‘How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.’
NIELS BOHR
He woke one morning into a strange universe. Everything in his one bedroom flat in Kensal Rise was exactly the same, but everything was also subtly different. He was not sure how.
There was a message for him on the answer machine which he listened to with the irritation the acute heat brought him. He hadn’t been able to sleep. He’d been puzzling over his latest case. With each new piece of information he was finding it more troubling.
The message was from the office, delivered in a verbal encryption which he simultaneously deciphered. The dead man had been seen in the café at the canal. He looked through the crack in his curtains. It was nearly dawn. In his garden the blackbirds whistled their morning chorus. Usually, when he heard them he knew that sleep was over for him. This morning, there was something different about their tone.
Detective Draper got out of bed and slipped on his dressing gown and went to his study to review the case. On the face of it, the case was simple.
There had been a murder near him in Kensal Rise, but the body of the victim had not been found. There was no actual proof of murder, but there was knowledge of it. A young overwrought Muslim woman in a blue headdress who gave her name as Ana had come into the local police station. She had broken down and said a man she knew had been murdered. She gave his name. When asked how she knew he had been murdered, her eyes widened and she threw up her hands. She knew, she said. Who was the murdered man, who was he to her, she was asked.
But she would not say. Who was the killer, she was asked. At this she panicked and fled from the station. A few enquiries led them to her address and a watch was placed on the building.
A man by the name of Barrett, the assistant of a famous artist, went missing that same day. He had been known to frequent the woman’s flat. This was a month ago. Barrett had still not been found.
Detective Draper, who believed more than anything that intuition was superior to intellectual deduction, opposing himself to the theatrical methods of Sherlock Holmes, which had so captivated the police force, Scotland Yard, and the general public, knew that he was dealing with a case that amounted to more than the appearance of the facts. He believed that it was indeed essential to study a case thoroughly, to acquaint oneself with the locale of the crime, to handle the items of the principal players, in short to furnish the senses and instinct with all the available data and living facts possible and then, like a fisherman who must commit himself to the sea, he must leave all those facts behind and trust to the mysterious dictates of intuition.
He had developed the faculty of intuition as a young man when he trained himself to be able to tell which side a coin would fall, just by following the clearest whisper in his head. By slow degrees, applying this method to phone calls, knocks on doors, letters that he had received, guessing their contents and who sent them before opening them for verification, he had come to develop this mysterious faculty to a formidable degree.
Detective Draper never spoke about this to anybody, knowing full well that he would be a laughing stock if he did. He masked his secret technique behind a tremendous amount of paperwork and planning and detailed analyses. To all accounts, from the outside, he was an eminently practical detective, who did his research, and left nothing to chance. In truth he believed in the fertility of chance itself, which he did not regard as chance at all. He believed that all things in the universe were linked and that every fact was related to every other. From his armchair he solved his cases by indirection. He was the best in the force, his reputation unmatched.
That morning in his study, he went over the case methodically. He realised that there was something wrong with the facts of the case, some slight alteration of the world. For example, as soon as they put a watch on the Muslim woman’s house certain other facts of the case shifted.
This was puzzling. The watch reported that, through the window, he had seen Ana’s neighbour – a man named Jorg – cutting up a large chicken. The moment he noticed the chicken being cut up the lights in Ana’s room had come on. Here was where it became baffling. The watch swore that he saw Jorg both cutting up the chicken and going into Ana’s room at the same time. The watch was a sober man of unimpeachable reputation.
There were several other curious anomalies. Another, taken at random, was that when Jorg was seen cutting up the large chicken in his room, the reported victim of the murder was seen by witnesses in a café on the canal a few miles down the road. Those who saw him said that he looked well, if a bit anxious, and that he was reading a book at the time. Most of the witnesses could not recall the title of the book. Detective Draper did not think this at all unusual. Most people, he found, did not notice what was right under their noses. The inattentiveness of people was a constant source of amusement to him. He had come to rely on their failure to notice things. His best deductions came from working round the bends of this failure.
