“Did Petersen tell you anything else about the death last night? Does he have the results of the post-mortem?”
“Yes. He wanted to rule out the possibility that the percussionist ingested something before the concert which might have caused the respiratory arrest. And sure enough, they found nothing like that. Nor were there any signs of violence, no marks on his neck. Petersen thinks the man was attacked by someone who was familiar with the music: he chose the longest section without percussion. That meant he could be sure the percussionist would be out of the spotlight. Petersen has also ruled out it being another member of the orchestra. The only answer, given the percussionist’s location at the back of the stage and the absence of marks on his neck, is that someone climbed up the back and…”
“Covered his mouth and nose.”
Seldom looked at me, surprised.
“That’s what Lorna thought,” I told him.
He nodded.
“Yes, I should have guessed: Lorna knows all there is to know about crime. The pathologist says that the shock of being attacked could in itself have triggered the respiratory arrest, before the percussionist even tried to struggle. Someone climbed up the back and attacked him in the darkness-that seems like the only reasonable explanation. But that wasn’t what we saw.”
“You surely not tending towards the ghost hypothesis?” I said.
To my surprise, Seldom seemed to give my question serious consideration. He nodded slowly.
“Yes,” he said, “of the two alternatives, for now, I prefer the hypothesis of the ghost.”
He drank some coffee and looked at me again.
“You shouldn’t let your eagerness to find an explanation interfere with your memory of events. Actually, I asked you to meet me because I wanted you to have a look at this.”
He opened his briefcase and took out an envelope.
“Petersen showed me these photographs when I went to his office today. I asked if I could keep them till tomorrow so I could look at them carefully. I particularly wanted you to see them: they’re the photos of the crime scene at Mrs Eagleton’s-the first murder, the start of everything. The inspector’s returned to the original question: how is the circle in the first note linked to Mrs Eagleton? As you know, I think you saw something else there, something you still haven’t realised is important, but which is stored in a recess of your memory. I thought the photos might help you remember. It’s all here again.” He held out the envelope. “The sitting room, the cuckoo clock, the chaise longue, the Scrabble board. We know that in that first murder he made a mistake. That should tell us something more…” Seldom was distracted for a moment. He looked round at the other tables and the corridor. Suddenly his face hardened as if he’d seen something alarming.
“Someone’s just left something in my pigeonhole,” he said. “It’s odd because the postman’s already been this morning. I hope Detective Sergeant Sacks is still around. Wait here a minute, I’m going to have a look.”
I swivelled in my chair and saw that from where Seldom was sitting he could just see the last column of wooden pigeonholes on the wall. So that was where he’d received the first note. I was struck by the fact that the correspondence of all the members of the college was so openly on display in the corridor. The pigeonholes at the Mathematical Institute were equally unprotected. When Seldom came back he was looking at something inside an envelope, with a big smile on his face as if he’d just had unexpected good news.
“Do you remember the magician I mentioned, Rene Lavand? He’s in Oxford today and tomorrow. I’ve got tickets here for this evening. It has to be tonight because I’ll be in Cambridge tomorrow. Are you coming on our mathematicians’ outing?”
“No, I don’t think so,” I said. “It’s Lorna’s day off tomorrow.”
Seldom raised his eyebrows slightly.
“The solution to the most important problem in the history of mathematics versus a beautiful woman. The girl still wins, I suppose.”
“But I would very much like to see the magician’s show this evening.”
“Of course, of course,” said Seldom, unusually vehement. “You absolutely must see it. It starts at nine. And now,” he said, as if he were giving me a homework assignment, “go home and look carefully at the photographs.”
Twenty
When I got back to my room I prepared a pot of coffee, made the bed and laid out the photographs from the enve-“ lope on the bedcover. As I looked at them I remembered the words, like a quiet axiom of a figurative painter: there is always less reality in a photo than can be captured in a painting. Indeed, something seemed to have been irretrievably lost from the fragmented picture made up of flawlessly sharp images that I composed on the bed.
I tried putting the photographs in a different order, shifting a few. Something that I had seen. I tried again, setting out the photographs in accordance with what I remembered seeing when we entered Mrs Eagleton’s sitting room. Something that I had seen but Seldom hadn’t. Why only me, why couldn’t he have seen it too? Because you’d had no warning, Seldom had said. Perhaps it was like one of those three-dimensional computer-generated images that had become so fashionable, quite invisible to an attentive eye, only appearing gradually, fleetingly, when you relaxed your attention. The first thing I’d seen was Seldom, walking quickly towards me up the gravel path. There was no photo of him here, but I clearly recalled our conversation at the front door and the moment when he asked me about Mrs Eagleton. I’d pointed out the electric wheelchair in the hall, so he too had seen the chair. He’d turned the door handle, the door had opened silently and we’d entered the sitting room together. After that everything was more confused. I could remember the sound of the pendulum, though I wasn’t sure if I’d glanced at the clock.
Anyway, the photograph showing the door from the inside, the coat stand and the clock should come first in the sequence. That image, I thought, would also have been the last thing the murderer saw as he left. I put the photograph down and wondered which should come next. Had I seen anything else before we found Mrs Eagleton? I’d automatically looked for her in the same flowery armchair that she’d greeted me from the first day. I picked up a photo of the two little armchairs standing on the diamond-patterned rug. You could just see the handles of her wheelchair behind one of them. Had I noticed the wheel-chair when I was there? I couldn’t say for sure. It was exasperating: suddenly everything was eluding me.
The only focus in my memory was Mrs Eagleton’s body lying on the chaise longue and her open eyes, as if this one image radiated a light so intense that it left everything else in shadow. But, as we went closer, I had seen the Scrabble board and the two letter racks on her side. One of the photos had frozen the position of the board on the little table. It had been taken from very close up and you just could make out all the words. Seldom and I had already discussed the words on the board and neither of us thought they revealed anything interesting, or that they were linked in any way with the symbol in the note. Inspector Petersen hadn’t thought them important either. We agreed that the symbol had been chosen before the murder, not by an inspiration of the moment. I peered anyway at the photos of the letter racks. I was sure I hadn’t seen this: there was only one letter, an A, on one rack, and only two, an R and an O, on the other. Mrs Eagleton must have played to the end-until she’d used up all the letters in the bag-before falling asleep. I tried for a while to think of words in English that could be formed on the board with those last remaining letters, but there didn’t seem to be any, and besides, I thought, if there had been, Mrs Eagleton would surely have found them. Why hadn’t I noticed the letter racks before? I tried to remember their position on the table. They were at one corner, nearest to where Seldom had stood holding the pillow. Perhaps, I thought, I had to find precisely what I hadn’t seen. I scanned the photos again, to see if I could detect any details I might have missed, until I came to the last one, the still terrifying image of Mrs Eagleton’s lifeless face. I couldn’t find anything I hadn’t noticed before. So it must be those three things: the letter racks, the clock in the hall, and the wheelchair.