“What rope?”
“A doormat? No. Rope? I don’t know. Where? God, no one ever saw anything like it. He looked like he didn’t like the light shining on him, but that’s impossible, Commissioner, isn’t it? The shavings — no! Straw… won’t… hold…”
A long silence, interrupted by scratching, blurred noises — it sounded as if several persons were carrying on a furious whispered conversation at some distance from the microphone. A short choking, the sound of hiccups, and suddenly the voice was gruffer:
“I’ll give it all away, I don’t want anything for myself. Where is she? Is this her hand? Is that you?”
Again scratching, tapping as if something heavy was being moved, the sound of cracking glass, the hiss of escaping gas, some sharp static, then a deafening bass voice uttering the words:
“Turn it off, there won’t be any more.”
Sheppard stopped the reels, the tape stood still. He returned to his place behind the desk. Gregory was hunched over, pressing his hand against the arm of the chair and staring at his own whitened knuckles. He seemed to have forgotten about Sheppard.
“If I could only turn everything back,” he thought. “The whole thing, all of it, to about a month ago — no, not enough, maybe a year. Ridiculous. I can’t escape…”
“Chief Inspector,” he said at last, “if you had picked someone else instead of me, you’d probably have a perpetrator locked up for this by now. Do you understand what I’m talking about?”
“Maybe. Why don’t you continue.”
“Continue? When I was studying physics, the section on optical illusions in my textbook had an illustration that was either a white wine glass against a dark background or two dark human profiles against a white background. You only saw one or the other, and as a student I took it for granted that only one of the two images was genuine, although to this day I still can’t say which. That’s funny, isn’t it, Chief Inspector? Do you remember the conversation about order we once had in this room? About the natural order of things. You said that the natural order can be imitated.”
“No, you said that.”
“Did I? Maybe so. But what if it isn’t really that way? What if there isn’t anything to imitate? What if the world isn’t scattered around us like a jigsaw puzzle — what if it’s like a soup with all kinds of things floating around in it, and from time to time some of them get stuck together by chance to make some kind of whole? What if everything that exists is fragmentary, incomplete, aborted, events with ends but no beginnings, events that only have middles, things that have fronts or rears but not both, with us constantly making categories, seeking out, and reconstructing, until we think we can see total love, total betrayal and defeat, although in reality we are all no more than haphazard fractions. Our faces and our fates are shaped by statistics — we human beings are the resultant of Brownian motion — incomplete sketches, randomly outlined projections. Perfection, fullness, excellence are all rare exceptions — they occur only because there is such an excess, so unimaginably much of everything! The daily commonplace is automatically regulated by the world’s vastness, its infinite variety; because of it, what we see as gaps and breaches complement each other; the mind, for its own self-preservation, finds and integrates scattered fragments. Using religion and philosophy as the cement, we perpetually collect and assemble all the garbage comprised by statistics in order to make sense out of things, to make everything respond in one unified voice like a bell chiming to our glory. But it’s only soup… The mathematical order of the universe is our answer to the pyramids of chaos. On every side of us we see bits of life that are completely beyond our understanding — we label them unusual, but we really don’t want to acknowledge them. The only thing that really exists is statistics. The intelligent person is the statistical person. Will a child be beautiful or ugly? Will he enjoy music? Will he get cancer? It’s all decided by a throw of the dice. At the very moment of our conception — statistics! Statistics determine which clusters of genes our bodies will be created from, statistics determine when we’re going to die. A normal statistical distribution decides everything: whether I’m going to meet a woman and fall in love, how long I’m going to live, maybe even whether I’m going to be immortal. From time to time, it may be, statistics participate in some things blindly, by accident — beauty and lameness, for example. But explicit processes will cease to exist before long: soon even despair, beauty, happiness, and ugliness will result from statistics. Our knowledge is underlined by statistics — nothing exists except blind chance, the eternal arrangement of fortuitous patterns. An infinite number of Things taunt our fondness for Order. Seek, and ye shall find; in the end ye shall always find, if you only look with enough fervor; statistics doesn’t exclude anything, and therefore it renders everything possible, or more or less probable. History, on the other hand, comes true by Brownian motion, a statistical dance of particles that never stop dreaming about another temporal world…”
“Maybe even God only exists from time to time,” the Chief Inspector added quietly. He had leaned forward, and with his face averted was listening attentively to what Gregory was spewing forth with such difficulty from deep inside himself.
“Maybe,” Gregory replied indifferently. “But the gaps in his existence are very wide, you know.”
He stood up, walked over to the wall, and stared at a photograph without seeing it.
“Maybe even we…” he began hesitantly, “even we only exist from time to time; I mean: sometimes less, sometimes almost disappearing, dissolving, and then, with a sudden spasm, a sudden spurt that disintegrates the memory center, we merge for a moment… for a day… and we become—”
He stopped abruptly. After a moment he spoke again in a different tone of voice.
“Forgive me for going on like that. It’s all nonsense. Maybe… I’ve had it for today. I think it’s time for me to go.”
“Can’t you stay a little longer?”
Gregory paused. He gave Sheppard a surprised look.
“I suppose so, but it’s been a long day; I think—”
“Do you know Mailer trucking?”
“Mailer?”
“Big trucks with red and gold stripes. You must have seen them.”
“Oh sure, ‘Mailer Goes Anywhere.’ ” Gregory recalled the slogan in their ads. “What about it?” He didn’t finish.
Not moving from his chair, Sheppard handed him a newspaper and pointed to a short paragraph at the bottom of the page. “Yesterday afternoon a Mailer Company truck crashed into a freight train near Amber. The driver, who drove onto the railroad tracks even though he had seen the warning signal, was killed instantly. None of the train crew was hurt.”
Gregory looked up at the Chief Inspector with a puzzled expression.
“He was probably on his way back to Tunbridge Wells with an empty truck. Mailer has a garage there,” said Sheppard. “About a hundred vehicles. They transport food in refrigerator trucks, mostly meat and fish. The deliveries are made at night so the shipment will be available in the morning. Each truck has a driver and a helper — they usually start out sometime in the late evening.”
“The paper only mentions a driver,” Gregory said slowly. He still didn’t understand any of this.
“That’s right. After the truck is unloaded, the driver takes it back to the garage, and the helper stays behind to help move the cargo into the warehouse.”
“The helper was lucky,” Gregory said indifferently.
“That’s for sure. These people work very hard. They have to keep their trucks rolling in all kinds of weather. Mailer services four routes — they form a cross on the map: Bromley and Levering to the north, Dover to the east, Horsham and Lewes in the west, and Brighton in the south.”
“What’s the point of all this?” Gregory asked.
“Each driver has a regular schedule. He’s on every third and fifth night, and he gets compensatory time off if road conditions are bad. The drivers weren’t too lucky this winter. Maybe you remember, there wasn’t any snow at all at the beginning of January. We had a little snow around the third week of January, and we got quite a bit of it in February. The more trouble the highway department has clearing the snow off the roads, the longer it takes the trucks to cover their routes. Their average speed was about fifty miles per hour at the beginning of January, it fell to thirty-five in February; and in March, when the thaw set in and the roads were covered with ice, it dropped another ten miles per hour.”
“What are you getting at?” Gregory asked uncomfortably. He was leaning against the desk with his hands spread wide apart, staring at the Chief Inspector. Sheppard gave him a bland look and asked:
