The Oxford Murders

by Guillermo Martinez

  We stood and watched him head towards St Giles’s Church, where a large crowd was already gathered. There were a few women in black veils, and some had to be helped up the front steps and into the church.

  “Are you going back to the Institute?” asked Seldom.

  “Yes,” I said. “In fact I shouldn’t have taken any time off now: I’ve got to finish and post my grant report without fail today. And you?”

  “Me?” he said. He glanced in the direction of the church and, for a moment, he seemed very alone and strangely helpless. “I think I’ll wait here until the service is over. I’d like to follow the procession to the cemetery.”

  Twenty-Five

  I spent the next few hours, stumbling more and more often, like a tired hurdler, as I filled in a series of ridiculous boxes on my report form. At last, at four o’clock, I printed up the files and slipped the pages into a large manila envelope. I went down to the secretary’s office, asked Kim to make sure it was posted to Argentina that afternoon and left the building feeling slightly euphoric at my liberation.

  On my way back to Cunliffe Close, I remembered that I had to pay Beth my second month’s rent, so I made a slight detour to get money from a cash machine. I found myself retracing the route of a month earlier, at almost exactly the same hour. The afternoon air was just as warm, the streets just as quiet. Everything seemed to be repeating itself, as if I were being given a last opportunity to go back to the day when everything started. I decided to walk along the same side of Banbury Road-the side in the sun-brushing past privet hedges, submitting to the mysterious conjunction of repetitions. When I reached the turning of Cunliffe Close I saw the last shred of the badger’s skin still lying in the road. That hadn’t been there a month earlier. I forced myself to look at it. The passing cars, the rain, dogs, had all done their work. There was no blood left, just a last piece of fur-covered skin, like a strip of dried-out peel. A badger will do anything to save its young, Beth had said. Hadn’t I heard something similar that morning? Yes, Inspector Petersen had said, “You never know how far you’d go for your child.” I stood frozen, my eyes glued to that last remnant, listening in the silence. Suddenly, I knew. I saw, as if it had always been there, what it was that Seldom had wanted me to see from the start. He’d told me, almost letter by letter, but I hadn’t listened. He’d repeated it, a hundred different ways. He’d put the photographs under my nose but all I’d seen were M’s, hearts and eights.

  I turned round and walked back up Banbury Road, impelled by a single thought: I had to find Seldom. I went through the market and along the High, then cut through a passage to get to Merton as quickly as possible. But Seldom wasn’t there. I stood for a moment at the window of the porter’s lodge, slightly disorientated. I asked if Seldom had come back at lunchtime but nobody remembered seeing him since first thing that morning. It suddenly occurred to me that he might be at the hospital, visiting Frank Kalman. I had a few coins in my pocket so I called Lorna from the pay phone in the college and asked her to put me through to the second floor. No, Mr Kalman hadn’t had any visitors.

  “Can you think where else Seldom might be?” I asked Lorna when I was transferred back to her.

  There was a silence at the other end of the line. I couldn’t tell if she was just thinking, or trying to decide whether to tell me something that would reveal the true nature of the relationship she’d had with Seldom.

  “What’s the date today?” she asked unexpectedly.

  It was the twenty-fifth of June. Lorna sighed, as if in agreement.

  “It’s the day his wife died, the day of the accident. I think you’ll find him at the Ashmolean Museum.”

  I walked back up Magdalen Street and climbed the steps to the museum. This was my first visit. I crossed a small gallery of portraits, presided over by the inscrutable face of John Dewey, and followed the signs to the great Assyrian frieze. Seldom was the only person in the room. He was sitting on one of the stools that were set out at a certain distance from the central wall. As I moved closer I saw that the frieze extended, like a long, slender stone parchment, all around the room. Involuntarily, I trod more quietly as I approached Seldom. He was fully absorbed, his eyes, empty of all expression, fixed on a detail of the frieze, as if he had long before stopped seeing it. For a moment I wondered if I shouldn’t wait for him outside. When he turned towards me he showed no surprise. He said simply, in his usual unassuming tone:

  “If you’re here, it’s because you know, or because you think you know. Isn’t that so? Take a seat,” he said, indicating the stool beside him. “If you want to see the entire frieze you have to sit here.”

  I sat down and saw a succession of multicoloured images of what appeared to be an immense battlefield. Small figures were carved into the golden stone with wonderful precision. In scene after scene a single warrior appeared to confront an entire army. He was recognisable by his long beard and a sword that stood out from the rest. When I looked along the frieze from left to right, the endlessly repeated image of the warrior produced a vivid impression of movement. Looking again, I noticed that the different successive positions of the warrior could be seen as a progression in time and that, at the end of the frieze, there were many more fallen figures, as if he had defeated the whole army single-handed.

