Equinox

Chapter 30

Croydon: 29 March, 2 p.m.

Charlie Tucker's funeral was a bleak, rainswept affair, steeped in suburban misery. The service was held in a concrete chapel built in the early 1980s a few miles outside Croydon, south of London. Fewer than a dozen people turned up. They dashed from their cars across the tarmac of the glistening car park with coats over their heads and umbrellas aloft. In the chapel there was a pervading smell of damp clothes mingled with ageing lilies.

For a short time after Charlie's body had been discovered the police had been working on the principle that he had committed suicide. But then CSI evidence from the scene proved conclusively that he could not have fired the weapon. The investigators began a murder inquiry.

Laura and Philip were the last to arrive and sat together at the back, listening in silence to the taped organ music, each submerged in their own thoughts.

Philip had hardly known Charlie. To him he'd been just another face at Oxford, a friend of Laura's. They had met at parties and had had the occasional argument about politics. Philip had been pretty, left-wing, which was more or less de rigueur for students in the 1980s, but Charlie, he recalled, had been rabidly Marxist.

Laura had grown used to the fact that Charlie was dead. Almost a week earlier, when the news had been thrust upon her so viciously, she had been shocked to the core of her being. This wasn't because she had been particularly close to Charlie. But he had been a part of her youth. Perhaps because she had hardly seen him in almost twenty years she still associated him with happy times, with college, freedom, a time just after the end of childhood, a time when, in memory at least, the world seemed to be a more innocent place. Now that he was dead, it felt like a part of herself had been consumed too.

Only later had come the terrible sense of dread that she now felt. The deaths, the slaughter and the violence had started to close in on her. Now Laura could not get it out of her mind that Charlie's death had to be linked in some way with her investigation.

Since returning to Oxford, she and Philip had made precious little progress. They had confirmed that the 1851 murders had been committed on exactly the nights when the relevant heavenly bodies had entered the sign of Cancer and that a five-body planetary conjunction had been expected on 20 July that year. The only difference between those murders and the current ones was that the killers had not started their series of crimes at the vernal equinox because the conjunction of planets had occurred at a quite different time of the year. All this was important, she knew, and it put her theory beyond reasonable doubt. But it still felt as though their search for clues to the identity of today's murderer was running out of steam — and the next killing was scheduled for the following evening, 30 March.

The funeral service was a dismal affair. The sound of a synthesised choir spilling gently from speakers in the ceiling carried the two hymns, and the best anyone in the congregation could muster was a barely audible mumble. As the second hymn petered out, the coffin bearing Charlie's body was lifted carefully by the pall-bearers and carried to a hearse outside. The mourners got up from their pews slowly and drifted towards the doors.

Outside, the hearse pulled away and the group followed, walking past a memorial garden, along a winding lane to an area with fewer graves where the soil had been freshly turned.

Walking back past the chapel, Laura and Philip had almost reached their car when they heard someone running up behind them. Turning, they saw a young woman in a long white dress, slowing to a stop. She looked about twenty-five, short, slim, with dark brown hair falling freely to her waist. She had huge blue eyes, a pixie's face, thin eyebrows and a shapely nose. Laura could see that she had been crying: she wore no make-up but her eyes were bloodshot and the skin beneath her eyes looked bruised.

'You're Laura and Philip, yeah?' she asked.

Laura nodded.

'I, I was Charlie's, er, Charlie's girlfriend. My name's Sabrina.' She extended a hand and as she did so she looked around as if to check that no one was watching them. A middle-aged couple from the service walked past, and Sabrina waited until they were out of earshot.

'I was asked to give you this.' And she slipped a small cold metal object into Laura's hand.

It was a key.

'Put it in your pocket,' Sabrina said quietly but firmly.

'Who. .?'

'Charlie, of course. He knew he was in trouble. Please, just listen,' Sabrina whispered. 'Charlie was particularly fond of a biography of Newton. You'll find it in his apartment. Number 2, Chepstow Street, New Cross. You have to go there today. His brother is sorting out his possessions and settling his rent tomorrow morning. The key has a number on it. Now, I have to go. Good luck.' And with that, she turned on her heel and walked swiftly away.

Stunned for a moment, Laura and Philip simply let her go. Then, snapping out of her silence, Laura made as if to go after the girl. But Philip held her back.

'I think we should leave her be.'

Charlie had lived in a tiny two-roomed place in a narrow street off the main road in busy New Cross, South London. It was one of six apartments that made up what had probably once been a rather grand house. Laura and Philip had gone straight from the funeral and parked in Chepstow Street a few doors down from the house. They reached the apartment on the second floor via a dimly lit winding staircase.

