Magpie

MAGPIE

one

People often ask me, Alex, do you believe in fate ? (*1)

My answer is generally no. I don't read horoscopes, in fact I don't
even know what my star-sign is. This takes some effort, because when I
tell people this, they are gripped by an insatiable desire to reveal it
to me "Oh, I can work it out for you - what month were you born ?
"

I believe that you make your own future, each and every day, by the
choices that you make. I don't think that any of it is out there,
laying in wait for you. Likewise, I don't believe that there is only
one true love and it is just chance that you find each other. (I am
even more fierce about that now, because if that theory is right, I
lost mine down the toilet in a cheap hotel room).

In essence, I basically believe that there are groups of people who
would fit together pretty much okay - so rather than a lock and a key
analogy, I guess my version is more Lego, Mechanno and Sticklebrix. As
long as you're in the right category, you can make it work, and if
you're lucky you snap together tightly and never budge.

So, I'm not really all that dazzled the day that James Mellow comes
into my office to see me and tells me that he is worried about my
future.

I immediately make a point of telling him that I am charging him for my
time and point out precisely what my rates are for the hour, or part of
the hour.

This doesn't phase him at all (as I later find out, that thirty pounds
an hour is hardly going to break the bank for James Mellow) and he
makes it obvious that he intends to have his say.

(* This is a lie, for dramatic purposes. Nobody asks me that. Strangers
ask me things like, "what's the time", or "what's your problem pal," or
"can you spare some change please". My friends ask me things like,
"when are you going to get a real job ?" or "do you actually like that
shirt ?" And none of my friends ever, ever call me Alex. They all call
me Lex, after the villain in the Superman movies, thanks to my best
friend Will, who came up with it and tells everyone to do the same. In
fact, Will's version has now evolved to a "Mister Luth-OR", impression
of the way Ned Beatty talks to Gene Hackman in the films. Cheers Will.
)

So, I take a quick look at him. He is about thirty-five and extremely
lean. His hair is a little crazy, in an over-gelled Gary Rhodes sort of
way, all angles and spikes - it is more architecture than hair.

James Mellow has a beard, a short one which is clipped neatly and he is
wearing both an earring and a very lively shirt, which has on it what
seems to be a pop-art painting - one of those by Liechtenstein of a
woman in a cheap comic book, saying something like, "But Brad, I love
you." He is wearing shiny black boots with at least fourteen
lace-holes; there is a splashmark of orange paint on the left
boot.

His legs are too long and when he bends his knees to sit down it seems
like he might collapse in on himself like a deckchair.

When he talks, he uses his hands to gesture, but only in one specific
way, holding them flat, like he might karate chop something.

Something is nagging me about Mellow, and it isn't just the fact that
he has opened the interview not by asking for my help, but by offering
to help me. I have a feeling in my mind similar to the feeling you get
in your mouth when an oversoft fruit-gum gets caught against a tooth.
This is the process of remembering, I don't often experience it.

"You're an artist, aren't you ? " I ask him, having worked it
out.

I read an article about him in a newspaper about three months back.
He's a conceptual artist (which probably means he doesn't know which
way round to hold a paintbrush). He specialises in big works. The
article was specifically talking about his construction by Canary Wharf
of a labyrinth, called "Minos" (*2)

As a result of both his artwork and his father leaving a very generous
estate, James Mellow is obscenely wealthy. I begin wondering why he is
here. If he genuinely needs a private detective, there are plenty of
very high-class agencies he could go to, not like my office situated
above a dentists.

And in particular, there are detectives he could visit who haven't
recently been smeared all over the papers. Though, to be honest, it was
only the Daily Mail who ran the "Evil private eye keeps parents from
lost child" storyline. In my view, and that of most of my friends,
being vilified in the Daily Mail ranks up there with my highest ever
achievements.
(*2 Named of course after the creator of the famous labyrinth of Greek
legend, Theseus and the minotaur. This labyrinth is interesting because
it is housed in an eight-storey building which used to belong to an
insurance firm. Mellow gutted the whole building and built the insides
again from scratch, creating a three-dimensional labyrinth. Most are
two-dimensional, because ignoring the walls, you could draw them out on
a piece of paper and follow the way out just by moving the pen along
one wall continually. "Minos" contained a vast number of stairs and to
find the way out, you might have to go along, left, right, right, up
some stairs, left, left, left, up another flight of stairs, left,
right, right, down one flight of stairs etc. The idea being that this
maze would be much harder to get out of. Add to that, Mellow's idea of
having some of the walls video screens which randomly vary what is
displayed, and it is little wonder that many of the visitors to the
exhibit do not venture far within it. )

"What's all this about, Mister Mellow ? " I ask him, because I am
beginning to be genuinely interested now.

"Please, call me Jimmy, " he says, "Nobody else does. "

He explains to me that after finishing Minos, he was looking for
something else to work on. He explains this in an artists way, so I
will do the best I can.

Apparently Minos was all about closing down the space, taking a finite
space and reducing the possibilities within it, winnowing it down until
there is only one route for the individual to take, all others leading
nowhere. So, he decides to go the opposite direction with his next
piece and consider the infinite.

"The problem with infinite art, " I say to him, "Is finding somewhere
to hang it."

He laughs and an index finger strokes his beard, "I like that. Do you
mind if I steal that ? "

Mellow goes on to tell me that he started to do a lot of research into
infinity, explaining to me that he began with the works of Cantor. I
surprise him a little by summarising Cantor. (There are lots of
different values of infinity - there are an infinite amount of odd
numbers, and even numbers, and decimals between 1 and 2.) He looks at
me with a degree of new respect.

"What I began to look at, " he says, "Was the idea of infinity by
taking a very small piece of it and showing its possibilities. I
decided to take a number that everyone heard of at school. "

"Pi, " I guess.

"Right, Pi. Most people know it as something to do with circles. The
relationship between diameter and circumference. But Pi is so much more
than that. It's as old as the Bible, maybe older. (*3) It is infinite,
for a start - it will never resolve into a complete answer. And it is
also effectively random. There's no way to predict the sequence of
numbers at any point. "

He's got my interest. I have a bit of a thing for numbers. And I don't
mean just money, I really like the way that numbers can dance, if the
right things are done to them. I read an awful lot of maths
stuff.
(*3 "And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the
other; it was round all about, and his height was ten cubits and a line
of thirty cubits did encompass it about" Book of Kings 7:23. I looked
it up, later on. Course, this is a very rough estimate of Pi as three,
but it's still quite weird. )

"I became more and more interested in the possibilities that Pi
offered. Not trying to remember it - people can do it to a thousand
places, I can only manage fifteen. "

And he reels them off. That's fairly impressive, I think. (Even I think
that numbers are difficult to recall - I tried doing that Dustin
Hoffman trick of memorising pages from the phone book after I watched
Rainman, and I couldn't do it at all. They don't have any emotional
resonance, I think that's why numbers are so tricky. ) He tells me the
trick to it though. (*4)

"So, not memorising it. Not calculating it either. I found out pretty
early on that people like the Chudnovsky brothers have calculated it to
billions of places - I think the current figure is about fifty billion.
"

"What else can you do with it ? " I ask, as I begin to quickly draw a
gerbera in a pot on my notepad. This is of some interest to me, but
this man is obviously going to take some time before getting to the
point, so the notes I'm writing are very sketchy.

"Well, for starters, because Pi is infinite and random, every possible
combination of numbers is in there somewhere. My phone number, all my
credit card numbers, the population of Quebec. Every possible number.
"

I can't see where he was going with this, or what any of it has to do
with me at all, and I told him so. He asks me to be patient, and what
the hell. I have no other appointments today and it looks like he might
well go into the second hour. I'm prepared to earn forty pounds for
listening to a great conceptual artist talk about maths.

"It was then that I got to thinking about the works of Shakespeare and
infinite monkeys. You know that old story, right ? "

This is the idea that if you have sufficient time, pure chance will
result from randomness and create something definite.

"Well, being a little crazy, I started wondering about actually doing
something like that as my work of art. Generating order from chaos,
taking randomness and actually doing something with it. And then I got
to thinking about the Library of Babel. "

I get completely lost at this point. Mellow can obviously sense this
and he tells me the gist of a story that some Argentinean bloke wrote,
about an infinite library that contains an infinite number of books,
every possible book that could ever be written.
(*4 The trick is the sentence, "How I want a drink, alcoholic of
course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics"
3.14159265358979. How you remember the next 985 numbers is your
problem. )

Nearly the entire library is gibberish, books with just a few
comprehensible words somewhere in their pages, but because every
possible book is in there, the inhabitants of the library realise that
there are books which will speak entirely to them and them alone, a
story of their life, an account of their future, an explanation of
their purpose - a Vindication. It starts to make my head hurt a
little.

"Basically, " he says, "I got some extremely powerful computers and
started running a program to encode the numbers of Pi into random
letters. I got the numbers from various web-sites. It takes bloody ages
to process and I've hardly scratched the surface so far. "

He opens the case that is on the floor next to him, it is not a
briefcase, it is black leather and much flatter than a briefcase, it is
also much larger. The dimensions, in my view, are about the same as a
sandwich board. I'm guessing that it is something for carrying artwork
in.

