House of Dust (35 page)

“Why is his nostrum not responding?” I heard the chief administrator say, her voice more animated than I'd ever heard it. “At the very least, why is the tracking signal not being received?” She listened and obviously didn't get the answer she wanted. “Find him,” she shouted. “Or I'll send your whole section to the fields. Off.”

I watched as she swung round, her nostrum deactivated. The fields? Did she mean the Poison Fields? And what was that about a tracking signal?

“Citizen,” she said, breathing what sounded very like a sigh of relief. “Just the man I need.”

Her tone, steely but also curiously vulnerable, put me off making a risqué response.

“Someone gone absent without signed and countersigned leave?” I asked.

She nodded, biting her lip.

I ran my eye over the group behind me. None of them was talking now. “Let me guess. Professor Raskolnikov.”

Raphael inclined her head forwards again. “He should have been here half an hour ago. No one is ever late for a Hebdomadal Council meeting. No one. And there is no sign of him on any of the Radcliffe Camera's surveillance systems.” She looked at me with eyes wide open. “He's disappeared without trace.” It was clear from her demeanour that no senior academics ever did that either.

I wondered about the gloomy, bearded Russian. Had he tempted fate by taking the name of Dostoevsky's axe-murderer?

There were a few moments of feverish silence. I let them stretch out. It's always good to put the squeeze on your employers – especially if they haven't bothered to propose a fee.

“So you want me to find the professor?” I asked, looking at Raphael with what I hoped was a convincing degree of nonchalance.

“That's what you're good at, isn't it, citizen?” she said, regaining the control she usually exercised over her voice.

“But he's only been missing for half an hour. Maybe he's fallen asleep over the latest burglary statistics from the suburbs, maybe he's got gut rot, maybe—” I broke off when I saw the stony stares my suggestions were inspiring. “All right,” I conceded. “So Raskolnikov would normally be here at this time of day?”

Dawkley stepped forward, his pale face above the spindly neck even more bloodless than before. “Yes, Dalrymple, he'd be here. There is a Hebdomadal Council meeting every evening. He and his colleagues” – he glanced at Yamaguchi and Verzeni – “are special advisers. They attend all our meetings.”

I glanced at Raphael; her face was tense. “And it's already been made clear to me that arriving late for one of those is a capital offence.”

“So is being facetious, citizen,” the proctor barked. “Professor Raskolnikov is a Fellow of Souls. We've already checked. He is not in his rooms there.”

I presumed that Souls was what they now called All Souls. I vaguely remembered that the place was a dons-only establishment, notorious before the break-up of the UK for giving a comfortable home to intellectuals who were too far removed from reality to fit in anywhere else. “How about his place of work? I presume he has an office in the Faculty of Criminology.”

Raphael nodded. “In the Taylorian. He left there at four minutes past seven.”

“The surveillance camera on top of the Martyrs' Memorial tracked him to the shed on the corner of Broad Street immediately afterwards,” Connington said. “He then took a public-use bicycle and—” The proctor broke off, looking embarrassed.

Raphael was glaring at him. “And . . .?” she prompted, not letting him off the hook.

“And then,” the doctor concluded in a low voice, “all contact was lost.”

There was an uneasy lull.

“It happens from time to time,” the proctor said, trying desperately to look like he knew what he was talking about. “There were a lot of students on bicycles on the Broad. My people are reviewing the tapes. We'll trace him soon enough.”

“Sounds like you don't need me,” I said.

Connington's nostrum made a noise. He glanced at it and breathed a gasp of relief. “We have him.” He spoke into the device and moved towards the nearest room-high transparent plastic panel. “There he is.”

The panel darkened and a detailed image appeared. I recognised the streets of central Oxford. A red square appeared around a specific area and the image was magnified. A digital timer on the screen showed that the footage had been taken at twelve minutes past seven.

“The High,” Connington said. “You observe Queen on the left.” He was referring to Queen's College. “Increase resolution.” The last words were spoken as a command.

