Five seconds tick by, then ten – with each second seeming like an age. Feet are shuffled, coughs are emitted, but no one seems to have the courage to shout out, ‘Get on with it,’ because they recognize – as I do – that he has the power.

  Finally, he does speak.

  ‘This country does not need pasty-faced democrats at all. It needs to return to its roots – to the aristocratic men of spirit, who had no fear and no compunction, and thus made Britain great. I’m talking about men like Lord Alvanley, who once gambled three thousand pounds he could ill-afford in White’s Gentlemen’s Club on which raindrop would slide to the bottom of the window first.’

  After the tension, at least half the audience is now laughing, but not – they believe – so much at Hetherington as with him. The Union has a tradition that even in the most serious debates, there are some speakers who will deliver humorous speeches, and what they think they are hearing now is a clever parody.

  But I know it isn’t.

  ‘Men like Lord Palmerston,’ Crispin Hetherington continues, ‘who was prepared to start a Europe-wide conflict because one British subject had been insulted by the Greek government. Men like Sir Winston Churchill, who would have let millions die in India before granting the country its independence. They had the courage to face their urges and desires – to embrace both the good and bad they owned.’

  As he sits down, I can see from their faces that several members of the audience are trying to identify the quote he closed with. It never occurs to them that he is quoting himself.

  The vote is taken (democracy, it turns out, is quite a good thing), and I return to the bar. It’s well after midnight by now, and all but the more hardened drinkers have left; so unlike earlier, I have no difficulty at all in getting a stool.

  I have only just sat down when Crispin Hetherington slides onto the stool next to mine. I am not surprised. In fact, I now know him well enough to have been expecting it.

  ‘Good evening, Miss Redhead,’ he says. ‘Have you come to see me in what you fondly imagine are my last few hours of freedom?’

  ‘You’re getting paranoid, Crispin,’ I tell him (the pot calling the kettle black!). ‘I didn’t know you’d be here, and I have no idea what you are talking about now.’

  He clicks his tongue in rebuke.

  ‘Come, come, the condemned man is at least entitled to a little honesty from his enemies, isn’t he?’

  ‘After everything you’ve done, you contemptible little shit, I don’t think you’re entitled to any consideration of any kind – and I still don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  He frowns. He has scripted this encounter as verbal fencing between two civilized adversaries, and now I have gone and spoiled it all with a personal insult. For a second, he seems about to leave, but then he decides that the scene he’s written in his head is a really good one, and it would be a pity to waste it.

  ‘You’re being very tiresome,’ he says, ‘but I suppose I should have expected no better. Very well, I’ll spell it out for you. I had a phone call from William, the oikish landlord of the Blind Beggar, who informed me that you and a certain Chief Inspector MacBollock had paid him a visit and asked him how often we’d rented his function room.’

  How much time had elapsed between us leaving the Blind Beggar and me entering the Union building? Twenty minutes at the most. Yet that had been long enough for Hetherington to have been informed of what we’d done.

  And there, I think, goes DCI Macintosh’s element of surprise.

  ‘I can only assume that what that visit presages is that the police are now almost ready to swoop down on us, drag us off to the police station, and put us through the third degree,’ he continues.

  ‘If that’s really what you think is about to happen, you’re taking it very calmly,’ I say.

  ‘Why wouldn’t I be calm?’ he asks. ‘We’re all very well prepared for whatever it is you’re going to throw at us. Besides, what’s the point of playing the game if there isn’t some danger attached to it – if there isn’t, in fact, a chance that the game itself will completely destroy you?’

  ‘Which game are you talking about?’ I say. ‘The game you played with Linda Corbet? Or the one you’re playing with me?’

  He giggles, in an almost girlish way.

  ‘Oh, neither of those,’ he says. ‘Nothing so parochial. What I’m talking about, my dear Miss Redhead, is the game of life.’

  SIXTEEN

  It is six twenty-three in the morning, and I am in front of St Luke’s boathouse, looking down at the Isis.

