“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.”