‘Do you believe in your theory?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, yes,’ he says awkwardly. ‘What kind of idiot would I be if I didn’t believe in my own theory?’

  ‘And do you think it could cast some light on what’s happened here?’

  ‘It might.’

  ‘Then, for goodness’ sake, tell me about it.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ George asked dubiously.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure.’

  ‘Well, in my opinion … and it is only my opinion—’

  ‘I swear to God, George, if you don’t get on with it soon, I’m going to hit you,’ I say.

  He smiles self-consciously, and begins again.

  ‘In my opinion, there are basically only two kinds of burglars – I call them the businessmen and the anarchists. Now all the businessmen want to do is to make a quick profit, so they’ll go through your stuff in record time, take what they think they can sell easily, and then get the hell out. They don’t leave much of a mess, but that’s not out of any consideration for you; they have no feelings about you, one way or the other – it’s simply a result of the way they work.’

  ‘And what about the anarchists?’

  ‘They want to steal things, just like the businessmen, and they’ll certainly try to sell what they take away with them, but, in some ways, stealing your property is not as important to them as the act of breaking into your house and causing damage. They’re full of rage at the world in general – and, at that moment, in your house, they’re mad at you in particular – so, more often than not, they’ll take the time to shit in your bed.’

  ‘Apart from the lack of faeces, this would seem to me to fit the anarchy pattern perfectly,’ I say.

  ‘You’re quite wrong, there,’ he tells me. ‘You see, the anarchist doesn’t have much control over the way he goes about things once he’s in the house. He can be tipping out the drawers of your sideboard, when his eye suddenly falls on your display cabinet, and he knows he has to do something about that immediately.’

  ‘Why does he have to do something about it immediately?’

  ‘If you get half-a-dozen behavioural psychologists in one room, the chances are that you’ll get half-a-dozen different answers, but my theory is that there’s something about the particular thing he’s spotted which reminds him of the source of his anger.’

  ‘In other words, he had an unhappy childhood, and one of the things that featured in that childhood was a display cabinet.’

  ‘That’s right. Maybe he felt his mother cared more about the display cabinet than she did about him. Maybe he once accidentally broke an ornament and got the thrashing of his life. Whatever the reason, it’s the trigger for a fresh wave of uncontrollable anger.’

  ‘So he leaves the sideboard and concentrates on destroying the display cabinet?’

  ‘Exactly! Sometimes he’ll come back to the sideboard, and sometimes he won’t – but if he does come back, then what you’ll find on the floor is one layer of stuff from the sideboard, then a layer from the display cabinet, then another layer from the sideboard.’

  ‘It’s a bit like archaeology,’ I say.

  ‘It’s a lot like archaeology.’ George crouches down and sorts through the rubble. ‘Aha!’ he says, ‘it’s exactly as I thought. The coat rack is at the bottom. You see what that means?’

  ‘No,’ I admit. ‘I’m not sure that I do,’

  George stands up and walks over to the door.

  ‘The coat rack was here,’ he says, pointing to some gaping holes in the plaster. ‘It’s the first thing he will have seen when he came through the door, and it’s the first thing he attacked. But it won’t have been easy, because – as you can tell from the holes – the screws were set quite deep into the wall. Now do you see what I’m getting at?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He tugs at the coat rack, but it doesn’t come away immediately. Now a businessman wouldn’t have bothered with the coat rack at all, for obvious reasons. And what are they?’

  ‘The coat rack has no saleable value?’

  ‘Spot on. The anarchist, on the other hand, might have gone for it, but would have given up the moment it became plain to him it was well-anchored to the wall. Because …?’

  He looks at me questioningly.

  ‘Because he wants to do the maximum possible damage, and the coat rack is only slowing him up?’ I suggest.

  ‘Exactly – but your man’s an entirely different kettle of fish. He struggles with the coat rack until he can finally prise it away from the wall – and only when he’s done that does he move on to the next thing, which is the bookcase. Then he deals with your desk, then the filing cabinet, and finally the visitor’s chair.’

