“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?”