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.
The wheelchair…Did that explain the symbol? A triangle for the percussionist, the fish tank for Clark, and for Mrs Eagleton, the circle-the wheel of her wheelchair perhaps. Or the O of the word ‘omerta’, Seldom had said.
Yes, the circle could still be almost anything. But, interestingly, there was a letter O on one of the letter racks. Or perhaps it wasn’t interesting at all, but just a silly coincidence? Perhaps Seldom had seen the O on the letter rack, and that was why he’d thought of the word ‘omerta’. Seldom had said something else, the day we went to the Covered Market, that he was confident I would see something because I wasn’t English. But what was a non-English way of seeing?
I was startled by the sound of someone trying to push an envelope under my door. I opened it and found Beth straightening up quickly, red-faced. She was holding several more envelopes.
“I thought you were out,” she said. “Or I would have knocked.”
I invited her in and picked up the envelope. Inside, there was a card with an illustration from Alice through the Looking Glass and the words ‘Non-wedding Invitation’ in embossed letters.
I smiled at her, intrigued.
“The thing is, we can’t get married yet,” said Beth. “Michael’s divorce could take ages. But we still want to have a celebration.” She caught sight of the photos lying all over the bed. “Photos of your family?”
“No, I don’t have any family in the usual sense. They’re the photos the police took the day of Mrs Eagleton’s murder.”
Beth, I reflected, was definitely English and her gaze was as representative as any-other. And she was the last person to have seen Mrs Eagleton alive, so she might notice if anything looked different. I motioned for her to approach but she hesitated, a look of horror on her face. At last she took a couple of steps forwards and glanced at the photographs quickly, as if afraid to look more closely.
“Why have they given you these after all this time? What do they think they can still find out from them?”
“They want to find the link between Mrs Eagleton and the first symbol. Perhaps if you look at them now, you’ll see something else-something missing or moved.”
“But I’ve already told Inspector Petersen: I can’t remember exactly where every single thing was when I left the house. When I came downstairs I saw that she was asleep, so I left as quietly as I could, without even glancing at her again. I’ve already been over this once. That afternoon, when Uncle Arthur came to the theatre to tell me what had happened, they were waiting for me in the sitting room, with the body still there.”
As if determined to overcome her terror, she picked up the photograph of Mrs Eagleton stretched out on the chaise longue. “All I could tell them,” she said, touching the photo with her finger, “was that ‘the blanket for her legs was missing. She never lay down without a blanket over her legs, not even on the warmest days. She didn’t want anyone to see her scars. We searched for the blanket all over the house that day but it never turned up.”
“It’s true,” I said, amazed that we hadn’t noticed. “I never saw her without that blanket. Why would the murderer have wanted to expose her scars? Or perhaps he took the blanket as a souvenir? Maybe he’s kept mementoes of the other two murders as well.”
“I don’t know, I don’t want to have to think about any of this again,” Beth said, heading towards the door. “It’s been a nightmare. I wish it was all over. When we saw Benito die in the middle of the concert and Inspector Petersen appeared on the stage, I thought I would die myself there and then. All I could think was that he was somehow going to lay the blame on me again.”
“No, he immediately ruled out anyone from the orchestra. It had to be someone who climbed up and attacked him from behind.”
“Well, whatever he thinks,” said Beth, shaking her head, “I just hope they catch him soon and it’ll all be over.” Her hand on the door handle, she turned to say: “Your girlfriend’s welcome to come to the party too, of course. She’s the one you play tennis with, isn’t she?”
Once Beth had gone, I slowly put the photographs back in the envelope. The invitation lay on the bed. The picture was actually of the un-birthday party or, more precisely, just one of the three hundred and sixty-four un-birthday parties that Lewis Carroll teases us with. The logician in him knew that what remains outside each statement is always overwhelmingly larger.
The blanket was a small, exasperating alarm signal. How much more was there in each murder that we hadn’t been able to see? Perhaps that was what Seldom was hoping for from me: that I should picture what wasn’t there but that we should have seen.
Still thinking about Beth, I searched a drawer for a change of clothes before taking a shower. The telephone rang: it was Lorna. She was free that evening after all. I asked if she’d like to come to the magic show.
“Of course I would,” she said. “I don’t intend to miss any more of your outings. But now that I’m going with you, I’m sure we’ll see nothing but silly rabbits pulled out of hats.”