“My father said they won’t be allowing any taxis or cars out for some time. But I’m heading back to Oxford now. I could drop you off somewhere.”
We followed her to the car park and got into a car with a discreet police identity badge on the windscreen. As we left the parking area we saw the two officers Petersen had requested.
“It’s the first time I’ve managed to get my father to a concert,” said the woman. “I thought it would take his mind off his work. Oh well, I suppose he won’t be coming to dinner now. My God, that man holding his throat…I still can’t believe it. Daddy thought someone was trying to choke him. He was about to fire at the stage but because the spotlight was on the man’s face he couldn’t see anything behind him. He asked me if he should fire.”
“What did you see from where you were sitting?” I asked.
“Nothing! It all happened so fast. And anyway, I was distracted, looking up at the palace. I knew the fireworks would be going off at the end of the movement so I was watching out for that. They always get me to organise the fireworks at these events. I suppose they think I know all about gunpowder because I’m a policeman’s daughter.”
“How many people were up on the roof dealing with the fireworks?” asked Seldom.
“Two. That’s all you need. There might have been one more person up there, at most-one of the palace security guards.”
“From what I could see,” said Seldom, “the percussionist was slightly apart from the rest of the orchestra. He was the last person right at the back of the stage, up on a platform. He was the only member of the orchestra who could be attacked from behind without the others noticing. Someone from the audience or from the palace could have gone round to the back of the stage when the lights went down.”
“But my father said the cause of death was respiratory arrest. Could something like that be induced externally?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” said Seldom, and then added very quietly: “I hope so.”
What did he mean? I was about to ask him, but the inspector’s daughter had already drawn him into a conversation about horses, which then switched irretrievably and rather unexpectedly to a search for common Scottish ancestors. I turned his intriguing words over in my mind for a while, wondering if I’d missed a possible nuance in English of the expression ‘I hope so’. I assumed that this had simply been his way of saying that the hypothesis about an attack was the only reasonable one, and that for the sake of general good sense it was better to assume that this was what had happened. That if the man’s death had not been caused in some way, that if he really had died of natural causes, one could only think of something inconceivable: invisible men, Zen archers, supernatural influences. Strange how the mind automatically makes little alterations, adjustments: I convinced myself that that was what Seldom had meant and never asked him about it, either when we got out of the car or during any of our subsequent conversations. And yet I now realise that those quietly uttered words would have been the key, the short cut, into his deepest thoughts.
All I can say in my defence is that I was intent on something else: I didn’t want to let Seldom escape that evening without him revealing the law of formation of the series. To my shame, even knowing the triangle symbol, I was as much in the dark as I had been at the start. Half-listening to the conversation in the front, I tried vainly to give some sense to the circle-fish-triangle sequence and imagine what the fourth symbol might be. I was determined to extract the answer from Seldom as soon as we got out of the car and was watching Petersen’s daughter’s smiles a little anxiously. Although the meaning of certain colloquial expressions escaped me, I realised that the conversation had become more personal and at one point she said again, in a forlorn tone intended to be alluring, that she would be having dinner alone that night. We took the Banbury Road into Oxford and the inspector’s daughter stopped the car at the start of Cunliffe Close.
“This is all right here, isn’t it?” she asked, with a charming but firm smile.
I got out of the car but before she drove off, on a sudden impulse I tapped at Seldom’s window.
“You have to tell me,” I said in Spanish, quietly but urgently, “even if it’s only a clue, tell me something more about the solution to the series.”
Seldom looked at me in surprise, but my plea had worked and he seemed to take pity on me.
“What are we, you and I, what are we mathematicians?” he said, and smiled with strange melancholy, as if recovering a memory that he had thought lost. “We are, as a poet from your country said, ‘the ardent disciples of Pythagoras’.”
Seventeen
I stood on the pavement watching the car disappear into the darkness. In my pocket, together with my room key, I had a key to the side door of the Institute and the swipe card for getting into the library out of hours. I decided that it was too early to go to bed, so I walked to the Institute in the yellowish glow of the street lights. The streets were empty; the only signs of movement I saw were in Observatory Street, through the window of a tandoori restaurant: two waiters were placing chairs on tables and a woman in a sari was closing the curtains. St Giles too was deserted, but there were lights in a few windows at the Institute and a couple of cars in the car park. Some mathematicians worked only at night, and others had to come back to check on the running of a long program.
I went upstairs to the library. The lights were on and, as I entered, I heard footsteps-someone was walking quietly among the bookshelves. I went to the History of Mathematics Section, and ran a finger along the titles. One book was jutting out, as if someone had looked at it recently and placed it back carelessly. The books were packed in tightly, so I had to pull it out with both hands. The illustration on the cover showed a pyramid consisting of ten points surrounded by fire. The title-The Pythagorean Brotherhood- was only just out of reach of the flames. From close up, the points were actually small shaven heads, as if they were monks seen from above. So perhaps, rather than being vaguely symbolic of the inflamed passions that geometry could arouse, the flames alluded specifically to the horrific fire which destroyed the sect.
I carried the book to one of the tables and opened it under the lamp. I didn’t have to turn more than a couple of pages. There it was: It had been there all along, in all its overwhelming simplicity. The most ancient and elementary mathematical concepts, not yet quite divested of mysticism. The representation of numbers in the Pythagorean doctrine as the archetypal principles of divine powers. The circle was One, unity in all its perfection, the monad, the beginning of everything, enclosed and complete within its own line. Two was the symbol of multiplicity, of all opposition and duality, of bringing into being. It was formed by intersecting two circles, and the oval-like an almond-enclosed at its centre, was called ‘Vesica Piscis, the belly of the fish. Three, the triad, was the union of two extremes, the possibility of bringing order and harmony to differences. It was the spirit that embraced the mortal and immortal within a single whole.
But also, One was the point, Two was the straight line joining two points, Three was the triangle and, at the same time, the plane. One, two, three: that was all, the series was simply the sequence of natural numbers. I turned the page to examine the symbol for Four. It was the tetraktys, the pyramid of ten points that was on the book’s cover, the emblem and sacred figure of the sect. The ten points were the sum of one, plus two, plus three, plus four. It represented matter and the four elements. The Pythagoreans believed that all of mathematics was encoded in the symbol. It was both three-dimensional space and the music of the celestial spheres, and it contained in rudimentary form the combinatorial numbers of chance and the numbers of the multiplication of life that Fibonacci rediscovered centuries later.