Questioning one of the witnesses he was able, through indirection, to work out the title of the book. To any other detective such a detail as the title of a book a victim was reading would be insignificant. But to Detective Draper nothing in the universe was insignificant. The witness remembered that in fact the victim was reading a cat.
‘What do you mean he was reading a cat?’
‘He was reading a cat.’
‘Did he have an actual cat in his hand?’
‘Both hands.’
‘What colour was the cat?’
‘It did not have a colour.’
‘Did it have a name?’
The last question had come to Detective Draper purely by intuition. It had simply dropped into his mind like that. But behind the intuition, hovering like the ghost of knowledge, was the understanding that some people see words as real things and that they are incapable of the abstract faculty of reading, transferring everything they read that has an image straightaway into its physical equivalent. This was one of those anomalous facts that the detective stored away in his mind.
‘Yes, it did have a name.’
‘What was it?’
‘It was a very strange name.’
‘Before you tell me what it was, tell me how you knew.’
‘It’s strange, but I just did. I looked at the cat he was reading and its name popped into my head just like that.’
‘There is no need to tell me the name of the cat,’ the detective said, nonchalantly.
‘Why not?’
‘I know it already. But, thank you.’
The detective rose to signify the end of the interview, leaving the witness quite baffled. Detective Draper, absent-minded the moment he was consumed by a clue, called several bookshops. In a short time he found out what he wanted. A copy of the book had been purchased that day, quite early in the morning, from Any Amount of Books on the Charing Cross Road. It was the only copy of the book purchased that morning. A check confirmed that the book had been bought by Jorg, as the detective had suspected. Another call to the local police station confirmed something else, that the victim had not been seen since. As it stood, there were two sightings. One was of the suspected killer in two places at the same time. The other was of the victim, after he had gone missing and was presumed dead.
For the rest of that day, contradictory reports kept pouring in. A warrant for the arrest of Jorg led to his detention. The large chicken he had been seen cutting up was brought in as evidence. But that same evening Jorg, who was in police custody, was seen in Ana’s room. He was shouting at her and at one point called her a whore.
‘I have killed that lover of yours and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.’
‘What have you done to him?’ she cried.
‘I have hidden him where no one will ever be able to find him.’
She was heard wailing, and Jorg was seen departing from the room. The watch was unable to do anything because he had conclusive proof that the murder suspect was in police custody. He had no legal right to arrest the same person twice.
Detective Draper considered the arrest of Jorg to have been an act of sublime stupidity by the local police.
The detective called in at the local station. The sergeant on duty, a thickset man, was reading Maigret. His name was Pillock and he had a reputation for brusqueness.
‘The way I see it, Detective,’ he said, ‘is that we know a crime has been committed. But we have no evidence. We suspect it’s a murder, but there is no body. And he could be a potential terrorist. We have to keep him locked up for the public good.’
The detective contemplated Sergeant Pillock. There was no use arguing with him. Explanation was equally futile. He would have to add the heavy-footedness of the sergeant into the equation.
‘But you do see that the problem multiplies?’
‘I see that it simplifies.’
‘Any new evidence?’
‘Only CCTV footage on a bus.’
‘What number?’
‘Six. Is that significant?’
‘Everything is significant. What did the footage yield?’
‘Something puzzling.’
‘What?’
‘The suspect made several trips in one direction with black plastic bags. He appeared to be moving house. We never saw him get off.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Yes, but it doesn’t make sense.’
‘Tell me.’
‘It stretches credibility.’
‘Let’s have it.’
‘On one of the cameras we caught an image of the bus just as it exploded.’
‘Did it explode?’
‘That’s just it. It didn’t. We believe the CCTV system has been hacked and false footage has been planted there.’
‘Unless there is an equally radical solution. But I fear we may be too late. We have to act fast.’
‘What shall we do?’
