The Oxford Murders Read online

  We entered the market and Seldom took his time choosing a tobacco mix at a tobacconist’s run by a woman of Indian appearance. The woman, who got up from her stool to serve him, was wearing a saffron-coloured robe and an earring like a silver coil hung from her left ear. On closer inspection, I saw that it was in fact a snake. I suddenly remembered what Seldom had said about the ouroboros of the Gnostics and couldn’t help asking the woman about the symbol.

  Tapping the serpent’s head, she said:

  “Nothing and everything. The emptiness of every separate thing, and the totality that embraces them all. Difficult, difficult to understand. Absolute reality, beyond negation. Eternity, that which has no beginning and no end. Reincarnation.”

  She carefully weighed out the tobacco and exchanged a few words with Seldom as she handed him his change. We made our way out through the maze of stalls. In the arcade, we saw Beth standing by a little table, handing out leaflets for the Sheldonian Orchestra. They were holding a charity concert and the members of the orchestra, she told us, took turns selling tickets. Seldom picked up one of the programmes.

  “It’s an orchestral concert at Blenheim Palace, with fireworks during one of the pieces,” he said. “I’m afraid you can’t leave Oxford without going, at least once, to a concert with fireworks. Allow me to buy you a ticket.” And he took the money for two tickets from his pocket.

  I hadn’t spoken to Beth since my trip to London. As she tore out the tickets and wrote the seat numbers, I had the feeling that she was avoiding my gaze. The meeting seemed to embarrass her.

  “Will I get to hear you play at last?” I asked.

  “It’ll probably be my last concert,” she said, her eyes meeting Seldom’s for a moment. She went on, as if this were something she hadn’t told anyone yet and she wasn’t sure he would approve: “I’m getting married at the end of the month and I’m going to take some time off. I don’t think I’ll carry on playing afterwards.”

  “That’s a pity,” said Seldom.

  “That I’m stopping playing or that I’m getting married?” asked Beth, and she smiled joylessly at her own joke.

  “Both!” I said. They laughed openly, as if my answer had provided unexpected relief. As I watched them laughing, I remembered what Seldom had said about me not being English. There was something restrained even in this spontaneous laughter, as if it were an unaccustomed liberty and they shouldn’t take it too far. Seldom could have objected that he was Scottish, of course, but even so, in their gestures, or rather in their careful economy of gestures, they had an undeniable air in common.

  We emerged on to Cornmarket Street and I pointed out to Seldom a notice that I had seen earlier on one of the boards at the entrance to the Bodleian Library. It was for a round-table discussion in which Inspector Petersen and a local crime writer would be taking part: “Is there such a thing as the perfect crime?” The title made Seldom stop for a moment.

  “Do you think this is some kind of bait Petersen is putting out?” he asked. The thought hadn’t occurred to me.

  “No, the poster’s been up for nearly a month. And I assume that if they were laying a trap for the murderer they would have invited you too.”

  “Perfect Crimes…I consulted a book with that same title when I was trying to establish the parallels between logic and criminal investigations. The book cited dozens of cases that have never been solved. The most interesting, for my purposes, was the case of a doctor, Howard Green, who formulated the problem most precisely. He wanted to kill his wife and wrote a diary setting out, in a truly scientific, detailed manner, all the possible adverse ramifications. It would be easy, he concluded, to kill her in such a way that the police couldn’t pin the blame on anyone with certainty. He proposed fourteen different methods, some highly ingenious. It would be much more difficult to ensure that he himself remained above suspicion forever.

  “The real danger for a criminal, Green claimed, was not the investigation of events backwards in time-that was no problem as long as the murder was planned carefully enough, making sure all trails were blurred or erased-but the traps that might be laid for him going forwards in time. The truth, he wrote in almost mathematical terms, is strictly unique; any deviation from the truth can always be refuted. At every interrogation, he would know what he had done, and in every alibi he devised there would inevitably be something false which, with sufficient patience, could always be exposed. He wasn’t satisfied with any of the options he analysed-getting someone else to kill her, pretending it was suicide or an accident, and so on. He concluded that he would have to provide the police with another suspect, one who was obvious and immediate and who meant the case was closed. The perfect crime, he wrote, wasn’t one that remained unsolved, but one where the wrong person was blamed.”

