The Oxford Murders Page 12

  “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.”

  “Bu
t 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.”

  Twenty

  When I got back to my room I prepared a pot of coffee, made the bed and laid out the photographs from the enve-“ lope on the bedcover. As I looked at them I remembered the words, like a quiet axiom of a figurative painter: there is always less reality in a photo than can be captured in a painting. Indeed, something seemed to have been irretrievably lost from the fragmented picture made up of flawlessly sharp images that I composed on the bed.

  I tried putting the photographs in a different order, shifting a few. Something that I had seen. I tried again, setting out the photographs in accordance with what I remembered seeing when we entered Mrs Eagleton’s sitting room. Something that I had seen but Seldom hadn’t. Why only me, why couldn’t he have seen it too? Because you’d had no warning, Seldom had said. Perhaps it was like one of those three-dimensional computer-generated images that had become so fashionable, quite invisible to an attentive eye, only appearing gradually, fleetingly, when you relaxed your attention. The first thing I’d seen was Seldom, walking quickly towards me up the gravel path. There was no photo of him here, but I clearly recalled our conversation at the front door and the moment when he asked me about Mrs Eagleton. I’d pointed out the electric wheelchair in the hall, so he too had seen the chair. He’d turned the door handle, the door had opened silently and we’d entered the sitting room together. After that everything was more confused. I could remember the sound of the pendulum, though I wasn’t sure if I’d glanced at the clock.

  Anyway, the photograph showing the door from the inside, the coat stand and the clock should come first in the sequence. That image, I thought, would also have been the last thing the murderer saw as he left. I put the photograph down and wondered which should come next. Had I seen anything else before we found Mrs Eagleton? I’d automatically looked for her in the same flowery armchair that she’d greeted me from the first day. I picked up a photo of the two little armchairs standing on the diamond-patterned rug. You could just see the handles of her wheelchair behind one of them. Had I noticed the wheel-chair when I was there? I couldn’t say for sure. It was exasperating: suddenly everything was eluding me.

  The only focus in my memory was Mrs Eagleton’s body lying on the chaise longue and her open eyes, as if this one image radiated a light so intense that it left everything else in shadow. But, as we went closer, I had seen the Scrabble board and the two letter racks on her side. One of the photos had frozen the position of the board on the little table. It had been taken from very close up and you just could make out all the words. Seldom and I had already discussed the words on the board and neither of us thought they revealed anything interesting, or that they were linked in any way with the symbol in the note. Inspector Petersen hadn’t thought them important either. We agreed that the symbol had been chosen before the murder, not by an inspiration of the moment. I peered anyway at the photos of the letter racks. I was sure I hadn’t seen this: there was only one letter, an A, on one rack, and only two, an R and an O, on the other. Mrs Eagleton must have played to the end-until she’d used up all the letters in the bag-before falling asleep. I tried for a while to think of words in English that could be formed on the board with those last remaining letters, but there didn’t seem to be any, and besides, I thought, if there had been, Mrs Eagleton would surely have found them. Why hadn’t I noticed the letter racks before? I tried to remember their position on the table. They were at one corner, nearest to where Seldom had stood holding the pillow. Perhaps, I thought, I had to find precisely what I hadn’t seen. I scanned the photos again, to see if I could detect any details I might have missed, until I came to the last one, the still terrifying image of Mrs Eagleton’s lifeless face. I couldn’t find anything I hadn’t noticed before. So it must be those three things: the letter racks, the clock in the hall, and the wheelchair.

  The wheelchair…Did that explain the symbol? A triangle for the percussionist, the fish tank for Clark, and for Mrs Eagleton, the circle-the wheel of her wheelchair perhaps. Or the O of the word ‘omerta’, Seldom had said.

  Yes, the circle could still be almost anything. But, interestingly, there was a letter O on one of the letter racks. Or perhaps it wasn’t interesting at all, but just a silly coincidence? Perhaps Seldom had seen the O on the letter rack, and that was why he’d thought of the word ‘omerta’. Seldom had said something else, the day we went to the Covered Market, that he was confident I would see something because I wasn’t English. But what was a non-English way of seeing?

  I was startled by the sound of someone trying to push an envelope under my door. I opened it and found Beth straightening up quickly, red-faced. She was holding several more envelopes.

  “I thought you were out,” she said. “Or I would have knocked.”