  ‘So he’s not a natural anarchist?’

  ‘No, he isn’t. There’s no rage in it. He’s a tidy, organized man. He needed to trash your office to make his point, but he didn’t really want to do it, because – and I’m speculating even more wildly here – to him, disorder is almost a sin. But having once committed himself to being sinful, he set about destroying the office in a methodical way, just as he would have put it together methodically – because that’s the only way he knows.’

  I can’t see Crispin Hetherington having that approach to life at all, I think – so maybe he had to send his father’s butler to do the job!

  The scene plays in my head – Crispin Hetherington standing in the doorway with an arrogant smirk covering his face, and the butler, tall and stately, in tie and tails, waiting for his instructions.

  ‘I want you to destroy this office, Jeeves. Can you do that?’

  ‘Certainly, Master Crispin. I would prefer to go about it methodically. Would you have any objection to that, sir?’

  ‘No, not at all, Jeeves. You just carry on.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  I giggle. I can’t help myself.

  And then I see the new expression on George’s face. He looks very hurt – almost crushed.

  For a moment, I can’t work out what’s happened to bring about this change – and then I understand. We take the piss out of each other all the time, but there are boundaries to that piss-taking which, though never formulated, are instinctively recognized. And he thinks I have gone beyond those boundaries. He has reluctantly shared his precious theory with me, and I – an Oxford smart-arse with letters after my name – can do nothing more than giggle at it.

  ‘I wasn’t laughing at you, George,’ I tell him.

  ‘What were you laughing at, then?’

  ‘Just something that came into my head.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what people always say when they’re caught out showing a lack of respect.’

  ‘I promise you, I wasn’t …’

  ‘Let’s just leave it there, shall we?’

  In order to distract him from his sense of grievance, I tell him about the Shivering Turn, and how I’m sure it’s a code for something else.

  ‘I’ve tried using synonyms for both the words, and it simply doesn’t work,’ I say.

  ‘Maybe it’s an anagram,’ George says offhandedly – as if to suggest that if I can laugh off one of his theories so easily, he’s certainly not going to put a great deal of effort into propounding another one.

  Looking at it from his perspective, I can’t say I blame him.

  I walk down the stairs to the street with him, though my body tells me at every step of the way that this is a mistake.

  Once we’re outside, I say, ‘Thank you very much for your time, George. I really appreciate it.’

  ‘And has my daft theory been of any use to you?’ he asks, giving me another chance to redeem myself.

  I want to say yes – I really do – but the problem is I can’t see any of the gentlemen-oafs who make up the Shivering Turn wrecking my office in quite the way it has been wrecked.

  ‘I don’t see any practical application for it at the moment, but it might well be useful when I’ve collected more information,’ I say.

  He smiles, as if he’s pleased. I’m fobbing him off, and he knows it – but for the sake of our friendship, he’s willing to pretend to believe what I’ve just told him.

  ‘See you around, Jennie,’ he says as he’s walking to his car.

  ‘See you around, George,’ I reply.

  I go to the very end of the ground-floor corridor, where I usually park my bike (this is at the request of the people who run the import-export lingerie business, who feel that the mere sight of a common bicycle would offend their refined clients intent on purchasing dirty underwear) – and it is not there.

  But of course it’s not there! I remember now – after I had used it as an offensive weapon against the Shakespearian ruffians, it was taken down to St Aldate’s police station by the rugby-playing firemen who rescued me.

  And, even if it had been there, do I seriously think I’d be able to use it, when every bone in my body aches?

  I am clearly still in a state of shock, or I would neither have forgotten where the bicycle was, nor imagined that I could ride it. My best course of action is thus to forget this detecting lark for the day, go back to my flat, and rest.

  Yes, that is what any sensible person would do.

