Monroe said nothing.
Rankin gave a quick cough and began looking through some papers on his desk. Then he stood up slowly and walked over to a wall of shelves. Crouching down, he lifted a huge pile of folders and loose sheets and dumped them on his desk. Licking a fingertip, he began to riffle through the pile. A few moments later he stopped.
'Yes, knew it was here somewhere.' He handed a green folder to Monroe. 'Spenser was a clever chap, had plenty of good ideas.'
'Was?' Rogers asked.
'Yes, left us before Christmas. Got offered a rather tasty number in Boston; MIT, I believe.'
'What was he doing exactly?'
'IQ studies was his thing,' Rankin said and looked out the window to the grey horizon. 'Not my bag, I'm afraid, a bit too dry for my taste.'
'What did the tests involve?' Monroe asked, quickly scanning the pages in front of him.
'He had his own system, quite an unorthodox slant — believed that IQ was directly related to the physical connection between the two hemispheres of the brain, the corpus callosum. You're aware of the idea of the split brain?'
Monroe nodded. 'Vaguely, layman's stuff.'
'Back in the 1960s research appeared to show that the two halves of the brain were very different. The left brain is the analytical side, the right is the imaginative, 'artistic' hemisphere. Roger Sperry won a Nobel Prize for coming up with the idea.'
'And Julius Spenser was developing these theories?'
'He was a Sperry disciple. Studied under him at Caltech in the late 1980s.'
'Dr Spenser did what, exactly?' Rogers asked. 'How did he conduct his tests?'
'Well, it's all there.' Rankin nodded his head towards the papers on their laps. 'He had a sample of around fifty: forty-seven in the end, I think. They were all young women in this phase.'
'This phase?'
'He conducted a similar set of tests on young men the month before. The girls spent most of the day on written IQ tests, then physical manipulation tests, response and reflex analysis, spatial-awareness experiments. They also had full medicals and brain scans.'
'Medicals?' Monroe frowned.
'Yes, it was a key element in Spenser's proposal. He reckons IQ is directly related to physical parameters.'
'What did the medicals involve?'
'Well, now you're asking. I wasn't present myself. In fact, I wasn't even in Oxford that day. But Spenser obviously submitted his research schedule for approval a month or two earlier. Let's take a look.'
Monroe handed back the folder. 'Yes, yes, here we are,' Rankin said after a few moments. 'CAT scan basically, full-body spectrum. The girls did the psych tests here, then went over to the John Radcliffe. Expensive stuff, but Spenser was very good at getting grants.'
Monroe remained silent as he leafed through the material and handed it to Rogers a page at a time.
'So, I take it Spenser wasn't working on his own?'
'No, no. He was always there, of course, a good supervisor with excellent management skills. He had three assistants for the tests and then another three, young female post-docs at the hospital conducting the ah. . body searches.' He gave the policemen a lopsided grin. 'Analysis of the results was done by young Bridges.'
'Bridges?'
'Malcolm, Malcolm Bridges — on his way to becoming a fine psychologist, that one.'
'And Malcolm Bridges works here?'
'Yes, but he spends all his spare time at the Bodleian with Professor Lightman, the Chief Librarian. He's a dedicated young chap. Don't honestly know how he fits it all in, actually.'
'Is he here at the moment?'
'Should be. Let me think. It's Friday' He looked at his watch. 'I'll buzz him.' He picked up the phone and tapped in three numbers. 'Nope, not there yet, I'm afraid.'
'No problem.' Monroe stood up. 'We'll get in touch with him. I'd be grateful if we could take this file with us, Dr Rankin. We'll guard it well, and make a copy.'
'Yes, yes, certainly,' Rankin said quickly. 'Is there anything. .?'
'Yes, actually, there is one other thing, Dr Rankin. Do you have anything to do with a young man named Russell Cunningham?'
Rankin looked at him blankly.
'I saw him earlier, leaving the car park in a very flash sports car.'
'Cunningham? Yes, yes, indeed. I can't say I know the boy, he's a first-year. Seen him in his car, of course, who hasn't?' Rankin laughed.