"My first batch was very unsuccessful, " he tells me, "Far too many d's
and j's. Hardly any words at all - pale, cave, farm. That kind of
thing. So I adjusted the coding process, to give more weight to popular
letters. So there are more E's than K's, more T's than B's. That sort
of thing. I thought that would give English words a better chance of
coming out of the random soup. "

He passes the computer printout to me. It is fairly heavy. I begin
looking through it idly, without a great deal of interest. The pages
are just long strings of random jumblings of letters, carrying no
meaning at all. Every now and then there is a word highlighted in
yellow, "bear", "the case", "jars of" - that type of thing.

"Flip through the first seven or so pages, " Mellow says, "I cut out a
lot of the early stuff, but some of it is still there for flavour.
"

I move quicker through the pages, looking only at the highlighted
words. "Alex". That's funny. "The decision", "bees", "pencil", "if a
bridge", "Alex". Hmmm. It is starting to get a little more complex as
we move on, probably because there have been more random numbers
produced.

"Every book ever written will be in Pi somewhere, and all the ones that
haven't been written too, " says Mellow, with an almost religious tone,
"Hamlet, the book Shakespeare never wrote explaining every mystery of
Hamlet. The Bible, the missing chapters of the bible. Alice's Third
Adventure... "

I get to the odd stuff - about sixty pages in. "Alex Marlowe Chandler."
I drop the pages onto my desk and blink furiously at them. That really
is what it says. My first thought is that this is a hoax, but I don't
see how. Not even Will, my best friend knows that my middle name is
'Marlowe'. I had to plead with my mother to write letters to the school
to keep that middle name secret. I never disclose my middle name on any
official forms. I use my initial only grudgingly.

"What the fuck is this ? "

Mellow steeples his fingers together and leans back slightly in the
chair. From beneath the floor comes the sound of the dentist's drill,
but for the first time ever, it is me that it is drilling through, not
the client. Ask not for whom the drill whirrs, it whirrs for thee. I
feel like a butterfly skewered to a cork-board.

"That's why I'm here, " he says, "You were a hard man to track down. I
had to guess that the M in your initials might be Marlowe. " (*5)

He gestures that I should keep reading and I pick up the pages and
start off again. This time I am even skimming the highlighted words,
unless they relate to me. There are quite a few Alex's, a few
Chandler's, once or twice, "the detective Chandler". I have a quick
look at other random words for comparison and there does seem to be
something about my name which is making it come out more than other
names. There's my full name again, and eight pages on, again.

"What is all this ? " I ask.

"I don't know, maybe something, maybe nothing, " says Mellow,
"Remember, every possible word is in there somewhere, that's the point
of infinite randomness, every possible combination of letters is in
there. And logic tells me that it is just chance, more so because it
was I who assigned which two-digit numbers would correspond to which
letters. This isn't a case of the words always being in there, these
are just the words that my system generated. "

"So it's just dumb luck, " I say, somewhat relieved.

"That's what logic tells me, but it still spooked the hell out of me, "
he says.

It spooks me too, especially when I get to the page where "Alex"
appears four times and towards the foot of the page, a phrase is
highlighted, "Alex Marlowe Chandler your friend will murder. "

"Where's the rest of it ? " I demand, "Who does my friend murder ?
Which friend ? "

James Mellow smiles at me weakly, "And that, is why I'm here
today."

(*5 Okay, it's an odd name. That's why I kept it so secret. I told you
earlier (In Cuckoo) that my father was a big reader. He named me not
only after Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler's detective, but also after
Christopher Marlowe, the writer and friend of Shakespeare, who died
tragically young. )

But what am I supposed to do with this ? Even if it means anything at
all. I keep telling myself that this is a purely random manipulation of
numbers, that any old gibberish could have come out. The highlighted
words could have spelled out the lyrics to Eleanor Rigby, that wouldn't
mean that Pi understood the Beatles. It is just brute chance, done time
after time, any words are bound to just pop out.

Is it more implausible that my name comes up a few times than that the
Bible appears word for word in Pi, somewhere - with no errors at all,
if only one had infinite time to search for it ?

Having said that, it isn't your name that's in that printout. Believe
me, when it happens to you, it feels a little different. I think Yuri
Geller is a fraud, but if he sat near me in a restaurant and bent all
my cutlery, I might feel a little less sceptical.

"What about this Alex all the time ? " I ask him, just after I buzz
Rachel and ask her to fetch me a cold can of Lilt, " Should that be
turning up as much as it does ? "

Mellow looks at me and uncoils those long legs, "No, you've spotted
that. The X should make it fairly unusual - but of course, Pi is a real
number, so it's not just like tossing a coin. Over billions of letters,
X will come out less frequently than any other. Except maybe Q. But
over short bursts, maybe it will keep cropping up. On pure chance, a
name like Ian should come up far more, but in this batch, it hasn't at
all. "

I crack open the can of Lilt and take a slow sip, making sure that I
don't start hiccuping. This whole thing is making my head spin, but I
think in a good way. It's always worthwhile to have the way you
perceive the world challenged. Usually my work is dull, waiting and
watching, making little notes and drawing flowers to kill the time.
This meeting is at least making me think. It's quite
exhilarating.

"I've got weeks more data to process, " Mellow tells me, "To be honest,
other than the stuff about you, the project has been very
disappointing. I think the problem is that to infinity, twenty million,
or a billion is really really small change. But this, this does
interest me. "

He stands up and crosses the room to jab at the printout, specifically
at the word 'murder'.

"This is odd, isn't it ? Like I said earlier about Vindications, the
possibility exists that somewhere in the random sprawl of Pi, exist
messages that are purely for you. In fact, it is not a possibility - it
is a certainty. The only issue is where in that infinite mess of
numbers those messages are waiting. Maybe this is a message for you.
"

When he says this, I feel odd. I had been thinking that this was blind
coincidence, just a freak random occurrence. But to an extent, Mellow
is right. Every word that emerges from Pi might be a random group of
letters, but on a larger scale if every possible sentence is in there,
then some of them are portents of the future, solved mysteries,
sentences to clarify and guide.

"I will keep crunching the numbers, keep slogging through the printouts
searching for words, just in case there is more for you. But it may
well be that your name doesn't crop up again for another hundred
billion letters. Or even more. Meanwhile, I want you to investigate
this for me. "

The highlighted words almost dance before me as I sit up sharply and
say, "No way. You must be mad. This is interesting, but there's nothing
to investigate. You said yourself that the letters are probably just
purely random. I'd be wasting my time. "

"For five thousand a day, for three weeks ? "

And this is how I find myself to be shaking James Mellow's hand and
agreeing to take on the stupidest case of my career.

two

It takes me about an hour to work out all the controls on the little
hand-held camera that Mellow has given me. It is a beauty, very light
and silver, with a small screen that unfolds so that you can see
exactly what you're filming. He has also given me a bunch of jiffy
envelopes and asked me to post the tapes through a letterbox in a flat
nearby every day, so that he can view them. The idea apparently is for
me to film as much of my investigations as I can, as they will form
part of the "Babel Project".

Ordinarily, I would have protested about this, but at the time Mellow
made it part of the deal, I was feeling very overwhelmed by the amount
of money he was talking about. I don't consider myself to be a
particularly avaricious man, if anything the deadly sin with my name on
it is gluttony, but he really was talking about a lot of money.

On the huge assumption that there was some truth in the message from
Pi, then I would want to prevent one of my friends committing murder
anyway, so the whole situation didn't seem all that bad. But, if the
message were true, what was to say that the murder would take place in
the next few weeks ? It might not happen for years.

In fact, the murder might already have happened. Just because I only
got the message yesterday, doesn't mean that the message was about the
future. The more I thought about it, the more I felt that this case was
going to be a big waste of time. But a big waste of time that would let
me take three months out and go to Japan, and I wasn't about to argue
with that.

Whenever I need to feel utterly calm, I do one of two things. I either
think about Japan, or I look at a photograph of an iceberg that I
clipped out of a magazine, because I saw it and it made me feel more
emotional than I'd felt in years. Just looking at the iceberg makes me
feel really calm and relaxed, just thinking about that bulk and the
texture of it. Is it like glass, or does it crunch like tightly packed
snow ? One day, I will walk on an iceberg, I'm certain of it.

At present, I feel pretty damn good. Ready to start on the wildest of
goose chases.

There are a couple of minor jobs that I am able to agent out to a pal
of mine across the river, who is always interested in scraps I can
throw him. However, there is one case that I can't give away, because I
gave the old woman my personal assurance. It isn't going to take up
much time anyway, just an inquiry into some petty theft. The money
she's paying me is more than what's been stolen, but she just wants to
know which of her sons to stop trusting.

I will take a good look at the Maple case today, and start suspecting
my friends of harbouring murderous thoughts tomorrow.

Joanie Maple is a sweet old thing. Her neck is too wrinkled for my
tastes, but she has a kindliness to her that I sort of warm to. She
isn't wearing a pink woollen cardigan, but has the look of someone who
just might, at any given moment.

