Chapter 2C

Zoë, Saturday 6th March, afternoon
There isn't a great deal that I can actually tell DC Green about Richard. I've only known him a few weeks, he was a lecturer on an option course I was taking with the rather unimaginative title of Mysteries in Physics for Non-Scientists, I kind of fancied him but not as much as I fancied causing a small amount of outrage... it all seems a bit naïve and pathetic now, and I feel annoyed with myself again.
I'd been to the pub with him a few times to try and seduce him. Seduce is a funny word, really – I keep using it to myself but it sounds slightly comical when I say it out loud. Somehow it seems more appropriate than “get off with” or “pull” or any other alternative I can think of though. Academics are the kind of people who are seduced rather than pulled. We ended up snogging after I almost literally dragged him along to see Pretentious Glen's awful experimental jazz-rock band, the Hip Critters, playing in the Cellar Bar in the Students' Union.
DC Green wants to know if I have any idea “why Dr. Mortimer might have taken his own life“, and if he had any enemies and so on, and all of a sudden I start feeling that stinging feeling again like smoke in my eyes. I am determined not to start crying in front of a policewoman.
Enemies, for fuck's sake? Who has enemies? The sort of enemies that kill you, not just people you don't like. Gangsters have enemies, not normal people. Not even university lecturers, surely? Not anyone I know.
The conversation peters out and I'm about to ask if that's all when I remember I actually wanted to ask something too. “There was some kind of equipment on his table. I think it was attached to the... the gun...” Nearly crying again. Shit.
“We think it was some kind of timer,” DC Green says in a carefully gentle voice. “The gun was fired by an electromagnet controlled by an electronic circuit.”
I have a wobbly vertiginous sensation for a moment and start to feel like I might be sick again. My stomach's had a pretty rough time of it over the last twenty-four hours or so.
“You mean, to give him a chance to bottle out at the last minute?” I have to ask, even though the tears are suddenly filling up my eyes so I can hardly see or speak. I have to get through this somehow, and I no longer care what I look like.
DC Green says, “or to stop him bottling... turning back, who knows?”
I can't get the image out of my head – the pile of technical gear I saw in Richard's room. Had he set that all up to automate his death? I think of all the elaborate killing machines in fiction from the potato-balanced gallows in the Tin Drum to the Pit and the Pendulum and all the proper-nasty stuff imagined by the Marquis de Sade. Then I remember the gruesome idea Richard recently explained about a machine which simultaneously kills a cat and leaves it unharmed. That seemed quite unnecessarily psychopathic, even if the machine was never meant to be actually built, and I found it quite offensive. I like cats. Why did it have to be a cat?
“Did this Scrotummer bloke have something against cats?” I asked him in the pub later.
“Schrödinger.”
“Shrew-Donger.” For some reason I had (still have) some kind of aversion to pronouncing his name right, this murderer of hypothetical pussycats. “Did he have something against cats?”
“Don't forget there wouldn't be any point in actually doing the experiment. It's what's known as a thought experiment – the point is what you can work out from imagining it.”
“But why imagine it with a cat? Why not a rat or a fruit fly or a worm or something?”
“I'm not sure it would be so convincing with a fruit fly. Everybody asks if he had something against cats, by the way, it never occurs to them that maybe he was particularly fond of them.”
“How d'you work that out?”
“He thought it was an absurd idea that a cat could be alive and dead at the same time – a cat's too much like a person for that, too much a conscious observer, not just an inanimate physical system. That's why I want you to try and imagine it from the cat's point of view.”
I tried to press him for more of an explanation but he got all “wait and see” – it was all to be revealed in his next lecture, and telling me more would spoil the sense of mystery. He's like that – was, I mean – a kind of a performer, in a way he seemed more like a conjurer than an academic. Maybe that was part of what was sexy about him – the stagey thing, the gift for creating a sense of mystery.
He's certainly being mysterious enough now. Why the fuck has he shot himself? He never gave the impression of a man who was about to commit suicide – that suppressed excitement I've been noticing was anything but depression. I'd flattered myself that it was because of me, but I have to admit with hindsight I was probably wrong.
He gave the impression of a man with a plan, a secret purpose, as if he was building up to something more significant than just the last day of explaining wacky theories to my class. A plan to kill himself? The idea just doesn't seem to fit, unless I'm a worse psychologist than I think.
As for the letter, that's plain weird. Who's this bloody sister? It would be insulting if it wasn't just bizarre. I leave the police station upset and puzzled – something's very wrong, and trying to explain it to DC Green has just made it worse. She didn't even seem to believe I haven't got a sister.