I glanced at Katharine and Davie. They’d obviously let slip something about what we’d been doing.
“But the children aren’t given any schooling,” Katharine said, impervious to my concern. “Apart from the ones who are chosen to be indoctrinated in the boarding schools.”
Burton laughed bitterly. “’Twas ever thus, dear lady. This university has operated a strict selection policy ever since the thirteenth century. The school you went to usually counted much more than any natural ability.”
I remembered the guy in the outfitters and decided to throw the word he’d used at the old don. “Tell me, doctor, what exactly are Grendels?”
He took the question without any giveaway twitches. The only thing that suggested he might have been surprised was his brief silence. Then he looked straight at me. “From your use of the plural form, I infer that you are not asking about the creature who caused the early Danes no end of bother in the old poem?”
I nodded, keeping my eyes on him. The choir was still singing the Lord’s, or more likely the administrators’, praises in the background.
Burton ran his tongue over his lips. “Grendels? You have been busy, Quintilian. Even I have heard very little about those individuals.” He smiled. “And I, as you may have gathered, am quite a collector of information.”
“Gossipmonger is the word,” said Davie in a low voice as he refilled our glasses.
Burton raised an unsteady hand to decline more sherry. “The Grendels,” he said, lowering his voice again, “are the Faculty of Criminology’s pride and joy. A highly trained, highly” – he glanced at Katharine – “to use your term, highly indoctrinated group of paramilitary operatives. They patrol the outer reaches of the state, especially the so-called Poison Fields, and deal with both interlopers and escapees.”
“Highly trained?” I said.
“Lethal, I should say. Capable of killing people with their bare hands. They’re also heavily armed.” The old don looked out of the window at the shadows that had now fallen across the lawn. “They are violence personified. So much so that they are restricted from entering the central university area. The bulldogs are lightweights compared with Grendels.”
I glanced at Davie and Katharine. It looked like they too were thinking about the mutilated bodies we’d seen in Edinburgh and in the Viewing Room here.
There was a trill from my nostrum. I raised it from my chest and saw Administrator Raphael’s face appear on the screen.
“Citizen Dalrymple,” she said, looking straight at me, “I want a full report from you. Kindly present yourself at the Hebdomadal Council Block immediately. And citizen?”
I returned her stare but didn’t speak.
“Come alone.” There was a dull click and her face disappeared.
“Do you know where you’re going, Quintilian?” Burton asked.
I nodded. “What used to be the Clarendon Building, on the far side of what used to be the Bodleian.” I drew Davie and Katharine towards me as I headed for the door. “Did you find out anything interesting?” I asked in a low voice.
They both shook their heads.
“No one in the Department of Metallurgy would give me much more than the time of day,” Davie complained. “Verzeni sat on my back all the time. I got nothing more than what the murder file shows.”
“Surprise, surprise,” I said, turning to Katharine.
“Same here,” she said. “Though I think Doctor Connington needed a drink by the time I’d finished with him. You?”
“Oh yes,” I said. “I struck twenty-four-carat gold.” I shrugged. “I’ll have to tell you about it later, though.”
“Quint!” they exclaimed.
I pushed them aside and went back. “One more thing, Doctor Burton,” I said, thinking of the high walls and chimney-like towers we’d seen from Dead Man’s Walk, and flying a kite. “What kind of prison facility is located in Christ Church?”
The old academic was leaning forward in the armchair. “Christ Church?” he repeated in a voice that was suddenly even shakier. “Christ Church? They . . . they call that—” He broke off and gave me a pained look, as if the words he was about to speak were already burning his mouth. “They call that the House of Dust.” He didn’t say anything more.
That kept my mind occupied as I went to meet Raphael. Until I remembered my act of arson at the Department of Forensic Chemistry. Maybe the flames were about to be lit under me.
I cut through Noxad, the high walls of the former library glowing pale gold in the failing light, and walked across the path to the administrator’s lair. A pair of bulky specimens in black suits and bowler hats were standing outside the central arch of the two-storey Hawksmoor building. Trout and Perch.
I nodded to them as I approached. “Evening, gentlemen. Or should that be—?”
“Don’t,” Trout said, his heavy face set hard.
“Fair enough,” I said, deciding on discretion. “The chief administrator’s expecting me.”
“You think we don’t know that?” Perch asked, his lips curled.
I tried to look unconcerned as they made a point by blocking my way for a few seconds. The Grendels that Burton had told us about must have been seriously worrying if they were worse than these apes.
After they’d stepped aside, I followed the line of red lights that had suddenly appeared on the floor in front of me into the old building. Well, the outside was old – early eighteenth century, I guessed – but the interior was stunningly high-tech; like the flight deck of a spaceship in one of those high-budget, low-intelligence Hollywood movies that used to be served up, before California fell to the religious right in the first decade of the century. Everything was shiny metal and tinted glass, with wall panels dotted and traced with multicoloured lights thrown in for contrast, the panels being scanned by personnel in high-necked dark suits.
