The Burning (23 page)

At some point between midnight and 1.15 a.m., one of Rowley’s neighbours on his staircase, Steven Mulligan, had heard footsteps accompanied by loud whistling, which he associated with Rowley (and had complained about in the past). He thought the student was leaving the building rather than returning, though as he had been woken up from a deep sleep, he wasn’t entirely sure. And that was the last that was heard of Adam Rowley, if it had indeed been him in the corridor. No one had seen him walk down to the river. No one had seen him fall, jump or be pushed in. None of his friends had been too concerned for his whereabouts initially, assuming that he had met a girl that evening and was therefore busy elsewhere. He had had no commitments on 1 May, which was a Wednesday. No one had thought it necessary to raise the alarm until late on Saturday, and when they did become aware that Adam was missing, there was very little to suggest where he had gone. His room was as he had left it, his wallet and passport still on his desk. His mobile phone was not in his room, nor was it ever located. The phone records and cell-site analysis showed that the phone had been in the general area of Latimer College until 2 a.m. on the morning of May Day, when it had been switched off, powered down or simply ceased to work. It didn’t take a genius to work out that there was a good chance that at 2 a.m. Adam Rowley’s phone might have been in the Cherwell along with its owner.

The college had contacted the police once Rowley’s friends had raised the alarm, but their investigation had been somewhat cursory, reading between the lines, until early morning on 6 May, when Mr Bryan Pitman, a tourist visiting Goring-on-Thames on a fishing holiday, had seen a dark shape caught in some low-hanging bushes by the river’s edge and abandoned his rod to see what it was. It was good luck that the river had given Adam up at all; it was even more fortunate that he had a swipe card that gave access to the computer room and library in Latimer College in the front pocket of his sodden jeans. Thames Valley Police had wasted no time in identifying the young man. The college had wasted no time in denying all responsibility. And the post-mortem had revealed, among other things, that his last meal had consisted of toast and blackcurrant jam and had been eaten not more than two hours before he died, that he had a blood alcohol level of 240 mg per 100 ml, more than three times the legal drink-drive limit, that he had taken a significant amount of diazepam and would, the pathologist thought, have been confused at best given that combination of intoxicants, and that injuries to his face and head, including a contusion at the base of his skull, had probably occurred after his death as the dark river washed him thirty miles downstream.

I abandoned the summary in favour of the photographs, of which there were many: the close-up Garland had shown me of Adam Rowley, alive and well, and two others taken in the year before his death that confirmed the impression I had formed that he had been an exceptionally handsome young man. Then the pictures from the riverbank of a very different Adam Rowley, bloated and pale, bloodless scrapes on his forehead and jaw, his hands wrinkled and soft with the uppermost layer of skin beginning to detach. I turned the photographs face down after a quick look, conscious that the busy coffee shop was not an ideal place to examine them. There were still pages and pages left in the file and I flicked through them with a rising sense of despair; I just didn’t have time to absorb all the information that DCI Garland had so lovingly preserved. Witness statements, maps, a floor plan of the Garden Building at Latimer College which Garland had marked with an X to indicate Adam Rowley’s room, cell-site maps that proved the location of Adam Rowley’s mobile phone during the week preceding his death, right up until the signal disappeared.

I went through the stack of statements methodically until I found Rebecca Haworth’s. I read it with interest, hoping to see a glimmer of her personality, but the process of creating the witness statement had brought about a deadening effect. So much depended on the police officer who wrote up the statement; Garland’s colleague had been addicted to jargon. Despite the stilted, formal language (‘I reside at an address known to police … I have known Adam ROWLEY for approximately two and a half years … I last saw him on 30 April in the Latimer College Bar, at approximately 10.30 … This statement is true to the best of my knowledge and belief …’) Rebecca’s emotional state bled through. She had seen nothing, she knew nothing of what had happened to him, but that she was mourning him there could be no doubt. She couldn’t believe he was gone. As Garland had said, she seemed to be genuinely broken up about his death. She also had a firm alibi for the night in question, having been at a house party in east Oxford with about thirty other students who could vouch for having seen her there.

