‘I’m going out for five minutes, Molly,’ he shouts to the barmaid in the frilly blouse.

  The function room is in the annexe. It is above the storeroom, and is reached via an outside metal staircase in the car park.

  ‘Is there any other way to get in or out?’ I ask my spotty guide.

  ‘No, this is it.’

  The ex-copper in me notes that the pub is guilty of a serious breach of the fire regulations, but the private detective side of me is growing increasingly excited, because although I have still had no real indication that this was the room the Shivering Turn used, it is certainly the sort of place they would have selected.

  The room itself is rectangular. There is a small stage at one end of it, and concealed behind the curtain is a basic light board from which it is possible to dim most of the lights and activate a couple of spots. Most of the rest of the place is taken up with tables which have seen better days, and chairs in a variety of styles. It is all rather seedy, but I don’t think that would have bothered Crispin Hetherington – in fact, he might even have seen that as an added attraction.

  ‘Was this function room booked last Friday?’ I ask the spotty youth.

  ‘Might have been,’ the youth replies, noncommittally. He ostentatiously consults his watch. ‘We have to leave now. I promised Molly that I’d only be gone for five minutes.’

  He walks towards the door, but I stay where I am, close to the shabby little stage. When he reaches the door, he seems – from his body language – to be surprised I am not just behind him.

  He turns fully around. ‘Listen, I’ve already told you once, we’ve got to go,’ he says.

  I open my bag, and take out the roll of bank notes that Mary Corbet gave me. The spotty youth notices it, and his gaze instantly becomes so intense that I’m almost surprised the roll doesn’t ignite.

  I sit down at one of the tables, and indicate that he should join me. His promise to Molly is discarded like an empty Coca-Cola can; he crosses the room and takes the seat opposite mine.

  ‘We’re going to play a game,’ I tell him.

  ‘What kind of game?’

  ‘It’s a very simple one, really. I ask you a series of easy questions, and if, at the end of each question, you give me an answer that I like, then you win a cash prize. All right?’

  ‘All right,’ he agrees.

  ‘Was this room used last Friday?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I slide a fiver across the table, and watch it disappear. Then I peel another five pounds off the roll, put it on the table in front of me, and flank it with my hands, palms down.

  ‘Who was it who hired the room?’ I ask.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He makes a grab for the fiver, but I am quicker, slamming the palm of my right hand on top of it.

  ‘That’s really not good enough for a cash prize,’ I tell him.

  ‘I think they were students from the university.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘They talked posh – like they had plums in their mouths.’

  I slide the note towards him, and peel off another.

  ‘Do you know any of their names?’

  ‘No. Why would I?’

  ‘You might have heard them addressing each other by name.’

  ‘I didn’t.’ He looks down at the fiver lying on the table with real yearning. ‘Can I …?’

  ‘No!’

  I reach into my bag and take out the series of photographs I last showed to Harry Garstead, the railway porter, in the Red Lion.

  I lay the photographs on the table.

  ‘Do you recognize any of these?’

  He studies the photographs for the shortest possible time he thinks he can get away with, then says, ‘Maybe if you put some more money on the table, it might, you know, sort of jog my memory for me.’

  ‘It doesn’t work like that,’ I tell him. ‘You have to earn it – and you can only earn it by telling me the truth.’

  He looks at the photographs again.

  ‘This one,’ he says, holding up the picture of Crispin Hetherington.

  ‘How do you happen to remember him?’ I ask testingly.

  ‘It’s the way he looks at you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He looks at you as if he thinks that you’ve just crawled out from under a stone.’

  That sounds like good old Crispin to a tee.

  ‘Any more?’ I ask.

  He picks out four more pictures. One of them is not a Shivering Turn, but the other three are – and that’s plenty good enough for me.

  ‘Who served the drinks?’ I ask. ‘Was it you, or was it Molly?’