  I walk back up the corridor and out on to the street. A taxi is passing, and I flag it down.

  ‘Where to?’ the driver asks, when I have painfully hoisted myself into the back seat.

  ‘St Luke’s College,’ I tell him.

  Remembering our last meeting – and especially that Crispin Hetherington announced he was bored and simply walked out – I’ve no idea how he will react to my unexpected visit now, but when he opens his door he looks neither surprised nor offended, only rather coldly amused.

  ‘Do come in,’ he says, opening the door wider, and making an elaborate sweeping gesture with his hand.

  I look around me. I have seen any number of undergraduate’s sitting rooms in my time, but never one anything like this.

  Some undergraduates bring the worlds they have known previously down to Oxford with them, so that once their pictures and photographs are up, the room looks almost like their old bedroom back home – but these transporters are in a minority.

  For most undergraduates, Oxford represents a new beginning, and they decorate their rooms in a style which reflects the people they believe they are evolving into. The walls of their rooms are thus both a declaration of intent and an exhibition space for newly discovered radicalism, anarchism, feminism, hedonism or pure eccentricity.

  Crispin Hetherington’s room resembles neither of these models. Apart from the bookcase – which is positively bulging with learned texts – and the furniture provided by the college, it is absolutely bare. It contains no photographs, no stereo system, no bric-a-brac of any kind. It is as spartan as a monk’s cell – as soulless as a room that is rented by the hour. I’d like to think that this asceticism of his is as much a stunt as the anarchism and eccentricity of some of the other students, but I can’t be entirely sure that it is.

  ‘Take a seat,’ Hetherington says. ‘I’m afraid I can’t offer you a drink, because I don’t keep any.’

  ‘I’d prefer to stand,’ I tell him. ‘And I didn’t come here for a drink. If you’ll answer just one question for me, I’ll be gone.’

  ‘And what question might that be?’

  ‘Where is Linda Corbet?’

  ‘I have absolutely no idea.’

  ‘I don’t believe that you just forced her on to the London train and then left her to fend for herself. That would have been far too risky for you, because she might have come straight back.’

  ‘And what makes you think we forced her on to the London train at all?’

  ‘You already have the answer to that, because you know that I know that Hugo Johnson and Gideon Duffy were seen at the railway station late last Friday night, and the only possible reason they could have had for being there was to make sure she left.’

  Hetherington laughs. His amusement sounds genuine enough, but with him it’s impossible to be certain.

  ‘Oh dear,’ he says, ‘you’ve got it quite the wrong way round. In fact, thus far, you haven’t got one single thing right.’

  ‘If I’m so far from the truth, why did you try to have me beaten up last night?’ I ask.

  ‘I didn’t,’ he says – and, suddenly, he is sounding distinctly uncomfortable.

  Why does he sound uncomfortable? I wonder.

  And then it comes to me.

  ‘You didn’t want them to do it!’ I say.

  ‘Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent,’ he replies. ‘Do you know who said that?’

  ‘You didn’t want them to do it, and the rest of the Shivering Turn overruled you!’ I say, sticking to the point.

  ‘It was Isaac Asimov – or, more accurately, one of the characters in an Asimov novel.’

  ‘You’re losing your control over them,’ I tell him. ‘You’ve had a good run as puppet master – I’ll give you that – but now you are so clearly losing control.’

  ‘The Shivering Turn was not responsible for the attack on you,’ he says, making no attempt to sound in the least convincing. ‘Each and every one of us has an alibi for last night.’

  ‘I’m sure you do.’

  I want him to say more, of course, and I know that he will – because there is nothing particularly clever about a false alibi, and showing me just how clever he can be is very important to him.

  ‘But let us say, hypothetically and purely for the sake of argument, that the Shivering Turn was responsible for the attack, and that I counselled strongly against it,’ he suggests.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I admit it would have weakened my position if the attack had been a success, but since it wasn’t, and the fact that you are standing there is living proof that it wasn’t, it’s clear that it was the wrong thing to do, and that my advice was the right advice. So the next time we are hypothetically forced to defend ourselves, whose guidance will be followed, do you think?’