  I invited her in and picked up the envelope. Inside, there was a card with an illustration from Alice through the Looking Glass and the words ‘Non-wedding Invitation’ in embossed letters.

  I smiled at her, intrigued.

  “The thing is, we can’t get married yet,” said Beth. “Michael’s divorce could take ages. But we still want to have a celebration.” She caught sight of the photos lying all over the bed. “Photos of your family?”

  “No, I don’t have any family in the usual sense. They’re the photos the police took the day of Mrs Eagleton’s murder.”

  Beth, I reflected, was definitely English and her gaze was as representative as any-other. And she was the last person to have seen Mrs Eagleton alive, so she might notice if anything looked different. I motioned for her to approach but she hesitated, a look of horror on her face. At last she took a couple of steps forwards and glanced at the photographs quickly, as if afraid to look more closely.

  “Why have they given you these after all this time? What do they think they can still find out from them?”

  “They want to find the link between Mrs Eagleton and the first symbol. Perhaps if you look at them now, you’ll see something else-something missing or moved.”

  “But I’ve already told Inspector Petersen: I can’t remember exactly where every single thing was when I left the house. When I came downstairs I saw that she was asleep, so I left as quietly as I could, without even glancing at her again. I’ve already been over this once. That afternoon, when Uncle Arthur came to the theatre to tell me what had happened, they were waiting for me in the sitting room, with the body still there.”

  As if determined to overcome her terror, she picked up the photograph of Mrs Eagleton stretched out on the chaise longue. “All I could tell them,” she said, touching the photo with her finger, “was that ‘the blanket for her legs was missing. She never lay down without a blanket over her legs, not even on the warmest days. She didn’t want anyone to see her scars. We searched for the blanket all over the house that day but it never turned up.”

  “It’s true,” I said, amazed that we hadn’t noticed. “I never saw her without that blanket. Why would the murderer have wanted to expose her scars? Or perhaps he took the blanket as a souvenir? Maybe he’s kept mementoes of the other two murders as well.”

  “I don’t know, I don’t want to have to think about any of this again,” Beth said, heading towards the door. “It’s been a nightmare. I wish it was all over. When we saw Benito die in the middle of the concert and Inspector Petersen appeared on the stage, I thought I would die myself there and then. All I could think was that he was somehow going to lay the blame on me again.”

  “No, he immediately ruled out anyone from the orchestra. It had to be someone who climbed up and attacked him from behind.”

  “Well, whatever he thinks,” said Beth, shaking her head, “I just hope they catch him soon and it’ll all be over.” Her hand on the door handle
, she turned to say: “Your girlfriend’s welcome to come to the party too, of course. She’s the one you play tennis with, isn’t she?”

  Once Beth had gone, I slowly put the photographs back in the envelope. The invitation lay on the bed. The picture was actually of the un-birthday party or, more precisely, just one of the three hundred and sixty-four un-birthday parties that Lewis Carroll teases us with. The logician in him knew that what remains outside each statement is always overwhelmingly larger.

  The blanket was a small, exasperating alarm signal. How much more was there in each murder that we hadn’t been able to see? Perhaps that was what Seldom was hoping for from me: that I should picture what wasn’t there but that we should have seen.

  Still thinking about Beth, I searched a drawer for a change of clothes before taking a shower. The telephone rang: it was Lorna. She was free that evening after all. I asked if she’d like to come to the magic show.

  “Of course I would,” she said. “I don’t intend to miss any more of your outings. But now that I’m going with you, I’m sure we’ll see nothing but silly rabbits pulled out of hats.”

  Twenty-One

  When we arrived at the theatre there were no more seats available in the front rows, so Seldom kindly offered Lorna his while he sat further back. The stage was in darkness, but you could make out a table on which stood a large glass of water, and a high-backed armchair facing the audience. Just behind, there were a dozen empty chairs set out in a semicircle around the table. We entered the auditorium a few minutes after the start of the show and the lights were going down as we took our seats. The theatre was in darkness for what seemed like only a fraction of a second before a spotlight was directed at the stage and the magician appeared, sitting in the armchair, as if he’d been there all along. He peered into the audience, holding his hand above his eyes like a visor.

  “Light! More light!” he demanded. He stood up and walked round the table to the edge of the stage, hand still shielding his eyes, scanning the audience.