The Oxford Murders

Fifteen

Almost two weeks passed without my hearing anything more about the case. I also lost contact with Seldom, though I found out from a casual remark of Emily’s that he was in Cambridge, helping to organise a seminar on Number Theory. “Andrew Wiles thinks he can prove Fermat’s last conjecture,” Emily said, amused, as if talking about an incorrigible child, “and Arthur is one of the few people who’s taking it seriously.” This was the first time I’d heard Wiles’s name. I didn’t think any professional mathematicians were still working on Fermat’s last theorem. After three hundred years of struggle and especially since Kummer, mathematicians had decided that the theorem was impossible to solve. At any rate, it was beyond all known mathematical tools, and so difficult it would consume the life and career of anyone who took up the challenge. When I said some of this to Emily, she agreed, as if she too found it mystifying. “And yet,” she said, “Andrew was my student, and if there’s anyone in the world who can solve it, I’d put my money on him.”

During those weeks I accepted an invitation to a conference on Model Theory in Leeds but, instead of paying attention to the lectures, I found myself, during sessions, drawing circle and fish symbols in the margins of my notebook, like an invocation to the void. I’d tried to read between the lines of the newspaper articles that appeared in the days following Ernest Clarck’s death but, perhaps because Inspector Petersen had intervened, a possible link between the two murders was only mentioned in passing. The fish symbol was described but the newspapers seemed unaware of its significance and inclined to believe it was a kind of signature. I’d asked Lorna to write in great detail if there were any new developments but, instead of a report, I received the kind of letter I thought people no longer wrote, and which I certainly never would have expected from Lorna. Long and tender, it was a love letter.

At the seminar someone was discussing the Chinese Room Experiment. This is a thought experiment devised by the philosopher John Searle in 1980. A person who has no knowledge of Chinese sits in a room. A native Chinese speaker slips a page of questions, written in Chinese, under the door. The person inside the room answers in Chinese with the help of an instruction book written in English. To the Chinese speaker outside, it seems as if the person in the room understands and speaks Chinese. I reread Lorna’s words, which she seemed to have written in an unchecked fit of passion, reflecting that the burning question in translation was knowing-really knowing-what the other person meant when they slipped a page containing the terrible word under your door. In my reply I copied Qais ben-al-Mulawah’s plea in one of his poems to Layla:

Oh God, make the love between us equal that neither should go beyond the other

Make our loves identical like two sides of an equation.

I returned to Oxford on the day of the concert. Seldom had left a note in my pigeonhole at the Institute containing a little map with directions, the different ways of getting to Blenheim Palace, and a time for us to meet. In the afternoon, as I was changing, there was a knock at my door. It was Beth. For a moment I couldn’t say anything-all I could do was stare. She was wearing a low-cut black dress and matching long gloves. Her hair was tied back, showing off her elegant jawline, long, slender neck and bare shoulders. It was the first time I’d ever seen her wearing make-up and the transformation was spectacular. She smiled nervously as I stared at her.

“Michael and I wondered if you’d like us to give you a lift, if you don’t mind arriving a little early. We’re about to leave.”

I grabbed my thin cotton sweater and followed her out through the garden. I’d seen Michael only once before, from a distance, from my window. He was loading Beth’s cello on to the back seat. When he looked up and said hello, I saw a cheerful, ingenuous face with ruddy cheeks that made him look like a countryman or happy beer drinker. He was tall and heavily built, but there was something soft about his features that reminded me of Beth’s disparaging remark about him. His tailcoat was slightly crumpled and he couldn’t quite button it across his middle. Lank blond hair flopped over his forehead, and I noticed that he flicked it back constantly. I reflected maliciously that he would probably soon be bald.

He started up the engine and manoeuvred the car slowly out of the close. As we came to the crossroads with the main road the headlamps lit up the crushed animal which was still lying in the road. Michael swerved to avoid it and lowered his window to look at the bloody remains. It was completely flattened but still, disturbingly, preserved its shape in two dimensions.

“It’s a badger,” he said to Beth. “It must have strayed out of the woods.”

“It’s been there for days,” I said. “I passed it when it had just been run over. I think it was carrying young. I’d never seen one before.”

Beth leaned over to Michael’s side and glanced quickly out the window, without much interest.

