Out in the corridor he has already shown himself to be a smart-arse extraordinaire and, even before I sit down, I have decided that I’m never going to get anywhere with him unless I take him down a peg or two first.

  ‘I believe, Crispin, that you are the president of the Shivering Turn Society,’ I say.

  ‘I’d prefer it if you addressed me as Mr Hetherington, and yes, I do have that honour,’ he replies.

  I snort. ‘It’s not really that much of an honour, is it, Mr Hetherington? The Shivering Turn isn’t exactly the United Nations – or even the OU Philatelists’ Association. When all’s said and done, you can only muster nine members.’

  ‘Ten,’ he corrects me, ‘and perhaps, when you’re looking at the society, you should consider quality, rather than just quantity.’

  ‘So your members are all quality, are they?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In what sense of the word?’

  ‘In every sense of the word.’

  ‘Including Jeff Meade?’

  He favours me with a thin, humourless smile.

  ‘You were right, after all,’ he says. ‘We do have only nine real members – Jeff is more of a mascot.’

  ‘Does he know that’s how he’s regarded?’

  ‘Of course not. That would require some degree of sophistication, and he’s about as sophisticated as dried rabbit shit.’

  ‘I might just tell him that,’ I say.

  He wags his finger at me. ‘Now I really wouldn’t do that, if I were you,’ he advises.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it would have completely the opposite effect to the one you intended.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really! You would be hoping to turn Jeff against me, but he would not believe me capable of saying a single unkind word about him, so all you would succeed in doing is making him your enemy.’

  For reasons not yet clear, Johnson and Duffy had spent their interviews stonewalling me, but stonewalling doesn’t interest Hetherington. He not only seeks out conflict – he revels in it.

  ‘Why is the Shivering Turn Society registered with the bursar’s office?’ I ask him.

  ‘Why shouldn’t it be?’

  ‘The reason societies register is so that they can claim the grant – and you don’t look as if you need the money.’

  ‘Appearances can be deceptive,’ he says. ‘I come from a very poor family. Mother is poor, Father is poor, the butler is poor, the footmen are poor, the maids are poor, all twelve of our gardeners are poor …’

  It is a very old joke, and I don’t laugh. I don’t even think he is expecting me to.

  ‘You haven’t answered the question,’ I point out. ‘Is that because you don’t dare to?’

  He smiles again. ‘You’re punching in the dark – just hoping that you’ll hit something,’ he tells me.

  Yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing.

  ‘Will you answer the question, “Or will you, like a cold and errant coward, Abandon all and make the shivering turn?”’ I quote at him.

  ‘Oh, that really is very good,’ he says, clapping his hands together slowly, in ironic appreciation. ‘Very well. Let us just say that the reason I registered the society is because the bursar is a very stupid man, and it amuses me to hide something he would certainly not approve of right under his nose.’

  ‘Would you like to expand on that?’ I ask.

  ‘No, that wouldn’t be any fun at all.’

  ‘Why do Hugo Johnson and Gideon Duffy deny taking Linda Corbet down to the railway station last Friday night?’ I ask, changing tack.

  ‘You’ll have to ask them.’

  ‘I have asked them, as I’m sure you’re only too well aware – and now I’m asking you.’

  ‘I am not my brother’s keeper,’ he says.

  ‘No,’ I concede, ‘but you are your brother’s puppet master.’

  He claps his hands together a second time, then stands up.

  ‘I’ve quite enjoyed our little chat, but now I’m getting bored and I think I’ll go,’ he says.

  ‘I haven’t finished,’ I tell him.

  ‘I cannot find the words to describe how little that is of interest to me,’ he replies.

  ‘Need I remind you, Crispin, that you’re here on the instructions of the dean to answer—’ I begin.

  ‘On the instructions of the dean?’ he interrupts. And then he laughs. ‘You were a student at St Luke’s yourself, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you came from a poor but honest background, and were so incredibly grateful for the wonderful opportunity that had been presented to you?’

  It’s a gross distortion of my situation, but it’s still close enough to make me feel uncomfortable.

  ‘Stop pissing around, and get to the point,’ I say.

  ‘Clearly, though we are both members of the same college, our different backgrounds mean that we view it from a different perspective. To you, the dean is an authority figure who must be obeyed absolutely. To me, he is no more than a servant, just like the scouts and the kitchen scullions. So I am not here because of the dean – I am here of my own free will, in order to help you out in your search for little Jeff Meade’s bit of totty …’

  ‘Did I say she was missing?’

  ‘Don’t insult my intelligence,’ Hetherington says. ‘Feel free, by the way, to report my lack of cooperation to the dean. Who knows, he may decide to have me rusticated – though that would certainly make things rather awkward for him the next time he wants to insinuate himself into my father’s box at the Royal Opera House.’

  I don’t try to stop him, and I wait until he’s almost at the door before I say, ‘Where were you last Friday night?’

  He turns around, and there is a smile on his face which tells me that he’s been waiting for just such a question, because that will give him the opportunity to demonstrate the full extent of his contempt for me.