The red line on the floor stopped in front of a highlighted section. I suspected that I’d just stepped on to an elevator pad. The only question was whether the sherry I’d drunk was going to be shaken up or down. There was a sigh of compressed air as a curved glass safety panel came up to my waist. Then, like an Old Testament saint, I was translated upwards. Not, I was relieved to see, to the pastures of heaven but to the first floor. I found myself in a long, airy room with deeply recessed windows looking out over Broad Street. I could see Administrator Raphael at the far end, near her a small group of individuals in the clothing worn by that rank, as well as a few others in academic robes.
The safety panel dropped down and I moved towards the occupants of the expansive room. The walls were hung with portraits of university worthies from days gone by, the sober paintings at odds with the gleaming metal and the glass screens. I wasn’t paying too much attention to the artwork though. I had plenty I wanted to nail Raphael about, as well as certain things I wanted to keep to myself. I was keen to see how she and her colleagues reacted to the outrage I was about to express; it had been building up since we’d been in the suburbs and had got even more intense since Burton confirmed what Pete Pym had told us about the prisons and the slave culture. I also wanted to see how she explained the Grendels. I was beginning to have major suspicions about them, though if it was true that they were kept out of the city centre one of their number would have had trouble murdering Ted Pym. And, last but not least, I wanted to know what Hel Hyslop and Duart had been doing in the Department of Forensic Chemistry.
As it turned out, I didn’t get the chance to broach any of those issues. I reached the gaggle of officials and realised immediately that something critical had happened. Their faces betrayed extreme anxiety and their voices were strained. Doctor Connington, resplendent as usual in his blue and red gown, looked like he was about to keel over. Even Dawkley, the science administrator, was jerking around like a puppet on a string, talking in a hoarse whisper to Professor Yamaguchi and Doctor Verzeni.
Raphael had moved a couple of paces to the rear and had turned her back to the others. She was speakin
g in a clear voice to nobody in particular and I realised that she was using the voice facility on her nostrum. Through the high window behind her I made out the Bridge of Sighs that was originally built to connect parts of Hertford College, now presumably called Hart. I wondered if the enclosed structure with its elegant arch was used by condemned prisoners like the Venetian original had been.
“Why is his nostrum not responding?” I heard the chief administrator say, her voice more animated than I’d ever heard it. “At the very least, why is the tracking signal not being received?” She listened and obviously didn’t get the answer she wanted. “Find him,” she shouted. “Or I’ll send your whole section to the fields. Off.”
I watched as she swung round, her nostrum deactivated. The fields? Did she mean the Poison Fields? And what was that about a tracking signal?
“Citizen,” she said, breathing what sounded very like a sigh of relief. “Just the man I need.”
Her tone, steely but also curiously vulnerable, put me off making a risqué response.
“Someone gone absent without signed and countersigned leave?” I asked.
She nodded, biting her lip.
I ran my eye over the group behind me. None of them was talking now. “Let me guess. Professor Raskolnikov.”
Raphael inclined her head forwards again. “He should have been here half an hour ago. No one is ever late for a Hebdomadal Council meeting. No one. And there is no sign of him on any of the Radcliffe Camera’s surveillance systems.” She looked at me with eyes wide open. “He’s disappeared without trace.” It was clear from her demeanour that no senior academics ever did that either.
I wondered about the gloomy, bearded Russian. Had he tempted fate by taking the name of Dostoevsky’s axe-murderer?
There were a few moments of feverish silence. I let them stretch out. It’s always good to put the squeeze on your employers – especially if they haven’t bothered to propose a fee.
“So you want me to find the professor?” I asked, looking at Raphael with what I hoped was a convincing degree of nonchalance.
“That’s what you’re good at, isn’t it, citizen?” she said, regaining the control she usually exercised over her voice.
“But he’s only been missing for half an hour. Maybe he’s fallen asleep over the latest burglary statistics from the suburbs, maybe he’s got gut rot, maybe—” I broke off when I saw the stony stares my suggestions were inspiring. “All right,” I conceded. “So Raskolnikov would normally be here at this time of day?”
Dawkley stepped forward, his pale face above the spindly neck even more bloodless than before. “Yes, Dalrymple, he’d be here. There is a Hebdomadal Council meeting every evening. He and his colleagues” – he glanced at Yamaguchi and Verzeni – “are special advisers. They attend all our meetings.”
I glanced at Raphael; her face was tense. “And it’s already been made clear to me that arriving late for one of those is a capital offence.”
“So is being facetious, citizen,” the proctor barked. “Professor Raskolnikov is a Fellow of Souls. We’ve already checked. He is not in his rooms there.”
I presumed that Souls was what they now called All Souls. I vaguely remembered that the place was a dons-only establishment, notorious before the break-up of the UK for giving a comfortable home to intellectuals who were too far removed from reality to fit in anywhere else. “How about his place of work? I presume he has an office in the Faculty of Criminology.”
Raphael nodded. “In the Taylorian. He left there at four minutes past seven.”
“The surveillance camera on top of the Martyrs’ Memorial tracked him to the shed on the corner of Broad Street immediately afterwards,” Connington said. “He then took a public-use bicycle and—” The proctor broke off, looking embarrassed.
Raphael was glaring at him. “And . . .?” she prompted, not letting him off the hook.
“And then,” the doctor concluded in a low voice, “all contact was lost.”
