The Oxford Murders Read online

  “Because it harms no one,” said Seldom. “Because it’s a world that has nothing to do with reality. You know, terrifying things happened to me when I was very young, and have happened throughout my life, as if they were signs. They’ve been intermittent, but still too frequent and too terrible for me to ignore.”

  “What type of signs?”

  “Let’s say…I noticed the chain of events provoked by any small action on my part in the real world. They were probably coincidences-just unfortunate coincidences-but they were so devastating that they almost brought me to a complete standstill. The last of these signs was the accident in which my wife and two closest friends died. I don’t know how to say this without sounding ridiculous but, from very early on, I noticed that the conjectures I made about the real world always came true, but by strange paths and in the most horrible ways, as if I were being warned that I should keep away from the world of people. I was utterly terrified during my adolescence. It was then that I discovered mathematics. For the first time in my life I felt I was on safe ground. For the first time I could follow a conjecture, as determinedly as I liked, and when I wiped the blackboard clean, or crossed out a page where I’d made mistakes, I could start again entirely from scratch, without unexpected consequences. There is a theoretical parallel between mathematics and criminology; as Inspector Petersen said, we both make conjectures. But when you set out a hypothesis about the real world, you inevitably introduce an irreversible element of action, which always has consequences. When you look in one direction, you stop looking in all the others. When you follow a possible path, you follow it in real time and it may then be too late to try a different one. What I most fear is not, as I told Petersen, getting it wrong. What I most fear is what has happened throughout my life: that what I’m thinking will come true in the most horrific way.”

  “But saying nothing, refusing to reveal the symbol, is that not in itself, by omission, a form of action which might also have incalculable consequences?”

  “Perhaps, but for now I’d rather take that risk. I’m not as keen as you to play the detective. And if maths is democratic, the next symbol in the series will be obvious to all. You, Petersen himself, you all have the necessary elements to find it.”

  “No, no,” I objected, “what I meant was that in maths there’s a democratic moment, when the proof is set out line by line. Anyone can follow the path once it’s been marked out. But there is of course an earlier moment of illumination, what you called the knight’s move. Only a few people, sometimes only one person in many centuries, manage to see the correct first step in the darkness.”

  “A good try,” said Seldom

  “One person in centuries’ sounds very dramatic. Anyway, the next symbol I have in mind is very simple. It doesn’t really require mathematical knowledge. But establishing the relationship between the symbols and the murders is more difficult. It may not be such a bad idea to have a psychological profile. Well,” he said, glancing at his watch, “I should head back to the Institute.”

  I said I wanted to walk on a bit further and he handed me the card that Petersen had given him.

  “Here’s the address of the police station. It’s opposite a shop called Alice in Wonderland. We could meet there at six, if that suits you.”

  I continued along the path and stopped in the shade of some trees to watch the unfathomable mystery of a game of cricket. For several minutes I thought I was witnessing the preparatory stages before the game, or else a series of failed attempts to start. But then I heard enthusiastic applause from some women in large hats sitting drinking punch at one end of the field. I’d obviously missed a wonderful piece of play. Perhaps the game had reached a decisive moment just then, before my very eyes, but all I could see was an exasperating lack of action.

  I crossed a small bridge-on the other side, the park lost some of its neatness-and walked along the river through yellowing pastureland. Every so often I saw couples in punts on the river. There was an idea somewhere there, close by, like the buzzing of an insect that you can’t see, an intuition about to be clarified, and for a moment I felt that if I were in the right place perhaps I’d be able to glimpse an edge and grab hold of it. As in maths, I wasn’t sure whether to persist and try to conjure it up, or forget about it, deliberately turn away and wait for it to appear of its own accord. Something in the tranquillity of the landscape, the gentle splashing of oars hitting water, the polite smiles of the students in the passing boats, seemed to dilute the tension. In any case it wasn’t here, I realised, that the key to deaths and murders would be revealed to me.

