“Were you able to remember anything?” he asked. When he saw my doubtful look, he said: “It’s difficult, isn’t it? Going back to the beginning as if one knew nothing. Emptying one’s mind of all that came afterwards. Did you see anything that you hadn’t noticed before?”
“Only this: when we found Mrs Eagleton’s body, she didn’t have a blanket over her legs,” I said.
Seldom leaned back in his chair and stroked his chin.
“That…could be interesting,” he said. “Yes, now that you mention it, I remember clearly, she always had a tartan blanket over her legs. When she was going out, at least.”
“Beth is sure that her grandmother still had the blanket when she came downstairs at two. The police searched the house for it later but couldn’t find it. Inspector Petersen didn’t mention any of this to us,” I said a little resentfully.
“Well,” said Seldom, gently mocking, “he is the police inspector in charge of the case. Perhaps he doesn’t feel the need to report every single detail to us.”
I laughed.
“But we know more than he does,” I said.
“Only in the sense that we’re familiar with Pythagoras’s theorem.”
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.