She doesn't have a great deal of cash, but is comfortably off, her
husband's life insurance having done what it is supposed to do in these
circumstances. She has three sons, Gavin, Stuart and Michael. All of
them live outside the home now, but still in London. Any of them would
be able to get into the house, they all have a key.

That being the case, it could have been any one of them who slips into
the house and borrows her cash card twice a month, using it to take out
forty pounds a time from the nearby Lloyds machine.

When she first comes to me, I just tell her straight, "Cut up your
card, then you don't need to worry. Get all your money from across the
counter. "

But she doesn't want to do that, and she doesn't want to call in the
police, who would make the same enquiries as me, but do it a lot
cheaper. She doesn't want any of her boys to get into trouble, she
would be happy to give them the forty pounds if they needed it, she
just doesn't like the idea of one of them taking it from her.

I was going to spend about six hours on the case, charge her
one-eighty. But as I've come into a bit of money from James Mellow, I
can halve that fee. I feel bad taking money from an old woman. But I
did try to talk her out of hiring me and she was adamant that she
wanted to find out the truth.

When I get to the house, she's already made me a cup of tea, by which I
mean a proper cup, with a saucer. I always get a bit embarrassed in
this situation, because I can't stand tea. Coffee, I can drink, but tea
just does nothing for me at all.

I pick up the cup and saucer and sit myself down carefully in the
armchair, which has a high back and high arms. Joanie begins chatting
to me of this and that. Not much of it is about the case, but I guess
that she just gets lonely, so I let her talk.

Gavin is the eldest, he has a wife named Helen and works as an estate
agent. She's quite proud of him. Stuart works in a record store, he's
kind of a disappointment, though she tries to conceal this. She says
that he's the brightest one, but never made anything of himself. Still,
he seems happy enough. Michael is at university, studying Fine
Art.

I go through the whole theft business with her, it is obvious that she
is a woman of habit.

Any of her sons would know the times when she is out at her meetings,
visiting the hospital, helping the church with the flowers, at the
Women's Institute, at her reading groups. They all have a key to the
house and any of them could guess her pin number, which was the year
she married her husband. She hardly ever takes the card out with her,
in case she gets mugged.

When she finishes telling me all of this, I look at her and fix a
decent, kindly look on my face, "I think the best thing for you to do
is to just take a pair of scissors and cut the card up. Start getting
money over the counter, then this will never happen. "

She doesn't take this advice, I knew she wouldn't. She doesn't want to
hear this at all. My clients very rarely take my advice. She doesn't
really seem that concerned about the money, it is the issue of trust
that is hurting her. People always want to know. Nobody is ever happy
with advice that solves the problem without knowing the answer.

Joanie Maple gets up and pads out to the kitchen, returning with a
small plate of biscuits. My heart soars as I notice that amongst the
heap of biscuits (easily enough for six of us) are some Malted Milk
biscuits.

These are my favourites, just the right blend of crunch and softness
with a milled edge and a picture of a cow. I used to eat these with a
glass of cold milk, nibbling away the edges and then eating the rest
carefully until all that was left was the cow. Taking the biscuit from
the plate feels almost magical, a transportation back to childhood. I
leave the more adult biscuits for her.

"So, who do you suspect ? " I ask her.

This shocks her a little and she doesn't want to answer. She mumbles
and protests.

"Come on, Mrs Maple, " I say, "You're a bright woman and you're a
mother. If anyone knows those boys then it's you."

"In my experience two things make someone steal. It's either
desperation or its in their character. There will have been flickers in
their past, money from piggy banks, crisps from the pantry, stationery
from school supplies. Which of your boys do you think it is ? "

She notices that I haven't even taken a sip of my tea and hastily picks
it up, scurrying off to the kitchen, from where I can hear the sound of
running water, indicating that she is already washing it up, and
probably screwing a tea-towel inside the cup to dry it.

Two minutes later, she comes out and says very quietly,
"Michael."

three

I set the camera up on some books opposite my desk and take a glance
through the view-finder to make sure that there is a view of my desk
and chair. It is difficult to gauge whether the top of my head will be
in shot, but I think that it will. I set the camera running and move
quickly to sit behind my desk.

"Day Two, " I announce, speaking directly to camera, " Some thoughts at
this early stage. "

I outline the thoughts that I have had.

Firstly, the more I think about this, the more convinced I am that this
is pure chance. Use a bag of Scrabble tiles as an analogy. If I start
pulling out Scrabble tiles I will be very very unlikely to pull out my
name, the chance of doing that is insignificantly small.

But, if I keep pulling out tiles forever, then the chance of pulling
out my name is not insignificantly small, it is absolutely certain to
come out. Likewise with any sentence, any phrase I can come up with. If
I keep pulling out tiles forever, that phrase will come out. However,
so will a number of related phrases that aren't true or accurate. I
could pull out 'Alex likes jam', but also in there somewhere are 'Alex
hates jam' 'Alex is allergic to jam', 'Alex is frightened of
jam'.

The fact that a sentence gets pulled out of Pi doesn't mean that it has
any deeper meaning. The strong likelihood is that it doesn't. If every
possible sentence is in there, then Pi is not about deep truths, it is
mostly about nonsense and falsehoods.

That sentence about my friend going to commit murder could easily have
said the opposite, and if we keep running the program forever, it
definitely will say that, at some stage.

So my principal conclusion is that I can't give any real weight to the
murder sentence. I'm assuming though, that James is not willing to pay
up the full sum agreed unless I conduct a more vigorous investigation
than that.

That being the case, the thing to do is to draw up a list of suspects.
This is a difficult thing to do, because obviously I don't tend to seek
out potential killers as friends, so if one of my friends is capable of
murder, I don't yet know it.

What I can do though, is narrow the search. There are a huge number of
people with whom I am friendly, but not all of them are my friends.
There's a difference.

The test I've chosen to sift out "friends" is this. If I were getting
married and I had to pare the guest list down, and keep trimming down,
where would I have to draw the line and say, 'if these people aren't
there, then I'm not getting married.' This seems to be a fair test and
it has reduced the numbers to twelve. (I'm not including any relative
as being a friend).

Now that I've done that, I can begin to work up a psychological profile
of each suspect / friend to see who is the most likely to be a
potential murderer.

After I say this, I stand up. I quickly realise that this means that
the camera is shooting film directly of my crotch, so I scurry out of
the way and turn the camera off. I take the film out of the camera and
stick it in an already prepared envelope for James. He has asked me to
send the film every day, so that he can start editing it. There will
obviously be more footage once I start doing the legwork and actually
going out to see people.

What I don't say on the tape, is that I'm starting to wonder whether in
fact, I am the Project. This is my suspicion, that my investigation is
of more interest to James Mellow than the jumble of letters spitting
out of his computers. That's just the feeling I have.

That the film footage I'm sending is in fact the Project, that the work
is designed to show what happens to someone when they are totally
exposed to one of two extreme possibilities.

Namely, that either the world is entirely random (Pi is just a concrete
example of this) or the world is really very detailed patterns, which
we just can't make out for all the background noise (the 'murder'
phrase being a signal aimed directly at me). Who can tell whether the
world is signal or noise ?

Infinity is something which it is not too good to think about for long
periods of time. As Nietzsche says, when you look into the abyss, the
abyss also looks into you.

I find that I'm beginning to be able to learn those first few digits of
Pi, using James Mellow's device. 3.1415926. I can't get beyond that bit
though. I wonder why.

four

I'm beginning to get less awkward with the camera. For the first few
days I walk around holding it with an almost rigid wrist, like a shop
dummy. Now my footage seems more fluid, naturalistic. Initially my
friends are curious as to why I would want to film short conversations
with them, but I tell them that I'm doing an Open University course and
want to capture natural dialogue. They seem to swallow this.

The structure that I've given the whole thing is a brief skirt around
all twelve of the suspects, with commentary done afterwards at my
office, as to what people are like, where I met them. I then give some
thought as to how exactly I will go about ascertaining which ones could
be capable of murder.

When I consider the whole sordid business of murder I conclude that
motive seems to be the most important factor in a murder. Almost anyone
might be capable of murder, were the motivation sufficient and the
opportunity tempting enough. So, focus on motive and analyse which of
my friends might have various motives for murder.

If I can't work out Why, I'll never know Who or When.

Motive Number One - Money. It is entirely possible that my friends
Crabtree and Evelyn might murder for money. They are sister and brother
(her real name is Shirley - Shirley Crabtree was Big Daddy's real name,
but these things get distorted over time) and I know for a fact that
they've got an aunt who is absolutely loaded.

The aunt lives in the South of France now, can't bear to be out of
sight of the sea, for even a few minutes. Completely bats. Whether the
two of them are in any way desperate for money I don't know. I wouldn't
imagine that they are, because Crabtree has got a very nice practice
just off Harley Street and Evelyn does a fair bit of lecturing these
days, which I understand to be quite lucrative.