  “King Nissam, eternal warrior,” said Seldom, his voice sounding strange. “That’s the name with which the frieze was presented to King Nissam and with which it arrived at the British Museum three thousand years later. But the stone guards a different story for whoever has the patience to see it. My wife managed to reconstruct almost all of it when the frieze came here. If you read the sign over there you’ll see that the most important Assyrian sculptor, a man called Hassiri, was commissioned to produce the work, to celebrate the king’s birthday. Hassiri had a son, Nemrod, to whom he’d taught his art, who worked with him. Nemrod was engaged to a very young girl, Agartis. On the same day that father and son were preparing the stone before starting the work, King Nissam, out hunting, came upon the girl by the river. He tried to take her by force but Agartis, who had not recognised the king, tried to escape into the forest. The king caught her easily: he raped her and then cut off her head with his sword. When he returned to the palace and passed the sculptors, father and son caught sight of the girl’s head hanging from the saddle with the rest of the catch from the hunt. Hassiri went to tell the girl’s mother the terrible news.

  “His son meanwhile, in despair, began carving into the stone the figure of the king cutting off a kneeling woman’s head. On his return, Hassiri found his son dementedly hammering an image into the stone that would surely condemn him to death. He dragged him away from the wall, sent him home and remained alone with his dilemma. He could easily have erased the image. But Hassiri was an artist in antiquity and he believed that every work of art contained a mysterious truth protected by a divine hand, a truth that men had no right to destroy. Perhaps too, as much as his son, he wanted future generations to know what happened. That night he hung a cloth over the wall and asked to be left alone to work in secret, hidden beneath the cloth. The frieze he was preparing, he said, would be quite different from all his previous work, and the king should be the first to look upon it.

  “Alone with that first image in the stone, Hassiri was in the same dilemma as the general in G.K. Chesterton’s The Innocence of Father Brown, in the chapter called ‘The Sign of the Broken Sword’: where does a wise man hide a pebble? On the beach, of course. But what does he do if there is no beach? And where does a man hide a dead soldier? On a battlefield, of course. But what if there is no battle? A general can start a battle, and a sculptor can…imagine one. King Nissam, eternal warrior, never took part in a battle; he lived during an unusually peaceful era and probably only ever killed unarmed women in his lifetime. Though the king found the war theme a little surprising, the frieze was flattering to him and he thought it a good idea to exhibit it in the palace so as to intimidate neighbouring kings. Nissam, and countless
generations after him, saw only what the artist wanted them to see: an overwhelming succession of images from which the viewer soon looks away, believing he finds repetition, that he has understood the rule, that each part represents the whole. That’s the trap created by the recurrence of the figure with the sword. But there is a tiny hidden part which contradicts and cancels out the rest, a part which is in itself another whole. I didn’t have to wait as long as Hassiri. I too wanted someone, at least one other person, to find out. I wanted someone to know the truth and judge. I suppose I should be pleased you’ve seen it at last.”

  Seldom stood and opened the window behind me before starting to roll a cigarette. Seemingly reluctant to sit down again, he continued to stand as he went on:

  “That first afternoon, when we met, I had received a message-not from a stranger or a madman but from someone, unfortunately, very close to me. It was a confession to a crime and a desperate plea for help. The note was in my pigeonhole, as I told Inspector Petersen, when I went to my class, but I only took it out and read it on my way down to the cafeteria, an hour later. I went straight to Cunliffe Close, where I bumped into you at the front door. I still thought there might be an element of exaggeration in the message. I’ve done something terrible, it said. But I still never would have imagined what we found. Someone you’ve cradled in your arms when she was a little girl is always a little girl to you. I’d always protected her. I wouldn’t have been capable of calling the police. I suppose if I’d been at the house alone I’d have tried to remove clues, clean up the blood, hide the pillow. But you were there, so I had to make the call. I’d read about Inspector Petersen’s cases, and I knew that as soon as he was in charge and on her trail she’d be finished.

  “While we waited for the police to arrive, I was in the same dilemma as Hassiri. Where does a wise man hide a pebble? On a beach. Where does one hide a figure holding a sword? On a battlefield. And where does one hide a murder? It could no longer be hidden in the past. The answer was simple, if horrific: there only remained the future, it could only be hidden in a series of murders. After my book came out, I received letters from all manner of deranged people. There was one in particular who claimed he killed a homeless man every time his bus ticket had a prime number. I had no trouble inventing a murderer who left a symbol from a logical series at every murder scene, like a challenge. I wasn’t prepared to commit murder, of course and I wasn’t sure how I’d resolve that, but I didn’t have time to think about it. When the police pathologist established that the time of death was between two and three in the afternoon, I realised they’d arrest her immediately, so I decided to take a leap in the dark.

  The piece of paper I’d thrown in my bin that afternoon was the rough draft of a proof in which I’d made an error but then wanted to retrieve. I was sure that Brent would remember the paper if the police asked him about it. I thought up a brief message, like the details for an appointment. I had to provide her with an alibi, so the most important thing was the time. I chose three in the afternoon, the latest time of death given by the pathologist. I knew that she was in rehearsal by then. When the inspector asked me if there was anything else in the note, I remembered that you and I had been speaking in Spanish and that when I’d glanced at the letters on the Scrabble racks I’d seen the word ‘arc’, or circle in Spanish. The circle was in fact the symbol I suggested in my book as the start of a series with maximum uncertainty.”

  “‘Aro’,” I said. “That’s what you wanted me to see in the photos.”

