me when I tell you that I know, I know that there is something terribly, desperately, appallingly wrong and that we must find it. Will you go with me now, to Cambridge?"
Richard nodded dumbly.
"Good," said Dirk. "What is this?" he added, pointing at Richard's plate.
"A pickled herring. Do you want one?"
"Thank you, no," said Dirk, rising and buckling his coat. "There is," he added as he headed towards the door, steering Richard with hi
m, "no such word as "herring" in my dictionary. Good afternoon, Miss Way, wish us God speed."
CHAPTER
25
There was a rumble of thunder, and the onset of that interminable tight drizzle from the north-east by which so many of the world's most momentous events seem to be accompanied.
Dirk turned up the collar of his leather overcoat against the weather, but nothing could dampen his demonic exuberance as he and Richard approached the great twelfth-century gates.
"St Cedd's College, Cambridge," he exclaimed, looking at them for the first time in eight years. "Founded in the year something or other, by someone I forget in honour of someone whose name for the moment escapes me."
"St Cedd?" suggested Richard.
"Do you know, I think it very probably was? One of the duller Northumbrian saints. His brother Chad was even duller. Has a cathedral in Birmingham if that gives you some idea. Ah, Bill, how good to see you again," he added, accosting the porter who was just walking into the college as well. The porter looked round.
"Mr Cjelli, nice to see you back, sir. Sorry you had a spot of bother, hope that's all behind you now."
"Indeed, Bill, it is. You find me thriving. And Mrs Roberts? How is she? Foot still troubling her?"
"Not since she had it off, thanks for asking, sir. Between you and me, sir, I would've been just as happy to have had her amputated and kept the foot. I had a little spot reserved on the mantelpiece, but there we are, we have to take things as we find them.
"Mr MacDuff, sir," he added, nodding curtly at Richard. "Oh that horse you mentioned, sir, when you were here last night, I'm afraid we had to have it removed. It was bothering Professor Chronotis."
"I was only curious, er, Bill," said Richard. "I hope it didn't disturb you."
"Nothing ever disturbs me, sir, so long as it isn't wearing a dress. Can't abide it when the young fellers wear dresses, sir."
"If the horse bothers you again, Bill," interrupted Dirk, patting him on the shoulder, "send it up to me and I shall speak with it. Now, you mention the good Professor Chronotis. Is he in at the moment? We've come on an errand."
"Far as I know, sir. Can't check for you because his phone's out of order. Suggest you go and look yourself. Far left corner of Second Court."