Of the two of them, it would clearly be Crabtree that would have the
stomach for murder, providing it wasn't gruesome. She has sterner fibre
than Evelyn. Crabtree did manage to kick that mugger in the shins a few
years back, but I don't think she could do anything with knives or that
might be messy. For one thing, I don't think she owns any clothes that
she would be prepared to burn to cover her tracks.

Still, she could gown up, snap on the latex gloves and set to work. I
think it's been years since she did any messy medical work, she
specialises in skin disorders these days.

I went to the same University as Crabtree, though on slightly different
courses, our paths crossed at various functions. (And for about six
months,
the paths stopped crossing and went parallel to each other, before
diverting again.) Somehow we managed to remain friends afterwards, and
even get on better these days than when we were lovers.

Evelyn is a top fellow and we have spent many happy times together. But
he wouldn't have the stomach for murder. I remember one night getting a
telephone call from him because his cat had brought in a dead mouse and
he couldn't face disposing of the body. I had to drive for twenty-five
minutes to do this on his behalf.

Will is my absolute best friend, on longevity as much as anything else,
but Crabtree and Evelyn would tie for a close second.

My overall view is that if their Aunt Violet has to be offed, then good
luck to them.

I don't think anyone else in my circle stands to inherit anything
significant, although there is always life insurance. These days, who
isn't better off dead ?

Of those who might off their nearest and dearest to cash in on those
premiums, I would think that Ben or Molly might, they're always a bit
short of cash and of course Will never has any money at all (but no
nearest and dearest to bump off).

I have ruled out for definite three of my twelve suspects. Two are
policemen, and Bill is a lawyer and would be far too careful. He's
terrified of prison, he has to keep glancing at his watch when he's in
there interviewing clients, to remind himself that he is only there for
a limited time.

He wakes up in the middle of the night thinking that he is in a bunkbed
with someone with tattooed muscles in the bed above, draped in itchy
grey blankets. He would never risk doing anything that might send him
to prison.

I think that when the police were trying to get me to crack and give up
a girl's name, Bill was more nervous than I was. He was more
uncomfortable about being in the cell talking to me about my rights
than I was sitting waiting for the next interview to begin. As soon as
we got in the interview room, he perked up completely. It makes a huge
difference to him, having a door with a handle.

Once, after squash, he tells me that every time the judge gives a
sentence, he has a moments panic that the police will take him by the
arms and lead him away, rather than his client. This is what helps him
work so damn hard to get his clients off.

The others, I talk to when I meet them, I've been having quite a
sociable week thanks to James Mellow and his lucrative case. Thanks to
the money, I'm buying. We talk about this and that and I film them in
busy bars as we all circle round a table and they all drink Coke to
keep me company.

I also film Molly as we sit down for a nice Italian meal together.
Eventually with all of them, I engineer the subject around to money and
what we would do if we ever got hold of a lot of it.

None of them show any particularly avaricious glints as they start
talking about money. It's somewhat disappointing how limited their
ambitions are, new house, better holidays, flash car. None of these
people seem particularly driven by money.

In fact Fiona and John are both doing jobs that pay far less well than
their previous jobs in the City, because they enjoy them more. John
even did a year in Africa, helping dig irrigation trenches for about
four pounds a week, so I don't see him killing someone for money.

Ben thinks getting rich could be the ruin of his life.

"It's not as if there is some rich man's curry that is a hundred times
better than ours. And football. Yeah, you can sit in a posh box and eat
barbecue Pringles in a leather chair, but it's still the same game
isn't it ? And music. You don't get special rich person music. My view
is, I'd like to have about twenty quid a week more in my pocket, and
that would do me. "

Would you kill someone for what would effectively be less than a
thousand pounds a year pay rise ?

When I interview Will, on the other hand, he is positively drooling at
the idea
of having an inflated bank account. He tells me at some length, the top
five people whom he would humiliate using his money; and the various
minor celebrities that he would bed as a result of being a
multi-millionaire.

It turns out that he has a set of draft letters on his Mac at home,
tucked into a neat folder called "Rich", which are pure vitriol from
start to finish to a great number of people who he perceives at having
slighted him in his past.

The targets go way back to the bus-driver who wouldn't accept his
under-age fare. This was due to the moustache Will grew so that people
would serve him in bars. I always felt it was risky, trying to pass for
both eighteen and thirteen in the course of the same day.

"You should see the one I've written to old Benchy, it's a real
snorter. He'll regret ever giving me 32\% in my History mocks. I'll
e-mail it to you. And I've done one for Barclays too, that's worth
seeing too. "

Will might be my best friend, but sometimes I feel like I don't really
know him at all. I'm very placid, whereas he scowls at anyone who uses
a mobile phone within fifty feet of him. Sometimes in queues, I forget
what I'm doing there while I wait, dreaming of other things, whereas
every second is agony for him.

We've been mates for years, since he shared a packet of fruit Polos
with me at Registration; keeping all the red and purple ones for
himself. For ages he was the cool one and I was the one who tagged
along with him.

At school we were inseparable. We took all the same subjects at O Level
and generally walked home together. When his family or mine went away
during the summer holidays, for the one who was left, that was the
worst week of the year. As we got older, Will got cooler, but he took
me with him. He didn't just move into a cooler crowd and leave me
behind.

Will was the one who knew cooler people, who knew how to talk to girls.
He had better clothes, listened to better music. He was the one who got
us invited to parties, found people and started conversations, letting
me join in.

From nowhere, I had developed something of a talent for exuberance.
Fuelled by Woodpecker and vodka, Will and I would entertain the crowd,
by drilling holes in the wall with a power-drill, by introducing our
peer-group to Flaming Sambuccas, by generally being at a higher plane
of party animals than anyone else. During my teenage years, I moved
from being a pathetic geek, to "Will's friend" to "Alex, he's
sound".

But I know that without Will to have got me the initial invitations, I
would still be a pathetic geek now, wearing a short-sleeve shirt to
work and secretly having Bill Gates as my hero. Everything fun I ever
did in my life has some connection to Will, no matter how slight.

And now I'm supposed to consider whether he might kill someone.

This is an unusual experience, trying to see who might do something
that hasn't yet been done. It's like a newly-wed coming to me and
asking whether their husband might have an affair in years to come,
after the relationship has got stale. It's asking me to think about
things in an entirely different way.

five

I am listening to old tapes as I sit in the car keeping an eye on the
estate agent, Gavin. Mostly he has been in the office all day, jacket
draped over the back of his swivel chair, plucking leaflets for people
and talking to them earnestly. I did get one brief passage of
excitement, when he left to show people round a property and I was able
to follow his car and park up in the street.

The music that I'm listening to at present is "Up Up and Away", by
Fifth Dimension, a tune that never fails to make me think of birthday
cake wrapped in thick towelling serviettes. As I've got older, I've
realised that the music that is mine is not what I thought it was. It
isn't The Smiths and The Stone Roses and The Teardrop Explodes, though
those are all very special to me.

It isn't the music that you listen to through your own choice that
carries emotional resonance, since most of the experiences you have to
this are listening to them alone or dancing to them in clubs. Your own
soundtrack is music that was playing when things happened in your
life.

The true soundtrack to your life are the songs that were playing when
you were doing other things, the songs selected by your parents or on
the radio. In essence then, my touchstone songs were all ones I heard
before the age of eight.

Downtown, Fly me to the Moon, Would you like to swing on a star ? King
of the Road. Simon Smith and his amazing dancing bear. These are my
real songs, whether I like it or not. You don't get any say in them,
they are picked for you.

Eventually, I go into the estate agents and begin idly flicking though
house details, picking up the odd one or two and looking at them. Gavin
doesn't pounce immediately, he lets me spend my own time looking and is
there with a smile at the point when I turn round looking for
assistance.

My assessment of him, after a ten minute conversation and three hours
observation is that he is a nice bloke, maybe a little bit boring, but
basically decent. His ears stick out a little bit too much, but he
doesn't recommend places to view which are wildly unsuitable and he
isn't too smarmy.

I don't see that he would be lifting small amounts of money from his
mother's bank account. It doesn't fit him at all, not in his character.
I can't even see him over-egging his expense claims.

I get back into the car and decide to get the camera out, update James
Mellow on my other investigation. I tell him that my next motivating
factor for murder is 'a crime of passion'.

While I'm pointing the camera at myself, I unbuckle my seat belt. I
feel an urge to unbuckle everything, to just get it out.

So I tell the camera the truth.

I am an alcoholic. I don't drink any more. Apart from odd flashes, I
haven't had a serious drink for six years. But when I was bad, I really
was pretty bad. Most of my friends know and they are very supportive,
but sometimes seeing them all tiptoe carefully around alcohol cuts me
up inside. I know when I go to a dinner party that other guests are
ringing up the host and saying 'just checking if Alex is coming,
otherwise we'll bring a bottle'.

Knowing that if I turn up, everyone else feels obligated not to drink,
even if we're in a bar or having a meal, someone orders cokes all
round. It makes me feel like I'm ruining everyone else's time, like I'm
a burden. I want to shriek out, 'Look, you can all drink, I can
manage'. If they ordered a Bud or a glass of chardonnay, it wouldn't
push me over the edge. It really wouldn't.

