The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul Read online

  Dirk ran his fingers up either side of his nose again.

  “I thigg id id trader,” Dirk said at last.

  “Straighter,” Sally said. “Say ‘straighter’ properly. It'll help you feel better.”

  “Straighter,” said Dirk. “Yed. I thee wad you mead.”

  “What?”

  “I see what you mead.”

  “Good,” she said with a sigh of relief, “I'm glad that worked. My horoscope this morning said that virtually everything I decided today would be wrong.”

  “Yes, well you don't want to believe all that rubbish,” said Dirk sharply.

  “I don't,” said Sally.

  “Particularly not The Great Zaganza.”

  “Oh, you read it too, did you?”

  “No. That is, well, not for the same reason.”

  “My reason was that a patient asked me to read his horoscope to him this morning just before he died. What was yours?”

  “Er, a very complicated one.”

  “I see,” said Sally, sceptically. “What's this?”

  “It's a calculator,” said Dirk. “Well, look, I mustn't keep you. I am indebted to you, my dear lady, for the tenderness of your ministrations and the loan of your coffee, but lo! the day wears on, and I am sure you have a heavy schedule of grievous bodily harm to attend to.”

  “Not at all. I came off night duty at nine o'clock this morning, and all I have to do all day is keep awake so that I can sleep normally tonight. I have nothing better to do than to sit around talking to strangers in cafés. You, on the other hand, should get yourself to a casualty department as soon as possible. As soon as you've paid my bill, in fact.”

  She leant over to the table she had originally been sitting at and picked up the running-total lying by her plate. She looked at it, shaking her head disapprovingly.

  “Five cups of coffee, I'm afraid. It was a long night on the wards. All sorts of comings and goings in the middle of it. One patient in a coma who had to be moved to a private hospital in the early hours. God knows why it had to be done at that time of night. Just creates unnecessary trouble. I wouldn't pay for the second croissant if I were you. I ordered it but it never came.”

  She pushed the bill across to Dirk who picked it up with a reluctant sigh.

  “Inordinate,” he said, “larcenously inordinate. And, in the circumstances, adding a 15 per cent service charge is tantamount to jeering at you. I bet they won't even bring me a knife.”

  He turned and tried, without any real hope of success, to summon any of the gaggle of waiters lounging among the sugar bowls at the back.

  Sally Mills took her bill and Dirk's and attempted to add them up on Dirk's calculator.

  “The total seems to come to ‘A Suffusion of Yellow’,” she said.

  “Thank you, I'll take that,” said Dirk turning back crossly and relieving her of the electronic I Ching set which he put into his pocket. He resumed his hapless waving at the tableau of waiters.

  “What do you want a knife for, anyway?” asked Sally.

  “To open this,” said Dirk, waggling the large, heavily Sellotaped envelope at her.

  “I'll get you one,” she said. A young man sitting on his own at another nearby table was looking away at that moment, so Sally quickly leaned across and nabbed his knife.

  “I am indebted to you,” said Dirk and put out his hand to take the knife from her.

  She held it away from him.

  “What's in the envelope?” she said.

  “You are an extremely inquisitive and presumptuous young lady,” exclaimed Dirk.

  “And you,” said Sally Mills, “are very strange.”

  “Only,” said Dirk, “as strange as I need to be.”

  “Humph,” said Sally. “What's in the envelope?” She still wouldn't give him the knife.

  “The envelope is not yours,” proclaimed Dirk, “and its contents are not your concern.”

  “It looks very interesting though. What's in it?”

  “Well, I won't know till I've opened it!”

  She looked at him suspiciously, then snatched the envelope from him.

  “I insist that you — ” expostulated Dirk, incompletely.

  “What's your name?” demanded Sally.

  “My name is Gently. Mr Dirk Gently.”

  “And not Geoffrey Anstey, or any of these other names that have been crossed out?” She frowned, briefly, looking at them.

  “No,” said Dirk. “Certainly not.”

  “So you mean the envelope is not yours either?”

  “I — that is — ”

  “Aha! So you are also being extremely... what was it?”

  “Inquisitive and presumptuous. I do not deny it. But I am a private detective. I am paid to be inquisitive and presumptuous. Not as often or copiously as I would wish, but I am nevertheless inquisitive and presumptuous on a professional basis.”

  “How sad. I think it's much more fun being inquisitive and presumptuous as a hobby. So you are a professional while I am merely an amateur of Olympic standard. You don't look like a private detective.”

  “No private detective looks like a private detective. That's one of the first rules of private detection.”

  “But if no private detective looks like a private detective, how does a private detective know what it is he's supposed not to look like? Seems to me there's a problem there.”

  “Yes, but it's not one that keeps me awake at nights,” said Dirk in exasperation. “Anyway, I am not as other private detectives. My methods are holistic and, in a very proper sense of the word, chaotic. I operate by investigating the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.”

  Sally Mills merely blinked at him.

