The Oxford Murders

Nineteen

By five o’clock I’d finished the first draft of my report. Before leaving the office I checked my e-mail again. There was a short message from Seldom asking me to meet him at Merton after his seminar, if I was free. I’d have to hurry to get there on time. I climbed the small staircase that led to the classrooms and, peering through the glass door, saw him discussing a problem on the blackboard with two students who had stayed behind.

The students left and he motioned for me to enter. While he put away his notes, he pointed to a circle drawn on the board and said:

“We were discussing Nicholas of Cusa’s geometrical metaphor-the truth as a circumference and human attempts to approach it as a series of inscribed polygons, with more and more sides, coming close in the end to a circular form. It’s an optimistic metaphor, because successive stages enable one to sense the final figure. There is, however, another possibility, one that my students still aren’t aware of and which is much more discouraging.” Beside the circle he quickly drew an irregular figure with numerous points and clefts. “Suppose for a moment that the truth was the shape, say, of an island like Britain, with a very irregular coastline, with endless projections and inlets. This time, when you try to approximate the figure by means of polygons, you encounter Mandelbrot’s paradox. The edge remains elusive, breaking up at each new attempt into ever more projections and inlets, and human efforts to determine it simply never arrive at a final figure. Similarly, the truth may not yield to the series of human approximations. What does this remind you of?”

“Godel’s theorem? The polygons would be systems with more and more axioms, but a part of the truth is always beyond reach.”

“Perhaps, in a sense. But it’s also like this case, and Wittgenstein’s and Frankie’s conclusion: the known terms of a series, any number of terms, are always insufficient. How can one know a priori with which of these two figures we’re dealing? You know,” he said suddenly, “my father had a big library, with a bookcase in the middle where he kept the books I wasn’t allowed to read, a bookcase with a door that locked. When he opened it, all I could ever see was an engraving he’d stuck inside, of a man touching the ground with one hand and holding his other arm up in the air. Under the picture there was a caption in a language I didn’t know, which I eventually found out was German. I also later discovered a book that I thought miraculous: a bilingual dictionary my father used when he was teaching his classes. I deciphered the words one by one. The sentence was simple and mysterious: “Man is no more than the series of his actions.” I had a child’s absolute faith in the words and I started to see people as temporary, incomplete figures; figures in draft form, ever elusive. If a man is no more than the series of his actions, I realised, then he can’t be defined before his death: a single action, his last, could wipe out his previous existence, contradict his entire life. And, above all, it was precisely the series of my actions that I most feared. Man was no more than what I most feared.”

He showed me his hands, which were covered in chalk dust. He must have touched his face inadvertently because there was also a comical white mark on his forehead.

“I’ll be back in a minute-I’m just going to wash my hands,” he said. “If you go downstairs you’ll find the cafeteria. Would you get me a large coffee, please? Without sugar.”

I ordered two coffees. Seldom reappeared just in time to carry his own cup to a table set slightly apart from the rest, with a view of the gardens. Through the open door of the cafeteria we could see the continuous stream of tourists entering the college and heading for the quads.

“I had a chat with Inspector Peter sen this morning,” said Seldom. “He told me about their dilemma over the counting yesterday evening. On one hand they knew the exact number of people who entered the gardens of the palace from the ticket stubs collected as they arrived, and on the other they knew the number of seats occupied. The person in charge of seating is particularly meticulous and assured them that he had added only the chairs that were strictly needed. Now here’s the strange thing: when they finished the count it turned out that there were more people than seats. Three people didn’t use their seats.”

Seldom looked at me as if expecting me to find the explanation immediately. I pondered for a moment, slightly embarrassed.

“I thought it wasn’t done in England to sneak into concerts without paying,” I said.

Seldom laughed frankly.

“Not to charity concerts anyway. Oh, don’t think about it any more; it really is very silly. Petersen was just teasing me. He was in a good mood for once today. The three extra people were disabled, in wheelchairs. Petersen was delighted with his counting. In the list drawn up by his assistants there was nobody missing and nobody extra. For the first time he thinks he’s narrowed down the search: instead of the five hundred thousand people in Oxfordshire, now he only has to concern himself with the eight hundred who attended the concert. And he thinks he’ll quickly be able to narrow it down even further.”

