The Oxford Murders

Twenty-Two

We were in the Eagle and Child, and Seldom and Lorna were teasing me for taking so long to finish my beer.

“It could not be drunk any slower…or perhaps it could,” said Lorna imitating the magician’s deep, slightly rasping voice.

We had gone to see Lavand in his dressing room briefly after the show and Seldom had tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade him to come with us to the pub. “Ah yes, our young sceptic,” the magician had said absently when Seldom introduced me and then, when he found out I, like him, was Argentinian, he said in Spanish that sounded as if he hadn’t used it in a long time, “Magic is safe thanks to the sceptics.” He was very tired, he told us, reverting to English. He was making his shows shorter and shorter but he couldn’t fool his old bones. “We must talk again before I leave,” he said to Seldom at the door. “I hope you find something about what you asked me in the book I lent you.”

“What did you ask the magician about? What book did he mean?” enquired Lorna confidently. The beer seemed to have a strange effect on her of recovered camaraderie, which I’d noticed in the way she smiled when she and Seldom clinked glasses, and I wondered again how far their friendship had gone.

“I told him about the death of the percussionist,” said Seldom. “And I asked him about an idea that I considered at one point, when I remembered how Mrs Crafford died.”

“Ah, yes,” said Lorna enthusiastically, “the case of the telepath.”

“It was one of Inspector Petersen’s most famous cases,” said Seldom, addressing me. “The death of Mrs Crafford, a very wealthy old lady who ran the local spiritualist circle. The qualifying rounds of the World Chess Championship were being held here in Oxford at the time. A well-known Indian telepath was in town and Mr and Mrs Crafford held a soiree at their mansion to try an experiment in remote telepathy. The Craffords’ house was in Summer-town, close to where you live. The telepath was to be across town, at Folly Bridge. The distance was supposedly some sort of record. Mrs Crafford had gladly volunteered to be the first test subject. With great ceremony, the Indian telepath asked her to sit in the middle of the sitting room, placed a kind of skullcap on her head and left the house, heading for the bridge. At the appointed time, they turned out the lights. The cap was fluorescent and glowed in the dark, and the people in the audience could see a ghostly aura around Mrs Crafford’s face. After thirty seconds they suddenly heard a terrible scream, followed by a long sizzling sound like eggs frying. When Mr Crafford switched the lights back on they found the old lady dead in her chair, with her skull burnt, as if she’d been struck by lightning.

“The poor telepath was arrested as a preventative measure, until he managed to explain that the cap was totally harmless, simply a piece of cloth covered in fluorescent paint designed purely for effect. The man was as baffled as everyone else: he’d performed his remote telepathy show in many countries, under all kinds of atmospheric conditions, and that day had been particularly clear and sunny. Inspector Petersen of course immediately turned his suspicions on Mr Crafford. It was common knowledge that he was having an affair with a much younger woman, but there seemed to be very little else to implicate him. And it was difficult to imagine how he could have done it. Petersen based his case against him on a single fact: that day Mrs Crafford had been wearing what she called her ‘dress wig’, which had wire mesh on the inside. Everyone had seen Mr Crafford kiss his wife affectionately just before the lights were turned out. Inspector Petersen claimed that at that moment Crafford had connected a wire to the wig to electrocute her, which he later removed when he pretended to go to her aid. It wasn’t impossible, but as was shown later at the trial, it would have been rather difficult.

“Crafford’s lawyer, on the other hand, had a simple and, in its way, brilliant explanation. If you look at a map of the city, halfway between Folly Bridge and Summertown you find the Playhouse, where the chess championship was being held. At the time of Mrs Crafford’s death, around a hundred chess players were concentrating furiously on their chessboards. The defence maintained that the mental energy liberated by the telepath had suddenly been boosted by all the energy from the players as it passed through the theatre, hitting Summertown like a whirlwind. And that would explain how what was at first merely a harmless brain wave ended up striking Mrs Crafford like a bolt of lightning. Crafford’s trial divided Oxford into two camps. The defence called to the stand an army of mentalists and supposed experts on the paranormal who, predictably, backed up the lawyer’s theory with all kinds of ridiculous explanations, couched in the usual pseudo-scientific jargon. The odd thing was that the more crazy the theory, the more prepared the jury-and the entire town-seemed to be to believe it.

“At that time I Was just starting my work on the aesthetics of reasoning and I was fascinated by the strength of conviction that an attractive idea could generate. True, one could argue that the jury was probably made up of people with no scientific training, people more apt to trust horoscopes, the I Ching and tarot cards than to doubt parapsychologists and telepaths. But the interesting thing is that the entire city embraced the idea and wanted to believe it, not due to an attack of irrationality but for supposedly scientific reasons. It was in a way a battle within the rational, and the theory of the chess players was simply more seductive, more clearly defined, more pregnant, as painters would say, than the theory of the wire mesh in the wig.