The detective did a rapid calculation. He felt himself encircled by time.
The first thing he did was order that the watch be pulled off Ana’s house. Then he suggested that the suspect be released and not followed.
‘Not followed?’
‘No.’
‘But he must be followed.’
‘It will only make things worse.’
‘How?’
‘We are being invaded by one of many possible futures.’
‘What was that?’
‘Nothing. Forget it.’
‘Are you on something?’
‘No, I’m sober as a surgeon on duty.’
‘Then you need to fill me in.’
Detective Draper knew he could not explain the intuition that was filtering through to him. Wearily, he sought the most innocuous expression of it. He softened his voice as he spoke.
‘Everything we do influences what the suspect does. We are multiplying the problem. Before there was one murderer, now there are three.’
‘Three? Which three?’
‘Free,’ the detective corrected himself. ‘I meant he should be free.’
Detective Draper knew there were only two ways to resolve the case. One was to prevent the murder, the other was to uncover it. All the evidence suggested it was too late to prevent the murder. It had happened. That past had now been lost. If the victim had been apprehended when he was seen reading the cat, things might have been different. That moment was gone. It was lost because no one noticed that the past lurks in the present. Not just past events, but the past as present.
Detective Draper liked to walk after he had been immersed in facts too long. When he had spent all day reading documents, studying evidence, listening to witnesses, when he was saturated with too much information, he would walk in a zigzag path through side streets to his home. Anyone seeing him would think he was wandering aimlessly. But his walks always followed the pattern of his thoughts. He had always known that the indirect route led more quickly to his destination. The direct routes were often bogged down in interruptions, conversations, and crowded streets.
That evening, after a long spell at the station, he left late.
His thoughts had gone off the map of indirection. He had taken so many side streets that he did not recognise where he was. He didn’t mind. His best intuitions came while waking and while walking. In an odd way he seemed to be doing both now. He seemed to be waking from the sleep of his thoughts. Where was he? He looked around. He had gone off the main road that led to his flat in Kensal Rise.
The street where he now stood looked decidedly strange. He searched for the street name, and found that he did not even recognise that. He walked on till he came to a barber’s shop. There were no customers. When he went in, he startled the barber who was reading a newspaper.
‘Can you please tell me where I am?’
The barber stared at him with his mouth half open.
‘Is anything wrong?’
‘You came in here about five minutes ago,’ the barber said. ‘And you asked the very same question.’
Detective Draper looked at the round clock on the wall with its Roman numerals. It was 6.35 p.m.
‘So I did, so I did,’ Detective Draper murmured, and he hurried out.
He went back the way he had come. A glance told him that the barber had come out of his shop and was watching him. He walked faster, aware that the faster he walked the faster walked all the events connected to him. If he sped up, things would speed up too. The web of connected events responded to his every deed. Suddenly in his mind he could see the lines that linked him to the victim and the murderer and the woman. Except that these lines had multiplied in ways he could only guess at. He was walking aimlessly now, following the vectors of his thought. He conjectured that if he had arrived at this strange place by getting lost, then only by getting lost again could he return to a familiar world.
He was thinking fast and walking fast, as if something unknown were stalking him. The linking lines moved faster in his mind. Then he suddenly stopped. In the middle of all that wandering, a clear thought, distilled and pristine, dropped into his mind. Why hadn’t he thought of it before?
There was now only one way to solve the murder. The past was closed to him. There was only one path left. He had to arrive at a future place before the murderer did. He had to outwit him in all the vectors of time. At this point the murderer had a time advantage over him. He had to overturn that advantage. He had to anticipate the murderer in the future.
He walked home much more slowly. He noticed the council estates and the silver birches and the uneven pavement. It did not surprise him that he now knew where he was. He walked slowly and breathed evenly. As he turned into his street someone brushed past him. The detective caught a confident smile on the face of the man who had jostled him. He was at his front gate when he realised that the smile belonged to the murder suspect. But when he turned to look the man was gone. There was an envelope pinned to his front door. Inside the envelope was a message composed of letters cut out of newspapers and magazines. The message read:
All alternative realities are true.