Two statements later, I was intrigued to see a terse one with Louise North’s name on it. She had been working in the college bar on the night in question, and had served Adam Rowley a number of times during the evening, though she hadn’t noticed him particularly. It had been a busy night. She had been one of five bar staff on duty, and had gone to bed after closing time. She had known Adam Rowley slightly, but had rarely spoken to him. Clipped, businesslike, unemotional. Louise hadn’t changed much since college, I guessed. I would ask her about Adam when I saw her next, since she had known both him and Rebecca. I had a feeling, though, that she would not have been of interest to Adam, considering his particular tastes.

Garland had collected statements from Rowley’s tutors who were united in the view that he was bright but lazy, and from his neighbours in Garden Building who had found him noisy and inconsiderate. Rowley’s friends had been kinder, as might have been expected, but there were remarkably few notes of genuine emotion. I couldn’t escape the feeling that Rowley had been a bully, and that even his friends had been almost relieved that he was gone.

Leaving the rest of the witness statements as a task for another day, I turned to the pathologist’s report, which informed me that all fresh corpses immersed in water sink to the bottom in the same position, face down, head hanging, and that the lacerations to Adam Rowley’s face were consistent with this, rather than suggestive of any ante-mortem violence, though he couldn’t be definite about that. Rowley’s lungs were over-inflated and heavy with fluid; his airways and stomach contained silt and other foreign matter from the river. Nonetheless, the pathologist noted, and I couldn’t help reading it in a scolding tone of voice, the sort I had heard so often from Glen Hanshaw, that wasn’t proof of drowning because ‘there are no autopsy findings pathognomonic of drowning. Rather, all other causes of death must be excluded.’ The debris from the river could have washed into his body during his long immersion in the water. It was necessary to consider that some other catastrophic event had preceded the victim entering the water. The pathologist warned that the blood-alcohol concentration could not be relied on because of the volume of water that Adam might have absorbed. He could state with a reasonable degree of certainty that the victim had been significantly intoxicated, however. On balance, therefore, the pathologist was prepared to allow that drowning was a likely cause of death. I rolled my eyes. It was a report that was typical of a practised expert witness. Here is my fence; allow me to sit on it. Reid Garland had sounded far more certain in his case summary, but I recognised the copper’s overwhelming desire to make a case. The coroner had noted it too, and had not been moved. An open verdict was probably fair, I thought, considering what I had read. But I could also list the unanswered questions that had stayed with the officer in the case for seven long years. Who gave him the drugs? What had brought him to the riverbank that night? Did he fall or was he pushed? Who might have wanted him dead? And why was Rebecca Haworth, among all of his friends and acquaintances, so desperately upset by his death?

There was, however, no escaping the final question. If Garland hadn’t solved those mysteries in seven years, what chance did I have?

Professor Stanwell Westcott had rooms in the third quad of Latimer College, in Staircase Sixteen, or so the porter informed me to my complete bemusement when I asked how to find him at the lodge. I had ignored another neat, white-painted sign announcing that the college was closed to visitors and passed through the doorway with a distinctly through-the-looking-glass feeling as the traffic noise faded behind me. The short, barrel-bodied porter, who was at least hatless, became much more helpful when I produced my warrant card and a smile designed to take the sting out of the formality. He shot out from behind his desk and insisted on taking me all the way to Professor Westcott’s door himself. I followed him through immaculately lawned courtyards that were, he explained, called quadrangles, quads for short, this one built in the early sixteenth century, that one added on ninety or so years later, the New Buildings over there a Victorian addition despite the name, the dining hall to my left up those steps, and as he carried on giving me a lightning-fast guided tour, I tuned out. I was imagining a young Rebecca Haworth hurrying through the archway that separated first and second quad, on her way to a lecture or a party or a date with handsome, cocksure Adam Rowley. The dark, wintry day meant that lights were on in most of the rooms overlooking the grassy quads, and the paths where we walked were crisscrossed with shadows. Not usually over-sensitive to atmosphere, I couldn’t help shivering. It felt for a moment as if we were intruding on a haunt of ghosts as we walked under a bare-branched climber that grew over the entrance to third quad, which turned out to be the largest of them all and elegantly colonnaded in the warm golden stone that was a great part of the city’s charm.

‘Staircase sixteen,’ my guide said, stopping at a doorway where a wooden board listed four names prefixed with Doctor or Professor, including the one I wanted. ‘Professor Westcott’s room is on the first floor, on the right. His oak will be open if he’s expecting you.’