  I took a short cut through the trees back to my office. My Russian colleague had gone to lunch, so I decided to ring Lorna. She sounded cheerful and excited. Yes, she had news, but first she wanted to hear mine. No, Seldom had told her only that a strange message had appeared stuck to a window. I told her how I had found the note, described the symbol and then repeated as much as I could remember of the conversation with Inspector Petersen. Lorna asked a few more questions before telling me what she knew: Ernest Clarck’s body hadn’t been transferred to the police morgue; instead, the police pathologist had carried out the post-mortem at the hospital, with one of the doctors there. She’d managed to get the doctor to tell her about it over lunch. “Was that difficult?” I asked with a pang of jealousy. Lorna laughed. Well, he’d invited her to sit at his table several times before, and this time she’d accepted.

  “Both he and the pathologist were nonplussed,” said Lorna. “Whatever Mr Clarck was injected with, it left no trace-they found absolutely nothing. The doctor said he too would have signed a certificate stating it was a death from natural causes. Now, there could be an explanation: there’s a fairly new drug, extracted from the mushroom Amanita muscaria, and no reagent to detect it has yet been found. It was presented last year at a closed medical conference in Boston. The strange thing-the most interesting thing-is that forensic pathologists have never publicised the existence of the drug. Apparently, they all swore never even to reveal its name. Wouldn’t that indicate that the police should look for the murderer among forensic pathologists?”

  “Or among the nurses who have lunch with them,” I said. “As well as the secretaries who took the minutes at the conference, the chemists and biologists who identified the chemical and maybe the police too. They must have been informed of the drug’s existence.”

  “Well, anyway,” said Lorna, offended, “it narrows down the search: it’s not something you find in any bathroom cabinet.”

  “That’s very true,” I said, trying to sound placatory. “Shall we have dinner together this evening?”

  “I can’t, I’m working late, but how about tomorrow? Six-thirty at the Eagle and Child?”

  I remembered my appointment with Inspector Petersen.

  “Could we make it eight? I’m still not used to having supper so early.” Lorna laughed. “OK, we can keep Argentinian hours for once.”

  Thirteen

  A policewoman so gaunt that she almost disappeared inside her uniform led us upstairs to Inspector Petersen’s office. We entered a large room, with walls a strong salmon-pink, which retained a proud British post-war austerity, quite devoid of luxury. There were several tall metal filing cabinets and a surprisingly modest wooden desk. From the window you could see a bend of the river and, in the protracted summer light, students lying on the bank catching the last of the sun. The still, golden water made me think of the paintings by Roderic O’Conor that I’d seen in London, at the Barbican Gallery.

  Here in his office, leaning back in his chair, Petersen looked more relaxed, less watchful. Or perhaps he simply no longer considered us suspects and wanted to show us that he could, if he chose, exchange his policeman’s mask for the usual British mask of politeness. He got up and brought us a couple of severe high-backed chairs, upholstered in a fabric that was shiny with wear and coming unstitched at the corners. As he sat down again, I noticed a silver frame on a corner of the desk: it contained
a photograph of a young Petersen helping a little girl on to a horse. From what Seldom had told me about him, I had expected to see piles of documents, newspaper cuttings, maybe some photos on the walls of cases he had solved. But, in that perfectly anonymous office, it was impossible to tell if Petersen was an exemplar of modesty, or simply the kind of person who prefers not to give away too much about himself so that he can find out everything about others. He opened a desk drawer and took out a pair of glasses, which he slowly wiped with a cloth. He glanced at some pages on his desk.

  “Right,” he said, “I’ll read you the main points of the report. Our psychologist seems to think the murderer is a man, of around thirty-five. In the report she refers to him as Mr M, presumably for ‘murderer’. M, she tells us, is probably from a lower-middle-class family, from a village or the suburbs of a town. He may have been an only child, but at any rate he was a child who excelled early in an intellectual pursuit, such as chess, or maths, or reading, which was something unusual in his family. His parents mistook his precociousness for genius, and it meant that he didn’t participate in the games and rituals of other children his age. He may have been a target for their teasing and things may have been made worse by some sign of physical weakness, such as a girlish voice, or glasses, or being overweight. The teasing made him even more withdrawn and caused him to entertain his first fantasies of revenge.