  “Yes. I tried to tell you every way I could think of. You’re not English, so you’re the only person who could have formed the word out of the letters on the rack and read it as I had. As we walked to the Sheldonian after giving our statements, I tried to find out if you’d noticed that or any other detail I might have missed and that could have implicated her. You drew my attention to the final position of the head, eyes facing the back of the chaise longue. She confessed to me later that she hadn’t been able to stand the fixed stare of those eyes.”

  “Why did you hide the blanket?”

  “At the theatre, I asked her to tell me everything, step by step, exactly as it happened. That’s why I insisted on going to give her the news myself: I wanted to make sure she spoke to me before she had to face the police. I had to tell her about my plan and I wanted, above all, to find out if she’d been careless about anything else. She told me she’d worn her evening gloves so as not to leave fingerprints but that she had, indeed, had to struggle with her and had torn the blanket with the heel of her shoe. She thought the police might guess the murderer was a woman because of that. She still had the blanket in her bag, so we agreed that I’d get rid of it. She was extremely agitated and I was sure she’d break down as soon as Petersen started questioning her. I knew that if the inspector focused his investigation on her she’d be finished. And I knew that to lodge the serial murder theory in his mind I’d have to provide him with a second murder as soon as possible. Fortunately, in our first conversation, you had given me the idea that I needed, when we talked about imperceptible murders-murders that nobody saw as murders. A truly imperceptible murder, I realised, didn’t even have to be a murder.

  “I thought immediately of Frank’s ward. I saw corpses wheeled out of there every day. I simply needed to get hold of a syringe and, as Petersen guessed, wait patiently for the first dead body to be placed in the little room off the main corridor. It was a Sunday, and Beth was away on tour. It was perfect for her. I checked the time of death noted on the label, to make sure that I too had an alibi, and then stuck the needle into the corpse’s arm, just to leave a puncture mark. That was as far as I was prepared to go. When I was researching unsolved murders, I’d read that forensic pa-thologists had for some time suspected that there existed a chemical that was dissipated within a few hours without leaving any trace. That suspicion was enough for me. And anyway, my murderer had supposedly planned things carefully enough to outsmart the police as well. I had already decided that the second symbol would be the fish, and that the series would be the first few Pythagorean numbers.

  “From the hospital I went straight to the Institute and stuck a note similar to the one I described to Petersen on the revolving door. The inspector pieced that part of it together and I think I was a suspect for a time. It was after the second death that Sacks started following me.”

  “But you couldn’t have done anything at the concert-you were sitting next to me!” I said.

  “The concert…The concert was the first sign of what I most feared, the nightmare that has haunted me since childhood. In accordance with my plan, I was waiting for a car accident, in exactly the spot that Johnson chose to crash off the road. It was where I had my accident, and was the only thing I could think of for the third symbol in the series, the triangle. I thought I would send a note after the event, claiming an ordinary everyday car accident as a murder, a perfect murder that leaves no clues. That was my choice and it would have been the last death. Straight after, I intended to publicise the solution to the series which I myself had initiated. My imaginary intellectual opponent would admit defeat and either disappear quietly, or leave behind a few false trails so that the police would continue chasing a ghost a little longer. But then the man died at the concert.

  “It was what I was looking for-a death. From where we were sitting it really did look like someone was strangling him. It was easy to believe we were witnessing a murder. But perhaps the most extraordinary thing was that the dead man had been playing the triangle. I took it as a good omen, as if my plan had been approved at a higher sphere and life was making things easy for me. As I’ve said, I’ve never known how to read the signs in the real world. I thought I could appropriate the percussionist’s death for my plan. While you and the others rushed towards the stage, I checked that nobody was looking and tore out of the programme the two words that I needed for my message. Then I simply placed them on my seat and followed you. Later, when the inspector motioned to us and made
his way along our row, I stopped deliberately, as if stunned, just before reaching my seat, so that he would be the one to pick up the words. That was the little illusion I created. Of course, fate had-or so I assumed-given me an extraordinary helping hand, because even Petersen was there to witness events. The doctor who went up on stage confirmed what had been obvious to me: it was a natural respiratory arrest, despite its dramatic appearance. I would have been surprised had the post-mortem revealed anything strange.

  “My only remaining problem-which I had already solved once-was making a natural death look like murder, and providing a convincing theory so that Petersen would include the death as one of the series. It was more difficult this time, because I couldn’t get near the body and put my hands around the neck. I then remembered the case of the telepath. All I could come up with was to suggest that it was a case of remote hypnosis. But I knew that it would be almost impossible to convince Petersen, even if he still had doubts about Mrs Crafford’s death. It wasn’t, so to speak, within the aesthetic of his reasoning, in the realm of the probable. He wouldn’t have thought it a plausible theory, as we would say in mathematics. But in the end none of it proved necessary. Petersen easily accepted a theory that, to me, seemed much more flimsy, that the man was attacked from behind. He accepted it, even though he himself was there and saw the same as us: that for all the theatricality of the death, there was no one else there. He accepted it for the reason people usually believe things: because he wanted to believe.