  ‘You’ve already failed,’ I say. ‘And the reason you’ve failed is that you haven’t been able to prevent the Shivering Turn from getting itself into a situation in which it is extremely vulnerable.’

  ‘Now that is interesting,’ Hetherington says. ‘In what way is it extremely vulnerable?’

  ‘I’ve only to tell the police that they attacked me, and they’ll be all over you in five minutes.’

  ‘You have no proof.’

  ‘I know that one of your members has a very battered nose because I nutted him in the face, and another has a long bruise along his jaw line where I hit him with the wheel of my bike. What other proof do you need?’

  ‘Maybe you could convince the police that the Shivering Turn attacked you if you really tried,’ Hetherington concedes, ‘but you won’t.’

  ‘Why won’t I?’

  ‘There are two reasons. The first is connected to the fact that you’ll have made a statement to the police about the attack – and don’t deny it, because I know you must have.’

  ‘I’ve no intention of denying it.’

  ‘And yet, despite having your statement, the police haven’t come storming in and arrested us. And why is that? It’s because you lied to them!’

  ‘What do you mean – I lied to them?’

  ‘Well, to pick just one example, you didn’t say that your attackers were wearing William Shakespeare masks.’

  ‘How do you know that they were wearing William Shakespeare masks?’ I ask.

  He sighs. ‘Let’s just say it was a lucky guess, though we both know that’s not true. Now, where was I? Oh yes – you’ve lied to the police, which is perverting the course of justice. You can’t go back now and tell them a completely different story, without getting into a great deal of trouble.’

  He’s right, of course.

  ‘What’s the second reason?’ I ask.

  ‘The second reason parallels the first. Simply put – your ego won’t let you do it.’

  ‘Well, if we’re going to talk about egos …’

  ‘You want to be the one who finds out why Linda Corbet ran away,’ Hetherington says, ‘and you’re terrified the police will beat you to it.’

  I am suddenly hit by an attack of self-doubt. Crispin Hetherington is right about me not wanting the police involved, and I’ve been telling myself that’s because they couldn’t handle this particular situation as well I can.

  But what if he’s right, and it isn’t that – what if the real reason is that I’m terrified they’ll do the job better than I could?

  Am I playing dice with Linda Corbet’s future for purely selfish reasons?

  I don’t think so. I really do believe that if they were investigated by the police, the Shivering Turn would put on an impenetrable united front, whereas by working on my own I just might be able to find a gap in their defences.

  But, even as I reach this conclusion, I know that if I’m wrong, I will never forgive myself.

  ‘Well, well, that’s certainly struck home, hasn’t it?’ Crispin Hetherington asks.

  And suddenly I’ve had enough of this evil little man – suddenly I can’t bear to be in his presence any longer.

  ‘Thank you for your time,’ I say, turning stiffly and heading for the door.

  ‘You’ve really no idea what’s been going on, have you?’ he calls mockingly after me. ‘You don’t even know what the Shivering Turn is all about, although – God knows – it’s all there in the name.’

  As I leave the college, Crispin Hetherington’s last words are echoing around in my head.

  ‘You don’t even know what the Shivering Turn is all about, although – God knows – it’s all there in the name.’

  I walk along the Broad, hardly conscious of the fact that there is anyone else there – hardly even noticing all my aches and pains.

  ‘You don’t even know what the Shivering Turn is all about, although – God knows – it’s all there in the name.’

  ‘Maybe it’s an anagram,’ George Hobson had said, back there in my shattered office.

  He’d never intended it to be a serious suggestion – but maybe he was right anyway!

  Maybe it is as simple as that!

  I am just passing the White Horse. I slip inside and order myself a medicinal gin and tonic.