  “Did he kill her in the end?”

  “Oh no, she killed him. She found the diary one night and they had a terrible fight. She defended herself with a kitchen knife, stabbing and mortally wounding him. At least, that’s what she told the court. The jury, horrified by the contents of the diary and photographs of the bruises on her face, decided that she acted in self-defence and found her innocent. It’s because of her in fact that the murder is included in the book: many years after her death some students of graphology proved that the handwriting in the diary, while an almost perfect imitation, was not in fact Dr Green’s handwriting. And they discovered another fascinating fact: the man she married discreetly shortly afterwards was a copyist of illustrations and ancient works of art. I’d like to know which of them penned the diary: it’s a masterly imitation of the scientific style. They were incredibly daring, because the diary, which was read out during the trial, recounted and revealed line by line what they had done. Lying with the truth, with all one’s cards on the table, like a conjuring trick performed with bare hands. By the way, have you heard of an Argentinian magician called Rene Lavand? If you see his act you never forget it.”

  I shook my head-the name wasn’t even vaguely familiar.

  “No?” said Seldom, surprised. “You must see his show. I know he’s coming to Oxford soon, we could go together. Do you remember our conversation at Merton, about the aesthetics of reasoning in different disciplines? As I told you, the logic of criminal investigations was my first model. The second was magic. I’m glad you don’t know him,” he said, with childlike enthusiasm. “It’ll give me an excuse to see his show again.”

  When we arrived at the Eagle and Child I could see Lorna inside. She was sitting with her back to us, her red hair loose and flowing. She was absent-mindedly turning over a beer mat. Seldom, who had automatically brought out his packet of tobacco, followed my gaze.

  “Go on in,” he said. “Lorna doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

  Fifteen

  Almost two weeks passed without my hearing anything more about the case. I also lost contact with Seldom, though I found out from a casual remark of Emily’s that he was in Cambridge, helping to organise a seminar on Number Theory. “Andrew Wiles thinks he can prove Fermat’s last conjecture,” Emily said, amused, as if talking about an incorrigible child, “and Arthur is one of the few people who’s taking it seriously.” This was the first time I’d heard Wiles’s name. I didn’t think any professional mathematicians were still working on Fermat’s last theorem. After three hundred years of struggle and especially since Kummer, mathematicians had decided that the theorem was impossible to solve. At any rate, it was beyond all known mathematical tools, and so difficult it would consume the life and career of anyone who took up the challenge. When I said some of this to Emily, she agreed, as if she too found it mystifying. “And yet,” she said, “Andrew was my student, and if there’s anyone in the world who can solve it, I’d put my money on him.”

  During those weeks I accepted an invitation to a conference on Model Theory in Leeds but, instead of paying attention to the lectures, I found myself, during sessions, drawing circle and fish symbols in the margins of my notebook, like an invocation to th
e void. I’d tried to read between the lines of the newspaper articles that appeared in the days following Ernest Clarck’s death but, perhaps because Inspector Petersen had intervened, a possible link between the two murders was only mentioned in passing. The fish symbol was described but the newspapers seemed unaware of its significance and inclined to believe it was a kind of signature. I’d asked Lorna to write in great detail if there were any new developments but, instead of a report, I received the kind of letter I thought people no longer wrote, and which I certainly never would have expected from Lorna. Long and tender, it was a love letter.

