The Oxford Murders Read online

  I ran upstairs to my office and phoned the police station, asking to be put through to Inspector Petersen or Detective Sergeant Sacks. I was asked my name and the number I was calling from and told to wait. After a couple of minutes Petersen came on the line. He let me speak without interrupting, at the end simply getting me to repeat what the night watchman had said. I realised that, like me, he thought another murder had already taken place. He said he’d send an officer and the fingerprints examiner to the Institute straight away. Meanwhile he’d go to the Radcliffe to check if anybody had died there yesterday. He’d want to talk to me again afterwards, and also, if possible, to Professor Seldom. He asked if we’d both be at the Institute. I said that, as far as I knew, Seldom should be about to arrive: there was a notice in the hall for a lecture at ten o’clock by one of his graduate students. It suddenly occurred to me that the piece of paper might have been stuck on the door for Seldom to see as he arrived. Perhaps, said Petersen, for him and another hundred mathematicians. He suddenly sounded uncomfortable. “We can talk about it later,” he said, ending the call quickly.

  When I went back down to the entrance hall, Seldom was standing by the revolving door. He was staring at the piece of paper with the little drawing of the fish as if he couldn’t take his eyes off it.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he asked when he saw me. “I’m afraid to ring the hospital and enquire about Frank. Although the time doesn’t make sense,” he said, looking more hopeful. “When I went to the hospital yesterday at four, Frank was alive.”

  “We could call Lorna from my office,” I said. “She’s on duty till midday; she must still be there. She can easily find put.”

  Seldom agreed and we went upstairs. I let him make the call. After being passed from department to department, he was eventually put through to Lorna. He asked her cautiously if she’d mind going down to the second floor and seeing if Frank Kalman was all right. I realised that Lorna was asking questions; I couldn’t make out the words but I could hear her intrigued tone at the other end of the line. Seldom said only that a message had appeared at the Institute and that he was rather worried about it. And yes, it was likely that the message had something to do with Mrs Eagleton’s murder. They talked for a little longer. Seldom told her that he was in my office and that she could call him there once she’d been down to check on Frank.

  He hung up and we waited in silence. Seldom rolled a cigarette and stood at the window to smoke. At one point he turned round, went to the blackboard and, deep in thought, slowly drew the two symbols: first the circle, then the fish in two short curved strokes. He stood motionless, chalk in hand, head bowed, every so often making small futile marks at the edge of the board.

  It was almost half an hour before the phone rang. Seldom listened to Lorna in silence, his face inscrutable, occasionally answering monosyllabically. “Yes,” he said at last, “that’s exactly the time it says on the message.”

  When he hung up and turned to me he looked relieved for a moment.

  “It wasn’t Frank,” he said, “it was the patient in the next bed. Inspector Petersen has just been to the hospital morgue to check on the deaths that occurred on Sunday. The man who died was very elderly, over ninety. He was reported dead at two-fifteen yesterday, from natural causes. Apparently, neither the nurse nor the doctor in charge on that floor noticed a small dot on his arm, like the mark left by an injection. They’re going to do a postmortem on him now to find out what it is. But I think we were right. A murder that nobody considers a murder at first. A death that’s believed to be from natural causes and a dot on an arm, that’s all. An almost imperceptible dot. The murderer must have chosen a type of substance that doesn’t leave any trace. I’m sure they won’t find anything in the post-mortem. The dot is all that distinguishes this death from a death from natural causes. A dot,” repeated Seldom quietly, as if that were the starting point for a multitude of as yet invisible implications.

  The phone rang again. It was Kim, from downstairs, telling me that a police inspector was on his way up to my office. I opened the door as Petersen’s tall, thin frame appeared at the top of the stairs. He was alone and was visibly annoyed. He came into the office and, as he was greeting us, caught sight of the two symbols Seldom had drawn on the blackboard. He sat down abruptly.

  “There’s a crowd of mathematicians down there,” he said, almost accusingly, as if we were somehow to blame. “The press will be here any minute. We’ll have to tell them part of the story, but I’m going to ask them not to mention the first symbol of the series. Wherever possible we try to avoid publicising details of serial murders, particularly the recurring features. Anyway,” he said, shaking his head, “I’ve been to the Radcliffe. This time it was a very elderly man called Ernest Clarck. He’d been in a coma, connected to a respirator, for years. He didn’t have any family, apparently. The only link we can find so far with Mrs Eagleton is that Clarck, too, played a part in the war effort. But of course the same goes for any other man his age: that generation has the war years in common. The nurse found him dead during her rounds at two-fifteen and that was the hour she noted on his wristband, before moving him from the ward. Everything seemed perfectly normal-there were no signs of violence, nothing out of the ordinary. She took his pulse and wrote ‘death from natural causes’, because she thought it a routine case. She said she couldn’t understand how somebody could have got into the ward, because visiting hours were only just starting.