There was the professor, instantly recognisable by his long monk's beard, which was being blown back in the slipstream along with his gown. He was perched on a bicycle with a silvery frame, his legs perfectly still.

“Gas-powered,” Raphael said, noticing my stare. “Provided free of charge to university members.”

Raskolnikov moved out to the centre of the road as he went past what used to be the Examination Schools. I'd noticed when we'd driven past the building earlier that it now housed the Department of Comparative Penology.

“He's going to turn,” I said, watching the figure on the screen and feeling a shiver of anticipation run up my spine. He was approaching Rose Lane, the street leading to Dead Man's Walk. Was that where he was heading?

But he went past the junction, still in the middle of the road. On his left were the buildings and walls of what used to be called Magdalen. Then the image disappeared in a flurry of black and white dots and the screen turned back into a blank plastic sheet.

“What has happened now?” Dawkley demanded, glaring at the senior proctor.

Connington was peering at his nostrum. “Em . . . it seems there was a fault on the camera unit outside Magd.”

“A fault on another unit?” Raphael asked.

Doctor Connington was floundering, his mouth open but no words being produced.

I stepped in to bail him out. “Did the cameras further down the road record Raskolnikov?”

He muttered into his nostrum and a shot of the bridge came up on the screen. He zoomed in on it. There was no sign of the professor.

“Go back a bit,” I said. I pointed at the area that had come up. “What's that place?”

“The Botanic Garden,” Dawkley said.

“Known as Bot?”

No one answered. They were all too busy staring at the screen. If I'd listened hard enough, I'd have picked up the sound of numerous pennies dropping. The gardens were no more than a couple of minutes' walk from where Ted Pym's body had been found on Dead Man's Walk.

“See you down there,” I called as I headed for the exit, taking my mobile out of my pocket.

I wanted Davie and Katharine to help me with this. What had been so urgent that Professor Raskolnikov had skipped a meeting with the administrators? And more worrying, why weren't his heavy features coming up on the nostrums of the colleagues who'd been calling him non-stop for nearly an hour?

It was time to do some digging.

I was taken to the Botanic Garden in Raphael's top-of-the-range Chariot, the canopy an opaque dark blue from the outside. Although there was no siren, everyone else on the roads got out of the way at speed. I thought back to the traffic jams, the lung-burning fumes that had ruined Oxford when I was a kid. At least the new regime had solved that problem – but at what cost? Behind us, a couple of slightly less flashy vehicles brought the rest of the administrators and their advisers. They had their headlights on even though the evening sun was still surprisingly bright. It was glinting through the rain shields and suffusing the old walls in shades that almost seemed to bring them to life.

“What's going on, administrator?” I asked as we moved rapidly past the Radcliffe Camera.

She looked at me. “That's what you're here to find out, citizen.”

“Cut the oxshit, chief administrator,” I said, raising my voice. I was beginning to suspect she was operating several different agendas. “If you really wanted me to catch the killer or killers, you'd tell me a fuck sight more about the set-up here.”

She didn't show any reaction to my deliberately pumped-up language – apart from a tight smile. “You're perfectly capable of obtaining all the information you need on your own, Quint.”

I wondered if she'd been monitoring all my conversations. If I asked her, she wouldn't admit it. I considered telling her that I'd seen Duart and Hel Hyslop, but decided against it. I didn't want to show her too much of my hand yet.

We soon pulled up outside the Botanic Garden. There were several Chariots with opaque canopies already on the pavement. Bulldogs were standing around them with their chests inflated, waiting for a command from their handlers. As I got out, I saw Davie and Katharine standing by a grandiose neoclassical gate. I went to join them.

“What's the story, Quint?” Davie asked. He wasn't showing any effect from the sherry. No doubt he'd managed to find something to soak it up since I'd seen him.

“Professor Raskolnikov,” I said. “He's gone missing. He was last seen on the High Street near here.”

“On a bike?” Katharine asked, pointing past the fussy stonework of the archway to a silver two-wheeler with the words “Public Use” stencilled on the seat.