The detective let himself into his flat, shut the door behind him and poured himself a glass of Argentinian Altamira. He sat down at a table near a window to contemplate the letter. After a while he brought out a worn book of Escher drawings. Leaving the doors in his mind open, he contemplated the drawings. But in the other rooms in his mind, he was thinking.
In his research he had discovered that the murder suspect had an unusual interest in a branch of speculative physics. In one room in his mind he realised that the solution to the crime was not to be found in the real world, but in an unreal space, a speculative realm. In another room, he pondered the message he had received. All alternative realities are true. He contemplated the ramifications of the message while leafing through the drawings. Calmly, he began charting out the clear lines of the case. Soon he came to a dead end. He paused, and put down the book.
He knew that all dead ends are an illusion designed to bring motion to a halt. To those who can see beyond the illusion, dead ends are portals into unknown possibilities. He paid more attention to dead ends than to open highways. He knew now that a leap of faith was required. Then he remembered the cat that was both seen and not seen. He realised he was going to have to work backwards. He went to sleep that night with the feeling that he had at least stopped the multiplication of the problem.
The next morning, an envelope was posted through his letter box. Before he opened it he knew that he would find letters cut out of newspapers and magazines composing an elusive message.
The envelope contained a single sheet of white paper with the words:
The world is still here.
He had a shower, got dressed, and regarded his face in the mirror. The mirror had a slight warp that morning. He was not sure that the world was still there.
Outside, the weather had changed. The sun shone intermittently through dark masses of clouds. A cool wind, with a deceptively icy core, blew from the south. He went down side streets towards the café where the victim, Barrett, had been seen reading a cat.
The café was run by a long-haired Italian who combined obsequiousness with a mildly intrusive personal charm. Sitting in the same seat where the victim had been seen reading a cat, Detective Draper saw the canal beyond the balcony. There were boats moored on both sides. The detective drank his hot water slowly. He had given up drinking coffee years ago and had now settled for the digestive refinements of hot water. Outside, birds were wheeling over the canal.
While sipping, he had a singular thought. He knew that entertaining it would create realities that would only blur the case further, so he pushed the thought to a corner of his mind. He caught a taxi back to the office.
To test his theory he had his contact at the Evening Standard plant a report that the police were draining an obscure canal in Richmond in their search for the missing body. To lend this deception the veneer of plausibility, he had two amateur frogmen busily explore the canal. They were to pretend to pull something out of its shallow depths.
‘What’s the idea behind this flagrant waste of public funds on sham frogmen in a remote canal?’ asked his superintendent who had summoned him to lunch. ‘You are aware that I have gone out on a limb for you too many times…’
‘And I have never let you down, have I?’ Detective Draper replied, calmly buttering his roll.
‘No, you haven’t, I grant you that, but there are many people after your job. They will use anything to get at you. God knows you have enough disadvantages as it is.’
‘Do I?’ Detective Draper said, while the glimmer of a new thought flitted through a door in his mind.
‘You know you do. You are not an Oxbridge man.’
‘Neither are you…’
‘You are…’
‘Black?’
‘I wasn’t going to say that.’
‘But you thought it.’
‘Look, we run the most…’
‘Colour-blind department in the country.’
‘You took the words right out of my mouth.’
‘But I am the only one that is…?’
‘We have to face the realities of the world.’
Detective Draper suddenly stiffened. He held his head at an angle. A new thought had come through.
‘Do we?’ he said absent-mindedly.
‘Yes, we do,’ replied the superintendent, puzzled by Draper’s behaviour.
‘Have you had this conversation with me before?’
‘That’s what I was getting to.’
‘About an hour ago?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘We don’t have any time. We have to stop it now.’
‘Stop what?’