  This is another trick. If he says either of them served the drinks, I’ll know he’s lying – because the very last thing the Shivering Turn would have wanted was an audience.

  ‘Nobody served them,’ he says. ‘They paid for all their drinks in advance, and said if we’d just leave the stuff up here before they got started, they’d serve themselves.’

  ‘What drinks did they order?’

  ‘Crates of beer and bottles of vodka.’

  That sounds about right. No mixers, but pints of beer with neat vodka chasers. Real macho stuff.

  ‘Bloody wimps!’ the youth says. ‘That’s what they were – bloody wimps. They didn’t drink much more than half of what they paid for.’

  No, they wouldn’t have, I think – because they were into something much more intoxicating.

  We have come to the crunch. I peel fifty pounds off my roll, lay it on the table, and slide the photograph of Linda across to him.

  ‘Was she here?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes,’ he says.

  He makes a fresh grab for the notes, but I am quicker.

  ‘I’ll want more than that before you win the jackpot prize,’ I say. ‘Much more.’

  He screws up his eyes in concentration.

  ‘I didn’t see her in here, but I saw her outside,’ he says.

  ‘Outside where?’

  ‘In the car park – a few feet from the foot of the stairs. I think she’d just got out of a car.’

  ‘What was she wearing?’

  ‘She was in a school uniform.’

  ‘What colour was her blazer?’

  He screws up his eyes again. ‘I think it was purple.’

  Close enough.

  ‘Anything else?’ I ask.

  ‘I think she’d started partying long before this party ever began.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘She wasn’t very steady on her feet. If it hadn’t been for the bloke who was with her holding her up, I think she would have fallen flat on her face.’

  I have been keeping back one photograph, but now the time is right, and I show it to him.

  ‘Was this the lad who was holding her up?’

  ‘Yes, that’s him,’ he agrees, identifying Jeff Meade.

  I hand him the notes, thinking, as I do, that this is the one and only time I have used any of the money that Mary Corbet gave me.

  I will not be spending the rest, because I am not working for Mary Corbet any more.

  Now, I am working for Linda.

  And for myself!

  FOURTEEN

  It’s eight o’clock in the evening, on what feels as if it has already been a very long day. I am sitting in the beer garden of the Head of the River pub on Folly Bridge, watching the River Isis flow slowly and calmly by.

  And it can afford to be slow and calm, I think, perhaps a little bitterly, because it knows where it is going and is pretty confident of getting there. Also, it has not been beaten up in the last twenty-four hours. I only wish I could say the same of myself – on all those counts.

  There are two men with me.

  One is George Hobson, who was the first person I called after I’d left the Blind Beggar.

  ‘You argue a good case, Jennie,’ he’d said back then, when I’d breathlessly outlined everything I’d done since I broke the Shivering Turn code, ‘but if you want the police to launch a full-scale investigation, it’s no use just convincing me – you’ll have to persuade one of our big beasties to get behind it.’

  And that is why I am here – to persuade the big beastie, who is the third person at the table, to get behind it.

  The big beastie’s name is Ken Macintosh. When I first met him, he was a detective sergeant with a bushy beard that crows could have happily nested in, and a shock of jet-black hair. Now he is a detective chief inspector, his beard has been trimmed short enough to make him a passable James Bond villain, and his hair has turned completely white.

  He catches me looking at him.

  ‘If this job doesn’t turn your hair white, then you’re not doing it properly,’ he says in a Scottish accent which seems totally unaffected by twenty years living in England.

  I am glad it’s Ken Macintosh. I don’t know him well, but I think I can both trust and respect him.

  Macintosh picks up his pint, and takes a deep swig.

  ‘Right, lassie,’ he says to me, ‘if you’re willing to talk, then I’m more than willing to listen.’

  ‘There are two sides to this – the Linda Corbet side and the Shivering Turn side,’ I explain. ‘From Linda Corbet’s side, it all started just before Christmas. She’d been planning to read medicine, right here in Oxford – I think she might have taken that decision partly to please her father – but her best friend told her that she simply wasn’t good enough to make it.’