  “The head doctor on the second floor admitted that he hadn’t checked the body thoroughly. He’d arrived at the hospital late, it was a Sunday and he wanted to get home as quickly as possible. But above all, they’d been expecting Mr Clarck to die for months, in fact they were surprised that he was still alive. So he trusted the nurse’s notes, copied the time and cause of death as they appeared on the label on to the death certificate and approved the transfer of the body to the morgue. I’m now awaiting the results of the post-mortem. I’ve just seen the note on the door downstairs. I suppose it was too much to expect that he’d use his own handwriting again, now that he knows we’re after him. But it definitely makes things more difficult. Judging by the typeface I’d say he cut the letters from the Oxford Times, possibly even from articles about Mrs Eagleton. But the fish has been drawn by hand.” Petersen turned towards Seldom. “What was your instinct when you saw the note? Do you think it’s from the same person?”

  “Difficult to say,” answered Seldom. “It looks like the same type of paper, and the size of the symbol and its location on the page are similar. Black ink in both cases. Yes, in principle I’d say it was from the same person. I go to the Radcliffe almost every afternoon, to visit a patient on the second floor, Frank Kalman. Ernest Clarck was in the bed next to Frank’s. Also, I don’t come to the Institute that often but I did have to be here this morning. I think it’s someone who’s following my movements closely and knows quite a bit about me.”

  “Actually,” said Petersen, taking out a small notebook, “we’re aware of your visits to the Radcliffe. You see,” he said apologetically, “we had to make enquiries about you both. Now, let’s see. You generally get to the Radcliffe around two in the afternoon, but this Sunday you got there after four. Why was that?”

  “I was invited to lunch in Abingdon,” said Seldom. “I missed the one-thirty bus back. There are only two buses on Sunday afternoons and I had to wait at the station until three.” Seldom searched one of his pockets and coldly held out a bus ticket to Petersen.

  “Oh no, that’s not necessary,” said the inspector, a little embarrassed. “I was just wondering if…”

  “Yes, I had the same thought,” said Seldom. “I’m generally the first and only person to go into that ward during visiting hours. If I’d gone at my usual time, I’d have been sitting beside Mr Clarck’s corpse the entire time. I assume that’s what the murderer intended-that I’d be there when the nurse discovered that the man was dead during her round. But, again, things didn’t-turn
out quite as he would have liked. In a way, he was too subtle: the nurse didn’t see the needle mark on Clarck’s arm, she thought he’d died of natural causes. And I arrived much later and didn’t even notice that there was a different patient in the next-door bed. For me, it was an absolutely normal visit.”

  “But perhaps he wanted the murder to be taken for a natural death at first,” I said. “Maybe he prepared the scene so that the body would be removed before your eyes as if it were a routine death. In other words, that the murder should be imperceptible to you too. I think you should tell the inspector what you think,” I said to Seldom. “What you told me earlier.”

  “But we can’t be sure yet,” said Seldom, his objection strictly intellectual. “We can’t make an induction with only two cases.”

  “I’d like to hear your view anyway,” said Petersen.

  Seldom still seemed unsure.

  “In both cases,” he said at last, cautiously, anxious to keep to the facts, “the murders were as slight as possible, if that’s the right word. I don’t think the deaths themselves are what really matters to him. The murders are almost symbolic. I don’t believe that the killer is actually interested in killing, but in signalling something. Something that’s undoubtedly linked with the series of figures he’s drawn on the notes, beginning with a circle and a fish. The murders are simply a way of drawing attention to the series and he’s choosing victims close enough to me so that I’ll get involved. I think in fact that it’s a purely intellectual problem, and that he’ll only stop if we somehow manage to prove to him that we’ve determined the meaning of the series; in other words, that we can predict which symbol, or murder, comes next.”

  “I’m going to get a psychological profile drawn up this afternoon, though I don’t think we’ve got much to go on yet. But perhaps you can now answer the question I asked you before: do you think it’s a mathematician?”

  “I’m inclined to say no,” answered Seldom slowly. “At least, not a professional mathematician. I think he’s someone who imagines that mathematicians are paragons of intelligence and that’s why he wants to challenge them directly. He’s a sort of intellectual megalomaniac. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he chose to place his second message on the Institute door. I assume there’s a second hidden message to me in it: if I don’t take up the challenge, another mathematician will. And if we’re making conjectures, I’d say that it’s someone who was once unjustly failed in a maths exam, or who missed an important opportunity in life because of an IQ test of the kind Frank Kalman devised. Someone who was excluded from what he considers the realm of intelligence, someone who both admires and hates mathematicians. Possibly he conceived the series as revenge against his examiners. In a way, he’s the examiner now.”

  “Could it be a student whom you failed?” asked Petersen.

  Seldom smiled.

  “I haven’t failed anyone in a long time,” he said. “I only have graduate students now, and they’re all excellent. I’m inclined to believe that it’s someone who hasn’t studied maths formally but who’s read the chapter on serial murders in my book and, unfortunately, thinks that I’m the person he has to challenge.”

  “Right,” said Petersen, “as a first step, I can get a list of all the credit-card purchases of your book at the bookshops in town.”

  “I don’t think it’ll be much help,” said Seldom. “When the book first came out, my publishers managed to get the chapter on serial murders published in the Oxford Times. A lot of people thought it was a new kind of crime novel. That’s why the first edition of the book sold out so fast.”

  Petersen stood up, looking a little discouraged, and examined the two figures on the blackboard for a moment.