‘There will be another murder unless we act fast.’
‘Murder? Of who?’
‘The woman. She’ll be murdered and there will be no evidence of it.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because she would have been murdered yesterday.’
Detective Draper stood up.
‘You’re not making sense, man,’ the superintendent exploded. ‘Sit down, and explain yourself.’
‘I really must dash, sir. I’ll have a full explanation for you tomorrow afternoon, if all goes well.’
‘But tomorrow is Saturday!’ the superintendent said to the departing figure of the detective. ‘Yorkshire are playing Middlesex at the Oval.’
‘I know,’ Draper said, before he disappeared through the door, ‘and the score will be seventeen for one.’
‘What?’ cried the superintendent.
Detective Draper was already out on the street.
From the Kensal Rise police station, Detective Draper requisitioned three frogmen. Early on Saturday morning he had them dive into the canal at Little Venice, right near the café. The area was cordoned off. The frogmen, in their dark wetsuits, began their mysterious exploration. There was a unit of police there, with an unmistakable police van. Detective Draper watched from a distance. If his intuition was correct, in the next hour a number of things would happen. Their precise order interested him. He knew he was in the realm of a speculative space now, where actually seeing what was sought made its existence real. The time, the opportunity, were limited. Things were in mutant formation. Events were hovering between two realms, between being and non-being. From here on the operation would be delicate.
The frogmen in the obscure canal at Richmond found nothing, as was the intention. But the story planted in the Evening Standard had its desired effect, as far as the detective could tell. He kept looking at his watch. The frogmen here at the Little Venice canal took turns going in. One of them would stand on the edge of the canal and then flip over backwards. He would root around below for a while and then emerge. For an hour now they had been exploring and had found nothing. The cricket game had begun at the Oval. The heat was beginning to rise. It was a bright day and people had begun to stop to watch the strange proceedings on the canal. This too had been factored into Detective Draper’s complex calculation of events. Only by the frogmen diving, verifying, and bringing up, could there be anything to dive for, verify, and bring up. The detective knew this. Something will be found only because something is looked for. The looking creates the finding.
In just the same way, only the presence of onlookers created the event. The onlookers were essential. The detective had surmised that what was needed was a weighting of events towards a more dense reality, to counterbalance the ambiguous reality between worlds which had so far bedevilled the investigation. He intuited that all worlds had to come together here. That was why even before he had full permission, he’d arranged for the frogmen to make a public exhibition of excavating the muddy depths of the canal.
The ruse had worked. The item planted in the Evening Standard had caught the lively interest of Londoners and soon everyone was talking about it. The crowd around the canal observing the frogmen grew in number. The trap sprung had yielded multi-dimensional fruit. An off-duty policeman had spotted the suspected murderer near the Little Venice canal and had reported the matter to the local police station. The station chief had relayed the message to Detective Draper. With a nonchalant expression, he continued to observe the frogmen at work.
Twice the frogmen claimed to have found nothing. They had said it was just mud and rotting bicycles and broken paddles down there.
The detective, with his keen awareness of the power of numbers, said:
‘Twice does not make anything conclusive. The canal conceals secrets which must be exposed. My career depends on it. Maybe even my life.’
He sent the frogmen down a third time. He suggested they look not so much in the deeper parts, but in the parts no one would think of looking.
‘What part is that, sir?’ one of the frogmen said.
‘You will know when you find it.’
Disgruntled, they returned to work. They flipped over backwards, and disappeared beneath the muddied surface. Detective Draper, aware of the proximity of the murderer, knew that it was now a race against time. The frogmen had to find something before the murderer found him. He remained calm. He ordered a cup of hot water from the café. The café manager, the insouciant Italian, brought the water himself. His dishevelled locks fell across his face. The Italian handed the detective the cup of hot water and held onto the pot.
‘So what is going on, sir?’ the café manager asked.
Detective Draper turned to look at him. The Italian had the eyes of an insomniac.
