His face darkened, as if suddenly reminded of his worst fears. He leaned towards me and said confidentially:
“His daughter told me he has trouble sleeping at night. She’s found him awake in the early hours several times, trying to read books on mathematics. He called me again this morning. I think he’s worried, like me, that Thursday will be too late.”
“But Thursday is only the day after tomorrow,” I said.
“Pasado mañana,” said Seldom. “The day after tomorrow. The thing is, tomorrow is no ordinary day. That was why Petersen called. He wants to send some of his men to Cambridge.”
“What’s happening tomorrow in Cambridge?” Lorna was back, carrying our beers.
“I have a feeling it’s all because of the book I lent Petersen, giving a rather fanciful account of the story of Fermat’s theorem. It’s the most ancient unsolved problem in mathematics,” he said to Lorna. “Mathematicians have been struggling with it for over three hundred years and, tomorrow in Cambridge, they may manage to prove it for the first time. The book traces the origin of the conjecture on Pythagorean triples, one of the secrets of the earliest years of the sect, before the fire when, as Lavand said, magic and mathematics were still closely linked. The Pythagoreans believed that numerical properties and relationships represented the secret number of a deity which should be kept secret within the sect. They could disseminate theorems, for use in daily life, but never their proofs, just as magicians swear not to reveal their tricks. Members of the sect broke this rule on pain of death.
“The book I lent Inspector Petersen claims that Fermat himself belonged to a more recent but no less strict sect than the Pythagoreans. He announced in his famous note in the margin to Diophantus’s Arithmetical that he had proof of his conjecture but, after his death, neither that nor any of his other proofs were found among his papers.
I expect what alarmed Petersen was the fact that there are several strange deaths linked with the story of the theorem. A lot of people have died, of course, over the three hundred years, including those who came close to finding a proof of the theorem. But the book’s author is shrewd and he manages to make some of the deaths seem truly suspicious-Taniyama’s suicide in the late fifties, for instance, with the strange note he left for his fiancée.”
“In that case the murders would be…”
“A warning,” said Seldom. “A warning to the world of mathematicians. As I told Petersen, I think the conspiracy set out in the book is probably a load of ingenious nonsense. But there is something that worries me: Andrew Wiles has worked in absolute secret for the past seven years. Nobody has a clue as to what his proof will be. He has never allowed me to look at any of his papers. If something should happen to him before his presentation and those papers disappeared, another three hundred years might pass before anyone repeated the proof. That’s why, quite apart from what I think, it’s not a bad idea for Petersen to send some of his men to Cambridge. If anything happened to Andrew,” he said, and his face darkened again, “I’d never forgive myself.”
Twenty-Three
On Wednesday 23 June I woke around midday. The heavenly smells of coffee and freshly made waffles were coming from Lorna’s tiny kitchen. Her cat, Sir Thomas, had managed to drag part of the bedspread on to the floor and he was now curled up on it at the foot of the bed. I walked around him and went to the kitchen to kiss Lorna. The paper was open on the table and I glanced through it while Lorna poured the coffee. A series of murders with mysterious symbols, said the Oxford Times with undisguised local pride, had become the lead story in the main London papers. They reproduced on their front page some of the headlines from the previous day’s national papers. But that was all, there had obviously been no new developments in the case.
I searched the inside pages for news of the seminar in Cambridge. All I found was a brief item entitled ‘Mathematicians’ Moby Dick’, including the long list of failed attempts to prove Fermat’s theorem over the years. The article mentioned that bets were being laid in Oxbridge on the outcome of the last of the afternoon’s three lectures and the odds at the moment were still six-to-one against Wiles.
Lorna had booked a tennis court for one o’clock. We stopped off at Cunliffe Close to collect my racket and then played for a long time without being interrupted, concentrating only on the ball going back and forth over the net, in that small rectangle out of time. As we left the courts I saw on the clubhouse clock that it was almost three and I asked Lorna if we could make a quick stop at the Institute on the way back. The building was deserted and I had to switch on lights as I went upstairs. In the computer room, which was empty too, I checked my e-mail. There was the short message that was being spread like a password to mathematicians all over the world: Wiles had done it! There were no details about the final exposition. All it said was that his proof had convinced the experts and that, once written up, it might be up to two hundred pages long.
“Good news?” asked Lorna as I got back in the car.
I told her, and in my admiring tone she must have caught the strange contradictory pride I felt in mathematicians.
“Perhaps you would rather have been there this afternoon,” she said and then, laughing: “What can I do to make it up to you?”