The apartment was not as bad as Laura had expected. Charlie had done his best to disguise the crumbling plaster and the general tattiness of the place with a lick of paint and some tasteful framed prints. His furniture was cheap and old. It had probably come with the place when he moved in, but he had invested in a couple of rugs and cushions, which helped a little. The influence of a woman was obvious; Sabrina had smartened things up, Laura thought as she wandered around the main room. There was a rudimentary kitchen at one end and a TV and bookcases at the other. She peered into the small bedroom that led on to a minuscule bathroom. A strong smell of cigarettes and alcohol pervaded the entire apartment.

'God, I feel like we're trespassing,' Laura said quietly.

'Well, I suppose we are.' Philip grinned. 'Gives me the creeps.'

'Oh, come on. Sabrina made it clear that Charlie wanted us to come here. Don't feel guilty. He trusted you.'

'Yeah, and look what happened after he saw me.' Laura sat down heavily in a swivel chair in front of a small desk. On the desk was a computer and beside it a messy pile of papers and an ashtray filled with cigarette ends. 'The Newton biography.' Laura nodded towards a bookcase next to the TV. 'Do you want to try that one? There's another in the bedroom.'

Philip found it almost immediately. They sat at a tiny wooden table in the kitchen end of the main room with the book opened between them. It was entitled Isaac Newton: Biography of a Magus by Liam Ethwiche.

'Charlie was particularly fond of this book,' Laura said recalling the words Sabrina had used. Then she added. 'The key has a number on it.' It was number 112.

'A page number, I would imagine,' Philip said and flicked through the book until he reached page 112.

As they scanned through the first two paragraphs, they noticed the anomaly at almost the same moment. In the middle of a line, the thread was suddenly lost. The final part of the sentence read: Paddington Station, box 14, Geoff's party, sweet pea.

Philip stood up and walked over to the window. Outside, the grey buildings and the grey sky seemed to merge. Rush hour had started and the traffic was stacking up on New Cross Road. At the end of the street, four lines of vehicles were stationary, their exhausts billowing fumes into the late-afternoon air. He did not notice the spotlessly clean black Toyota parked across the street.

'Make any sense to you?' he asked.

'Yeah, it does, actually,' Laura replied. 'Let's go.' She tucked the book under her arm. 'You want to drive, or shall I?'

Paddington Station was no more than six miles from New Cross as the crow flies but it took them nearly ninety minutes to fight their way through the traffic, including a twenty-minute period during which, thanks to roadworks near Piccadilly Circus, they were immobilised on Pall Mall. The sun had set as they approached the Thames from the south some forty minutes earlier, and as they turned along Praed Street the seedy neon red and lemon glow only accentuated the drabness of the crumbling, pollution-stained buildings on either side, home to cheap jean shops and walk-up peep-shows.

Inside the station a human tidal wave washed through the concourse. The personal lockers and security boxes were positioned between a ticket office and a cafe called The Commuter's Brew. On the front of each box was a small panel containing a numeric keypad.

'So, you going to tell me the combination at last, and what "sweet pea" means, Laura?' Philip asked.

She sighed. 'Do I have a choice?'

'Not really.'

Laura leaned back against the boxes, eyeing the commuters as they streamed past. Turning back to Box 14, she mumbled: 'It's my nickname — well, Charlie's nickname for me, anyway'

Philip snorted.

'We first met at a party in Oxford in 1982. It was in a big shared house on the Banbury Road owned by the parents of a guy in our year, Geoff. . Geoff Townsend, I think his name was. Anyway, after that night, Charlie always called me "sweet pea".'

'"Sweet pea"?'

'I wore a jacket made of peacock feathers to the party.'

Philip looked at her in disbelief for a moment, then burst out laughing.

'It was a long time ago.'

Her earnest expression made him laugh even harder. 'I'm sorry,' Philip managed to say, his face straightening. 'It's just the vision of you in a peacock-feather jacket, it's. .'

'Priceless?'

'Well, yes.'

'The New Romantics were at their height. You remember? You were probably wearing a silk shirt and tucker boots.'

'I never owned a pair of tucker boots,' Philip said indignantly.

Now it was Laura's turn to laugh. 'And you had a horrible little plait when I first met you.'

'It was a real ponytail, actually' Philip grimaced. 'OK. What's the combination?'

She stared at the keypad and began punching in some numbers. Philip watched. 1…9…8… 2. Then she hit the 'enter' button, took the handle and pulled.

Inside the box lay a rolled-up sheet of paper tied with a black silk ribbon. Beside it was a CD in a clear plastic case.

Philip reached in and withdrew the items.

'A DVD, I guess,' he said. He loosened the ribbon on the scroll. 'And what looks …' He paused. 'Well, this is interesting. Even I know enough Latin to translate that.'

At the top of the first page was written: Principia Chemicum by Isaacus Neuutonus .