  ‘I don’t know where I was last Friday night,’ he says. ‘I haven’t worked it out yet. But I expect that by the time anyone of any importance asks me that same question – if anyone of any importance ever does ask it – I’ll have a nice little story prepared which involves me being in my room with two or three of my chums.’

  I wonder if a more softly-softly approach would have yielded better results, and quickly realize that it wouldn’t have. Crispin Hetherington would have been just as objectionable whatever approach I’d used, because being objectionable and superior is both what he enjoys the most – and what he does best.

  Jeff Meade is a young Paul Newman. I don’t mean that he actually looks like Newman (for a start, his hair is dark and his eyes as black as coal) but he has the same instant effect on me as Paul Newman would have done if he’d walked in the room – the same ‘Oh my God, is he for real?’ sensation. And for all that Crispin Hetherington might refer to him as ‘Little Jeff’, he is at least three or four inches taller than his esteemed leader.

  So his appearance is the first thing I notice. The second is that, unlike all the other members of the Shivering Turn Society I’ve talked to, he seems as nervous as hell – which might explain his regular trips to the loo.

  ‘Take a seat, Jeff,’ I say.

  When he hears my voice, he immediately starts to relax.

  ‘Your accent didn’t really come through properly when you were just calling out our names, but it does now,’ he says as he sits down. ‘You’re from up north, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ I agree.

  ‘From Lancashire,’ he says, narrowing it down. ‘Maybe even from Whitebridge?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  He smiles. ‘I’m from Accrington!’

  If he were still in the north, he would probably regard anyone from my home town as an alien being, to only be approached with caution – ‘careful lad, they’re right funny folk in Whitebridge.’ Here in the south, one hundred and eighty-one miles from what all true Accringtonians know with certainty is the centre of the universe, he is inclined to embrace anyone who comes from within a ten-mile radius of that town as a next-door neighbour.

  ‘What school did you go to?’ he asks. ‘Was it the Vale?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I was on my school’s football team. We played your school in the Lancashire Challenge Cup last year, and—’

  ‘Vale’s not my school,’ I interrupt him.

  ‘But I thought you said …’

  ‘It was a school that I went to a long time ago. It’s nothing but ancient history now.’

  ‘But surely you must still have some of the old school spirit left, because, after all—’

  ‘Look, I’d love to sit around chatting to you about the north, Jeff, but time is passing, and I’ve got a lot of questions to get through.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course, I can understand that,’ he says, looking really dropped on. ‘Ask away.’

  ‘Tell me about Linda Corbet.’

  ‘She’s … she’s sort of a friend.’

  ‘Really? Crispin was much more explicit than that – he described her as your bit of totty.’

  ‘We did go out a couple of times – to the cinema and that,’ he agrees reluctantly.

  ‘Where did you first meet?’

  ‘There’s a tea shop near her school called the Mad Hatter’s. We met there.’ He pauses, as if counting beats in a well-rehearsed script. ‘Funnily enough, we might never have got together if I hadn’t been such a clumsy oaf. I wasn’t looking where I was going, you see, and I crashed straight into her. Her tea tray went flying halfway across the room. I apologized, bought her another cup of tea, and we got talking. And we sort of went on from there.’

  Well-rehearsed, but not well-edited, I think. If you’re going to lie, keep it simple.

  ‘What made you go to the Mad Hatter’s tea room in the first place?’ I ask him.

  His mouth falls open, as if he hadn’t been expecting the question – which, of course, is exactly the case.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ he says.

  ‘Well, it’s not exactly a student hangout, now is it? It’s not close to this college, it’s not close to the library – it’s not even close to the shops. So why were you in the area?’

  ‘I’d … I’d been out running.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought it was a particularly good place to run, either. The road is busy, the pavements are narrow – in your situation I’d have chosen to run down by the river.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t,’ he says, clenching his jaw stubbornly, like a child who’s been caught out in a lie.

  ‘Tell me about the night you were arrested,’ I say.

  ‘That was all a big misunderstanding.’

  ‘That’s what a lot of people say when the bobbies feel their collars,’ I tell him. ‘So the seven of you – you, Linda Corbet, and five of your mates – had all been out on the piss and—’

  ‘We weren’t with them. We’d been to the pictures, and it was only by chance that we ran into them outside the Playhouse.’

  In other words, he’s implying that she had absolutely nothing to do with the Shivering Turn. But the more its members claim she wasn’t a part of it, the more convinced I am that she was.

  ‘Which film had you been to see?’

  There is fresh evidence of panic on his face.

  ‘What?’ he asks, to give himself time to think.

  ‘The film! What was it called?’

  ‘I … I can’t remember. It was a while ago now.’

  ‘It wasn’t really, you know. It was less than two months.’

  ‘Well, anyway. I don’t remember.’

  ‘You amaze me,’ I tell him. ‘Carry on with what you were saying.’

  ‘We were standing there, just chatting, and then these two bobbies came along. We weren’t doing anything wrong, but they—’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, you were totally innocent, and they were agents of the fascist state,’ I say, in a bored voice. ‘The fact is, you were caught red-handed, and you haven’t got the balls to admit it.’

  Angry men make mistakes, so I’m doing all I can to make Jeff angry – and I would appear to be succeeding.