“But then, just as everything seemed to be going Crafford’s way, the Oxford Times printed a letter from a reader, a certain Lorna Craig, a girl who was a huge fan of crime novels,” said Seldom, indicating Lorna with his glass. They smiled, as if sharing an old joke. “The letter simply pointed out that in an old edition of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine there was a story about a similar death by remote telepathy, the only difference being that the brain wave went through a football stadium during a penalty shot instead of through a room full of chess players. The funny thing was that in the story the theory of the brainstorm, now put forward by Crafford’s lawyer, was taken to be true and to be the solution to the mystery. But how fickle is human nature: as soon as people found out that Crafford might have copied the idea, they all turned against him. The lawyer tried to persuade the jury that Crafford wasn’t much of a reader and was unlikely to know the story, but it was no use. The idea, by dint of repetition, had lost some of its attraction and now sounded ridiculous, like something that only a writer could have thought up. The jury, a jury of fallible men, as Kant would say, found Crafford guilty even though no other proof against him had been found. Let us say this: the only piece of evidence presented during the entire trial was a fantastical story that poor Crafford had never even read.”

“Poor Crafford fried his wife!” exclaimed Lorna.

“As you can see,” laughed Seldom, “some people were totally convinced of his guilt and didn’t need proof. Anyway, I remembered the case the night of the concert. If you recall, the percussionist suffocated just as the music reached the climax. Well, I asked Lavand about the kind of effects that can be created from a distance and he lent me a book on hypnotism. I haven’t had time to look at it yet.”

A waitress came to take our order. Lorna said I should have fish and chips, and then got up to go to the ladies. Once Seldom had ordered and the waitress had left, I returned the envelope containing the photographs to him.

“Were you able to remember anything?” he asked. When he saw my doubtful look, he said: “It’s difficult, isn’t it? Going back to the beginning as if one knew nothing. Emptying one’s mind of all that came afterwards. Did you see anything that you hadn’t noticed before?”

“Only this: when we found Mrs Eagleton’s body, she didn’t have a blanket over her legs,” I said.

Seldom leaned back in his chair and stroked his chin.

“That…could be interesting,” he said. “Yes, now that you mention it, I remember clearly, she always had a tartan blanket over her legs. When she was going out, at least.”

“Beth is sure that her grandmother still had the blanket when she came downstairs at two. The police searched the house for it later but couldn’t find it. Inspector Petersen didn’t mention any of this to us,” I said a little resentfully.

“Well,” said Seldom, gently mocking, “he is the police inspector in charge of the case. Perhaps he doesn’t feel the need to report every single detail to us.”

I laughed.

“But we know more than he does,” I said.

“Only in the sense that we’re familiar with Pythagoras’s theorem.”

His face darkened, as if suddenly reminded of his worst fears. He leaned towards me and said confidentially:

“His daughter told me he has trouble sleeping at night. She’s found him awake in the early hours several times, trying to read books on mathematics. He called me again this morning. I think he’s worried, like me, that Thursday will be too late.”

“But Thursday is only the day after tomorrow,” I said.

“Pasado mañana,” said Seldom. “The day after tomorrow. The thing is, tomorrow is no ordinary day. That was why Petersen called. He wants to send some of his men to Cambridge.”

“What’s happening tomorrow in Cambridge?” Lorna was back, carrying our beers.

“I have a feeling it’s all because of the book I lent Petersen, giving a rather fanciful account of the story of Fermat’s theorem. It’s the most ancient unsolved problem in mathematics,” he said to Lorna. “Mathematicians have been struggling with it for over three hundred years and, tomorrow in Cambridge, they may manage to prove it for the first time. The book traces the origin of the conjecture on Pythagorean triples, one of the secrets of the earliest years of the sect, before the fire when, as Lavand said, magic and mathematics were still closely linked. The Pythagoreans believed that numerical properties and relationships represented the secret number of a deity which should be kept secret within the sect. They could disseminate theorems, for use in daily life, but never their proofs, just as magicians swear not to reveal their tricks. Members of the sect broke this rule on pain of death.

“The book I lent Inspector Petersen claims that Fermat himself belonged to a more recent but no less strict sect than the Pythagoreans. He announced in his famous note in the margin to Diophantus’s Arithmetical that he had proof of his conjecture but, after his death, neither that nor any of his other proofs were found among his papers.

I expect what alarmed Petersen was the fact that there are several strange deaths linked with the story of the theorem. A lot of people have died, of course, over the three hundred years, including those who came close to finding a proof of the theorem. But the book’s author is shrewd and he manages to make some of the deaths seem truly suspicious-Taniyama’s suicide in the late fifties, for instance, with the strange note he left for his fiancée.”

“In that case the murders would be…”

“A warning,” said Seldom. “A warning to the world of mathematicians. As I told Petersen, I think the conspiracy set out in the book is probably a load of ingenious nonsense. But there is something that worries me: Andrew Wiles has worked in absolute secret for the past seven years. Nobody has a clue as to what his proof will be. He has never allowed me to look at any of his papers. If something should happen to him before his presentation and those papers disappeared, another three hundred years might pass before anyone repeated the proof. That’s why, quite apart from what I think, it’s not a bad idea for Petersen to send some of his men to Cambridge. If anything happened to Andrew,” he said, and his face darkened again, “I’d never forgive myself.”