  The sun began to rise over an hour ago, but the air which engulfs me is still cold enough to make my body shudder occasionally. Or maybe the shuddering has nothing at all to do with the temperature. Maybe it is the anticipation – half-hope, half-dread – which makes me tingle so.

  That I am here on my own is DCI Macintosh’s idea. It is his Plan B, now that it has become clear his Plan A isn’t going to work.

  ‘The trick in a situation like this one is to produce the unexpected,’ he told me, when we first arrived at the boathouse. ‘If Crispin Hetherington is expecting us to arrest all the Shivering Turn …’

  ‘He is. He made that quite clear last night.’

  ‘Then they’ll also be expecting us to come in mob-handed, and when it isn’t like that at all – when there’s only you, a civilian, waiting for them – it will unnerve them.’

  ‘I’m not sure that will work,’ I’d said honestly.

  ‘Trust me, lassie, I’ve been in this job a long time, and I know what will work and what won’t,’ he assured me.

  Yes, I’d thought, you might well have been in the job a long time – but you don’t know Crispin Hetherington like I’m starting to.

  The morning mist – wispy but impenetrable – still clings softly to the river like a lover who knows his time is running out, and through this mist I hear a sound which is neither the birds, joyously heralding the arrival of a new day, nor the water, lapping gently against the bank.

  The sound I hear is being produced by a voice which is clearly human, but has a strangely metallic edge to it.

  At first, I cannot distinguish any individual words, but as the still-invisible boat draws ever closer, the sounds separate to create meaning.

  ‘In … out … in … out … in … out …’

  I wonder if it was the same on that terrible night in the Blind Beggar’s function room – Crispin Hetherington sitting there then, watching as one after another of the members of the Shivering Turn Society violated Linda Corbet, and chanting – with the same rhythm, but with a salacious relish quite absent now – ‘in … out … in … out … in … out …’

  The prow of the boat bursts through the mist, and I can see the broad backs of the rowers as they heave on the oars, cutting through the water and propelling the craft forward.

  ‘In … out … in … out … in … out …’

  And now I can see the cox, sitting at the stern of the boat, with a megaphone strapped to his head.

  As the boat steers in towards the boathouse, I note that Jeff Meade is not one of the crew members.

  Of course he isn’t! He might be tolerated – simply because he is needed – in their sordid little society, but there is no way they would ever allow riff-raff like him to join the crew training for that holy of holies, the Summer Eights.

  The rowers cannot see me, but there is no way that Crispin Hetherington could have failed to notice my presence there on the bank. Yet, despite this, he keeps his attention focused on the task in hand, and though I don’t enjoying feeling a grudging admiration for him, there’s nothing I can do about it.

  The boat reaches the boathouse, and is lifted out of the water by the crew. This is the point at which a mistake in handling it might result in damage to the craft, and Hetherington watches the whole process with real concern in his eyes, because this is not some girl you can use for your own sick pleasure and then just throw away – this is the college’s best boat.

  Only when the boat is safely stowed does Crispin Hetherington finally turn towards me and say, ‘So where are the police? Are they hiding behind the boathouse?’

  ‘No, they’re waiting behind the boathouse,’ I correct him. ‘They have no need to hide. They haven’t done anything wrong.’

  ‘And neither have we,’ Hetherington replies. ‘I must say, it was jolly sporting of DCI Macintosh to allow us to finish our practice.’

  He frowns, as if something has just occurred to him. But it is an act – almost everything he does is an act.

  ‘Or maybe it wasn’t sporting at all,’ he continues. ‘Maybe Macintosh was just giving us the opportunity to tire ourselves out, thus making it easier for him to question us.’

  The rest of the crew have gathered around us in a loose semi-circle. They do not ask what’s going on – because they already know.

  I look from face to face. Even moments before they are due to be arrested, they are assessing me and imagining what they could do to me – just as they will have assessed Linda Corbet and imagined what they were about to do to her.