  At the seminar someone was discussing the Chinese Room Experiment. This is a thought experiment devised by the philosopher John Searle in 1980. A person who has no knowledge of Chinese sits in a room. A native Chinese speaker slips a page of questions, written in Chinese, under the door. The person inside the room answers in Chinese with the help of an instruction book written in English. To the Chinese speaker outside, it seems as if the person in the room understands and speaks Chinese. I reread Lorna’s words, which she seemed to have written in an unchecked fit of passion, reflecting that the burning question in translation was knowing-really knowing-what the other person meant when they slipped a page containing the terrible word under your door. In my reply I copied Qais ben-al-Mulawah’s plea in one of his poems to Layla:

  Oh God, make the love between us equal that neither should go beyond the other

  Make our loves identical like two sides of an equation.

  I returned to Oxford on the day of the concert. Seldom had left a note in my pigeonhole at the Institute containing a little map with directions, the different ways of getting to Blenheim Palace, and a time for us to meet. In the afternoon, as I was changing, there was a knock at my door. It was Beth. For a moment I couldn’t say anything-all I could do was stare. She was wearing a low-cut black dress and matching long gloves. Her hair was tied back, showing off her elegant jawline, long, slender neck and bare shoulders. It was the first time I’d ever seen her wearing make-up and the transformation was spectacular. She smiled nervously as I stared at her.

  “Michael and I wondered if you’d like us to give you a lift, if you don’t mind arriving a little early. We’re about to leave.”

  I grabbed my thin cotton sweater and followed her out through the garden. I’d seen Michael only once before, from a distance, from my window. He was loading Beth’s cello on to the back seat. When he looked up and said hello, I saw a cheerful, ingenuous face with ruddy cheeks that made him look like a countryman or happy beer drinker. He was tall and heavily built, but there was something soft about his features that reminded me of Beth’s disparaging remark about him. His tailcoat was slightly crumpled and he couldn’t quite button it across his middle. Lank blond hair flopped over his forehead, and I noticed that he flicked it back constantly. I reflected maliciously that he would probably soon be bald.

  He started up the engine and manoeuvred the car slowly out of the close. As we came to the crossroads with the main road the headlamps lit up the crushed animal which was still lying in the road. Michael swerved to avoid it and lowered his window to look at the bloody remains. It was completely flattened but still, disturbingly, preserved its shape in two dimensions.

  “It’s a badger,” he said to Beth. “It must have strayed out of the woods.”

  “It’s been there for days,” I said. “I passed it when it had just been run over. I think it was carrying young. I’d never seen one before.”

  Beth leaned over to Michael’s side and glanced quickly out the window, without much interest.

  “Isn’t anybody going to clear away the remains?” I asked.

  “No. The refuse collectors are superstitious. Nobody dares touch a badger, they think they bring bad luck. It’ll gradually get worn away by the cars.”

  Michael speeded up to get through the lights and, as we joined the flow of traffic, he starting asking me the usual polite questions. I recalled the words of an English writer-Virginia Woolf, I think-who had once excused the formality of her compatriots by explaining that the initial, apparently trivial, conversation about the weather served to establish common ground and a comfortable atmosphere before moving on to more important subjects. But I was starting to wonder if that second stage really existed, and if I’d ever get to hear about those more important subjects. At one point I asked them how they had met. Beth said that they sat next to each other in the orchestra, as if that explained everything, and in fact the more I watched them, that did indeed seem like the only explanation. Proximity, routine, repetition-a most effective combination. He hadn’t even been, as some women say, ‘the first to come by’; it was something more immediate: ‘the one sitting nearest’. But what did I know? I didn’t, of course, but I suspected that Michael’s main attraction was that another woman had chosen him first.

  We joined the ring road and, for a few minutes, as Michael accelerated on the dual carriageway and advertising hoardings flashed past, I felt I was back in the modern world. We turned off towards Woodstock down a narrow tree-lined road. The branches intertwined overhead, forming a long tunnel in which you could only see to the next bend in the road. We went through the small village, drove about two hundred metres down a side road and, passing under a stone arch, we saw, in the late-afternoon sun, the huge gardens, the lake and the majestic outline of the palace, with its gold spheres on the roof and marble figures peering down from the balustrades like lookouts. We parked near the entrance. Beth and Michael walked across the gardens carrying their instruments to the stage, where chairs and music stands were set out for the orchestra. The seats for the audience, as yet unoccupied, had been painstakingly arranged in perfect concentric semicircles. I wondered how long this small miracle of geometry would last once people started arriving and if anybody else would get to admire the effort. I decided to go for a walk through the woods and around the lake in the half-hour before the performance.

