Equinox

Chapter 18

At five a.m. Philip's house possessed a particular charm that had been largely absent from Laura's life for at least two decades. In Greenwich Village, five a.m. was not so very different from any other hour. From her apartment she could hear traffic noise, including sirens and the blare of car horns, throughout the day and the night. It was background mush and she only really noticed it when it was no longer there. Here, in this sleepy Oxfordshire village, in the pre-dawn, the cars of New York were as real to her as Pinocchio.

Laura had a woollen wrap around her shoulders and tried to warm herself up by the Aga as the kettle boiled. Then, with a hot cup of strong coffee in her hand, she walked through the hall into the main sitting room with its low-beamed ceiling and bowed leadlight windows. The floorboards creaked and, conscious of Philip and Jo asleep upstairs, she closed the door behind her. She turned on a couple of lamps and walked over to the fireplace. There was some

residual heat there from the night before when Tom had been over and they had worked out so much about the dates of the murders — the ones that had already been committed and the ones she felt sure would come. Indeed, if her ideas were correct then another young woman somewhere not far from here would now be lying dead, her body probably still undiscovered.

Sipping her coffee, Laura paced around the room, gazing abstractedly at the pictures Philip had on his walls. There were three of his mother's paintings, fantastic bold blocks of colour with tiny spindly figures standing in the foreground: figures that seemed to be on the verge of being overwhelmed by some nameless horrible thing. These paintings would not have looked out of place in a Manhattan duplex or a Milan studio, and perhaps, she mused, a few could be found there too.

When it came to art, Philip had eclectic tastes. Close to his mother's modern paintings he had hung Victorian oils and even a couple of early 1940s landscapes. On the same wall beside these could be found a few of his favourite photographs, mainly abstracts taken in the mid-1980s. And to cap it off he had hung with them some ancient-looking family portraits, figures from the nineteenth century, great-great-grandparents in bonnets and wing collars.

Tom had said something in passing last night that

Laura had taken little notice of at the time, but now it was clamouring for her attention. She sat down and stared at the grey ash and embers in the fireplace. Then she had it. Tom had described the five-body conjunction. 'That is so rare,' he had said. 'It's only happened maybe ten times during the past thousand years or so.'

'Of course,' she said aloud. 'Of course. Ten times during the past thousand years or so. Which means it must have happened a few times in the not-too-distant past.'

Jumping up, Laura walked over to the computer. Finding Netscape, she pulled up 'History' and scrolled down to open the home page for almanac.com

Tom had left her his password in case she needed it and, recalling what he had worked through the previous evening, she typed in information at the prompts and pressed 'enter'. Taking a sip of coffee, she watched the screen changing until a new page appeared. In a box near the bottom of the screen entitled 'Five-body conjunctions AD 1500–2000' she could see a list of three dates: 1564, 1690, 1851.

Laura smiled to herself and drummed her fingertips on the desktop. Then, returning to the keyboard, she exited the website, called up Google and typed in: '1851 + Oxford + murders'.

The results were disappointing. In its inimitable way the search engine had dredged up a medley of what seemed like spurious links to the three words. Top of the list was material on the Great Exhibition of 1851. Lower down came references to the murder that year of a policeman in South London. Other pages offered insights into the Oxford Dictionary definition of murder, books published in 1851 with the word 'murders' in the title, and a left-field entry offering a gateway to the work of an American acoustic pop duo called Murder In Oxford.

Google had turned up more than two thousand links to the three words, and Laura was determined not to give up. The two pages that followed were filled with ephemera, more Oxford Dictionary links and plenty more about the Great Exhibition. On the verge of trying some other combination of words, Laura scrolled down to links 60–80 and something caught her eye. Halfway down the screen was a link that read: 'Victorian Psycho? Brother Norman thinks so.' She hovered the cursor over the link and clicked.