  I am a twenty-nine-year-old woman, who knows that the police are just around the corner, yet I feel frightened and alone. How must Linda, a girl of seventeen, have felt when she realized that she was alone – that whatever they chose to do to her, no help would be forthcoming?

  My anger for Linda overcomes my fear for myself.

  ‘Well, I can see two of my Shakespearian friends here,’ I say, looking with burning contempt first at the rower with the bruise running along his jaw line, and then at the one with a plaster on his nose. ‘But who’s the third of the courageous trio? If he’d care to step forward, I’ve got something I’d like to give him before the police arrive.’

  None of them moves even a fraction of an inch.

  ‘You seem to have your monkeys well trained indeed,’ I tell Crispin Hetherington.

  ‘Go ahead and mock as much as you wish,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t matter who gets the first laugh; it’s only the last laugh that counts.’

  I was right about how to handle the situation, and Chief Inspector Macintosh was wrong. Doing it this way hasn’t unsettled them. If anything, it’s only tightened their bond.

  Almost half-heartedly, I take the police whistle out of my pocket, and blow it as hard as I can.

  The mist has completely lifted, and the sun has begun its daily task of warming up the river. Most of the rowers have been cautioned, handcuffed and led away to the Black Maria vans, which are parked just up the lane, but there is still enough activity in front of the St Luke’s boathouse for the crews from other colleges, out for their own early morning practice, to ignore their coxes’ harsh megaphone instructions to focus, and instead to turn their heads to see what is going on.

  ‘I’d like you to come to the station and monitor some of the interviews,’ DCI Macintosh tells me.

  ‘Is that normal?’ I ask, surprised – because it wouldn’t have happened in my day.

  ‘Well, of course it’s not normal,’ Macintosh replies. ‘Nothing about this whole bloody operation is normal. But you’ve been involved in the investigation for several days now, and we’re going in cold, so you just might pick up on something we miss.’

  ‘What do you want me to do, sir?’ George Hobson asks.

  ‘I want you to perform a minor bloody miracle, Sergeant Hobson,’ Macintosh replies.

  ‘Do you have any particular miracle in mind, sir?’ George asks, taking it in his stride.

  ‘Yes, I want you to find a way to stop Tom Corbet from finding out what’s going on.’

  ‘It’s a bit more than a minor miracle that you’re asking for there, sir,’ George says. ‘It’s Tom Corbet’s own nick we’ll be using.’

  ‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ Macintosh demands, with a hint of anger – or perhaps just frustration – in his voice. Then he softens a little. ‘Look, George, just do your best. Keep him out of the loop for as long as you can – because when he does find out, God alone knows what he might do.’

  Behind me, I hear a voice say, ‘I’ll see you at the station then, will I, Miss Marple?’

  I turn. Crispin Hetherington is standing there. His hands are cuffed behind his back, which is enough to subdue the spirits of most people, yet there is a broad, excited grin on his face.

  And with a sinking feeling I suddenly realize what part of me has always known – that, as far as he’s concerned, this may not be part of the original game as planned out, but it’s certainly nothing more than an extension of it.

  I am sitting at a table in the room adjoining Interview Room B. On the table sits a microphone.

  ‘It’s the latest thing,’ Macintosh says, seeing me looking questioningly at the mike. ‘It allows us to talk directly to whoever is conducting the interview.’

  Whatever will they think of next!

  I look through the two-way mirror into the interview room. There, three people are sitting around a table.

  Hugo Johnson – big, beefy, and still, despite the situation he finds himself in, looking very arrogant – is one of them.

  The other two are detective police constables.

  ‘He’s Norman Bassett,’ Macintosh says, indicating the larger of the pair, ‘the most fearless rugby prop forward I’ve ever seen. The little bloke with him is Gordon Hough, the Federation snooker champion. They both know about playing games and they both know about strategy – and they’re the two best interrogators I’ve got. If anybody can get Johnson to spill his guts, it’s them.’