“Isn’t anybody going to clear away the remains?” I asked.

“No. The refuse collectors are superstitious. Nobody dares touch a badger, they think they bring bad luck. It’ll gradually get worn away by the cars.”

Michael speeded up to get through the lights and, as we joined the flow of traffic, he starting asking me the usual polite questions. I recalled the words of an English writer-Virginia Woolf, I think-who had once excused the formality of her compatriots by explaining that the initial, apparently trivial, conversation about the weather served to establish common ground and a comfortable atmosphere before moving on to more important subjects. But I was starting to wonder if that second stage really existed, and if I’d ever get to hear about those more important subjects. At one point I asked them how they had met. Beth said that they sat next to each other in the orchestra, as if that explained everything, and in fact the more I watched them, that did indeed seem like the only explanation. Proximity, routine, repetition-a most effective combination. He hadn’t even been, as some women say, ‘the first to come by’; it was something more immediate: ‘the one sitting nearest’. But what did I know? I didn’t, of course, but I suspected that Michael’s main attraction was that another woman had chosen him first.

We joined the ring road and, for a few minutes, as Michael accelerated on the dual carriageway and advertising hoardings flashed past, I felt I was back in the modern world. We turned off towards Woodstock down a narrow tree-lined road. The branches intertwined overhead, forming a long tunnel in which you could only see to the next bend in the road. We went through the small village, drove about two hundred metres down a side road and, passing under a stone arch, we saw, in the late-afternoon sun, the huge gardens, the lake and the majestic outline of the palace, with its gold spheres on the roof and marble figures peering down from the balustrades like lookouts. We parked near the entrance. Beth and Michael walked across the gardens carrying their instruments to the stage, where chairs and music stands were set out for the orchestra. The seats for the audience, as yet unoccupied, had been painstakingly arranged in perfect concentric semicircles. I wondered how long this small miracle of geometry would last once people started arriving and if anybody else would get to admire the effort. I decided to go for a walk through the woods and around the lake in the half-hour before the performance.

The light was fading. An elderly man in a grey uniform was rounding up the peacocks for the night. Through the trees, I glimpsed horses loose in a field. I passed a guard with two dogs and he tipped his cap in greeting. By the time I reached the lake it was dark. When I looked back towards the palace it was as if a giant switch had been flicked: the entire facade was lit up, brilliant and serene as an ancient jewel. Touched by the reflection, the lake stretched much further than I had thought, so I gave up on the idea of getting all the way round and doubled back.

A great many seats were now occupied and I was surprised by the number of people still arriving in groups, trailing perfume and long dresses. Seldom was waving his programme at me from a row near the front. He too looked unusually elegant, in a dinner jacket and black bow tie. We chatted for a while about the seminar he was organising in Cambridge, the secrecy surrounding Wiles’s presentation and, very briefly, my trip to Leeds. I looked round and saw two ushers hurriedly unfolding chairs and setting out an extra row.

“I didn’t expect so many people,” I said.

“Yes,” said Seldom, “almost all of Oxford ’s here: look over there.” And he indicated with his eyes a place a few rows back to the right.

I turned as discreetly as I could and saw Inspector Petersen with a young woman, probably the fair-haired little girl from the photograph twenty years on. The inspector nodded to us.

“And there’s someone else I now find everywhere I go,” said Seldom. “Two rows back, the man in the grey suit pretending to read the programme. Do you recognise him out of uniform? It’s Detective Sergeant Sacks. Petersen seems to think our man may try to strike closer to me next time.”

“So you’ve spoken to Inspector Petersen again?” I asked.

“Only on the phone. He asked me to write, as simply as possible, a justification for the third symbol, the law of formation of the series, as I see it. I sent him my explanation from Cambridge. It was barely half a page long, unlike that very…er…imaginative report he read us. I think he has a plan, but he probably still has some doubts. It’s interesting how seductive a psychologist’s conjectures can be. Even if they’re incorrect or ridiculous, they’re always more attractive than purely logical reasoning. People have a natural resistance to, and instinctive mistrust of logical thought. And even if it is completely mistaken, that resistance-as one sees if one studies the historical development of logic in the human mind-may have some foundation.”