It was a garish amateur site and a lot of the material appeared to be bordering on the delusional. Called Brother Norman s Conspiracy Archive , its creator — Norman, Laura presumed — seemed obsessed with the usual topics: Roswell, the Kennedy assassination, Princess Diana's death in Paris, the CIA plot to blame an innocent Bin Laden for September 11. She had seen it all before and ignored the blaring titles along the left-hand margin that promised 'New Revelations that will Rock your World'. Scrolling down impatiently, she found a title that held some promise. 'Oxford Slaughter: A Victorian Charles Manson?'

Disappointingly, it consisted of no more than three paragraphs. In breathless prose, Brother Norman described the scant facts known to conspiracy theorists. Three murders in Oxford, England during the summer of 1851. Three women killed and mutilated. Could it have been a young Jack the Ripper almost four decades before he turned up again in East London? Was it a conspiracy propagated by the British Parliament? Or were there Satanist overtones?

Feeling tired suddenly, Laura rubbed her eyes and drank the last of her coffee. If there had been a series of murders in Oxford in 1851 wouldn't she have heard of them? She looked at the screen without really seeing it, letting the thoughts meander through her mind.

Maybe the murders had been forgotten. How thorough were police investigations in those days? Would the killings have been reported methodically? Was there a local newspaper in Oxford over a century and a half ago?

There were so many questions and so few answers. Worse, every time Laura thought she was peeling back a tiny corner of the mystery more puzzles would fall into her lap. All she had were pieces of the jigsaw, oddities that did not fit together. Indeed, they were pieces that seemed to have come from completely different jigsaws, and all she kept turning up were new chunks of these puzzles that appeared to have no link to any of the others. She considered delving further into other conspiracy websites but felt little inclination.

But she was convinced now that some contemporary murderer was working to some weird astrological agenda, and, if Brother Norman was to be believed, something not too dissimilar had happened at the time of the last conjunction and perhaps the time before and the time before that. And the link was astrology, the occult, some crazy alchemical connection. Laura's years of experience following New York City homicides and corruption could offer no help. But as she stared at the blue screen and Brother Norman's words drifted out of focus, she knew exactly what her next move should be.

Two hours later Laura was on the London train, peering through a grimy window onto dew-covered fields as they sped along. She hadn't woken Philip but had left him a note which said simply that she was going to London for the day to follow a lead, and that if there was any news he must call her on her mobile right away.

The idea of visiting Charlie Tucker now seemed obvious. He had been one of her best friends during her student days, and they had stayed in touch for a while after college. He was one of the most exciting and dynamic people she had ever met. His working-class Essex family had provided him with a colourful background. His father was a stallholder in a fruit market in Southend, and his mother, a former stripper, had died from cancer at thirty-nine. He had entered Oxford with the highest grades in the country that year, but had loathed almost everything about the city and the university. A socialist activist, on at least three separate occasions he had just escaped being sent down, and before he was twenty-one he had been investigated by Ml6 for his involvement in an extreme left-wing group. In his third year he had spent so much time on hunt sabs, demonstrations and covert anarchist activities that he almost missed a crucial final. Most astonishing of all was the fact that he still ended up with a First in mathematics.

Laura had never shown the slightest interest in politics, and that had probably been at the root of their closeness. Being an American, she hadn't cared much about modern British politics even though the politics of previous centuries fascinated her and had informed her studies in Renaissance art. She liked Charlie for his energy, his wit and his razor-sharp intelligence. He liked her, she supposed, because she didn't care about his views: she was a blank sheet upon which he could write any political slogan he wanted.

Just as Laura was leaving Oxford, Charlie had started a PhD on the Group Theory of Encryption, a topic, he claimed in letters to her, that was as far removed from human trivia as one could get. This seemed to satisfy him until, for no apparent reason, he dropped out and disappeared. In the last letter that Charlie had sent her from Oxford, he'd said simply that he was leaving — no explanations, no details.

And that had been that until, a year earlier, a postcard had arrived at Laura's apartment in Greenwich Village. It had been from Charlie and was postmarked London. He was going to be visiting the States, he'd written — would she like to meet up with him in New York?