‘It’s best you don’t know. We don’t want you entangled in the multiple webs of the problem.’
‘I might be able to help.’
‘How?’
‘I hear things. People tell me things.’
‘I’m sure that’s true. I’ll contact you if your help is required.’
‘Any time,’ said the Italian. ‘It would be an honour to be of service.’
The café manager stood there watching the first frogman emerge from the murky canal. The detective turned to him with a furrowed brow and the Italian immediately understood that his presence had become redundant. He filled the detective’s cup and retreated into his café.
Detective Draper felt the murderer moving closer, but he sipped his hot water with perfect calm. It is not the number of encounters in the numberless realms that count, it is the world in which the encounter is fixed, thought the detective grimly. A flurry among the frogmen told him that the nature of the game had shifted at last. He drank what was left of his hot water and went towards them.
One of the frogmen had pulled out from the depths of the canal a black plastic bag. Dripping with muck, it was placed on the ground. The frogmen hosed it down and then the detective had it brought to the back of the van. A casual glance at its form told him what he needed to know. There was no need to expose the contents. The first stage of the duel had been fought. It might have been difficult to fix the reality of this black dustbin bag, but now that it was fixed the rest were sure to be found. It was at that moment, perhaps delayed by the variable factors in the calculations of time, that a shadow moved into sight.
Jorg fired two shots. One shot pierced the metal of the white van, the other grazed Detective Draper’s shoulder. Then Jorg was wrestled to the ground by the plainclothes policemen who had been drinking cups of innocuous tea in the café. Before the detective fell, he was heard to cry out:
‘On no account are the frogmen to cease their exploration!’
He passed out for only a few moments. An act of will wrenched him back into consciousness. Detective Draper allowed the paramedics to bandage his shoulder, while he surveyed the scene before him. The frogmen had persisted and eventually they had dredged up three black bin liners from diverse parts of the canal. They were hosed down and kept in the back of the van that the bullet had pierced. The detective had no need to inspect their contents. He knew what they were.
The afternoon sun played on the water of the canal, making its surface shine like gunmetal. The light came through the trees on both sides of the metal fences. Detective Draper could see the church through the leaves. He felt tired. He made a signal to one of the men. They bore him to a waiting car, but instead of being taken to the hospital for further treatment, he insisted on being taken home.
The next morning, with his arm in a sling, Detective Draper was at the police station. Out of respect for the part he had played in the investigation, he was allowed the first conference with the man who had shot him. They were in a soundproof room. The detective sat on a chair at the table and the murderer sat opposite.
‘Something puzzles me,’ said Jorg.
There was nothing repentant about his expression. He stared at the detective intensely.
‘You want to know how I knew where to look?’
Jorg smiled. It was a thin smile, sustained by something resembling a twitch. Then he nodded faintly.
‘My question to you is why?’
‘Why what?’
They were still duelling. It was not over yet.
There was still the chance for further multiplications. He had to be careful.
‘Why did you kill him?’
‘Are you sure it is why and not when?’
‘I know when.’
‘You do?’
‘You are not going to trap me that easily again.’
‘I have no idea what you mean.’
‘Of course you do. All alternative realities are true.’
‘I see. You got the clue.’
‘It was designed to throw me off the scent.’
‘You went against your own psychology.’
‘Like you, I have many psychologies,’ the detective said, leaning back. ‘But why did you kill him?’
‘He was after my woman.’
‘She was not your woman. She told the police that you were just her neighbour and that you had misunderstood her friendship.’
‘She was a whore and he deserved to die. He was not even one of us.’
‘You killed him out of jealousy.’
‘Not jealousy. Revenge.’
The detective stood up. He felt weary. He was at the door when Jorg fired the last question at him.
‘How did you know?’
The detective at that moment felt a throb of pain in his shoulder.
‘The world is still here,’ he replied, and went out.