  “Can you tell me anything more about this now?”

  “The second symbol of a series generally provides a clue as to how the rest of the series should be read: whether as a representation of objects or facts from a possible real world-in other words, as symbols in the most usual sense-or, without any connotation of meaning, on a strictly syntactical level, as geometric figures. The choice of the second figure is, again, very clever because the fish is drawn in such a simplified style that it can be read both ways. The vertical position is interesting. It might be a series of figures symmetrical to the vertical axis. If we really are to interpret it as a fish, there are, of course, many other possibilities.”

  “The fish tank,” I said, and Petersen turned to me, a little surprised. Seldom nodded.

  “Yes, that’s what I thought at first. That’s what they call the floor Ernest Clarck was on at the Radcliffe,” he said. “But that would point directly to someone inside the hospital, and I don’t think he’d choose a symbol that would incriminate him so obviously. And anyway, if that’s the case, what does the circle have to do with Mrs Eagleton?” Seldom paced up and down for a while, head bowed. “Something else that’s interesting,” he said, “and which is implicit in a way in the notes, is that he assumes that mathematicians will be able to find the solution. In other words, there must be something in the symbols that matches the type of problems, or intuitions, related to a mathematician’s way of thinking.”

  “Would you like to venture what the third symbol might be?” asked Petersen.

  “I have an initial idea,” said Seldom. “But I can see several other ways the series might continue that are, shall we say, reasonable. That’s why in tests you’re given at least three symbols before you’re asked what the next one is. Two symbols still allow too many ambiguities. I’d like to have more time to think about it. I wouldn’t want to get it wrong. He’s the examiner now and another murder would be his way of giving us another bad mark.”

  “Do you really believe he’ll stop if we find the solution?” asked Petersen doubtfully.

  But there was no such thing as the solution, I thought. That was the most exasperating thing. I suddenly understood why Seldom had wanted to introduce me to Frank Kalman and the second dimension to the problem that was preoccupying him. I wondered how he’d explain minds that took big leaps, Wittgenstein, rule-following paradoxes and the movements of normal bell-curves to Petersen. But Seldom needed only one sentence:

  “He’ll stop,” he said slowly, “if it’s the solution that he has in mind.”

  Twelve

  Petersen stood up and paced about the room, his hands behind his back. He picked up his jacket-which earlier he’d laid on the edge of the desk-turned for a moment to stare at the blackboard, and wiped off the circle with his hand.

  “Remember, as far as possible, we’re going to keep the first symbol to ourselves. I don’t want to tempt a copycat killer. Do you think any of the mathematicians downstairs might be able to guess the next symbol, now that they know the second?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” said Seldom. “And I’m not sure they’d be interested enough to try. To a mathematician, the only problem that matters tends to be the one he’s working on at the time. It may take more than a couple of murders to tear them away from what they’re doing.”

  “Does the same go for you?” Petersen was now staring hard at Seldom; there was cold reproach in his voice. “To be honest, I’m a little…disappointed,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “I wasn’t expecting you to give me a definitive answer today, of course, but I had hoped for four or five possible alternatives, conjectures that we could work on or eliminate. Isn’t that how mathematicians work? But perhaps a couple of murders don’t interest you enough either.”

  “I have an initial idea, as I said,” said Seldom, his small pale eyes meeting the inspector’s. “I promise I’ll give the matter my full attention. I just want to be sure that I’m not mistaken.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to wait until the next murder to find out if you were right,” said Petersen. Then, as if reluctantly trying to make up for his earlier sharpness, he went on: “But if you really do want to help, please come to my office tomorrow, after six. We’ll have the psychological profile by then. I’d l
ike you to read it: it may bring someone to mind. You’re welcome to come too,” he said to me, and quickly shook hands with both of us.

  After Petersen had left there was a long silence. Seldom went to the window and started rolling a cigarette.

  “Can I ask you a question?” I said at last cautiously. I was aware that he might not want to tell me anything either, but I decided it was worth a try. “Your idea, your conjecture, is it about the next symbol, or the next murder?”

  “I think I’ve got an idea about how the series continues-about the next symbol in the series,” said Seldom slowly. “But it doesn’t enable me to infer anything about the next murder.”

  “All the same, wouldn’t even that-the symbol-be a great help to Inspector Petersen? Is there any other reason why you don’t want to tell him?”

  “Come on, let’s go for a walk in the park,” he said. “I’ve got a few minutes before my student’s lecture and I need a cigarette.”

  There were policemen still at the entrance dealing with the fingerprints on the glass, so we left by one of the back doors. En route we passed Podorov. He greeted me halfheartedly and stared fixedly at Seldom, as if hoping Seldom would recognise him. We walked around the Physics Laboratory and took one of the gravel paths leading into the University Parks. Seldom smoked in silence, and I thought for a moment that he wasn’t going to say anything more.

  “Why did you become a mathematician?” he asked suddenly.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Perhaps it was a mistake. I always thought I’d do a humanities degree. I suppose what attracted me was the kind of truth that theorems contain: timeless, immortal, self-contained, and yet absolutely democratic. Why did you choose mathematics?”