He had of course despised the place, even though Laura could see in his eyes an irrepressible admiration for the undeniable glamour of it all. They had gone to a bistro on West 34th Street and she had listened to him mock the vanity of Manhattan, but he could not disguise from her entirely what she interpreted as a deeply buried acknowledgement that this city really was something amazing.

Charlie had turned forty a few years earlier, and he was, he could now admit, tired: tired of radicalism, tired of seeing so little coming from his efforts, tired of life. He had all but given up, he had told her. About ten years earlier he had started to write a book about the circle of thirteenth-century mathematicians who became known as the Oxford Calculators: William Heytesbury, Richard Swineshead, John Dumbleton and, most prominently, Thomas Bradwardine. But he had never completed it. Instead, his research had drawn him into a line of investigation that took him to the heretical philosopher Roger Bacon, and from there to the entire world of medieval occultism.

The upshot, he told her, was that a few years earlier he had exchanged his political cap for a fascination with alternative lifestyles. He had gone deep into mysticism, the occult and what he referred to as 'the rich underbelly of the intellect'. He had even opened a little shop — near the British Museum in Bloomsbury — called White Stag, which specialised in arcane and alternative literature. He made a living of sorts from the place and it gave him the time and resources to pursue his own researches.

Laura had been a little surprised by these twists in Charlie's life. She herself had never been at all interested in the occult. But after a while, as she listened to him speak, it seemed to make sense that Charlie would have become absorbed with such ideas. And, indirectly, it was Charlie's visit that had given her the idea of a thriller about Thomas Bradwardine and a plot to kill King Edward II. Now, as she headed towards London hoping to find Charlie sitting quietly in his little shop, she felt a pang of guilt that she had failed to make contact with him during the entire three weeks she had been in England. Nor had she even told him that she was going to be coming over.

Arriving at Paddington Station a few minutes after eight-thirty, Laura caught the Underground to Warren Street. Emerging into heavy morning traffic, she realised she would be too early for Charlie. To kill time, she stopped for a coffee and a croissant at a Starbucks and then walked south down Tottenham Court Road. At an Internet cafe she stopped to check her e-mail, bought a newspaper and nursed a second cup of coffee, before heading east past Centre Point and along New Oxford Street to find the lane off Museum Street where she knew White Stag was situated. On the way she called Philip's mobile but all she got was an answer service.

As Laura turned along a street no more than four yards wide and within sight of the British Museum, she spotted the tiny shopfront, whose window was piled high with books. Above the door was an old-fashioned painted sign of a magnificent white stag.

From the outside the shop looked dark, silent and closed, but the door opened gently as she pushed. She smelled old paper and the fug of cigarette smoke. A single light bulb dangled from the cracked ceiling; the bare floorboards were scuffed and scratched. Every inch of wall space was covered with shelves packed with books of all shapes, colours and sizes. It was dingy but oddly comforting.

At the far end of the room stood an old desk. It had ugly, carved ash legs and the top was strewn with papers. An ancient-looking computer stood to one side, an overflowing ashtray the other. A waste-paper bin beside the desk was also over-brimming with scrunched-up paper and other detritus. Behind the desk a door leading to a pantry in the back of the shop stood open. Dull orange light emanated from inside and Laura could hear a kettle whistling. A few moments later a man emerged from the doorway and walked over to the desk. He seemed completely unaware of her. From his mouth dangled a cigarette and in his hand was a large grimy-looking mug. Laura gave a little cough.

'My God!' Charlie exclaimed, and put the mug down on the desk so carelessly that milky tea spilled over a pile of papers next to it. Stubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray, he bounded around the desk, his arms outstretched in welcome. 'Laura, baby,' he said as he embraced her.

She giggled and hugged him.

He held her at arm's length. 'You've lost weight, girl, and your 'air's too short.' His accent was pure Essex, untainted by Oxford, arcane literature or half a decade in Bloomsbury. 'Fancy a cuppa?'

'No, thanks, Charlie, just had enough caffeine to last me a year. But, boy, it's good to see you.'

He pulled over an old and battered chair and wiped the seat with his hand. Then he strode over to the door, locked it and flipped over the 'open' sign. 'You never know — the 'ordes we get in 'ere.' He laughed as he threw himself into the chair behind the desk.