  The light was fading. An elderly man in a grey uniform was rounding up the peacocks for the night. Through the trees, I glimpsed horses loose in a field. I passed a guard with two dogs and he tipped his cap in greeting. By the time I reached the lake it was dark. When I looked back towards the palace it was as if a giant switch had been flicked: the entire facade was lit up, brilliant and serene as an ancient jewel. Touched by the reflection, the lake stretched much further than I had thought, so I gave up on the idea of getting all the way round and doubled back.

  A great many seats were now occupied and I was surprised by the number of people still arriving in groups, trailing perfume and long dresses. Seldom was waving his programme at me from a row near the front. He too looked unusually elegant, in a dinner jacket and black bow tie. We chatted for a while about the seminar he was organising in Cambridge, the secrecy surrounding Wiles’s presentation and, very briefly, my trip to Leeds. I looked round and saw two ushers hurriedly unfolding chairs and setting out an extra row.

  “I didn’t expect so many people,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Seldom, “almost all of Oxford ’s here: look over there.” And he indicated with his eyes a place a few rows back to the right.

  I turned as discreetly as I could and saw Inspector Petersen with a young woman, probably the fair-haired little girl from the photograph twenty years on. The inspector nodded to us.

  “And there’s someone else I now find everywhere I go,” said Seldom. “Two rows back, the man in the grey suit pretending to read the programme. Do you recognise him out of uniform? It’s Detective Sergeant Sacks. Petersen seems to think our man may try to strike closer to me next time.”

  “So you’ve spoken to Inspector Petersen again?” I asked.

  “Only on the phone. He asked me to write, as simply as possible, a justification for the third symbol, the law of formation of the series, as I see it. I sent him my explanation from Cambridge. It was barely half a page long, unlike that very…er…imaginative report he read us. I think he has a plan, but he
probably still has some doubts. It’s interesting how seductive a psychologist’s conjectures can be. Even if they’re incorrect or ridiculous, they’re always more attractive than purely logical reasoning. People have a natural resistance to, and instinctive mistrust of logical thought. And even if it is completely mistaken, that resistance-as one sees if one studies the historical development of logic in the human mind-may have some foundation.”

  Seldom had lowered his voice slightly. The murmur of conversation around us ceased and the lights dimmed. A powerful beam of white light dramatically illuminated the orchestra. The conductor tapped briefly on the music stand, pointed his baton at the lead violin and the solitary first line of the piece that opened the programme made its way tentatively in the silence, like a curl of smoke rising.

  Gently, as if gathering delicate threads in the air, the conductor brought in Beth and Michael, the wind section, the piano and, lastly, the percussionist. I stared at Beth, although in fact I’d been watching her all along, even while listening to Seldom. I wondered if it was on stage that she felt her true connection with Michael. They both looked fully absorbed and focused, following the score, turning the pages briskly. Every so often a sudden strike of the drum would make me look up at the percussionist. Very tall, hunched with age, with a white moustache, slightly yellowed at the tips, that must once have been his pride and joy, he was by far the oldest member of the orchestra. When he wasn’t playing he looked shaky and unsteady, in contrast to the spasmodic vigour with which he struck the drum, almost as if he were trying to hide the early stages of Parkinson’s. I noticed that he put his hands behind his back after striking the drum and that the conductor was trying, rather comically, to get him to moderate his efforts. The music rose to a majestic climax and the conductor signalled the end of the piece with an energetic wave of his baton, before turning, with bowed head, to receive the first applause.