  In these fantasies, typically, M imagines that he triumphs over his enemies with his talent and success, crushing those who’ve humiliated him.

  “At last, the day of the test arrives, the moment he’s been waiting for for so many years-a particularly important contest of some kind or exam in the area he has excelled in. It’s his big opportunity, his chance to escape his background and start the other life he’s been preparing for, silently, obsessively, his entire adolescence. But something goes terribly wrong, the examiners are unfair in some way and M returns, defeated. This causes the first crack. It’s called the Ambere Syndrome, after the writer in whom this type of obsession was first observed.”

  Petersen opened a drawer and brought out a thick volume on psychology. A little strip of paper marked a place a few pages in. “I thought it might be interesting to go over this first case. Let’s see: Jules Ambere was a penniless, obscure French writer. In 1927, he sent the manuscript of his first novel to the publisher G…, then the leading publisher in France. He’d worked on the novel for years, rewriting it obsessively. Six months went by before he received an unquestionably polite letter from one of the editors, a letter he kept until the very end. In the letter, the editor expressed her admiration for his novel and suggested that he come to Paris to discuss the terms of a contract. Ambere pawned his few possessions of value to pay for the journey, but at the meeting something went wrong. They took him to lunch at a smart restaurant, where his clothes looked out of place, he had poor table manners, he choked on a fish bone. Nothing too serious, but the contract didn’t get signed and Ambere returned to his village humiliated. He started carrying the letter around in his pocket and, for months, repeated the story endlessly to his friends. The second recurring feature of the syndrome is this period of incubation and fixation, which can last several years. Some psychologists call it the ‘missed opportunity’ syndrome, to emphasise this feature: the injustice occurs at a decisive moment, a turning point which could have drastically altered the person’s life. During the incubation period the person returns obsessively to that one moment, unable to resume his previous life, or else he readjusts, but only outwardly, and he begins to have homicidal fantasies.

  “The incubation period ends when what is referred to in psychological literature as the ‘second opportunity’ arises, a conjunction which partially recreates that first event, or seems sufficiently similar. Many psychologists here draw a parallel with the tale of the genie in the bottle in The Thousand and One Nights. In Ambere’s case the second opportunity was particularly clear-cut, but the pattern is often more vague. Thirteen years after his rejection, a reader who had only just joined the publisher G…came across the manuscript by chance as they were moving offices, and the author was summoned to Paris for a second time. This time Ambere was impeccably turned out, watched his manners throughout the meal, made sure his conversation was casual and cosmopolitan and, once the pudding was served, strangled the woman at the table before the waiters had a chance to stop him.”

  Petersen raised an eyebrow and closed the book. He glanced at the next page of the psychologist’s report in silence before putting it aside, and quickly scanned the first few paragraphs of the third page.

  “The report continues here with what interests us. The psychologist maintains that we’re not dealing with a psychopath. A psychopath typically exhibits a lack of remorse and a gradual increase in cruelty, combined with nostalgia-he’s searching for something that will move him. But so far in this case, on the contrary, he’s shown delicacy, a concern to do as little harm as possible. The doctor, like you,” he said, turning towards Seldom for a moment, “seems to find this particularly fascinating. In her opinion, it was the chapter of your book on serial murders that provided M with the ‘second opportunity’. Our man felt revived. He’s seeking both admiration and revenge: admiration from the group to which he’s always wanted to belong and from which he’s been unjustly excluded. And here at least the psychologist does offer a possible interpretation of the symbols. In his fits of megalomania, M feels like a creator, he wants to name things again. He endlessly perfects his creation: as in Ecclesiastes, the symbols testify to the stages in his development. The next symbol, she suggests, could be a bird.”

