2005 - The Oxford Murders by Guillermo Martinez

Author:Guillermo Martinez
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2005-04-22T04:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

We left the police station in silence and walked back along St Aldates without a word until we reached Carfax Tower.

“I need to buy tobacco,” said Seldom. “Would you like to come with me to the Covered Market?”

I nodded and we turned down the High. I hadn’t said a word since we left the police station. Seldom smiled to himself.

“You’re offended because I didn’t tell you what the symbol was. But believe me, I have a very good reason.”

“A different reason from the one you gave me in the park yesterday? Now that you’ve shown it to Petersen, I can’t see why there should be any adverse consequences of me knowing it.”

“There could be…other consequences,” said Seldom. “But that’s not exactly why I haven’t told you. I don’t want my conjectures to influence yours. It’s what I do with my graduate students: I try not to get ahead of them with my own reasoning. The most valuable time in a mathematician’s thinking process is the moment when he has his first solitary intuition about a problem. Though you may not believe it, I have more faith in you than in myself to find the correct answer. You were there at the beginning, and the beginning, as Aristotle would say, is half of everything. I’m sure you noticed something, though you may not yet know what. And above all, you’re not English. The first crime was the matrix. The circle is like the zero in natural numbers, a symbol of maximum uncertainty but which also determines everything.”

We entered the market and Seldom took his time choosing a tobacco mix at a tobacconist’s run by a woman of Indian appearance. The woman, who got up from her stool to serve him, was wearing a saffron-coloured robe and an earring like a silver coil hung from her left ear. On closer inspection, I saw that it was in fact a snake. I suddenly remembered what Seldom had said about the ouroboros of the Gnostics and couldn’t help asking the woman about the symbol.

Tapping the serpent’s head, she said:

“Nothing and everything. The emptiness of every separate thing, and the totality that embraces them all. Difficult, difficult to understand. Absolute reality, beyond negation. Eternity, that which has no beginning and no end. Reincarnation.”

She carefully weighed out the tobacco and exchanged a few words with Seldom as she handed him his change. We made our way out through the maze of stalls. In the arcade, we saw Beth standing by a little table, handing out leaflets for the Sheldonian Orchestra. They were holding a charity concert and the members of the orchestra, she told us, took turns selling tickets. Seldom picked up one of the programmes.

“It’s an orchestral concert at Blenheim Palace, with fireworks during one of the pieces,” he said. “I’m afraid you can’t leave Oxford without going, at least once, to a concert with fireworks. Allow me to buy you a ticket.” And he took the money for two tickets from his pocket.

I hadn’t spoken to Beth since my trip to London.

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