Charlie had never been precisely the model of health and had always been underweight and pasty, but now he looked positively haggard and far older than his forty-four years. Laura had last seen him just a year ago but since then he had lost hair, lost weight, lost even more colour from his skin. He looked very unwell, as though he was suffering from a terminal illness, she concluded.

'Charlie, I hate to say this but you look dreadful.'

He shrugged. 'Been working 'ard, Laura. I feel great, though. Just me 'air falling out,' and he tugged at the thin greasy brown strands that hung down over his ears. 'Anyway, don't worry about me.' He grabbed a packet of cigarettes from beside a pile of papers on the desk, fished one out and lit it with an old-fashioned lighter. 'What brings you to this neck of the woods, then?'

'Actually, it was you. .'

'Pull the other one!'

'I was starting a new novel, a book about Thomas Bradwardine. Remember we talked about him that night in New York? After you left I began to weave a little web.'

'You said you started — past tense. You hit writer's block?'

Laura looked around at the thousands of books lining the walls from floor to ceiling. Suddenly she felt very small. 'No, just a better idea.'

'Goon.'

'You've seen the news about the Oxford murders?'

'Yes,' he said quizzically.

'Well, can I trust you? As an old friend?'

'Of course.' He looked both surprised and a little hurt. 'You know that. .'

'Yeah, I'm sorry. It's just. . Well, the police haven't told the public everything they know. But then, they're actually in denial anyway — at least they were when I last spoke to them.'

'You're speaking in riddles, Laura.'

'The thing is, these murders have a ritualistic aspect to them. No, more than that — the murderer is following a schedule, an astrological schedule.'

Charlie's eyes narrowed. He took a long drag on his cigarette. 'You say the murderer is working to a schedule, which implies you think he hasn't finished yet.'

'That's exactly what I think. I'm afraid he's only just begun.'

'OK.' Charlie leaned back in his chair, scrutinising Laura through the smoke that billowed in the air between them. 'Could you start from the beginning? I need to get a handle on this.'

Laura told him as much as she dared. When she had finished, she was alarmed to see that he had turned even paler than usual.

'You know something about this, don't you, Charlie?'

He took a final drag from his cigarette and pulled another from the packet, lighting it with the fading red tip of the first. 'Why do you say that?'

'I know you. Remember?' Laura noticed how dirty his fingernails were. She also saw that the index and middle fingers of his right hand, through which the cigarette protruded, were stained orange.

'Look, all I've 'eard are rumours. That's how the occult works these days. It's all Internet chat rooms, but we have to be discreet. If you know the language you can talk the talk, as they say'

'And what does the talk tell you, Charlie?'

As he dragged deeply on the cigarette, his face became a skeletal mask. 'Something big is going

down, something very big and very nasty.' 'What do you mean?'

'A group, a small group — completely anonymous, you understand — are playing dangerous games.'

'In Oxford?'

'In Oxford.'

'What sort of games?'

'That, darlin', I can't say, 'cos I dunno.'

'You don't know. .? Can't you hazard a guess?'

'People are too nervous to talk too much about this one.'

'OK.' Laura could not conceal her exasperation. 'I understand it's delicate, but forget the details — give me the broad strokes.'

Charlie was sucking on his cigarette again, filling the air with more grey smoke. Finally, he said: 'The word is that some very old hands are involved. I don't know what they're doing, nor do I wish to know, to be honest. But I've 'eard. .' He paused for a full ten seconds. 'I've 'eard that there's a manuscript.'

'A manuscript?'

Charlie stubbed out the cigarette, took a gulp of his tea and picked up the lighter. He flicked it on, then closed the lid. Laura tried her best to ignore him but after he had repeated the action four times she suddenly sprang forward and grabbed the lighter from him.

'Charlie. . what manuscript?'

'Laura, doll, I'd tell you if I knew, but you see, that's it. You know all I know. Whoever's behind this, it's someone big, and not just big within the community, either. Someone with great power.'