The Oxford Murders

Twenty-Three

On Wednesday 23 June I woke around midday. The heavenly smells of coffee and freshly made waffles were coming from Lorna’s tiny kitchen. Her cat, Sir Thomas, had managed to drag part of the bedspread on to the floor and he was now curled up on it at the foot of the bed. I walked around him and went to the kitchen to kiss Lorna. The paper was open on the table and I glanced through it while Lorna poured the coffee. A series of murders with mysterious symbols, said the Oxford Times with undisguised local pride, had become the lead story in the main London papers. They reproduced on their front page some of the headlines from the previous day’s national papers. But that was all, there had obviously been no new developments in the case.

I searched the inside pages for news of the seminar in Cambridge. All I found was a brief item entitled ‘Mathematicians’ Moby Dick’, including the long list of failed attempts to prove Fermat’s theorem over the years. The article mentioned that bets were being laid in Oxbridge on the outcome of the last of the afternoon’s three lectures and the odds at the moment were still six-to-one against Wiles.

Lorna had booked a tennis court for one o’clock. We stopped off at Cunliffe Close to collect my racket and then played for a long time without being interrupted, concentrating only on the ball going back and forth over the net, in that small rectangle out of time. As we left the courts I saw on the clubhouse clock that it was almost three and I asked Lorna if we could make a quick stop at the Institute on the way back. The building was deserted and I had to switch on lights as I went upstairs. In the computer room, which was empty too, I checked my e-mail. There was the short message that was being spread like a password to mathematicians all over the world: Wiles had done it! There were no details about the final exposition. All it said was that his proof had convinced the experts and that, once written up, it might be up to two hundred pages long.

“Good news?” asked Lorna as I got back in the car.

I told her, and in my admiring tone she must have caught the strange contradictory pride I felt in mathematicians.

“Perhaps you would rather have been there this afternoon,” she said and then, laughing: “What can I do to make it up to you?”

We spent the rest of the afternoon making love like a pair of happy rabbits. At seven, as it was getting dark, we were lying side by side in exhausted silence when the telephone rang. Lorna leaned across me to answer it. A look of alarm appeared on her face, and then horrified sorrow. She indicated that I should turn on the television and, with the phone wedged between shoulder and chin, she started dressing.

“There’s been an accident on the way into Oxford, at a spot they call the ‘blind triangle’. A bus drove over the side of the bridge and down the bank. They’re expecting several ambulances with the injured at the Radcliffe-they need me in the X-ray department.”

I changed channels until I found the local news. A female reporter was talking as she moved closer to the shattered barrier of the bridge. I pressed buttons on the remote but couldn’t get any sound.

“The sound doesn’t work,” said Lorna. Now fully dressed, she was searching for her uniform in the wardrobe.

“Seldom and a big group of mathematicians were coming back from Cambridge by bus this afternoon,” I said.

Lorna turned round, as if gripped by a terrible foreboding, and came over to me.

“My God, they would have had to cross that bridge if they were coming from there.”

We stared despairingly at the screen. There was a shot of broken glass scattered over the bridge at the spot where the bus had crashed through the barrier. As the reporter peered over the side and pointed, we saw, magnified by the telephoto lens, the mass of crumpled metal that had once been the bus. The camera moved unsteadily, following the reporter as she made her way down the steep slope. A section of the chassis had broken off where the bus must have first struck the ground. The camera swung to show the bottom of the slope, much closer now. Ambulances had managed to reach the bus from below and paramedics had started rescuing passengers. There was a heart-rending close-up of the silent, shattered bus windows and a section of orange bodywork showing an emblem I didn’t recognise. Lorna squeezed my arm.

“It’s a school bus,” she said. “My God, there were children inside! Do you think…?” she whispered, unable to finish her sentence. She looked at me, frightened, as if a game we’d been playing had become nightmarish reality. “I’ve got to go to the hospital now,” she said, kissing me quickly. “Just pull the door shut when you leave.”

I sat watching the hypnotic succession of images on the screen. The camera circled the bus, focusing on the window where the rescue team was gathered. A paramedic had managed to climb inside the bus and was trying to get one of the children out. A child’s bare legs appeared, swinging disjointedly until a row of arms, forming a stretcher, grabbed hold of them. The child was wearing gym shorts, bloodstained down one side, and bright white trainers. As the rest of his body emerged I saw that he was wearing a vest with a large number across the chest. The camera again focused on the window. A pair of hands was carefully supporting the boy’s head. There was blood trickling down the wrists, as if it were pouring from the back of the child’s head. The camera showed a close-up of the boy’s face and I was startled to see, beneath a long, untidy blond fringe, the unmistakable features of a child with Down’s Syndrome. The face of the man inside the bus now appeared for the first time. He mouthed something, repeating it in desperation and indicating with his bloodstained hands that there was no one left inside the bus.

The camera followed the procession that carried the last child round behind the bus. Someone then stopped the cameraman going any further, but there was a brief glimpse of a row of bodies on stretchers covered with sheets. The programme then returned to the studio and showed a picture of a group of boys before a game. They were the basketball team from a school for children with Down’s Syndrome, on their way back from an inter-school competition in Cambridge. The boys’ names appeared briefly at the bottom of the screen-five players and five substitutes-followed by the terse statement that all ten were dead. Then another photo appeared: the face of a young man, which I vaguely recognised, though the name beneath the picture, Ralph Johnson, was quite unfamiliar. He was the driver of the bus. He had apparently managed to jump out just before it crashed, but had died too, just before reaching hospital. The photo disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by a list of all the tragedies that had happened at the same spot.

I switched off the television and lay down with a pillow over my eyes, trying to remember where I’d seen the bus driver’s face. The picture had no doubt been taken several years earlier. The very short, curly hair, sharp cheekbones, sunken eyes-I’d seen him before, not as a bus driver but somewhere else. Where? I got up irritably and took a long shower, trying to picture all the faces I’d seen around town. As I was dressing and heading back to the bedroom for my shoes, I tried to recall the face on the screen-the small, tight curls, the fanatical expression. Yes. I sat on the bed, stunned by the surprise, by all the different implications. But I was sure I was right. After all, I hadn’t met that many people in Oxford. I called the hospital and asked for Lorna. When she came on the phone, I said, automatically lowering my voice:

“The bus driver…he was Caitlin’s father, wasn’t he?”

“Yes,” she said after a moment, and I noticed that she too was almost whispering.

“Is it what I think it is?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I didn’t want to say anything. One of the lungs was a match. Caitlin’s just been taken to theatre-they think they can still save her.”