The Oxford Murders

Twenty-Four

For the first few hours I thought it must have been a mistake,” said Inspector Petersen. “I thought the real target was the bus you mathematicians were in, which wasn’t far behind. I believe some of you even saw the other bus fall down the bank, didn’t you?” he asked Seldom.

We were in the French café in Little Clarendon Street. Petersen had arranged to meet us there, away from his office. I wondered if he wanted to apologise, or thank us for something. He was wearing a severe black suit and I remembered that there was to be a special funeral service that morning for the children who had died. It was the first time I’d seen Seldom since his trip to Cambridge. He was grave and silent and the inspector had to repeat his question.

“Yes,” answered Seldom, “we saw it crash into the barrier and come off the bridge. Our bus stopped immediately and someone called the Radcliffe. Some people thought they could hear screaming from the bottom of the slope. The strange thing is,” he said, as if recounting a nightmare, ‘when we looked down, two ambulances were already there’.”

“They were there because, this time, the message came before, not after the crime. That’s the first thing I noticed too. And it didn’t go to you, as the previous ones did, but directly to the accident and emergency department at the hospital. They called me as the ambulances set out.”

“What was the message?” I asked.

“‘The fourth in the series is the tetraktys. Ten points in the blind triangle.’ It was a telephone call, and fortunately it was recorded. We’ve got other recordings of his voice and though he tried to disguise it a bit there’s no doubt it’s him. We even know where the call was made from: a call box at a service station on the outskirts of Cambridge, where he stopped to fill up with petrol. This is where we find the first intriguing detail. Detective Sergeant Sacks noticed it when he checked the receipts: he bought very little petrol, much less than when leaving Oxford. And sure enough, when we inspected the bus after the crash, we found that the tank was almost empty.”

“He didn’t want the bus to catch fire when it crashed,” said Seldom, as if reluctantly agreeing with flawless reasoning.

“Yes,” said Petersen, “at first I thought that he sent a warning beforehand because unconsciously he wanted us to stop him, or that maybe it was part of the game-he was giving us a handicap. But what he wanted was for the bodies not to be burnt and ambulances to be nearby so that the organs got to the hospital as quickly as possible. He knew that with ten bodies there was a good chance of finding an organ match. I suppose he’s won in a way: when we realised what was happening, it was already too late. The transplant was carried out almost immediately, that very afternoon, as soon as they got the consent of the first set of parents, and I’m told the girl is going to live.

“In fact we only started to suspect the father yesterday, when we noticed during a routine check that his name was on the list at Blenheim Palace. He drove a different group of children from the school to the concert. He was supposed to wait for them in the car park. He was in a perfect position to go round the back of the stage, suffocate the percussionist and get back to the car park during all the upheaval without being spotted. At the Radcliffe they confirmed that he knew Mrs Eagleton: a nurse had seen him chatting to her a couple of times. We know too that Mrs Eagleton once had your book on logical series with her in the waiting room. She must have told him you were a friend of hers, not knowing that that would make her the first victim. And lastly, among his books, we found one on the Spartans, one on the Pythagoreans and organ transplants in antiquity, and another on the physical development of children with Down’s Syndrome-he wanted to be sure that their lungs could be used.”

“And how did he kill Mr Clarck?” I asked.

“I’ll never be able to confirm my theory now, but I don’t think Johnson killed Ernest Clarck. He simply waited until a dead body was wheeled out of the ward that he knew Seldom visited. The bodies are left in a little room on that floor, with nobody watching them, sometimes for hours.

All he did was go in and jab the needle of an empty syringe into Clarck’s arm, leaving a puncture mark to make it look as if he’d been murdered. In his way, the man truly intended to do as little harm as possible. To understand his reasoning, I think we have to start at the end. I mean, with the group of Down’s Syndrome children. He may have begun to have thoughts in that direction when his daughter was refused a lung for the second time. He was still working then, driving the group of Down’s Syndrome children to school by bus every morning. He started to think of them as a bank of healthy lungs which he was allowing to get away every day, while his own daughter was dying.

“Repetition leads to desire, and desire leads to obsession. Perhaps at first he thought of killing only one of the children, but he knew it wasn’t easy to find a compatible lung. He knew too that many of the parents at the school were devout Catholics. It’s very common for parents of such children to turn to religion. Some even believe that their children are angels. He couldn’t choose one of the children at random and risk the transplant being refused again, nor could he simply drive the bus off a cliff-the parents would immediately have suspected something and refused to donate organs. It was common knowledge that Ralph Johnson was desperate to save his daughter and that, shortly after she was admitted to hospital, he had checked whether it would be legal for him to donate a lung himself by committing suicide. He needed someone to kill the children for him.

“This was his dilemma until he read, either thanks to Mrs Eagleton, or in the paper, the chapter about serial murders in your book. It gave him the idea he needed. He worked out a plan. It was simple: if he couldn’t get someone to kill the children for him, he’d invent a murderer. An imaginary serial killer who would fool everyone. He’d probably already read about the Pythagoreans, so it was easy for him to come up with a series of symbols that would be seen as a challenge to a mathematician. The second symbol-the fish-might, however, have had an additional private connotation: it was the symbol of the early Christians. It may have been his way of signalling that he was getting his revenge. We know too that he was fascinated by the tetraktys symbol-he drew it in the margin of almost all his books-possibly because of its correlation with the number ten, the full basketball team, the number of children he was thinking of killing.

“He chose Mrs Eagleton to start the series because it would be hard to find an easier victim: an elderly lady, an invalid who stayed at home alone in the afternoons. Above all, he didn’t want the police to be alerted at the start. This was a key element of his plan. The first murders had to be discreet, imperceptible, so that we wouldn’t be on his trail immediately and he’d have time to get to the fourth murder. He only needed one person to know-you. Something went slightly wrong with the first murder but he was still cleverer than us and he didn’t make any more mistakes. So, in a way, he won. It’s odd, but I can’t quite bring myself to condemn him. I too have a daughter. You never know how far you’d go for your child.”

“Do you think he was planning to save himself?” asked Seldom.

“We’ll never know,” answered Petersen. “When the bus was examined, it turned out that the steering had been tampered with. In theory, that would have given him an alibi. On the other hand, he could have jumped from the bus sooner. I think he wanted to stay at the wheel as long as possible, to make sure the bus fell down the slope. He Only jumped once it had crashed through the barrier. He was unconscious when they found him and he died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.” The inspector glanced at his watch and beckoned to a waiter. “Right, I don’t want to be late for the service. I’d just like to say again how much I’ve appreciated your help, both of you.” And he smiled openly at Seldom for the first time. “I read as much as I could of the books you lent me, but maths was never my strong point.”

We stood and watched him head towards St Giles’s Church, where a large crowd was already gathered. There were a few women in black veils, and some had to be helped up the front steps and into the church.

“Are you going back to the Institute?” asked Seldom.

“Yes,” I said. “In fact I shouldn’t have taken any time off now: I’ve got to finish and post my grant report without fail today. And you?”

“Me?” he said. He glanced in the direction of the church and, for a moment, he seemed very alone and strangely helpless. “I think I’ll wait here until the service is over. I’d like to follow the procession to the cemetery.”