Laura and Philip barely exchanged a word as they weaved their way out of London, heading west back towards Oxford. The traffic had lightened a little, and within twenty minutes they had reached the A40 which would lead them to the motorway and the fifty-mile stretch home. They were lost in their own thoughts, each of them working through the threads of what they had learned, neither of them yet ready to talk about it. Philip drove as Laura studied the Newton document. It was covered in tiny, precise calligraphy, most of it written in a strange language or elaborately encoded, giving the appearance of gibberish. This was interspersed with lines written in Latin, along with line drawings, odd-looking symbols, and tables and charts dotted around the page seemingly at random. Then, as they left behind the lights of the city and entered the dark monotony of the motorway and the beckoning countryside on either side of the road, it became too dark for her to read.

'It's obviously a photocopy,' Laura said. 'But what the hell is it about?'

'I wish now I'd paid more attention in Latin lessons when I was thirteen,' Philip said.

'Actually, my Latin's pretty good, but this is a complete jumble of languages. And what about all these symbols and coded sections? It looks like word soup to me.'

'And what on earth was Charlie Tucker doing with a copy of a document written by Isaac Newton? It's not one I've ever heard of.'

'Me neither. He wrote the Principia Mathematica , of course, but. .' Reaching over to the back seat, Laura grabbed the Newton biography that they had picked up at Charlie's apartment. Switching on the interior light, she began to flick through the pages. 'Biography of a Magus ,' Laura said quietly. 'I remember this book coming out. Caused quite a stir at the time, didn't it?'

Philip looked puzzled.

'It's a revisionist work — Newton as some wacko sorcerer or something. . Now I remember,' she added and tapped the opened book with her fingers. 'It hinged on the idea that Newton was a dedicated alchemist.'

'Yeah,' Philip replied. 'I remember it too. The book came out a few years back. I read a review in The Times'

'Newton wasn't just an alchemist,' Laura replied and looked up from the book. 'Looks like he was seriously into black magic. Says here: "Newton was an adept in the black arts. Evidence for this astonishing fact may be found among the writings he kept hidden until his death. These were held in secret by his disciples for fear of tarnishing the great man's enormous scientific reputation. It was only in 1936 under the auspices of the economist and Newton scholar John Maynard Keynes that these documents were rediscovered — more than a million words on occult subjects ranging from divination to alchemy.'" 'So he published the legitimate scientific stuff, but kept the risque material well away from prying eyes?'

'Apparently. He couldn't have let his interest in the occult become known; it would have destroyed his career.'

'And you think this Principia Chemicum could have been one of his secret works?'

'Not sure yet.' Laura flicked to the index of the biography in her lap. 'He wrote all his documents in Latin, it was the standard form of the time.' 'But it's odd that he should use the Latinised version of his name. But. . Ah-ha,' she said after a moment. 'Listen. . "Newton's most famous work, his Principia Mathematica is sadly not paired with a Principia Chemicum — what would have been a definitive work describing his alchemical findings. He leaves us clues and hints, but no manuscript offering an account of success in producing the mythical Philosopher's Stone. This is because, like many hundreds of researchers before and after him,

Newton, for all his extraordinary talents, never did accomplish his ultimate aim. He never did forge the Stone with which he could find the method of producing gold from base metal; he was not offered eternal life, and he never could commune with the Almighty, at least not as a living man.'"

A few minutes later they entered the cutting into the Chilterns and began the long, steep descent crossing the border from Buckinghamshire into Oxfordshire. In the dark they could see little of the magnificent panorama that daylight could offer, a patchwork quilt of cultivated fields stretching to the horizon.

Laura closed the book, flicked off the interior light and switched on the radio. 'Fancy some music?'

Pushing a preset button marked '1' all they got was static. '2' and '3' were the same. With '4' the car was filled with power chords, a Van Halen track from the mid-1980s. Philip started to head-bang. 'Yeah, baby. .'

Laura pushed button number five and turned the volume down. A cacophony of atonal sounds cascaded from the speakers. 'Must be Radio 3,' Philip said. 'Concerto for three sinks and a vibrator, anyone?' he quipped. 'For God's sake, let's have Van Halen.'

'Not likely,' Laura laughed. She switched through a couple of French long-wave stations, some rap coming from a local independent and then found Radio Oxford and what sounded like the tail end of the news.

. The head of the Estonian delegation, Dr Vambola Kuusk, declared that the meeting had been a great success and that he hoped the European commission would abide by their earlier recommendations.' There was a pause.

'And now to some local news. Police are becoming increasingly concerned over the whereabouts of Professor James Lightman, Chief Librarian at the Bodleian Library. His car was found around ten o'clock this morning, left abandoned on Norham Gardens in North Oxford. Police say there was no sign of a struggle and that the professor left his briefcase on the passenger seat and that his keys were still in the ignition. We will be providing a phone number at the end of the programme for anyone with information that may help Thames Valley police.'