'You've probably heard of his father,' Rogers said.
'Quite right, yes … the library man, the famous philanthrope. Come to think of it, I think Bridges is Russell's supervisor. But what's he got to do with anything?'
Monroe extended his hand, ignoring the question. 'Thank you very much for your time, Dr Rankin. And for these.' He tapped the folder clutched to his chest.
Monroe and Rogers exited into unexpected bright sunshine. Beyond the car park they could see rugby goalposts and a squad of players in hooded tops running around the field.
'I want to see Malcolm Bridges at the station a.s.a.p.,' Monroe said. 'Get back to the station and drag Greene away from whatever he's doing. I want him to go through this list of girls. I want to know the whereabouts of all of them and I want each of them interviewed, understand?'
Rogers nodded.
'Meanwhile, I'll get a warrant. I think it's time to pay Mr Russell Cunningham a little visit, don't you?'
Chapter 29
Oxford: 29 March, 11.05 a.m.
In the golden days described by Evelyn Waugh, when Sebastian Flyte and his teddy bear Aloysius came up to Oxford they chose to reside in a suite of rooms on the ground floor of Tom Quad, Christchurch, where his lordship had the walls painted in duck-egg blue upon which he placed delicate Chinese lithographs. The best part of a century later, a few undergraduates who came from an entirely different social bracket from the Flytes (but possessed comparable amounts of disposable cash) preferred greater independence from the university. So they had their parents buy them apartments — costing upwards of a quarter of a million pounds — overlooking the Cherwell and located close to the amenities of central Oxford.
Yuppie hutches such as these came with piped vacuuming (to make the maid's life easier) and subterranean garaging for three cars. It was in just
such a place that Russell Cunningham was enjoying his first year at Oxford University. He found it a perfect place to entertain, and considered it to be an entirely appropriate pad for the only son of one of Britain's wealthiest self-made entrepreneurs, Nigel Cunningham, who was known among the Oxford snob class (who were happy to accept his multimillion-pound donations) as 'the Library Man'. This was an epithet always delivered with heavy sarcasm because, in spite of the fact that Cunningham had recently financed the building and the stocking of the university's largest library, anyone who was anyone in Oxford assumed that the only books in Nigel Cunningham's home were ones that you coloured in.
Monroe was on his way out of the police station when Inspector Rogers called from his car parked outside Cunningham's apartment. 'I think you'd better get over here, sir. You'll think it's your birthday and Christmas rolled into one.'
Five minutes later, Monroe was pulling up outside an exclusive apartment block just off Thames Street and opposite the Head of the River pub. Rogers met him as he stepped out of the car.
'Just look at this frigging place,' Rogers muttered. 'I couldn't get close to this on an inspector's salary, and some snotty-nosed eighteen-year-old kid brings his girlfriends back here in his sodding Morgan.'
Monroe grinned. 'Never had you down as the bitter type, Josh.'
'Yeah, well,' Rogers replied, shaking his head. 'I think we might bring the little bastard down a peg or two.'
Monroe stared at him, his eyes narrowing. 'Lead the way,' he said and followed his junior officer to the doors of the apartment block.
Two uniformed officers were waiting for them in the hall outside Cunningham's apartment. Monroe and Rogers crossed the polished concrete floor, and entered a vast living room
where they could hear an Oscar Peterson track spilling from a pair of oversized Bang and Olufsen speakers. The wall opposite the entrance was an expanse of glass with views over the Cherwell and the sandstone spires of Oxford. In the foreground, the two detectives could see the sun-splashed tower of Christchurch Cathedral. For some reason, at that moment Monroe recalled a tale about Oxford that he had heard when he had himself been an undergraduate here. Apparently, glider pilots and balloonists loved flying over the city, not just for the views but because there were always good thermals. The jokey explanation for this was that the thermals were produced from the hot air of the dons, but the real reason was the ubiquitous sandstone which reflected the heat of the sun.