  ‘Look, if we’d done anything wrong, why did the police let us go?’ he demands.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I admit, ‘but it could just have something to do with the fact that Linda’s father is a police inspector.’

  He visibly pales.

  ‘She didn’t tell me that Mr Corbet was a policeman,’ he gasps.

  That was hardly surprising, was it? Young girls don’t like to put their boyfriends off, and to say your father is a policeman – or works in a slaughterhouse, or has been arrested on some particularly unsavoury charges – is pretty much guaranteed to do just that.

  ‘Where were you on Friday night?’ I ask.

  ‘I was in my room. I had an essay to write.’

  ‘You can’t remember the name of the film you saw, but you can instantly recall where you were last Friday evening,’ I muse. ‘That is interesting, because if you’d asked me that very same question, I’d have had to think about it for at least a minute.’

  ‘I’m nearly always in my room writing essays,’ he tells me. ‘I find the work very hard.’

  It’s a good recovery on his part, since it not only explains his instant recall, but also invites me to feel sympathy for him.

  ‘What I don’t understand is why it was Hugo Johnson and Gideon Duffy who escorted Linda down to Oxford railway station on Friday night,’ I say. ‘As her boyfriend—’

  ‘I’m not her boyfriend.’

  ‘That’s how she introduced you to her mate, Janet.’

  ‘She was just showing off to Janet – and I didn’t want to humiliate her by denying it.’

  ‘Then let me rephrase it,’ I suggest. ‘As her friend, I would have thought you should be the one to see her off, rather than Johnson and Duffy.’

  ‘Hugo and Gideon weren’t anywhere near the railway station on Friday night.’

  ‘I don’t see how you can be so sure of that, given that, by your own admission, you were in your room all night.’

  ‘If that was what they’d done, they would have told me.’

  ‘Not if they had a reason to keep it from you.’

  ‘You don’t understand. We’re always totally honest with each other. We have to be. We’re a band of brothers.’

  Yeah, right, I think. Well, if he’s going to deny that the Shivering Turn had anything to do with Linda’s leaving, there’s not much point in asking why she decided to leave.

  ‘Moving on,’ I say, ‘what made you decide to join the Shivering Turn Society?’

  He folds his arms across his chest – which I think means that he’s suddenly gone all defensive.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I have joined?’ he asks. ‘Most students join all kinds of societies.’

  ‘Yes, that’s true, but they’re mostly general-interest societies or societies connected with their studies – and you’re a geographer.’

  ‘Aren’t geographers allowed to be interested in poetry?’

  ‘Of course they are, but if you were going to study a poet, why choose a particularly obscure one?’

  ‘Robert Cudlip is an undiscovered genius.’

  ‘Is he now?’

  ‘Yes, he is.’

  ‘And would you care to quote one of his poems to me?’

  Jeff Meade clears his throat. ‘“And dare you face your urges and desires—”’

  ‘Not that one,’ I interrupt. ‘I’d like to hear one of his other poems.’

  ‘I don’t know any of the others off by heart.’

  ‘Just tell me their titles, then,’ I suggest.

  ‘I haven’t been a member of the society for long,’ he mumbles.

  ‘Which raises another interesting question,’ I say. ‘How did you come to join the society?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Was there a notice in the junior common room which advertised the society?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So how did you hear about it?’

  He is silent for some time, and when he does finally speak, it is with a mixture of reluctance and pride.

  ‘I was invited to join,’ he says.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t understand the question,’ he says.

  ‘I’ve just talked to three other members of the society. They’re all in their final year, and they all come from what you might call “privileged” backgrounds, in which having an indoor swimming pool is probably considered a basic necessity of life. In addition, they were all educated at expensive public schools, and are studying either the arts or classics. That’s them. And then there’s you – a working-class, first-year geographer.’

  ‘Are you saying I’m not good enough to be a member of the Shivering Turn Society?’ he demands angrily.

  ‘No,’ I tell him. ‘From what I’ve seen of the other members of the society, I’d say the Shivering Turn isn’t good enough for you. But that’s not the point. I can see why you might want to join the society. You’re the only lad from Accrington in St Luke’s – maybe the only lad from Lancashire – and you’re feeling very isolated. So when these posh fellers offer you the hand of friendship, you make a grab at it. But what’s in it for them?’

  ‘Maybe I’ve got a winning personality,’ he says – and I can tell that’s not his own line, but one he’s been fed.

  ‘Do they ever make jokes you don’t quite understand?’ I ask, embarking on the course that Crispin Hetherington warned against, because I don’t have anywhere else to go. ‘Do you ever wonder what it is they’re laughing at?’

  ‘No,’ he says, unconvincingly.

  I am reluctant to press on with this line of questioning, because he is finding life difficult enough already, without me making him feel like a piece of shit. But then I remember the look on Mary Corbet’s face, and realize I don’t have any choice in the matter.

  ‘Back in medieval times, they’d have given you a hat with bells on to wear,’ I say.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re the Shivering Turn’s jester. You surely realize that. And I’ll tell you something else – you’ll be the only one without an alibi for Friday night. All the rest have covered for each other, but you’re the outsider, and nobody cares what happens to you.’