There are two questions for alcoholics, why did you start and why did
you stop ?

I started when I was at University. I went out and got giddily drunk,
principally because I could and because everyone else was doing it. I
soon realised that I was a nicer person, kinder, funnier, more
attractive, with a few spirits inside me. It became more and more of a
prop for me. I always felt that my friends were more interesting than
me, more rounded. When I was sober, I felt dull and ordinary.

It became a problem though, because of the Pet Shop Boys. I was alone
in the shared house one day, reading some notes or a textbook or
something and a refrain just snagged in my head. It wasn't like a tune
that you hear and can't stop humming, it just stuck there completely. I
just couldn't get rid of it.

"What have I, what have I, what have I done to deserve this ? "

Couldn't get it out. Even when I played other music, on as many stereos
as there were in the house, five different tunes at high volumes, I
couldn't shift this incessant chanting in my head. In the past, I had
always thought that Neil was singing that he didn't deserve the bad
things that were happening to him, that things were unfair. At that
moment though, it was the reverse. I suffered some sort of breakdown
where I just became convinced that I was a fraud, that I didn't deserve
my place at university, my friends, my girlfriend, that secretly nobody
liked me.

I took to alcoholism pretty well. I stopped eating more or less
completely, to devote my time and money to alcohol. There were a number
of days when the only solid thing to go in my mouth were the ice-cubes
I crunched up. I was on the vodka diet.

After a month or so, I felt like I was having problems and made an
appointment, went along to an AA meeting. It had completely the wrong
effect.

Almost everyone there was more desperate, had sunk far, far lower than
I had. I came away feeling that even as an alcoholic I was a fraud,
that I couldn't even collapse properly.

So I set to work making a better job of it.

And I did pretty well.

Much, much later in life I read a lot of stuff about Zen and clearing
your mind. I found that when you try to get rid of all your thoughts,
there are always a few that linger. These days, what remains for me,
when I'm quiet and think about nothing else is "Gin, gin, gin." I have
to stop the meditation, because it just makes this chant, this internal
bassline of the brain louder and clearer.

I've tried to talk to other people about this lingering chant when your
mind is quiet, but either they don't have it, aren't aware of it, or
don't want to talk about it. Will did admit to me that when he doesn't
keep tight control of his mind, it just says, "Sixty pounds, sixty
pounds" all the time. Even when he's got enough money, or even when the
money he needs is four hundred pounds and sixty would be of no use,
this is the phrase that races about in his brain.

Crabtree says that hers is about time. It's usually, "come on, come on,
hurry". She feels that there is never enough time to get anything done,
that she would like to get rid of sleep, free up eight hours a day. She
wishes someone would invent a microwave bed, that could get all your
sleep crammed into a much shorter period.

"All this time, " she says, "All these inventions and nobody has ever
come up with a way to improve sleeping, to make it more efficient, more
pleasurable, more useful. We spend a third of our life doing it and
nobody has invented anything useful since the electric blanket and the
alarm clock. "

After I have said all this into the camera, I pause and take a deep
breath, before I say, "Well James, now I've told you everything. What's
your bassline of the brain ? "

And then the tape is stopped and I eject it and place it into a jiffy
bag, seal it down and drop it in at the address James gave me. We will
see what emerges. This is the first time I have ever revealed my
alcohol problems to someone who didn't already know.

By the way, I am of course, very aware of the connection between my
drinking and my panmnesiac memory. I wasn't at the time, but I do still
blissfully recall the experience of waking up one day in my bath, still
with my boots laced up and a pizza box on my lap, still with two greasy
triangles stiff with mushrooms and pineapple inside the box, stuck fast
to the cardboard. What I recall most about that is the joyous
experience of trying and failing to remember the night before. The
first time in my life that memory failed me. It was delicious, a
completely novel experience. Perhaps repeating that was what I was
looking for at the bottom of those bottles.

I start the car and drive off, parking up to visit Stuart at his record
store. It is a small place, with a high counter at the rear of the
shop, so that the staff seem to be tall, carved totem poles. There is
no section of chart music and the divisions and sub-divisions which
group the music seem idiosyncratic. Every now and then there is a small
piece of cardboard which says, "Stuart's top pick" or "Like the best
bits of Roxy Music added to new psychedelia"

The shop is called "Passionfruit" and I get immediate credit with
Stuart and his manager for observing casually that this is a line from
"She Bangs the Drums" by the Stone Roses. They nod appreciatively as I
go about my searches. In my life, I have spent far too much time in
shops like this, where the posters on the walls celebrate favoured
singles rather than the latest big releases, where there is a piece of
white card on the wall, written in marker pen with a biro on a piece of
string next to it, asking the customers to vote which of two
indie-darlings should be brutally murdered.

This is the sort of shop where asking for Celine Dion would be the most
heinous of crimes, not even in jest would her name be mentioned. My
friends are a nice bunch, but other than Will, none of them can
understand my incandescent hatred for Dion and Puff Daddy. They all
have a 'live and let live' mentality, which is nice, but not something
I can go along with when it comes to music.

I do quite a bit of browsing in the shop, both because I love flipping
though racks of albums and because I want the chance to size Stuart up
before I go to the counter. I eventually select "It's a Shame About
Ray", by Lemonheads.

Unfortunately it's the reissued version that ends with their cover of
"Mrs Robinson". It isn't that I have anything against that song, but if
you believe, as I do, that an album is a work of art, you can't crowbar
another track in after the album is released, just to sell more copies
at a later date.

The original ends on quite a downbeat note, and now this version has a
really poppy song at the end, probably their most commercial song to
date. Changes the mood of the album completely.

Still, it's an album I've always enjoyed and I'll just program the CD
not to play the last track. (I always program Automatic for the People
not to play "I try not to breathe" because it freaks me out. ) My
original was stolen in a burglary. I was able to track the burglar
down, but I never did anything about it. I sat outside his house in my
car for a few nights with a baseball bat in the passenger seat, but I
never took it any further. I've still got the bat, though.

I join in the conversation that Stuart is having with his manager, who
is slightly older and paler. Stuart is arguing that the Monkees were a
better pop group than the Beatles, which is clearly nonsense, but I am
interested in how he will develop his argument.

"Sure they were a manufactured group, " Stuart says passionately, "But
listen to Last Train to Clarksville, Daydream Believer. Those songs
have got more intensity, more to say than any of the Beatles stuff.
"

His manager disagrees, citing a number of the later album-tracks, and
in particular, Eleanor Rigby.

"Fair enough, " says Stuart, " Great song, but it's so mournful; when I
listen to the Monkees, they're uplifting. Most underrated band ever.
Whereas the Beatles are the most overrated band ever. Maybe the Monkees
aren't a better group, but I'm asking for a re-evaluation. "

"Sergeant Peppers, " I say.

They both look at me, not as if I'm demented, but just wondering what
I'm going to say.

"It nearly always comes out as top album, but when you sit and listen
to it, most of the tracks are fillers. Lovely Rita, Meter Maid , With a
little help from my friends, Jesus, When I'm Sixty-Four! Ringo sings on
two songs on the album. That's unforgivable. So that's four tracks, and
then some of the others are just throwaway rubbish. "

" Yeah, " Stuart says, glad of the moral support, "That's the sort of
thing I mean. Yeah, the Beatles were cool when they did all their
mind-expanding stuff, but they kept throwing in shite like Oh Bla Di
and Yellow Submarine to keep the pensioners sweet. "

"If there's any driving force in the Monkees, " I say, "It's Mickey
Dolenz. He had that beautiful ugliness going on, tight drumming and
sang as well. "

"Wow, " says Stuart, "Imagine if the Beatles had signed Mickey Dolenz
and kicked Ringo out. "

We all pause for a second and imagine what they might have been capable
of.

I hand over my record and ask about when certain albums might be
released. Stuart tells me and lets me know which of them are going to
turn out disappointing. I think I'll be back here again someday.

Conclusion - I like Stuart. He has obviously taken a path in life that
was towards doing something he loves rather than earning lots of money
and having a proper job (which is, after all, the same path I took), so
I don't feel inclined to accept him as the thief. Of course, instinct
isn't everything and I could have been wrong. (But I don't think I
was)

Stuart strikes me as being a bit like my friend Ben - as long as he has
a few quid for records, beers and going to gigs, he'll be quite
happy.

When I get back to the car, I take my purchase out of the bag and pop
open the case, which is a little stiff because it is new. Ordinarily, I
listen to albums from track one, but in this case, I know the album
very well and it is the title track, track three that I want to listen
to.

"I've never been too good with names, but I remember faces."

six

So it occurs to me, as I'm parking the car, that I have already
nominated Michael as the son who would steal from his own mother,
before I've even met him. Gavin is too dull and I liked Stuart, so I am
left with Michael as the only alternative. Convicted before I've even
met him.

I feel a little bit bad about this. Maybe Michael is a wonderful man, a
real model of humanity. I decide to give him the benefit of the doubt
and go to talk to him as a person rather than a suspect.