Russell Cunningham was reclining in a black leather George Nelson chair close to the window. A police officer was standing close by. Cunningham was tall, blond, handsome and tanned from what Monroe later learned had been a brief but extremely pleasant skiing holiday in Andorra, from which he had returned two weeks earlier. Dressed in designer jeans and a black V-neck cashmere sweater, he looked every inch the pampered son of a billionaire. He stood up as Monroe strode in, but the DCI ignored him and followed Rogers through the room to a corridor beyond.
Three doors led off the corridor; one of them was ajar. Monroe followed Rogers into a small window-less room lit by a single dull red bulb in the ceiling. Shelves were filled with CD cases. Against the far wall were two flat-screen monitors and in front of them was a small console. Above the monitors the wall was covered with pornographic images, a sordid collage of young women tied up, mutilated, disfigured.
Monroe looked at the scene, his face betraying no emotion. Rogers leaned over the console. 'Our boy's certainly having fun here,' he said wryly.
'What exactly is this stuff?'
'State-of-the-art cyber-porn,' Rogers replied. 'He's got web cams set up all over the place — girls' college rooms, the gym showers, ladies' toilets, East Oxford student houses. He keeps careful records, too.' He waved a hand toward the stacks of discs on the shelves. 'Looks like we've struck gold.'
'Maybe,' Monroe replied. 'Let's take him in. We'll leave this stuff here. Get a couple of tech guys to go through it, OK?'
Monroe returned to the living room, his mind racing.
'Perhaps you could explain what all this is about?' The young man had a mid-Atlantic twang to his voice.
'I was rather hoping you could do that, Mr Cunningham.'
Cunningham looked at the floor for a second and then fixed Monroe with a superior glare. 'Detective? Admiral. .?' He waved a hand in the air.
'Just a DCI, sir. That is, Detective Chief Inspector. . Monroe.'
'Well, DCI Monroe, I take it you have a warrant? The other guy. .'
'Inspector Rogers.'
'Yes, he waved a bit of paper under my nose before stomping all over my place.'
'Oh yes, Mr Cunningham, we do have a warrant. And I'm placing you under arrest. Taylor,' Monroe snapped, turning to the uniform standing over Cunningham. 'Take him in.'
The young man laughed unconvincingly while Monroe read him his rights. 'Terrible mistake you are making. Huge. I assume you know who my father is?'
'Fully aware of the facts, Mr Cunningham. Don't worry yourself about that. I'll be along in ten minutes, Taylor,' Monroe told the constable. 'See that Mr Cunningham is properly looked after.' And he turned back towards the corridor.
Chapter 30
Croydon: 29 March, 2 p.m.
Charlie Tucker's funeral was a bleak, rainswept affair, steeped in suburban misery. The service was held in a concrete chapel built in the early 1980s a few miles outside Croydon, south of London. Fewer than a dozen people turned up. They dashed from their cars across the tarmac of the glistening car park with coats over their heads and umbrellas aloft. In the chapel there was a pervading smell of damp clothes mingled with ageing lilies.
For a short time after Charlie's body had been discovered the police had been working on the principle that he had committed suicide. But then CSI evidence from the scene proved conclusively that he could not have fired the weapon. The investigators began a murder inquiry.
Laura and Philip were the last to arrive and sat together at the back, listening in silence to the taped organ music, each submerged in their own thoughts.
Philip had hardly known Charlie. To him he'd been just another face at Oxford, a friend of Laura's. They had met at parties and had had the occasional argument about politics. Philip had been pretty, left-wing, which was more or less de rigueur for students in the 1980s, but Charlie, he recalled, had been rabidly Marxist.
Laura had grown used to the fact that Charlie was dead. Almost a week earlier, when the news had been thrust upon her so viciously, she had been shocked to the core of her being. This wasn't because she had been particularly close to Charlie. But he had been a part of her youth. Perhaps because she had hardly seen him in almost twenty years she still associated him with happy times, with college, freedom, a time just after the end of childhood, a time when, in memory at least, the world seemed to be a more innocent place. Now that he was dead, it felt like a part of herself had been consumed too.
Only later had come the terrible sense of dread that she now felt. The deaths, the slaughter and the violence had started to close in on her. Now Laura could not get it out of her mind that Charlie's death had to be linked in some way with her investigation.