  Petersen gathered together the pages and looked at Seldom.

  “Does any of this chime with your thoughts on the matter?”

  “Not with regard to the symbol. I still believe that if the notes are addressed to mathematicians, the key must also in some way be mathematical. Is there any explanation in the report for the ‘slight’ nature of the murders?”

  “Yes,” said Petersen, leafing back through the pages. “I’m afraid the psychologist believes that the murders are a way of paying court to you. In M, a general desire for revenge is combined with a much more intense desire to belong to the world that you represent, to have the admiration-even horrified admiration-of those who have rejected him. That’s why for now he’s chosen a way of murdering which he thinks a mathematician would approve of-with a minimum of components, aseptic, without cruelty, almost abstract. As in the early stages of infatuation, M is trying to please you; the murders are offerings. The psychologist thinks that M may be a repressed homosexual who lives alone, but she doesn’t discount the possibility that he’s married and, even now, has a conventional family-life masking his secret activities. She adds that if he gets no sign of a response, this initial seduction stage may be followed by a second, furious stage, in which the murders are more vicious, or target people much closer to you.”

  “Well, this psychologist seems almost to know him personally. All that’s missing is for her to tell us that he’s got a mole on his left arm!” exclaimed Seldom. I wasn’t sure if there was only sarcasm in his voice, or a hint of contained irritation as well. I wondered if he’d been shocked by the reference to homosexuality. “I’m afraid that we mathematicians make much more modest conjectures. I have, however, given more thought to what you said and decided that I should maybe tell you my idea.” He took a small notebook from his pocket and, using a fountain pen from Petersen’s desk, quickly drew a few strokes which I couldn’t see. He tore out the page, folded it in two and handed it to Petersen. “Here you have two possible continuations of the series.”

  There had been something secretive in the way Seldom folded the paper that Petersen seemed to have caught. He looked at the paper in silence for a moment before folding it again and placing it in a desk drawer. He didn’t ask Seldom any questions. Perhaps in the small duel the two men had engaged in, Petersen was satisfied for now-he had got Seldom to reveal the symbol and didn
’t want to bother him with more questions. Or perhaps he simply wanted to discuss it later with him in private. It occurred to me that maybe I ought to get up and leave, but it was Petersen who stood and saw us out with an unexpectedly friendly smile.

  “Have you had the results of the second post-mortem?” asked Seldom as we headed towards the door.

  “That’s another interesting little mystery,” said Petersen. “At first, the forensic pathologists were puzzled: they found no trace of any known poison in the body. They thought they might even be dealing with a very new drug that leaves no trace, of which I’d never heard. But I think I’ve solved this at least,” he said, and for the first time I saw something like pride in his eyes. “The murderer may think he’s very clever, but we policemen do a bit of thinking from time to time as well.”

  Fourteen

  We left the police station in silence and walked back along St Aldates without a word until we reached Carfax Tower.

  “I need to buy tobacco,” said Seldom. “Would you like to come with me to the Covered Market?”

  I nodded and we turned down the High. I hadn’t said a word since we left the police station. Seldom smiled to himself.

  “You’re offended because I didn’t tell you what the symbol was. But believe me, I have a very good reason.”

  “A different reason from the one you gave me in the park yesterday? Now that you’ve shown it to Petersen, I can’t see why there should be any adverse consequences of me knowing it.”

  “There could be…other consequences,” said Seldom. “But that’s not exactly why I haven’t told you. I don’t want my conjectures to influence yours. It’s what I do with my graduate students: I try not to get ahead of them with my own reasoning. The most valuable time in a mathematician’s thinking process is the moment when he has his first solitary intuition about a problem. Though you may not believe it, I have more faith in you than in myself to find the correct answer. You were there at the beginning, and the beginning, as Aristotle would say, is half of everything. I’m sure you noticed something, though you may not yet know what. And above all, you’re not English. The first crime was the matrix. The circle is like the zero in natural numbers, a symbol of maximum uncertainty but which also determines everything.”