“The three people in wheelchairs,” I said.

Seldom smiled.

“Yes, in theory the three wheelchair users as well as a group of children with Down’s Syndrome from a special school, and several very elderly ladies-the most likely-could all have been potential victims.”

“Do you think the deciding factor in his choice of victim is age?”

“I know you’ve got another theory: that he chooses people who are living on borrowed time, living longer than expected. Yes, in that case age would not be an excluding factor.”

“Did Petersen tell you anything else about the death last night? Does he have the results of the post-mortem?”

“Yes. He wanted to rule out the possibility that the percussionist ingested something before the concert which might have caused the respiratory arrest. And sure enough, they found nothing like that. Nor were there any signs of violence, no marks on his neck. Petersen thinks the man was attacked by someone who was familiar with the music: he chose the longest section without percussion. That meant he could be sure the percussionist would be out of the spotlight. Petersen has also ruled out it being another member of the orchestra. The only answer, given the percussionist’s location at the back of the stage and the absence of marks on his neck, is that someone climbed up the back and…”

“Covered his mouth and nose.”

Seldom looked at me, surprised.

“That’s what Lorna thought,” I told him.

He nodded.

“Yes, I should have guessed: Lorna knows all there is to know about crime. The pathologist says that the shock of being attacked could in itself have triggered the respiratory arrest, before the percussionist even tried to struggle. Someone climbed up the back and attacked him in the darkness-that seems like the only reasonable explanation. But that wasn’t what we saw.”

“You surely not tending towards the ghost hypothesis?” I said.

To my surprise, Seldom seemed to give my question serious consideration. He nodded slowly.

“Yes,” he said, “of the two alternatives, for now, I prefer the hypothesis of the ghost.”

He drank some coffee and looked at me again.

“You shouldn’t let your eagerness to find an explanation interfere with your memory of events. Actually, I asked you to meet me because I wanted you to have a look at this.”

He opened his briefcase and took out an envelope.

“Petersen showed me these photographs when I went to his office today. I asked if I could keep them till tomorrow so I could look at them carefully. I particularly wanted you to see them: they’re the photos of the crime scene at Mrs Eagleton’s-the first murder, the start of everything. The inspector’s returned to the original question: how is the circle in the first note linked to Mrs Eagleton? As you know, I think you saw something else there, something you still haven’t realised is important, but which is stored in a recess of your memory. I thought the photos might help you remember. It’s all here again.” He held out the envelope. “The sitting room, the cuckoo clock, the chaise longue, the Scrabble board. We know that in that first murder he made a mistake. That should tell us something more…” Seldom was distracted for a moment. He looked round at the other tables and the corridor. Suddenly his face hardened as if he’d seen something alarming.

“Someone’s just left something in my pigeonhole,” he said. “It’s odd because the postman’s already been this morning. I hope Detective Sergeant Sacks is still around. Wait here a minute, I’m going to have a look.”

I swivelled in my chair and saw that from where Seldom was sitting he could just see the last column of wooden pigeonholes on the wall. So that was where he’d received the first note. I was struck by the fact that the correspondence of all the members of the college was so openly on display in the corridor. The pigeonholes at the Mathematical Institute were equally unprotected. When Seldom came back he was looking at something inside an envelope, with a big smile on his face as if he’d just had unexpected good news.

“Do you remember the magician I mentioned, Rene Lavand? He’s in Oxford today and tomorrow. I’ve got tickets here for this evening. It has to be tonight because I’ll be in Cambridge tomorrow. Are you coming on our mathematicians’ outing?”

“No, I don’t think so,” I said. “It’s Lorna’s day off tomorrow.”

Seldom raised his eyebrows slightly.

“The solution to the most important problem in the history of mathematics versus a beautiful woman. The girl still wins, I suppose.”

“But I would very much like to see the magician’s show this evening.”

“Of course, of course,” said Seldom, unusually vehement. “You absolutely must see it. It starts at nine. And now,” he said, as if he were giving me a homework assignment, “go home and look carefully at the photographs.”