  “Every particle in the universe,” continued Dirk, warming to his subject and beginning to stare a bit, “affects every other particle, however faintly or obliquely. Everything interconnects with everything. The beating of a butterfly's wings in China can affect the course of an Atlantic hurricane. If I could interrogate this table-leg in a way that made sense to me, or to the table-leg, then it could provide me with the answer to any question about the universe. I could ask anybody I liked, chosen entirely by chance, any random question I cared to think of, and their answer, or lack of it, would in some way bear upon the problem to which I am seeking a solution. It is only a question of knowing how to interpret it. Even you, whom I have met entirely by chance, probably know things that are vital to my investigation, if only I knew what to ask you, which I don't, and if only I could be bothered to, which I can't.”

  He paused, and said, “Please will you let me have the envelope and the knife?”

  “You make it sound as if someone's life depends on it.”

  Dirk dropped his eyes for a moment.

  “I rather think somebody's life did depend on it,” he said. He said it in such a way that a cloud seemed to pass briefly over them.

  Sally Mills relented and passed the envelope and the knife over to Dirk. A spark seemed to go out of her.

  The knife was too blunt and the Sellotape too thickly applied. Dirk struggled with it for a few seconds but was unable to slice through it. He sat back in his seat feeling tired and irritable.

  He said, “I'll go and ask them if they've got anything sharper,” and stood up, clutching the envelope.

  “You should go and get your nose fixed,” said Sally Mills quietly.

  “Thank you,” said Dirk and bowed very slightly to her.

  He picked up the bills and set out to visit the exhibition of waiters mounted at the rear of the cafe. He encountered a certain coolness when he was disinclined to augment the mandatory 15 per cent service charge with any voluntary additional token of his personal appreciation, and was told that no, that was the only type of knife they had and that's all there was to it.

  Dirk thanked them and walked back through the café.

  Sitting in his seat talking to Sally Mills was the young man whose knife she had purloined. He nodded to her, but she w
as deeply engrossed in conversation with her new friend and did not notice.

  “...in a coma,” she was saying, “who had to be moved to a private hospital in the early hours. God knows why it had to be done at that time of night. Just creates unnecessary trouble. Excuse me rabbiting on, but the patient had his own personal Coca-Cola machine and sledge-hammer with him, and that sort of thing is.all very well in a private hospital, but on a shortstaffed NHS ward it just makes me tired, and I talk too much when I'm tired. If I suddenly fall insensible to the floor, would you let me know?”

  Dirk walked on, and then noticed that Sally Mills had left the book she had been reading on her original table, and something about it caught his attention.

  It was a large book, called Run Like the Devil. In fact it was extremely large and a little dog-eared, looking more like a puff pastry cliff than a book. The bottom half of the cover featured the normal woman-in-cocktail-dress-framed-in-the-sights-of-a-gun, while the top half was entirely taken up with the author's name, Howard Bell, embossed in silver.

  Dirk couldn't immediately work out what it was about the book that had caught his eye, but he knew that some detail of the cover had struck a chord with him somewhere. He gave a circumspect glance at the girl whose coffee he had purloined, and whose five coffees and two croissants, one undelivered and uneaten, he had subsequently paid for. She wasn't looking, so he purloined her book as well and slipped it into the pocket of his leather coat.

  He stepped out on to the street, where a passing eagle swooped out of the sky at him, nearly forcing him into the path of a cyclist, who cursed and swore at him from a moral high ground that cyclists alone seem able to inhabit.

  Chapter 11

  Into the well-kempt grounds that lay just on the outskirts of a well-kempt village on the fringes of the well-kempt Cotswolds turned a less than well-kempt car.

  It was a battered yellow Citron 2CV which had had one careful owner but also three suicidally reckless ones. It made its way up the driveway with a reluctant air as if all it asked for from life was to be tipped into a restful ditch in one of the adjoining meadows and there allowed to settle in graceful abandonment, instead of which here it was being asked to drag itself all the way up this long gravelled drive which it would no doubt soon be called upon to drag itself all the way back down again, to what possible purpose it was beyond its wit to imagine.

  It drew to a halt in front of the elegant stone entrance to the main building, and then began to trundle slowly backwards again until its occupant yanked on the handbrake, which evoked from the car a sort of strangled “eek”.

  A door flopped open, wobbling perilously on its one remaining hinge, and there emerged from the car a pair of the sort of legs which soundtrack editors are unable to see without needing to slap a smoky saxophone solo all over, for reasons which no one besides soundtrack editors has ever been able to understand. In this particular case, however, the saxophone would have been silenced by the proximity of the kazoo which the same soundtrack editor would almost certainly have slapped all over the progress of the vehicle.

  The owner of the legs followed them in the usual manner, closed the car door tenderly, and then made her way into the building.

  The car remained parked in front of it.

  After a few minutes a porter came out and examined it, adopted a disapproving manner and then, for lack of anything more positive to do, went back in.

  A short time later, Kate was shown into the office of Mr Ralph Standish, the Chief Consultant Psychologist and one of the directors of the Woodshead Hospital, who was just completing a telephone conversation.

  “Yes, it is true,” he was saying, “that sometimes unusually intelligent and sensitive children can appear to be stupid. But, Mrs Benson, stupid children can sometimes appear to be stupid as well. I think that's something you might have to consider. I know it's very painful, yes. Good day, Mrs Benson.”

