Our dangerous impulse to make sense of murder

‘On Friday noon, July the 20th, 1714,’ begins the small, perfect 20th-century novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, ‘the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below.’ In the coincidence of crossing the bridge at the same time, explains the writer, Thornton Wilder, these five seemed to have been assembled by pure chance.

Or had they? He entitles this first chapter ‘Perhaps An Accident’. He spends the rest of his book tracing the lives of each until the moment when, in a twang of rope, fate hurled all together into the abyss. Thus is the reader’s interest engaged for the human histories that unfold. But Wilder, an American Christian humanist, falters in his rationalism. His concluding chapter is entitled ‘Perhaps An Intention’.

In fact no evidence of an intention, let alone an Intention, is adduced, and the novel stands as a gem of modern literature without need of any twist of divine intervention. But Wilder just couldn’t help speculating, and the reader cannot help searching.

Searching for a hidden meaning comes so naturally to us. It’s one of the hardest things in life, but especially a journalist’s life, to accept that some big stories may have no meaning. Tremendous events may carry no tremendous implications, but man is an intelligent animal who must always seek to make sense of life’s mess. We forever strain to join the dots; and often they do join; and sometimes joining them early proves a lifesaver.

But sometimes they are just dots. What happened at the Palace of Westminster last week may prove to be of this kind. The knife-wielding Khalid Masood may prove to have been part of no great plan, the agent of no malign external power, a pawn in nobody’s game.