That lasts about ten seconds, when he answers the door and takes a
fraction too long to pull his shirt sleeve down to cover his arm. Even
if I'd been dumb and hadn't noticed the angry, ugly mess he has made of
his arm, I couldn't miss the glassiness to the eyes.

Dear Michael the art student is a heroin user. And quite a prolific
one, by my judgment. I give him some lie about conducting a survey, but
he isn't interested in anything that I have to say, he is busy looking
over my shoulder to see who might be coming down the street. My guess
is that he's waiting for his dealer.

This guess is confirmed when I leave and settle back into the car seat,
watching a skinny guy in black T-shirt and jeans that are unspeakably
narrow around his pencil legs walk up to the door and knock. Michael
lets him in, but not before he has asked him the question quietly. I'm
too far away to hear, but I can guess what is said, have you got the
stuff ? Yeah, have you got the money ?

Case solved, I think. Now all I've got to do is explain the motive to
this junkie's mother.

I sit down with Joan Maple and once again she makes me a cup of milky
tea. Nobody ever notices the people who don't drink tea, it is such a
big default setting in social situations. I always seem to be causing
problems for people with what I can and can't drink. This time, I feel
bad about what I'm about to tell her, so I take some small sips of the
tea, as a placatory gesture.

"I've done some investigating, " I tell her, " And my view is that you
are right. Michael is the one stealing money from your account. "

For a second, I think she is going to cry, but the expression crosses
her face quickly and she sets in its place a hard, interested
look.

"I can set up a camera and watch the cash machine, see what happens, "
I say, "But I'm afraid that I have no doubt at all, from what I've
seen. "

The saucer she is holding is beginning to make a rattling noise against
the cup as her hand trembles. It is always a different thing to know
than to think you know. She wants to know why, of course.

"I'm sorry to have to say this, Mrs Maple. But Michael is a drug-user.
My investigation was conclusive in that regard. "

There is something in the way that she looks, in the way her eyes
moisten that tells me that of all of them, Michael is her favourite.
She knows that there is something rotten in him, but he is still the
one she loves best.

"What should I do ? " she asks me.

Already knowing that she won't do as I advise, I tell her anyway. I
tell her that Michael is, by now, so heavily into smack that there
won't be much that she can do. She can book him into a clinic, but
chances are that he'll either walk out or relapse straight afterward. I
tell her to cut her losses and change her locks, because he will keep
taking money for what he needs and he will just get more and more
bold.

She stands up after I tell her all this and says goodbye to me very
politely. She tells me to make sure that I send her the bill for my
time and thanks me for what I have done. I can't believe I'm going to
have to bill her for this. I feel instead like trying to give her some
money, tell her to take care of herself. I already know that she is the
type of woman who will ring up and ask what's happened to the bill if I
decide not to send one.

Sorry. There is no great mystery, there is no great drama. This is the
way the world works. People do bad things because they are driven to do
so. The nice dull man with the sticking out ears doesn't turn out to be
the bad guy. The mother will do her best and keep letting her son steal
from her, so that he can buy poison to stick in his arms. She will do
this because he is her son and at least if he's stealing from her, he
isn't stealing from someone else.

3.1415926.

The next motivation to murder, in my assessment of my friends, is the
crime of passion. Jealousy or freeing yourself to marry your lover, or
freeing your lover to marry you.

Let's look at the usual suspects. Ben is quite happy with his
girlfriend, who is very attractive and must have more patience than any
other woman I know. Molly is in a long-term relationship and I can see
how she's blossoming within that. Fiona and John are together and as
far as you can ever tell, they seem quite happy. I wouldn't be able to
definitively rule them out, but they seem unlikely.

Tony, I know has had a bit of a thing going with a married woman for
some time. He never talks about this being a difficulty. I ask him
outright, with the video-camera pointing at him. He tells me that it
sometimes gets a bit tiresome, but it will do until someone else comes
along, someone who is free. He does feel sometimes that he is wasting
his life on her, but hasn't found anyone else who makes him feel the
same.

"D'you think she'll ever leave him ? " I ask.

He shrugs, "Not sure I'd ever want her to. I dunno, maybe part of the
attraction is that I'm the excitement in her life. When we see each
other, it's secret, it's special. If we lived together, it might just
get as stale as all the other times in my past. Keep things the way
they are. "

Of course, he could just be saying that.

Liz isn't seeing anyone, but when I've accompanied her on works
evenings (orange juice is fine for me thanks, I'm driving), her eyes
always seem to shine a bit more when she is near to Mike Finch from
Policy. I don't know if he's attached in some way.

I ask her, but she doesn't want to talk about it; particularly not
while I'm pointing a video camera at her.

Crabtree is more or less celibate since her bad experience. Not with
me, I hasten to add, I don't think I registered as much more than a
tremor on her emotional Richter scale. No, she went out with someone
for a long time and then found him in bed with another man. I think I
would know if she had her eye on someone else, we're pretty close.
She's the only person I have told about the girl who thought she might
be Emily Feather.

Although Will is my best mate, Crabtree is my closest friend. As you
get older, there becomes a difference. I sometimes wonder if Will and I
have outgrown each other.

These days, when we see each other, almost all we do is talk about old
times. And the things that used to make him cool and funny, like being
nasty about women - they're now starting to just make him seem a bit
odd. He absolutely hates his job and I rather like mine. He thinks all
modern music is just for uncles, that there's been nothing decent since
the early nineties and I disagree. He persists in his view that Pierce
Brosnan isn't right for Bond, whereas I think he might turn out to be
as good as Connery.

Crabtree doesn't like Will, she never has. She puts up with him,
because of me, but they would never see each other if they didn't have
me in common. She told me once that she thought he looked like a boy
who might start fires, not out of malice, but just because he would be
fascinated by the flames and the power.

Evelyn is too much of a tart to ever fall in love. He doesn't even fall
in love for short periods, he just wants to touch, to be a part of,
achieves his goal and then moves onto the next.

And then of course, there is Will. I don't know his current love-life,
he's become a bit cagey about the subject of late. He has no ties, but
it is possible that he could have fallen for some girl who is
inextricably attached. Would he ever care enough about anyone to kill
for them ? I don't know.

All I do know is that he doesn't seem to be the same person I once
knew. He sounds sometimes like he's not joking when he makes his
outrageous comments. I wonder sometimes if all of that sharpness and
wit isn't a cover for someone who badly wants to change but doesn't
know where to start.

So, on the crime of passion front, we have Tony and Liz as faint
possibles and Will as a don't know. It's a hell of a thing to do for
love, kill someone to be with someone else. Wouldn't that sour the
whole thing eventually ? That taint of blood, the burden of knowing
what you did ?

Surely the first row you have about mowing the lawn or whose turn it is
to wash up, that gets thrown in the other person's face - "I killed
your husband to be with you, and this is all the thanks I get !" And if
things start to get into a rut, doesn't that guilty knowledge just rub
away at you, make you more and more frustrated that you risked
everything for a relationship that didn't deliver what you thought it
might.

Maybe I should look at this closer myself. Is there anyone I would
kill, given the opportunity ? I don't think so. Not even Celine Dion,
not really. Yes, I think she should have her vocal cords forcibly
removed, but if she was in the sights of my sniper rifle and I knew my
escape route was watertight, would I squeeze and make her head pop ? I
don't think I would. I actually feel a little ashamed to admit
this.

Political assassination as motive. Only Fiona and John are vaguely
political. I'm sure they would say that they would happily have pulled
the switch for General Pinochet, but that's a far cry from hunkering
down with a rifle and steady hand. I don't think anyone else has any
sort of political convictions.

The other obvious motive is revenge. Again, the name which leaps to
mind when considering revenge is Will, who I know keeps a mental note
of people who have slighted him. Indeed, he may even write this list
down now, as it has increased over the years. (*6)

I talk to my friends about their history, to find out whether any of
them have ever been badly treated by anyone else - whether there is
someone that they could hate with a passion. The sort of things I am
looking for are bankruptcies, cheating business partners, lovers who
forced them to have abortions. Nothing emerges from the investigation
at all.

In the end, I ask them point blank, who do you most hate in the whole
world? Some of them can't even think of anyone. Some want to get back
to me once they have decided between two people. Only one of the whole
group names someone that they have actually met. (Will, of course - and
he takes some time to get the answer reduced from a top ten).

If they can't identify an individual, what about the question, "what's
the worst thing that ever happened to you ? "

Most of them either can't think of anything that was really all that
bad, or it was an embarrassing moment rather than a devastating one,
usually occurring at the age of fourteen.

Ben nominates being too hungover to put a bet on the National winner
four years ago and it romping home. Crabtree says, "going out with
you," and then she giggles. Evelyn talks about having to tell his
parents that the partner he was bringing to stay for the weekend being
of the same gender. Liz says that she once saw somebody get killed in a
car crash, when she was walking to school.

Looking at this, it seems pretty clear that hatred and revenge are not
sufficient motivators within this group. Even the person Will named as
hating most in the world was for pretty trivial reasons, the manager at
Barclays. Hating someone like that is the sort of scale where if you
hit his car in a car park by accident you wouldn't leave a note -
that's my view anyway, Will takes a somewhat harder line.

(*6 Without ever thinking about it properly, I wonder if my drinking
has anything to do with the fact that Will has become more cynical and
bitter about the world. I always feel a little bad that I was never
able to tell him. Even at the end, when it was all brutally obvious, it
had to be Ben that told him, while I sat in the bathroom too scared to
face him. The thing was, he had been a part of my life for so long, and
a part that tied directly into living at home with my family, that it
was almost like letting my dad down. Even now, we never ever talk about
the booze. He just orders us both a coke if we're out together, and if
anyone says anything smart, he tells them that we're driving. Plus
point of a night out with me, you don't need a taxi to get home.
)

I think I have almost ruled out this batch of friends on the standard
motives for murder. Which would leave the possibility that one of them
is mentally unbalanced, psychotic.

Oh good.

seven

There is nothing like trying to work out which of your friends is a
potential killer to stimulate those areas of the brain which deal with
paranoia. I find myself waking in the morning thinking, has it happened
? I scan the papers, buying an Evening Standard every day to check the
inner pages for violent and unexplained deaths. I flick through pages
on Ceefax, then look on the Internet.

I'm rather ashamed to admit this, but I even start to follow one or two
of them during the day. None of them notice - after all, I do this for
a living, I'm pretty discreet. Still, it is not the sort of thing you
should do to your friends.

The fact is though, that I'm beginning to feel guilty that I'm taking
James Mellow's money and doing very little for it. I don't believe for
a second that following my friends will produce anything sensational in
the way of murder evidence, but I feel that I should be doing
something. And besides, following someone makes better footage for the
camera.

I follow Ben at first, who does nothing of any interest. He goes to
work, he goes out to the pub at lunch-time. I can't follow him into the
pub because he would spot me. Refreshing to know that my friends do
feel able to drink when I'm not around though. He drives off after work
to play five-a-side football with some mates. He goes home. Nothing at
all suspicious.

When I follow Tony, I get to see the precautions he has to take to meet
up with his married lover. They end up eating at a little restaurant
that is a good half-an-hour from either of their houses and they sit
well inside, away from any of the windows. Although when I walk past
they are locked in conversation, I don't see anything in their
body-language to suggest they are plotting the grisly death of her
husband.

Project Babel has seven more days to go. That works out as thirty-five
thousand pounds. This seems like a hell of a lot of money, but I've got
to say that this job is proving very tiring. Not physically, but it is
more emotionally wearing than I imagined to be suspicious of my
friends. I like my friends, that's why I'm friends with them. This
business of prying into their life, mixing my business with their
personal life, it just seems utterly wrong.

I wouldn't accept Liz suddenly feeling that because she knows about
money, that she should start reorganising my mortgage and savings
accounts, or that Crabtree should be able to discuss my medical history
with her colleagues. I shouldn't be involving any of them in this.
Imagine if any of them found out. What a breach of trust this would be.
I could lose all of them.

So, I decide. One more day, take the last five grand and then go to see
Mellow, tell him that I've gone as far as I can, that the investigation
is finished and that I've found nothing suspicious about anyone.

Why one more day ? Well, aside from the obvious five grand, there's the
fact that of all of my friends, the most likely candidate for a killer
is Will. I have remarked on this in the tapes that I have sent to
James. How would it look if I conclude my investigation without
following the prime suspect ?

I record all this and deliver the tape. A light goes on just after I
leave, no doubt James picking up the tape.

Next morning, I get up early and get myself down to Will's street. Will
has the day off, so I wait just along the street from his house. He
doesn't even open his front door until eleven. He's wearing stone
combat trousers and a chocolate brown sweatshirt. He walks down to the
tube station and I follow, at a careful distance, getting into another
carriage and watching who gets out at each stop.

He does some shopping first, magazines from Smiths, a large Coke in
MacDonalds. He browses around Playstation games in HMV. He even picks
one up, weighing it in his hand as if deciding whether or not to buy
it, before changing his mind.

It comes as something of a surprise when he walks into some art
gallery. This doesn't seem like Will at all. He's never shown any
interest in art. He's the sort of person who is tempted to father a
son, simply so that he could say things like, "my six year old could do
better than that" with conviction.

I wait for a few minutes outside the gallery. The explanation surely is
that there is some girl he's taken a shine to who works in the gallery.
Not the case. When I peep inside, he is not visible at all. There are
three or four people wandering around, but he is not amongst them. He
must have gone upstairs.

When I take a look at the sign above the door, I see that it is not
only a gallery, but it is a conceptual studio. The studio just happens
to belong to James Mellow.

And this is when the paranoia really starts to kick in.

James Mellow is running an art project, in which he's paying handsomely
to find which one of my friends will murder. If this art project is
going to work, then he will need an ending. An inconclusive, "sorry,
none of my friends are killers " ending is going to fall a bit
flat.

And I have been sending off tapes on a daily basis, telling James that
the only one of my friends that I can imagine killing someone is Will
and that he is greatly motivated by money.

What the hell have I done ?

After Will leaves, I go in and make my way up to the studio. James is
standing in front of a bank of computers, all churning away and
spitting paper from the printers. He has a long row of highlighter pens
and there is a camera fixed on a tripod. The blinking light tells me
that everything is being filmed.

"Hello Lex, " says James, sounding genuinely pleased to see me, "An
integral part of Project Babel. I got yesterday's tape. Sorry that
you've got cold feet. Interesting. I should have foreseen something
like that. "

Now that I'm in front of him, I don't seem to have much to say. He is a
presence, there is no doubt about it.

"As you can see, the letters keep coming. I haven't found anything
useful about your situation, but there have been some fragments that
were vaguely poetic. Even some stuff that could have been straight from
Ulysses. "

I am starting to get sceptical, not just about whether the murder
phrase has any significance as a random slice of Pi, but whether it was
actually in those numbers at all. Maybe James Mellow put in words for
me to find, and jumbled in random letters all around to give the
impression that the order emerged from chaos. Maybe that's why he
wanted a cheap-rate detective that he could dazzle with money. That
could be why he wanted a detective that had recently had some bad
publicity.

"What's interesting, " he says, "Is that sometimes you get almost a
complete sentence, just missing the last critical word. That's true
about our sentence as well. "

That's true. If the last word of the sentence were there, it would
reveal who it is that my friend will murder. If Mellow has paid Will to
murder someone, who would he select ? The people Will dislikes mean
nothing to Mellow.

Mellow goes over to a desk and slides open a drawer. He takes out a
large envelope and hands it to me. It is full of cash. More cash than I
have ever seen before. I don't think I've ever really seen more than
ten fifty pound notes in one place before, but here are groups of them,
all bound together with little looped slips of paper. I don't need to
count it to realise that there is seventy-five thousand pounds in here,
tax free. Even if I'm honest and declare the income, that's still an
unspeakable amount of money.

He knew I was coming for the money. He had it ready. Of course, he knew
because of the tape I sent him yesterday that this would be my last
day. He just got the money together in case I showed up.

No. That isn't it. If he saw the tape I made yesterday, collected it
from the drop point, then he knew that today I would be following Will.
When he made his arrangement, asked for Will to come and see him, he
knew that I was following Will.

He shoots me a smile. He has watched my face as I worked this out. I
curse myself for taking so long over it. If he has hired Will to commit
murder, he has also made sure that I am aware of it. He has picked his
time. Maybe he always knew I would quit and was just waiting for the
day that I decided to follow Will to make his offer.

So does he want me to stop Will, to intervene ? Or does he want me to
do nothing ? Or does he just want to watch what happens ?

I put this to the test, " Mind if I keep the camera for a day or two ?
No charge. It's just, maybe something might come to me. "

"That's a good idea, " he says, "There might be some thoughts you may
want to add to the Project. "

During the course of the evening, my mind pancake-flips over and over,
it is nonsense to think that Will would kill someone. Then I look at
the envelope stuffed with fifties and I think that Mellow could offer
far more money than that to complete the Project. I can also imagine
Will doing it for the experience. Do I know James well enough to judge
that he wouldn't pay to have someone killed ?

Money is hardly an issue. Mellow is more than capable of getting
whatever sum is required. I can imagine him being interested in the
artistic side of things. Murder as a fine art. He might not even be
bothered about getting caught, it would make a fine piece -
controversial and unique. An artist creating and executing a murder for
artistic purposes.

This is not doing any good. I should just accept that Will might be
capable of killing someone, if enough money was thrown at him. What am
I going to do about it ? I can hardly go to the police. I've got
nothing at all - some babble about Pi and a sighting of my friend going
into an art gallery that is open to the public.

What I could do, is just talk to Will. Surely an old friendship is
going to be more persuasive than money ?

I decide to have a look at the printout that James left for me, see if
I can make any sense of it. Looking at the page with the famous murder
message, this time I see something that I never noticed before. Letters
that aren't highlighted, that finish directly after the "Alex Marlowe
Chandler your friend will murder" fragment. One letter, over and
over.