  ‘That’s not exactly what you’d expect from someone who was your best friend,’ Macintosh says. ‘In fact, she sounds like a little bitch to me.’

  I picture Janet as she was in the Mad Hatter’s tea room. She’d been so calm and confident – and absolutely broken-hearted that, by her own actions, she’d lost the girl who she believed would be the love of her life.

  ‘I think she meant it for the best,’ I say to Macintosh. ‘Anyway, instead of being sensible and accepting that she might have to lower her sights, Linda started getting depressed, and the quality of her school work fell off.’ I take a sip of G&T. ‘And now, before we can go any further with Linda’s story, we need to talk about the Shivering Turn.’

  I tell him all about the purpose for which the society was formed, how the members created a poet called Robert Cudlip, and the reasons they registered the society with the bursary.

  ‘The two sides eventually intersect in the tea shop,’ I say finally. ‘That’s where Linda Corbet met Jeff Meade.’

  ‘And you don’t think that was accidental?’ Macintosh asks.

  ‘I’m bloody sure it wasn’t. She was targeted. And it’s no coincidence that it was Jeff, of all the members of the Shivering Turn, who picked her up. He’s a good-looking boy – and they used him as bait. That’s the reason they invited him to join the society in the first place.’

  ‘There could be a second reason, as well,’ George Hobson suggests. ‘If something went wrong, they needed a fall guy.’

  ‘That’s true,’ I agree. ‘Anyway, they persuade her that because she’s so interested in literature, she’s been wasting her talents by studying science – and maybe they’ve got a point, because there’s certainly more literature than science in the bookcase in her bedroom. They probably told her that – though it might take a little longer than she’d been planning – she could still get accepted by an Oxford college, but on the arts side. They may have hinted that if she applied to St Luke’s, they would be able to use their influence with their tutors on her behalf.’

  ‘Isn’t it possible that the only thing she was really interested in was this Jeff Meade boy?’ Macintosh asks sceptically.

  ‘Oh, I think she certainly was interested in Jeff – in a sort of chaste, teenage-crush sort of way,’ I tell him. ‘As I said, he’s a very good-looking boy. But if it had been just Jeff she was interested in, she’d never have gone to the meeting of the Shivering Turn Society, to hear a talk about Robert Cudlip. And it would have been Jeff’s name, not a supposed poem by Cudlip, which she would have embroidered onto her blouse.’

  ‘Maybe she only did the embroidery to fool her parents into thinking that she was interested in this nonexistent poet,’ Macintosh says.

  ‘She didn’t know he was nonexistent,’ I point out, ‘and she never told her parents anything at all about it. She didn’t use the Shivering Turn as an alibi while she did something else. In fact, she came up with an alibi – going over to study at her friend’s house – so she could attend a meeting of the Shivering Turn.’

  ‘And you say they set up the Shivering Turn Society before they targeted Linda Corbet?’ Macintosh asks.

  ‘Yes.’

  Macintosh sighs. ‘It all seems rather elaborate,’ he says, ‘perhaps over-elaborate. Are you sure you’re not reading into all this something that simply isn’t there?’

  I’m losing him, I realize in a sudden wave of panic. And if I lose him, I lose the entire Thames Valley police, because nobody – neither a lower-ranking officer nor a higher-ranking officer – is going to be willing to second-guess a detective chief inspector.

  I wonder what I can do to bring him back, and realize that my only chance is to attempt to lead him deep into the alien minds of Crispin and his gang.

  ‘Of course it’s elaborate,’ I say. ‘That’s the whole point of it. It’s a game, and the more unnecessarily complicated it is, the more they enjoy it.’ I can see he’s still not convinced. ‘They didn’t have to invent a poet. They could have called themselves the Wordsworth Society. That would have worked just as well. But it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as much fun – and it wouldn’t have given them the same feeling of superiority. It’s like … it’s like …’ I catch myself waving my hands helplessly in the air, ‘… it’s like fox hunting, which is probably something else they all indulge in.’