Three hours later he was sitting with the superintendent in the Scotland Yard canteen. They had window seats looking out over the river.
‘The facts don’t make sense. Can you make sense of them for me, so I can explain it to the board?’
‘I don’t recommend an explanation.’
‘What then?’
‘Leave them with the facts. Sometimes people need to be brought face to face with the incomprehensibility of the world.’
The superintendent stared at him.
‘Now you know why you will never make department head.’
‘It never was my ambition.’
‘You have ambitions?’
‘I have ambitions that perhaps you won’t understand,’ said the detective, sipping his hot water. ‘Besides, there are things better than ambition.’
‘How can you stand to drink that tasteless stuff?’
‘It’s not tasteless at all. It restores me to the fundamental simplicity of the world.’
‘The world seems to be anything but simple. Take this case for example. What on earth was going on?’
‘It wouldn’t make sense if I explained it.’
‘Try me.’
‘It was a multiverse murder.’
‘What on earth is that? Speak plain English, man!’
‘It was a murder that happened in many universes.’
‘You must be mad.’
‘In one universe the murder hadn’t happened yet. In another, it had. Each time we apprehended him, we multiplied…’
‘Okay, that’s enough of that. If I hear any more I might start to have crackpot ideas myself. Just tell me this. Why the canal?’
‘I realised it when I learnt the victim was seen in the café reading a cat.’
‘Reading a cat?’
‘The policeman who saw him was dyslexic. His condition was extreme. He saw visually what he read. About one per cent of dyslexics have this syndrome.’
‘What was the cat he was reading?’
‘It was a book. The book gave me the second clue. The rest unravelled itself.’
‘Out with it, man. You are tying me up in riddles. What was the book?’
‘Schrodinger’s Cat.’
‘Schrodinger’s what?’
‘He had bought the book that morning and was seen reading it in the café after he had been murdered. Unless we were dealing with apparitions, there could only be one solution.’
The superintendent looked red-faced and exasperated.
‘I had to somehow get all the universes in which the murder was multiplying to converge. I had to create what physicists call an event convergence.’
‘What on earth is that?’ bellowed the superintendent, by now a swollen image of himself.
‘It is the one event, the one thing, that will fix time. In quantum mechanics, it is conjectured that the universe only comes into existence when we perceive it. I surmised that perhaps the body of the victim would only be found when we find it. The crime did not exist till the body was found.’
‘And the body was in the bin bags?’
‘Exactly.’
‘How did you know?’
‘One of the watchers outside the woman’s house had seen the murder suspect cutting up a chicken.’
‘It was a chicken.’
‘It was a chicken because the watcher had seen a chicken.’
‘Do you mean to say…’
‘Yes.’
The superintendent paused for a long moment.
‘But why was he trying to kill you?’
‘He wasn’t really. We have to understand that this man was taking a cosmic gamble. He never really had any intention of killing anybody. He was overcome with rage, with jealousy, with a kind of love madness. In that state it occurred to him that maybe if he killed the man in one universe the man would still be alive in another. Somewhere along the line he forgot what universe he was in. In short, he lost his reason.’
‘You mean he went mad?’
‘Depends on what you think madness is.’
‘Continue.’
‘In one of those universes it occurred to him that if he could stop me before I could find the body then he would never be caught and the murder would to all accounts be forever speculative.’
‘Why wasn’t I told all this at the time?’
‘You were at your cricket match, sir.’
‘A terrible game. We were mauled.’
‘Sorry to hear that, sir.’
‘Still, you could have sent me a message.’
‘It was a delicate matter.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I had to arrive at the body before his bullet arrived in me.’
There was a long pause.
‘Detective Draper, you look terrible,’ the superintendent said. ‘When was the last time you had some sun?’
‘Can’t remember, sir.’
‘Get some sun. I want that shoulder working when you get back. Take a holiday, Detective Draper.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ the detective said, with a wry smile. ‘I think I might. While the world is still here.’