40 | 4 CRImE AND PUNISHmENT
Another of Turing’s wartime friends, Peter Hilton (the author of Chapter 3), was employed in
the mathematics department at Manchester University and was seeing Turing regularly at this
time. Hilton told me that, before going home that last time, Turing left a note in his university
office: the note contained Turing’s instructions to himself about the work he was going to do
the following week. Another of Turing’s colleagues at the university, computer engineer Owen
Ephraim, who worked side by side with Turing at the computing laboratory from early 1954,
told me: ‘I was the last person to spend working time with Alan’. The two had ‘said cheerio’ as
usual at the end of what turned out to be Turing’s last week at the laboratory. ‘Nobody from the
police or elsewhere ever interviewed me to ask about his behaviour in those last days before his
life ended’, Ephraim said. He continued:
If I had been asked, I would have said that Alan Turing acted perfectly normally during those last
days, and with as much dedication as ever.
Not long before his death Turing made an important appointment with Bernard Richards
(the author of Chapter 35) to hear the details of this young scientist’s exciting new confirmation
of Turing’s theory of biological growth. Tragically the appointment was for the very day Turing’s
body was discovered.^33 Richards says:^34
I had indicated to Turing that I had obtained some startling three-dimensional results showing
a biological solution to his Morphogenesis Equation. He said that our meeting could not come
soon enough. Alas, he never came and I was shocked by the news of his death.
figure 4.1 Extract from Turing’s will, signed by him on 11 February 1954.