There was an uneasy lull.
“It happens from time to time,” the proctor said, trying desperately to look like he knew what he was talking about. “There were a lot of students on bicycles on the Broad. My people are reviewing the tapes. We’ll trace him soon enough.”
“Sounds like you don’t need me,” I said.
Connington’s nostrum made a noise. He glanced at it and breathed a gasp of relief. “We have him.” He spoke into the device and moved towards the nearest room-high transparent plastic panel. “There he is.”
The panel darkened and a detailed image appeared. I recognised the streets of central Oxford. A red square appeared around a specific area and the image was magnified. A digital timer on the screen showed that the footage had been taken at twelve minutes past seven.
“The High,” Connington said. “You observe Queen on the left.” He was referring to Queen’s College. “Increase resolution.” The last words were spoken as a command.
There was the professor, instantly recognisable by his long monk’s beard, which was being blown back in the slipstream along with his gown. He was perched on a bicycle with a silvery frame, his legs perfectly still.
“Gas-powered,” Raphael said, noticing my stare. “Provided free of charge to university members.”
Raskolnikov moved out to the centre of the road as he went past what used to be the Examination Schools. I’d noticed when we’d driven past the building earlier that it now housed the Department of Comparative Penology.
“He’s going to turn,” I said, watching the figure on the screen and feeling a shiver of anticipation run up my spine. He was approaching Rose Lane, the street leading to Dead Man’s Walk. Was that where he was heading?
But he went past the junction, still in the middle of the road. On his left were the buildings and walls of what used to be called Magdalen. Then the image disappeared in a flurry of black and white dots and the screen turned back into a blank plastic sheet.
“What has happened now?” Dawkley demanded, glaring at the senior proctor.
Connington was peering at his nostrum. “Em . . . it seems there was a fault on the camera unit outside Magd.”
“A fault on another unit?” Raphael asked.
Doctor Connington was floundering, his mouth open but no words being produced.
I stepped in to bail him out. “Did the cameras further down the road record Raskolnikov?”
He muttered into his nostrum and a shot of the bridge came up on the screen. He zoomed in on it. There was no sign of the professor.
“Go back a bit,” I said. I pointed at the area that had come up. “What’s that place?”
“The Botanic Garden,” Dawkley said.
“Known as Bot?”
No one answered. They were all too busy staring at the screen. If I’d listened hard enough, I’d have picked up the sound of numerous pennies dropping. The gardens were no more than a couple of minutes’ walk from where Ted Pym’s body had been found on Dead Man’s Walk.
“See you down there,” I called as I headed for the exit, taking my mobile out of my pocket.
I wanted Davie and Katharine to help me with this. What had been so urgent that Professor Raskolnikov had skipped a meeting with the administrators? And more worrying, why weren’t his heavy features coming up on the nostrums of the colleagues who’d been calling him non-stop for nearly an hour?
It was time to do some digging.
I was taken to the Botanic Garden in Raphael’s top-of-the-range Chariot, the canopy an opaque dark blue from the outside. Although there was no siren, everyone else on the roads got out of the way at speed. I thought back to the traffic jams, the lung-burning fumes that had ruined Oxford when I was a kid. At least the new regime had solved that problem – but at what cost? Behind us, a couple of slightly less flashy vehicles brought the rest of the administrators and their advisers. They had their headlights on even though the evening sun was still surprisingly bright. It was glinting through the rain shields and suffusing
the old walls in shades that almost seemed to bring them to life.
“What’s going on, administrator?” I asked as we moved rapidly past the Radcliffe Camera.
She looked at me. “That’s what you’re here to find out, citizen.”
“Cut the oxshit, chief administrator,” I said, raising my voice. I was beginning to suspect she was operating several different agendas. “If you really wanted me to catch the killer or killers, you’d tell me a fuck sight more about the set-up here.”
She didn’t show any reaction to my deliberately pumped-up language – apart from a tight smile. “You’re perfectly capable of obtaining all the information you need on your own, Quint.”
I wondered if she’d been monitoring all my conversations. If I asked her, she wouldn’t admit it. I considered telling her that I’d seen Duart and Hel Hyslop, but decided against it. I didn’t want to show her too much of my hand yet.
We soon pulled up outside the Botanic Garden. There were several Chariots with opaque canopies already on the pavement. Bulldogs were standing around them with their chests inflated, waiting for a command from their handlers. As I got out, I saw Davie and Katharine standing by a grandiose neoclassical gate. I went to join them.
“What’s the story, Quint?” Davie asked. He wasn’t showing any effect from the sherry. No doubt he’d managed to find something to soak it up since I’d seen him.
“Professor Raskolnikov,” I said. “He’s gone missing. He was last seen on the High Street near here.”
“On a bike?” Katharine asked, pointing past the fussy stonework of the archway to a silver two-wheeler with the words “Public Use” stencilled on the seat.
“On a bike,” I confirmed. I waved Raphael and her group over. “Look what we’ve found.”
“Most impressive, citizen,” Dawkley said drily. “There are over seven thousand public-use bicycles in central New Oxford. How do you know this is the one the professor was using?”
House of Dust Page 26
