The Oxford Murders

Fourteen

We left the police station in silence and walked back along St Aldates without a word until we reached Carfax Tower.

“I need to buy tobacco,” said Seldom. “Would you like to come with me to the Covered Market?”

I nodded and we turned down the High. I hadn’t said a word since we left the police station. Seldom smiled to himself.

“You’re offended because I didn’t tell you what the symbol was. But believe me, I have a very good reason.”

“A different reason from the one you gave me in the park yesterday? Now that you’ve shown it to Petersen, I can’t see why there should be any adverse consequences of me knowing it.”

“There could be…other consequences,” said Seldom. “But that’s not exactly why I haven’t told you. I don’t want my conjectures to influence yours. It’s what I do with my graduate students: I try not to get ahead of them with my own reasoning. The most valuable time in a mathematician’s thinking process is the moment when he has his first solitary intuition about a problem. Though you may not believe it, I have more faith in you than in myself to find the correct answer. You were there at the beginning, and the beginning, as Aristotle would say, is half of everything. I’m sure you noticed something, though you may not yet know what. And above all, you’re not English. The first crime was the matrix. The circle is like the zero in natural numbers, a symbol of maximum uncertainty but which also determines everything.”

We entered the market and Seldom took his time choosing a tobacco mix at a tobacconist’s run by a woman of Indian appearance. The woman, who got up from her stool to serve him, was wearing a saffron-coloured robe and an earring like a silver coil hung from her left ear. On closer inspection, I saw that it was in fact a snake. I suddenly remembered what Seldom had said about the ouroboros of the Gnostics and couldn’t help asking the woman about the symbol.

Tapping the serpent’s head, she said:

“Nothing and everything. The emptiness of every separate thing, and the totality that embraces them all. Difficult, difficult to understand. Absolute reality, beyond negation. Eternity, that which has no beginning and no end. Reincarnation.”

She carefully weighed out the tobacco and exchanged a few words with Seldom as she handed him his change. We made our way out through the maze of stalls. In the arcade, we saw Beth standing by a little table, handing out leaflets for the Sheldonian Orchestra. They were holding a charity concert and the members of the orchestra, she told us, took turns selling tickets. Seldom picked up one of the programmes.

“It’s an orchestral concert at Blenheim Palace, with fireworks during one of the pieces,” he said. “I’m afraid you can’t leave Oxford without going, at least once, to a concert with fireworks. Allow me to buy you a ticket.” And he took the money for two tickets from his pocket.

I hadn’t spoken to Beth since my trip to London. As she tore out the tickets and wrote the seat numbers, I had the feeling that she was avoiding my gaze. The meeting seemed to embarrass her.

“Will I get to hear you play at last?” I asked.

“It’ll probably be my last concert,” she said, her eyes meeting Seldom’s for a moment. She went on, as if this were something she hadn’t told anyone yet and she wasn’t sure he would approve: “I’m getting married at the end of the month and I’m going to take some time off. I don’t think I’ll carry on playing afterwards.”

“That’s a pity,” said Seldom.

“That I’m stopping playing or that I’m getting married?” asked Beth, and she smiled joylessly at her own joke.

“Both!” I said. They laughed openly, as if my answer had provided unexpected relief. As I watched them laughing, I remembered what Seldom had said about me not being English. There was something restrained even in this spontaneous laughter, as if it were an unaccustomed liberty and they shouldn’t take it too far. Seldom could have objected that he was Scottish, of course, but even so, in their gestures, or rather in their careful economy of gestures, they had an undeniable air in common.

We emerged on to Cornmarket Street and I pointed out to Seldom a notice that I had seen earlier on one of the boards at the entrance to the Bodleian Library. It was for a round-table discussion in which Inspector Petersen and a local crime writer would be taking part: “Is there such a thing as the perfect crime?” The title made Seldom stop for a moment.

“Do you think this is some kind of bait Petersen is putting out?” he asked. The thought hadn’t occurred to me.

“No, the poster’s been up for nearly a month. And I assume that if they were laying a trap for the murderer they would have invited you too.”

“Perfect Crimes…I consulted a book with that same title when I was trying to establish the parallels between logic and criminal investigations. The book cited dozens of cases that have never been solved. The most interesting, for my purposes, was the case of a doctor, Howard Green, who formulated the problem most precisely. He wanted to kill his wife and wrote a diary setting out, in a truly scientific, detailed manner, all the possible adverse ramifications. It would be easy, he concluded, to kill her in such a way that the police couldn’t pin the blame on anyone with certainty. He proposed fourteen different methods, some highly ingenious. It would be much more difficult to ensure that he himself remained above suspicion forever.

“The real danger for a criminal, Green claimed, was not the investigation of events backwards in time-that was no problem as long as the murder was planned carefully enough, making sure all trails were blurred or erased-but the traps that might be laid for him going forwards in time. The truth, he wrote in almost mathematical terms, is strictly unique; any deviation from the truth can always be refuted. At every interrogation, he would know what he had done, and in every alibi he devised there would inevitably be something false which, with sufficient patience, could always be exposed. He wasn’t satisfied with any of the options he analysed-getting someone else to kill her, pretending it was suicide or an accident, and so on. He concluded that he would have to provide the police with another suspect, one who was obvious and immediate and who meant the case was closed. The perfect crime, he wrote, wasn’t one that remained unsolved, but one where the wrong person was blamed.”

“Did he kill her in the end?”

“Oh no, she killed him. She found the diary one night and they had a terrible fight. She defended herself with a kitchen knife, stabbing and mortally wounding him. At least, that’s what she told the court. The jury, horrified by the contents of the diary and photographs of the bruises on her face, decided that she acted in self-defence and found her innocent. It’s because of her in fact that the murder is included in the book: many years after her death some students of graphology proved that the handwriting in the diary, while an almost perfect imitation, was not in fact Dr Green’s handwriting. And they discovered another fascinating fact: the man she married discreetly shortly afterwards was a copyist of illustrations and ancient works of art. I’d like to know which of them penned the diary: it’s a masterly imitation of the scientific style. They were incredibly daring, because the diary, which was read out during the trial, recounted and revealed line by line what they had done. Lying with the truth, with all one’s cards on the table, like a conjuring trick performed with bare hands. By the way, have you heard of an Argentinian magician called Rene Lavand? If you see his act you never forget it.”

I shook my head-the name wasn’t even vaguely familiar.

“No?” said Seldom, surprised. “You must see his show. I know he’s coming to Oxford soon, we could go together. Do you remember our conversation at Merton, about the aesthetics of reasoning in different disciplines? As I told you, the logic of criminal investigations was my first model. The second was magic. I’m glad you don’t know him,” he said, with childlike enthusiasm. “It’ll give me an excuse to see his show again.”

When we arrived at the Eagle and Child I could see Lorna inside. She was sitting with her back to us, her red hair loose and flowing. She was absent-mindedly turning over a beer mat. Seldom, who had automatically brought out his packet of tobacco, followed my gaze.

“Go on in,” he said. “Lorna doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”