Private London

Chapter 13

Chancellors University London

A half-mile across London from the offices of Private, heading south and east. A barman in his late twenties called Ryan pushed a tray of shot glasses filled with tequila towards a red-faced pair of students.

They carried them to a nearby table and handed them round to a group of equally flushed young men. They were all wearing the university rugby colours and were chasing pints with slammers. One of them dropped his glass into his pint of lager and shouted: ‘Depth charge!’

Contempt was too mild a word for what the barman thought of them. He was a postgraduate student who had worked two jobs while getting his first degree and was still left with a mountain of debt. This lot of braying jackasses wouldn’t know a day’s work, or debt, if it bit them on their privileged arses. He looked across at a pretty dark-haired woman who was standing further along the bar. Sometimes he hated his job. Sometimes he liked it.

Chloe Wilson didn’t even notice the barman looking at her. She was feeling hot.

And not in a sexy manner, but in a sweaty, giddy kind of way. The three of them had come out all heels, squeals and ready to partay! At least, that had been the plan. Her two friends, Laura Skelton and Hannah Durrant, had been knocking back the vodka and Red Bulls since six o’clock like they were going out of fashion. And why not? They were all twenty-something-year-old students in the heart of the fine city of London on a Friday evening in spring – what the hell else were they supposed to be doing? But Chloe had held back on the booze. She had to. Someone had to keep a clear head. London could be a dangerous place, after all. Even on campus.

Chancellors University London, also known as CUL or Chancellors, was spread throughout the capital – as were most London-based colleges. But CUL dated way back to the sixteenth century. It had been founded by Henry VIII’s Chancellor – Cardinal Wolsey. It had a central block or two of ancient residential buildings and lecture halls in a warren of inner connecting squares and passages. In the sixteenth century it had been a theological school set to rival Magdalen College at Oxford University.

Nowadays it had a more secular curriculum. After the Reformation the Chapel of the Blessed Virgin had been one of the first to go under the sledgehammer. All trappings of Catholic worship stripped out. Now it was simply the Chapel Bar. It was at the northern end of Chancery Square beneath the main rectory and was a stone-flagged cellar that on this evening was packed wall to wall with animated young adults.

Like the three beautiful young women near the busy bar – making hay while the May sun shone bright.

Ryan stepped over to ask if they needed any more drinks. The dark-haired woman he had been watching earlier shook her head. But her friends drained their glasses and held them out for a refill. Not so much as a ‘please’ or a ‘thank you’.

Some of them were coming to the end of their time at college, Ryan knew. Some of them were coming towards the end of their first year. All of them with a bright future ahead. Their confidence was evident in their loud voices, their designer wear and perfect teeth. The privilege that they had inherited would be passed on through generations to come, as it always had been.

Some of them, though, had no future.

They just didn’t know it yet.