We spent the rest of the afternoon making love like a pair of happy rabbits. At seven, as it was getting dark, we were lying side by side in exhausted silence when the telephone rang. Lorna leaned across me to answer it. A look of alarm appeared on her face, and then horrified sorrow. She indicated that I should turn on the television and, with the phone wedged between shoulder and chin, she started dressing.
“There’s been an accident on the way into Oxford, at a spot they call the ‘blind triangle’. A bus drove over the side of the bridge and down the bank. They’re expecting several ambulances with the injured at the Radcliffe-they need me in the X-ray department.”
I changed channels until I found the local news. A female reporter was talking as she moved closer to the shattered barrier of the bridge. I pressed buttons on the remote but couldn’t get any sound.
“The sound doesn’t work,” said Lorna. Now fully dressed, she was searching for her uniform in the wardrobe.
“Seldom and a big group of mathematicians were coming back from Cambridge by bus this afternoon,” I said.
Lorna turned round, as if gripped by a terrible foreboding, and came over to me.
“My God, they would have had to cross that bridge if they were coming from there.”
We stared despairingly at the screen. There was a shot of broken glass scattered over the bridge at the spot where the bus had crashed through the barrier. As the reporter peered over the side and pointed, we saw, magnified by the telephoto lens, the mass of crumpled metal that had once been the bus. The camera moved unsteadily, following the reporter as she made her way down the steep slope. A section of the chassis had broken off where the bus must have first struck the ground. The camera swung to show the bottom of the slope, much closer now. Ambulances had managed to reach the bus from below and paramedics had started rescuing passengers. There was a heart-rending close-up of the silent, shattered bus windows and a section of orange bodywork showing an emblem I didn’t recognise. Lorna squeezed my arm.
“It’s a school bus,” she said. “My God, there were children inside! Do you think…?” she whispered, unable to finish her sentence. She looked at me, frightened, as if a game we’d been playing had become nightmarish reality. “I’ve got to go to the hospital now,” she said, kissing me quickly. “Just pull the door shut when you leave.”
I sat watching the hypnotic succession of images on the screen. The camera circled the bus, focusing on the window where the rescue team was gathered. A paramedic had managed to climb inside the bus and was trying to get one of the children out. A child’s bare legs appeared, swinging disjointedly until a row of arms, forming a stretcher, grabbed hold of them. The child was wearing gym shorts, bloodstained down one side, and bright white trainers. As th
e rest of his body emerged I saw that he was wearing a vest with a large number across the chest. The camera again focused on the window. A pair of hands was carefully supporting the boy’s head. There was blood trickling down the wrists, as if it were pouring from the back of the child’s head. The camera showed a close-up of the boy’s face and I was startled to see, beneath a long, untidy blond fringe, the unmistakable features of a child with Down’s Syndrome. The face of the man inside the bus now appeared for the first time. He mouthed something, repeating it in desperation and indicating with his bloodstained hands that there was no one left inside the bus.
The camera followed the procession that carried the last child round behind the bus. Someone then stopped the cameraman going any further, but there was a brief glimpse of a row of bodies on stretchers covered with sheets. The programme then returned to the studio and showed a picture of a group of boys before a game. They were the basketball team from a school for children with Down’s Syndrome, on their way back from an inter-school competition in Cambridge. The boys’ names appeared briefly at the bottom of the screen-five players and five substitutes-followed by the terse statement that all ten were dead. Then another photo appeared: the face of a young man, which I vaguely recognised, though the name beneath the picture, Ralph Johnson, was quite unfamiliar. He was the driver of the bus. He had apparently managed to jump out just before it crashed, but had died too, just before reaching hospital. The photo disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by a list of all the tragedies that had happened at the same spot.
I switched off the television and lay down with a pillow over my eyes, trying to remember where I’d seen the bus driver’s face. The picture had no doubt been taken several years earlier. The very short, curly hair, sharp cheekbones, sunken eyes-I’d seen him before, not as a bus driver but somewhere else. Where? I got up irritably and took a long shower, trying to picture all the faces I’d seen around town. As I was dressing and heading back to the bedroom for my shoes, I tried to recall the face on the screen-the small, tight curls, the fanatical expression. Yes. I sat on the bed, stunned by the surprise, by all the different implications. But I was sure I was right. After all, I hadn’t met that many people in Oxford. I called the hospital and asked for Lorna. When she came on the phone, I said, automatically lowering my voice:
“The bus driver…he was Caitlin’s father, wasn’t he?”
“Yes,” she said after a moment, and I noticed that she too was almost whispering.
“Is it what I think it is?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I didn’t want to say anything. One of the lungs was a match. Caitlin’s just been taken to theatre-they think they can still save her.”
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 a
dmitted 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.”
The Oxford Murders Page 14