  ‘If they’re the best you’ve got, then why not put them on Jeff Meade,’ I suggest. ‘I think he’s the weakest link.’

  I really do think that. Not only is he the youngest of the group, but he’s also the most innocent or, to put it another way, the least corrupted. There might be a part of him which is already lost – the part which allowed him to lead Linda Corbet to the Blind Beggar, when he knew what was waiting for her there – but there is also the part which, only a couple of days ago, was still so childlike that he thought it would be really good fun to discuss the football rivalry between his school and my school back in Lancashire.

  ‘I’d put Bassett and Hough on Meade if we had him,’ Macintosh says, ‘but unfortunately we don’t.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He’s not in his rooms, and he’s not anywhere else in the college. I’ve issued a general alert, which means that both the crime cars and the foot patrols will be keeping an eye open for him, but so far they’ve come up with sweet Fanny Adams. If you ask me, he’s decided to do a runner.’

  Or else he’s been persuaded by Crispin Hetherington to do a runner, I think.

  I’m seeing Hetherington’s puppet-master hand behind everything that happens. It might sound like ever-increasing paranoia on my part – but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’ve got it wrong.

  Bassett has switched on the tape recorder, and begun the process of cautioning Johnson.

  ‘Where’s Johnson’s solicitor?’ I ask Macintosh.

  ‘He says he doesn’t need one.’

  ‘What about the rest of them?’

  ‘Apparently, they don’t need one either.’

  They’re such arrogant little shits – but that may well turn out to be to our advantage!

  The interrogation proper is about to start. I lean forwards, so I’m closer to the mirror, and then wonder why I did that, when I could hear perfectly clearly from where I was.

  ‘Were you in the function room of the Blind Beggar public house on Friday the third of May 1974?’ DC Bassett asks Hugo Johnson.

  ‘Yes,’ Johnson replies.

  ‘And was there a schoolgirl, by the name of Linda Corbet, also present that night?’

  ‘A schoolgirl!’ Johnson says, with a smirk on his face.

  ‘What’s wrong with calling her that?’ Bassett wonders. ‘After all, it’s what she is.’

  ‘It just makes her sound so young.’

  ‘She is so young.’

  ‘She’s well above the age of consent.’

  ‘So was she there or not?’ Bassett asks.

  ‘She was there.’

  ‘We have a witness who says that, before Linda Corbet arrived at the pub, she had been drugged.’

  ‘If your witness really says that, then he’s got it all wrong. She was as clear-headed as any of us.’

  ‘And how clear-headed was that?’

  ‘We’d all had a couple of drinks, but we were far from drunk.’

  ‘Did you have sexual intercourse with Linda Corbet on the night in question?’

  ‘Oh yes, indeed I did.’

  ‘So you are aware, are you, that you could well be charged with raping this young girl – and that if you are found guilty, you could go to prison for at least ten years?’

  ‘I didn’t rape her,’ Johnson says dismissively. ‘None of us raped her. She wanted it – she was gasping for it – and we were all more than pleased to give it to her.’

  ‘Can I ask a question?’ I say to Macintosh.

  ‘Yes, that’s what you’re here for – to ask the questions that we wouldn’t think of asking,’ the chief inspector says.

  ‘So what do I do?’

  ‘There’s a switch on the base of the microphone. When you’re ready to ask your question, click it – but don’t speak too loudly, or you’ll probably shatter Norman Bassett’s bloody eardrum.’

  I click on the mike and say softly, ‘Ask him if Crispin Hetherington had sex with Linda.’

  There is only the slightest flicker of Bassett’s eyes to indicate that he has received the message in his earpiece.

  He asks the question.

  Johnson says no, Hetherington didn’t.

  And the interesting thing to me is that he looks surprised to hear himself saying it. It’s almost as if his mind had registered the fact that Hetherington had abstained while it was all going on, but now, for the first time, he is considering the implications of that.

  ‘What was that all about?’ Macintosh asks me.

  ‘I’m not sure yet – I’m just feeling my way,’ I say.