  He put the phone away into a desk drawer and spent a couple of seconds collecting his thoughts before looking up.

  “This is very short notice, Miss, er, Schechter,” he said to her at last.

  In fact what he had said was, “This is very short notice, Miss, er-” and then he had paused and peered into another of his desk drawers before saying “Schechter”.

  It seemed to Kate that it was very odd to keep your visitors' names in a drawer, but then he clearly disliked having things cluttering up his fine, but severely designed, black ash desk because there was nothing on it at all. It was completely blank, as was every other surface in his office. There was nothing on the small neat steel and glass coffee table which sat squarely between two Barcelona chairs. There was nothing on top of the two expensive-looking filing cabinets which stood at the back of the room.

  There were no bookshelves — if there were any books they were presumably hidden away behind the white doors of the large blank built-in cupboards — and although there was one plain black picture frame hanging on the wall, this was presumably a temporary aberration because there was no picture in it.

  Kate looked around her with a bemused air.

  “Do you have no ornaments in here at all, Mr Standish?” she asked.

  He was, for a moment, somewhat taken aback by her transatlantic directness, but then answered her.

  “Indeed I have ornaments,” he said; and pulled open another drawer. He pulled out from this a small china model of a kitten playing with a ball of wool and put it firmly on the desk in front of him.

  “As a psychologist I am aware of the important role that ornamentation plays in nourishing the human spirit,” he pronounced.

  He put the china kitten back in the drawer and slid it closed with a smooth click.

  “Now.”

  He clasped his hands together on the desk in front of him, and looked at her enquiringly.

  “It's very good of you to see me at short notice, Mr Standish — ”

  “Yes, yes, we've established that.”

  “— but I'm sure you know what newspaper deadlines are like.”

  “I know at least as much as I would ever care to know about newspapers, Miss, er — ”

  He opened his drawer again.

  “Miss Schechter, but — ”

  “Well that's partly what made me approach you,” lied Kate charmingly. “I know that you have suffered from some, well, unfortunate publicity here, and thought you might welcome the opportunity to talk about some of the more enlightening aspects of the work at the Woodshead Hospital.” She smiled very sweetly.

  “It's only because you come to me with the highest recommendation from my very good friend and colleague Mr, er — ”

  “Franklin, Alan Franklin,” prompted Kate, to save the psychologist from having to open his drawer again. Alan Franklin was a therapist whom Kate had seen for a few sessions after the loss of her husband Luke. He had warned her that Standish, though brilliant, was also peculiar, even by the high standards set by his profession.

  “Franklin,” resumed Standish, “that I agreed to see you. Let me warn you instantly that if I see any resumption of this 'Something nasty in the Woodshead' mendacity appearing in the papers as a result of this interview I will, I will — ”

  “‘— do such things —

  ‘What they are yet I know not — but they shall be

  ‘The terror of the Earth’,” said Kate, brightly.

  Standish narrowed his eyes.

  “Lear, Act 2, Scene 4,” he said. “And I think you'll find it's ‘terrors’ and not ‘terror’.”

  “Do you know, I think you're right?” replied Kate.

  Thank you, Alan, she thought. She smiled at Standish, who relaxed into pleased superiority. It was odd, Kate reflected, that people who needed to bully you were the easiest to push around.

  “So you would like to know precisely what, Miss Schechter?”

  “Assume,” said Kate, “that I know nothing.”

  Standish smiled, as if to signify that no assumption could possibly give him greater
pleasure.

  “Very well,” he said. “The Woodshead is a research hospital. We specialise in the care and study of patients with unusual or previously unknown conditions, largely in the psychological or psychiatric fields. Funds are raised in various ways. One of our chief methods is quite simply to take in private patients at exorbitantly high fees, which they are happy to pay, or at least happy to complain about. There is in fact nothing to complain about because patients who come to us privately are made fully aware of why our fees are so high. For the money they are paying, they are, of course, perfectly entitled to complain — the right to complain is one of the privileges they are paying for. In some cases we come to a special arrangement under which, in return for being made the sole beneficiaries of a patient's estate, we will guarantee to look after that patient for the rest of his or her life.”

  “So in effect you are in the business of giving scholarships to people with particularly gifted diseases?”

  “Exactly. A very good way of expressing it. We are in the business of giving scholarships to people with particularly gifted diseases. I must make a note of that. Miss Mayhew!”

  He had opened a drawer, which clearly contained his office intercom. In response to his summons one of the cupboards opened, and turned out to be a door into a side office — a feature which must have appealed to some architect who had conceived an ideological dislike of doors. From this office there emerged obediently a thin and rather blank-faced woman in her midforties.

  “Miss Mayhew,” said Mr Standish, “we are in the business of giving scholarships to people with particularly gifted diseases.”

  “Very good, Mr Standish,” said Miss Mayhew, and retreated backwards into her office, pulling the door closed after her. Kate wondered if it was perhaps a cupboard after all.

  “And we do have some patients with some really quite outstanding diseases at the moment,” enthused the psychologist. “Perhaps you would care to come and see one or two of our current stars?”

  “Indeed I would. That would be most interesting, Mr Standish, you're very kind,” said Kate.