I had absolutely no idea what he meant, but I couldn’t be bothered to ask since it would mean another lecture. I started up the dusty wooden staircase, feeling nervous in spite of myself. The vice-principal had been terse on the phone and so plummy when he did speak as to be almost incomprehensible. The principal, I had been told, was away. Professor Westcott would speak to me on his behalf. I couldn’t wait.

There was a heavy, dark-varnished outer door standing open when I got to the top of the stairs, with a more conventional white-painted panelled door closed behind it. I looked from one to the other, realising that the porter had probably been talking about the dark door when he’d mentioned the oak. It was no wonder I was feeling unsettled. It was like being in another country without a guidebook and only the haziest grasp of the language. I knocked on the panelled door and pushed it open after hearing a muffled, ‘Come!’ from inside.

Professor Westcott’s room was large, dark, and infinitely cluttered. I stopped just inside the door to squint at the floor, afraid to knock over one of the piles of books or papers that were littering the carpet. A single desk lamp with a very bright bulb was the only source of light apart from the tall windows, but heavy curtains cut off most of the slate-grey daylight. The books that lined the walls seemed to absorb light too, and gave off a fusty smell. At least, I hoped the smell was from the books.

‘Ah, the policewoman.’ The voice came from the darkness beyond the lamp. ‘You must forgive me the disorder. I am lost in the arms of Virgil at the moment, preparing a new edition of the
Georgics
for the university press, and the research has rather taken over my room. Are you familiar with Virgil, DC Kerrigan?’

‘Not personally. But your work sounds fascinating,’ I said politely.

‘I doubt that.’ He came out from behind his desk, stooping slightly, and revealed himself to be a tall man with a grey-fringed bald head and the thick-lensed glasses of the compulsive reader. ‘But how kind of you to say so.’

He was a lot more congenial than I had been expecting from his telephone manner. I was aware that he was determined to put me at my ease as if I was a nervous undergraduate, and I had to remind myself that I was not, in fact, a timid eighteen-year-old, but fully ten years older and a detective constable in the Metropolitan Police at that.

A small crimson-covered armchair loaded with books and papers stood near the door and he pointed to it. ‘Please. Sit. Just throw those things anywhere.’

It took me a minute to move the clutter from the chair, discovering in the process a single khaki-coloured sock, which I draped gingerly over the top of the pile of books at my feet. I sat down and found that Professor Westcott had drawn an upright chair into the centre of the room and was sitting on it, peering at me keenly.

‘Sorry for being short on the phone. I hate the bloody thing. Never rings at the right time. You wanted to ask about a student.’

I scrambled to get out my notes, wrong-footed by his rapid-fire delivery. ‘Two students, actually. They were undergraduates here seven or so years ago – I don’t know if you’d remember …’

He flicked a long hand as if to imply that seven years were a mere moment, and I did appreciate that if you spent your days and nights thinking about the literature and history of Ancient Rome, you probably had a different perspective on what counted as recent.

I explained briefly that I was investigating Rebecca Haworth’s murder and that I was interested in finding out more about what had happened to Adam Rowley.

‘Rowley,’ Professor Westcott repeated. ‘Yes. The boy who drowned. Such a sad accident.’

‘I’ve just been talking to the DCI who investigated that case. He told me he had suspicions that it was murder.’

‘Suspicions but no proof,’ Professor Westcott said, and I had the feeling his mind was elsewhere. ‘I remember him too.’ He crossed his legs and smoothed his bottle-green cords over his bony knee. ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you. The senior common room cooperated fully with the police investigation, and it was the coroner’s decision to record an open verdict. Of course, the boy had been drinking, as the young folk tend to do on that night. It’s quite a bacchanal. The roots of the celebration go right back to pagan times, not that the students care about that, but it’s all dressed up as a quasi-religious ceremony now, in the Christian tradition. You know about what goes on in Magdalen Tower, I take it? No? The choristers from the college choir sing the
Hymnus Eucharisticus
in celebration of the day, not that you can hear much from down on the ground. In my day, the thing to do was to take a punt on to the river and listen from the water, but they’ve stopped that now. There’s nothing for people to do but drink, which I think is always a mistake.’