  ‘Go on,’ says Macintosh – still sitting on the fence.

  ‘The object of the whole exercise is supposedly to catch the fox, but in some ways that’s a bit of an anti-climax, because once he’s dead, it’s all over,’ I say. ‘But the ritual and pageantry beforehand, the gathering in front of a pub all properly decked out according to your place in the hierarchy, the whipping-in of the hounds, the blowing of the post horn – ah, that’s something else. And then there’s the thrill of the chase, and the sense of excitement they feel when they can smell the victim’s fear as they close in for the kill. What does tearing the fox apart – or virtually tearing the girl apart – matter after that?’

  I stop, exhausted. But I can see it’s worked – can see that Macintosh is playing the same horror movie in his mind that I’m playing in mine.

  Linda is led up the iron stairs and into the function room by her friend Jeff Meade, whom she trusts.

  She doesn’t know she’s been drugged. All she does know is that she’s feeling a little queasy, and she hopes she won’t fall asleep or be sick during the talk on Robert Cudlip, because she really wants to impress her new friends with her interest and her intelligence.

  Jeff opens the door, and almost pushes her into the room.

  And what does she see? She sees a group of young men – naked save for their mortarboards and gowns – who begin baying like wild animals the moment she is inside.

  She tries to turn around, but Jeff will not let her pass. And then they are on her, and what feels like a thousand hands are probing and pinching her body.

  DCI Macintosh looks as if he’s about to be sick. Then he closes his eyes and takes several deep breaths.

  ‘What do you think happened next?’ he asks.

  ‘They took her back to her home – both her parents were out for the night – and got her to pack a bag. Then they took her down to the railway station, and put her on a train to London.’

  ‘Did she do all this voluntarily, do you think – or did they force her to do it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I admit. ‘One possibility is that she asked them to help her, because she couldn’t bear the thought of facing her parents.’

  ‘Have her mum and dad heard from her since she left?’

  I shake my head. ‘No. Her father thinks it will be quite some time before they do. In fact, I think there’s at least a part of him that feels they’ll never hear from her again.’

  And her mother thinks she’s dead, I remind myself – but I don’t mention it, because Mary Corbet is in a minority of one.

  ‘What’s the other possibility?’ Macintosh asks.

  ‘They weren’t expecting her to react as badly as she did. Maybe they’ve seen a few of those pornographic films in which the girl who is ravaged turns into a nymphomaniac who loves every minute of it. Whatever the case, they realize they can’t just let her loose, because she’ll run screaming to the police, and then they’ll be in trouble. So they put her on the train.’

  ‘And what happens once she’s reached London?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ I say. ‘If she was liable to scream rape at any moment, she’d have been as much of a danger to them on the train as she would have been on the streets of Oxford, so I think that at least one of them must have gone to London with her.’

  ‘And once they got there?’

  ‘She and her escort would have met at the station, and then she’d have been taken off somewhere.’

  ‘Kidnapped, you mean?’

  ‘I’m sure the Shivering Turn would think of it more as providing her with a refuge until she’d calmed down, and was prepared to be sensible,’ I say.

  ‘Are you suggesting they’d put her in some sort of mental asylum?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But wouldn’t that be terribly expensive – especially in London?’

  ‘With the greatest respect, sir, what you have to understand from the outset is that money is absolutely no problem at all to these little shits. If they’ve had to bribe a less-than-ethical doctor to lock her up in a clinic for the mentally unstable, they’ll have had no difficulty in raising the cash.’

  Macintosh knocks back the remainder of his pint.

  ‘You tell a good story, but I’m still not entirely convinced it’s any more than something you’ve fashioned out of a series of coincidences and unrelated facts,’ he tells me.