“On a bike,” I confirmed. I waved Raphael and her group over. “Look what we've found.”

“Most impressive, citizen,” Dawkley said drily. “There are over seven thousand public-use bicycles in central New Oxford. How do you know this is the one the professor was using?”

I tapped the side of my nose. “Call it intuition, administrator.”

“Or a highly developed sense of smell,” Davie said under his breath. He looked at the science administrator with distaste.

I put my hand on his arm. “Doctor Connington,” I called. “We'll take the centre. Get the bulldogs to spread out and start searching. See if they can find anyone who saw the professor.” I looked through the gateway and into the gardens. There didn't seem to be a soul around.

“You'll be lucky, Dalrymple,” Dawkley said with a shake of his head. “The garden is out of bounds after seven o'clock. Students and university staff are expected to be at their desks in the evenings.”

I gave him a dubious look. “That doesn't apply to university professors then?”

He turned away abruptly.

“Let's check this place out,” I said to the others.

So we did. There was no sign of the Russian in the garden itself. He wasn't lurking behind a tree or hiding in any of the greenhouses, he wasn't in the rockery, he wasn't up to his knees in the cultivated bog. I led the line out into the meadow to the south. Twilight was well advanced now, but I could still see the walls and twin shafts of the former Christ Church beyond Dead Man's Walk. It was then I remembered that Elias Burton had called the college founded by Henry VIII “the House of Dust”. What was that about?

We followed the path down towards the river, Davie and Katharine a few yards on either side of me and the bulldogs spread out across the playing fields. A branch of the Cherwell – now the Char? – swung round close to us and I heard the soft purr of a motor.

“Punting for lazy folk,” Katharine said, pointing to the low craft on the water. A pair of aquatic bulldogs were manning the punt, their bowler hats replaced by bright orange helmets.

I saw what Katharine meant. Although the men had poles, they were using them to probe the depths of the water. The craft was powered by a small engine and presumably steered by some kind of programmed rudder as there was no helmsman.

Then I looked to the front. At the same moment a bulldog on the shore let out a loud cry. Before I knew what I was doing, I was sprinting forwards. Not that there was any point in hurrying. The figure strung up among the verdant branches of a weeping willow on the riverbank wasn't going anywhere.

“What has happened to him?” Administrator Raphael's voice was faint but the words were enunciated clearly enough.

“Hard to tell,” I said, stepping back from the missing professor. I'd noticed a jumbled pattern of footprints and had been marking the area off so that they could be identified. “I can't feel any pulse.” I looked round at her. “I'd say he was dead, but I made that mistake in Edinburgh with George Faulds.”

She looked at me then nodded. “Are there any obvious injuries?”

I shook my head. “His face is bruised. Apart from that and the dribble of blood from his mouth, nothing that I can see.”

Raskolnikov's academic gown was in a heap on the path. He was still wearing his dark suit and the dark blue tie with the closed book emblem worn by university staff. His shoes were still on his feet. If it hadn't been for the position his body was in, you'd have thought he was taking a nap. But people taking a nap don't tie themselves to branches with pieces of plastic cord under their armpits and round their ankles. The Russian's head was leaning back, the willow's new leaves like a crown or a cushion, while his arms were dangling by his sides. His legs were about a yard apart, the feet lashed to the tree's lower branches. He looked like a rag doll that had been thrown aside by a bored child.

“Here is the medical examiner,” Dawkley said, ushering forward a tall, balding man in a white protective suit with a mask round his neck.

I moved aside to let the expert look Raskolnikov over, but I stayed close. I wanted to hear everything he said to his superior. As it turned out, he didn't have a lot to say. He fiddled around with some sophisticated instruments, spoke some medical jargon into his nostrum and then stepped back, a puzzled expression on his face.

“All organs are inactive,” he said. “This man is indubitably dead. But I am at a loss to explain how.”

“Hang on,” I said, drawing up to Raskolnikov again. “What's this?”

I moved forward on to the damp path and examined the cuffs of the Russian's suit jacket under the bright lights that had been set up.