Since returning to Oxford, she and Philip had made precious little progress. They had confirmed that the 1851 murders had been committed on exactly the nights when the relevant heavenly bodies had entered the sign of Cancer and that a five-body planetary conjunction had been expected on 20 July that year. The only difference between those murders and the current ones was that the killers had not started their series of crimes at the vernal equinox because the conjunction of planets had occurred at a quite different time of the year. All this was important, she knew, and it put her theory beyond reasonable doubt. But it still felt as though their search for clues to the identity of today's murderer was running out of steam — and the next killing was scheduled for the following evening, 30 March.
The funeral service was a dismal affair. The sound of a synthesised choir spilling gently from speakers in the ceiling carried the two hymns, and the best anyone in the congregation could muster was a barely audible mumble. As the second hymn petered out, the coffin bearing Charlie's body was lifted carefully by the pall-bearers and carried to a hearse outside. The mourners got up from their pews slowly and drifted towards the doors.
Outside, the hearse pulled away and the group followed, walking past a memorial garden, along a winding lane to an area with fewer graves where the soil had been freshly turned.
Walking back past the chapel, Laura and Philip had almost reached their car when they heard someone running up behind them. Turning, they saw a young woman in a long white dress, slowing to a stop. She looked about twenty-five, short, slim, with dark brown hair falling freely to her waist. She had huge blue eyes, a pixie's face, thin eyebrows and a shapely nose. Laura could see that she had been crying: she wore no make-up but her eyes were bloodshot and the skin beneath her eyes looked bruised.
'You're Laura and Philip, yeah?' she asked.
Laura nodded.
'I, I was Charlie's, er, Charlie's girlfriend. My name's Sabrina.' She extended a hand and as she did so she looked around as if to check that no one was watching them. A middle-aged couple from the service walked past, and Sabrina waited until they were out of earshot.
'I was asked to give you this.' And she slipped a small cold metal object into Laura's hand.
It was a key.
'Put it in your pocket,' Sabrina said quietly but firmly.
'Who. .?'
'Charlie, of course. He knew he was in trouble. Please, just listen,' Sabrina whispered. 'Charlie was particularly fond of a biography of Newton. You'll find it in his apartment. Number 2, Chepstow Street, New Cross. You have to go there today. His brother is sorting out his poss
essions and settling his rent tomorrow morning. The key has a number on it. Now, I have to go. Good luck.' And with that, she turned on her heel and walked swiftly away.
Stunned for a moment, Laura and Philip simply let her go. Then, snapping out of her silence, Laura made as if to go after the girl. But Philip held her back.
'I think we should leave her be.'
Charlie had lived in a tiny two-roomed place in a narrow street off the main road in busy New Cross, South London. It was one of six apartments that made up what had probably once been a rather grand house. Laura and Philip had gone straight from the funeral and parked in Chepstow Street a few doors down from the house. They reached the apartment on the second floor via a dimly lit winding staircase.
The apartment was not as bad as Laura had expected. Charlie had done his best to disguise the crumbling plaster and the general tattiness of the place with a lick of paint and some tasteful framed prints. His furniture was cheap and old. It had probably come with the place when he moved in, but he had invested in a couple of rugs and cushions, which helped a little. The influence of a woman was obvious; Sabrina had smartened things up, Laura thought as she wandered around the main room. There was a rudimentary kitchen at one end and a TV and bookcases at the other. She peered into the small bedroom that led on to a minuscule bathroom. A strong smell of cigarettes and alcohol pervaded the entire apartment.
'God, I feel like we're trespassing,' Laura said quietly.
'Well, I suppose we are.' Philip grinned. 'Gives me the creeps.'
'Oh, come on. Sabrina made it clear that Charlie wanted us to come here. Don't feel guilty. He trusted you.'
'Yeah, and look what happened after he saw me.' Laura sat down heavily in a swivel chair in front of a small desk. On the desk was a computer and beside it a messy pile of papers and an ashtray filled with cigarette ends. 'The Newton biography.' Laura nodded towards a bookcase next to the TV. 'Do you want to try that one? There's another in the bedroom.'
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