Seldom had lowered his voice slightly. The murmur of conversation around us ceased and the lights dimmed. A powerful beam of white light dramatically illuminated the orchestra. The conductor tapped briefly on the music stand, pointed his baton at the lead violin and the solitary first line of the piece that opened the programme made its way tentatively in the silence, like a curl of smoke rising.

Gently, as if gathering delicate threads in the air, the conductor brought in Beth and Michael, the wind section, the piano and, lastly, the percussionist. I stared at Beth, although in fact I’d been watching her all along, even while listening to Seldom. I wondered if it was on stage that she felt her true connection with Michael. They both looked fully absorbed and focused, following the score, turning the pages briskly. Every so often a sudden strike of the drum would make me look up at the percussionist. Very tall, hunched with age, with a white moustache, slightly yellowed at the tips, that must once have been his pride and joy, he was by far the oldest member of the orchestra. When he wasn’t playing he looked shaky and unsteady, in contrast to the spasmodic vigour with which he struck the drum, almost as if he were trying to hide the early stages of Parkinson’s. I noticed that he put his hands behind his back after striking the drum and that the conductor was trying, rather comically, to get him to moderate his efforts. The music rose to a majestic climax and the conductor signalled the end of the piece with an energetic wave of his baton, before turning, with bowed head, to receive the first applause.

I asked Seldom for the programme. The next piece was a recent one by a composer I’d never heard of, Salvatore Oronzo’s The Birth of Spring. I handed the programme back to Seldom and he glanced at it quickly.

“Perhaps we’ll get the fireworks now,” he whispered.

I followed his gaze up to the palace roofs. Among the statues, you could make out the moving shadows of the men preparing the fireworks. Everything became quiet, the lights over the orchestra went out and a single spotlight focused on an elderly, ghostly figure holding up a triangle. We heard a distant, hieratic tinkling, like the dripping of thawing ice. The orchestra reappeared, bathed in a light tinged with orange, possibly intended to represent the dawn. The triangle sounded in counterpoint to the flutes, gradually fading from the central motif. In turn, other instruments joined in, putting one in mind of flowers slowly opening out. The conductor’s baton suddenly set a frenzied rhythm for the brass, which sounded like wild horses galloping across the plains. Gradually all the sections of the orchestra submitted to the insane pace, until the conductor waved his baton in the percussionist’s direction. The spotlight again focused on him, as if a crescendo was to come from there. But, in the harsh white beam, we could see that something was terribly wrong.

Still holding the triangle, the old man seemed to be gasping for air. He dropped the instrument, which struck a jarring note as it hit the ground, and staggered down from his platform. The spotlight followed him, as if the lighting technician couldn’t take his eyes off the horrifying scene. The percussionist held out his arm towards the conductor in a mute plea for help, then raised both hands to his throat, as if defending himself from an invisible attacker who was trying to strangle him. He fell to his knees and there was a chorus of muffled screams, most of the people in the front row rising from their seats. Members of the orchestra surrounded the percussionist and called desperately for a doctor. A man made his way along our row and on to the stage. I stood to let him pass and couldn’t help following him.

Inspector Petersen was already with the musicians and I saw that Detective Sergeant Sacks too had jumped up on to the stage, gun in hand. The percussionist lay face down in a grotesque pose, his hand still gripping his throat, his face a bruised blue, like a marine animal that had stopped breathing. The man who had pushed past me was a doctor.

He turned the body over, pressed two fingers to the neck to check the pulse and closed the eyes. Crouching beside him, Petersen discreetly showed him his ID card and spoke to him for a moment. He then made his way through the orchestra to the percussionist’s platform and began searching the floor. The triangle was lying by the steps and he picked it up with his handkerchief. I turned and saw Seldom in the crowd behind me.

Petersen was motioning for Seldom to join him in one of the empty rows of seats. I pushed through the throng until I reached Seldom and followed him, but he seemed not to notice me. He said nothing and his expression was impossible to read. We made our way slowly back to our seats. Petersen had climbed down from the stage and was now approaching us from the opposite end of the row. Seldom stopped suddenly, frozen at the sight of something on his seat. Someone had torn a couple of phrases from the programme and formed a short message. I managed to read them before the inspector moved me aside. The first said: “The third of the series.” The second was the word ‘triangle’.