U, U, U, U, U.

eight

I don't own a gun, and although I am sure I could get hold of one, I
don't like the idea. Far easier to pull out the trusty baseball bat
from where it has been propped up behind my winter coats. I go out with
it into my garden and try a few practice swings, becoming more and more
venomous. After a while, I start saying things under my breath, Robert
De Niro type things. Let's get in character.

The bat will do the job, if it's needed.

For the rest of the day, the bat will stay by my side, I decide. When
I'm in my car, when I'm at lunch, when I'm sat at my desk. If needs be,
I can reach to my left and grab the bat. You want some of this ?

Of course, I'm having to detach myself from the idea that this is my
best friend whose skull I am imagining denting with my bat. Still, if
he decides to accept a contract on my life, then he's got this coming
to him.

I wonder when it will come. If I were James, I would either want it to
come very quickly, before I've taken precautionary steps, or otherwise
to delay for so long that I've stopped taking the threat seriously.
Delay a while, make me panic for a few days. Get some footage of the
tough detective jumping at every noise in the shadows. He could be
filming me right now.

If it were me being the killer, how would I do it ? Without a doubt I
would use a vehicle as the weapon. In a car, even if you get caught,
you can plead accident and get two years tops. Better even than that,
is the shove in the back in front of the tube tracks. Who would see
that, in the crowd of people all hating being there, wishing they were
in bed ? Slip away unnoticed in the crowd. I resolve quickly not to
travel by tube for a week or two.

How persistent is Will going to be ? Depends on the money. I think if
he tries to engineer a situation and fails a few times, he will lose
heart. But it depends on the money.

I park the car near to the office and decide to make a telephone call
from a payphone before I go in. It is seven thirty and the street is
still quiet. There's a mixture of grey and pink in the sky and I can
hear the sound of metal shutters being rolled up, and mopeds moving
along the street. It doesn't matter how early you are in London,
someone else is already trying to go somewhere.

It takes a while before James answers the telephone. He is an artist,
after all. And a rich one at that, why would he want to get up at seven
thirty ?

"How much ? " I ask.

To his credit, he doesn't try to bullshit me, or act puzzled. He pauses
for a second and says, " Why ? Are you thinking of joining the bidding
? "

I'm thinking of the money that I've got in that envelope. I'm thinking
that I was going to go to Japan with that money. Hole in my head, I am
thinking, coffin, I am thinking.

Could I buy Will off with the money that I've already got ? Give my
seventy-five grand to Will and say, just cancel the contract, let's be
mates again. On the plus side, the money is no good to me if I'm dead.
On the debit side, how could we ever be friends again if I have to pay
him not to kill me ? Wouldn't I begrudge that money ? Wouldn't James
just offer more money ?

"I think I'll handle things my own way, " I tell him, " I was just
curious. "

James laughs, "I like you Luth-or, " he says, "Let's just say it took
an obscene amount. "

I don't know whether I've got more to ask, but he's hung up anyway. It
wouldn't be very cool to ring back, so I leave things the way they are.
Maybe I should just take my trip to Japan, take six months out of the
country, spend my money. I already know that I'm not going to do that.
This detective business is the only thing I've ever stuck at. This is
important to me, to try to see something through.

While I'm at the payphone, I have a terrible desire to call another
number, speak to a friendly voice, explain that my best friend is going
to kill me for money, tell her I miss her. But I don't.

The bat is in my hand as I push open the office door; my coat is
bunched up in my other hand, ready to throw in the assailant's face,
blind him so that I can get a few blows in. I've given Rachel the day
off. I don't want to get her killed, even if she does take too long for
her lunchbreak.

There is nobody in my office, but something seems different. Not sure
what it is. I'm not putting my bat down any time in the near future. I
size up the office and decide to move my chair. This way, nobody can
just come through the door and shoot, they have to come right into the
room and turn to the right, by which time, I'll already be
moving.

By the time I figure out what's wrong with the room, the doorknob is
already half-turning. I grip the bat tight and move towards the door,
light on my feet. The door opens and I swing the bat, as hard as I can,
aiming for where I think the forearm might be.

I connect and there is a crack, a sickening noise. A man screams and
stumbles into the room. I hit him again, this time across the midriff.
He falls at this point, sagging down onto his knees. He's not much of a
risk at this point, to be honest, but I hit him once more for good
measure, across the back. The bat copes well with all this activity,
considering you're meant to hit small white balls with them rather than
muscle and bone.

It's Will, of course. He's not wearing a mask or anything, and he's not
carrying a gun. I think about patting him down, but change my mind. I
don't really want to know at this stage. He's making small noises in
his throat, but he doesn't have enough in him to actually speak. I
haven't brought anything to tie him up with. Stupid.

I settle for standing over him with the bat and waiting for him to
speak. If he tries anything, I'll swing for the head. He clearly wants
a glass of water, but he isn't going to get one.

"Jesus, " he says, "What's got into you ? "

This is how it's going to play then, lies.

"James Mellow, " I say, "He's promised you money to carry out a job.
I'm making sure you don't collect. "

"What happens now, " I say, "Is up to you. "

I can see the lies travelling across his face, pausing, half-settling
before he weighs them up and sees that I'm not going to go for any of
them. I feel nothing but coldness in my stomach. I wonder if I've ever
really known this man.

He disappoints me by trying one of the lies, I suppose he feels he has
nothing left to lose now. He starts by denying knowing James Mellow,
then says that James did offer him money and he came to warn me. He was
worried that someone else might try to kill me.

It would be so much easier to just swallow the lie. I can see how
frightened he is, he knows that if I had to finish this off, I would
have no qualms. He isn't going to try again, and I could just buy the
lie and we could be friends again.

"Where's the gun ? " I ask him. Earlier, I'd hoped that I was wrong and
that there would be a good excuse for the early morning visit. I hadn't
wanted to see the gun. But I know, I can tell in his lips and the way
his tongue is darting at his teeth.

He says, "Coat pocket, " and I tell him to take the coat off and slide
it across the floor. When I take the gun out of the pocket, he begins
to cry. I wonder for a moment whether he thinks I'm going to kill
him.

I don't want to kill him. If anything, this says more about me than it
does about him. I don't know whether he would have gone through with
it, would ever have even shown me the gun, never mind shot me. Probably
not, when it came down to it. He probably just wanted to come in, talk
idly to me and assess how it felt, see if he had the nerve.

On the other hand, I knew as soon as that door started to open that I'd
kill him if I had to.

He starts babbling about how things have changed between us, how I
don't trust him, that I never talk to him about things that matter. He
says that we've grown apart. I really couldn't care.

I leave him bathed in the electric light of the computer screen, which
was off when I left the previous day. On top of the computer is a new
addition, a webcam, no doubt transmitting pictures to James Mellow, to
add to the Project.

For a second, I think about smashing the computer with the bat, that
would be a good end to the Project footage. But it's my computer.
Instead I put my face directly in front of the web-cam.

"He's not my friend anymore, " I say, very clearly.

The gun gets slipped into the waistband of my trousers and I leave the
office, still carrying the bat. The wretch that used to be a friend is
still on the floor sobbing. I wonder how long it will be before he
manages to get up and wash his face.

I have seventy-five thousand pounds at home in an envelope and all at
once, it makes me feel sick all the way down to my feet to think about
that money. If I was one for dramatic gestures, I'd burn the damn lot,
but I'm not that stupid. I don't even feel like I might drink the damn
lot. Though for a moment, that bloody number and the mnemonic goes
through my mind again - 3.1415926.

After I've sat down for a moment and took some breaths, this feeling of
revulsion passes. I knew it would. The money has cost me a friend and
it could have cost me my life; but it didn't.

Outside the office I get to a payphone and call Rachel. She isn't
happy, because I'd given her a day off and here I am calling her up at
home in the early hours. I tell her that I'll post her pay, but I'm
going away for three months. There'll be a job waiting for her, she can
take three months paid leave. Up to her.

Considering everything, I feel pretty upbeat. I've been wanting to go
to Japan for a long time. I've had a real desire to sleep in one of
those hotel rooms in Tokyo that are almost like a capsule, a little
tube. Eat Kobe steak, the most expensive meat in the world. Walk in
small perfect gardens. Sit and watch Sumo. Maybe I'll ring Crabtree
before I book the ticket and tell her she was right about Will - just a
boy who wanted to look at the fire.

Why do I feel so philosophical about everything ? I'm thinking about
Japan, and I'm thinking that I might get the chance to spend some of
this money, get a boat to take me out to an iceberg. Walk on a real
iceberg.

Who knows how long those beasts have been in the sea, waiting for us ?
My view is a long time, you don't get that big quickly. Those icebergs
will still be there, imperious and beautiful long after I'm gone.

My view is that life tests you. A lot of the tests so far, I've failed.
This one, it feels like I've passed. And up there in my office, poor
Will has failed his. There are always more tests.

There's some sense of a release. All my life, I've been grateful to
Will. Grateful that he was my friend when I was lonely, grateful that
he was cool and still liked me, grateful that I was a drunk and he
stood by me. My gratitude was becoming a weight round my neck. And all
the time in the recovery, I felt bad that I'd let him down, that I
didn't deserve to have such a good friend.

And now, I don't feel bad anymore.