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still the old-fashioned bobby on the beat who brings the villains in, don’t you be in any two minds on that score, Mr Robey. They may have all them machines an’ stuff up at the Yard—”
    “Then why do you think he did it?”
    “Now look, sir, I’m just a policeman. A public servant. I can’t afford to spend much of my time in thinking . In fact that’s part of the trouble, if you ask me. These kids who go to the colleges, they’re highly strung. Intellectual, you know what I mean? Could be he didn’t have any reason at all that you or I would recognise. Just sits there thinking to himself and then he ups and does it. It’s all got to do with the strain of modern life.”
    “You could have something there,” Dobie said.
    Looking down at the notepad upon which he had been doodling, he saw that he had covered the page with squiggly representations of the Eiffel Tower. Curious, that.
     
     
     
    There was a strong wind blowing at the airport and Dobie stood on the waving base with his shoulders hunched and his hands driven deep into his pockets, watching Jenny walk briskly with the other passengers towards the waiting 727. When she turned to look back he waved, since that’s what waving bases are for, and she raised the hand that wasn’t carrying her holdall and then walked on. Back on Saturday. That’s if I don’t get held up.
    The plane took off on time, anyway.
    Driving back, Dobie slipped one of his favourite tapes into the cassette-player. The C major string quintet, K.515. But not even the lilt of the opening theme did much to soothe his sense of unease. At the roundabout he turned left, heading not back home but for Culverhouse Cross and Cardiff. He didn’t want to go back to the flat. Not just yet.
    He stopped some way short of the castle and got out the street map. Ludlow Road was off the City Road and appeared to be a cul-de-sac. There was, as he soon discovered, nothing very prepossessing about it; the usual drab late-Victorian houses ran to either side of it, alleviated here and there by glass shop frontages. About halfway down on the left-hand side, however, someone had plonked down a modern supermarket of modest size, its windows filled with posters announcing various cut-price offers and bearing the pine-tree logo of a well-known supermarket chain. Dobie, parking opposite, wondered if there was anything he wanted to buy but couldn’t think of anything; Jenny would certainly have left the pantry shelves and the fridge well stocked. Number 12, almost directly opposite, was a solidly-built (as Kate had said) two-storey construction conforming pretty much to the general and depressing pattern of the other houses in the street; it bore, however, an inscribed plaque which said:
     
    DR CAITLIN COYLE
     
    Consulting Hours
    1000 - 1230
    1700 - 1900
     
    Three worn stone steps led up to the front door. Dobie climbed them.
     
     
     
    Cantwell’s rooms were decidedly a cut above the usual student digs. Luxurious, no. But spacious and comfortable. Two armchairs, adequately cushioned, had been placed to either side of a three-bar electric fire with two small tables conveniently adjacent; the bed, on the far side of the room, was plumply mattressed and an electric radio-cum-alarm-clock stood on the night table, its large digital figures greenly glowing. Nearby was an enormous wardrobe, Edwardian in its majesty, and an almost equally capacious chest of drawers. Along the far wall were shelves that held a couple of dozen textbooks, a rather swish Sony cassette-player and a few cassette boxes, while right-angled to it was a work-desk, much less impressively dimensioned than the monstrosity in Dickie Bird’s office but sizeable, none the less, offering adequate space for an IBM computer and monitor, a Smith Corona word processor and several loose-leaf notebooks. “Is all this stuff valuable?” Kate asked. “It looks as though it might be.”
    “I wouldn’t throw any of it away. IBM computers aren’t