The Burning (22 page)

Chapter Eight

M
AEVE

I arrived in Oxford two days after the memorial service with a notebook full of questions and a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. It wasn’t actually that far from London, but the train journey had taken a surprisingly long time, stopping at every hole in the hedge between Paddington and the university city. It had been a slow trip and felt slower because the heating was broken. The inside of the windows in my carriage had frosted over by the time we pulled into the station, and I was chilled to the bone.

The day was raw and dank. Fog hung in the air and I tucked my chin down into my chest, walking fast to get to where I was going without being tempted to do any sight-seeing. The city was hiding its charms effectively as my route took me through the shopping precinct that was somehow more depressing for being decked out with uninspired Christmas lights. The colleges carried on their business behind high walls that hid most of the grandeur I had been expecting. In fact, the main difference between Oxford and any other provincial city was the number of tourists mixed in with the Christmas shoppers in the crowds I had to dodge on my way down the wide, busy street named St Aldates. I was curious enough to look through the heavy, imposing archway on my left as I walked past Christ Church, or I would have looked if a bowler-hatted man with a purple-veined nose and a forbidding expression hadn’t been barring the way. A sign in front of him declared the college to be closed to the public. It might as well have said ‘no riffraff’.

I had arranged to meet DCI Reid Garland at St Aldates police station, although he had retired the previous year. On the phone, he had sounded positively cheerful at the prospect of going back to his old stamping ground, and when I asked for him at the desk, the receptionist pointed one manicured finger at the waiting area with an indulgent smile. I turned to see a heavyset man in a blazer, grey flannel trousers and a dangling tie sitting on one of the plastic seats with his hands clasped loosely between his knees. He had probably noticed me the moment I walked in, but was affecting to read the notices on the board by the front desk. The tie was a particularly offensive shade of purple and narrower than was currently fashionable; I guessed he’d had it since the eighties. He wore a Thames Valley CID enamel pin in his lapel, and the material of his blazer was shiny with wear on the shoulders and elbows.

‘DCI Garland?’ I ventured.

He was on his feet surprisingly quickly for such a big man, one hand extended for me to shake. ‘Hello, my love. Maeve, isn’t it? I’ve arranged for us to use one of the interview rooms here – hope you don’t mind, they’re not the most comfortable places but they are private and I thought we wouldn’t want to have anyone listening to our conversation, if what I understood from you on the phone is right.’

He carried on talking as he led the way into the back office, his voice deep and accented with the local lilt, the vowels as rounded and smooth as river pebbles. He had picked up a file from the seat next to him in the reception area, and I stared at it covetously as I walked behind him.

‘I was glad you called, even though it was out of the blue. I said to Mrs Garland, I always knew this case would come up again. I never liked the way it was left, you see.’ He held open the door for me and I found myself in a small white-painted room with all of the charm I expected of interview rooms, which was none at all. I settled at the table and flipped open my notebook, but if I had thought I was going to be interviewing DCI Garland, I was wrong. He sat down on the other side of the table with a barely suppressed grunt of effort and put the file in front of him, then leaned a meaty elbow on it.

‘Now you tell me what’s been going on with this serial killer. How many victims are you up to now?’

‘Four,’ I said. ‘It looks like five, but we’re not convinced girl number five was the same killer.’

‘Is that so? I was wondering what brought you to Oxford. I couldn’t see how it fitted in.’

‘Well, maybe it doesn’t,’ I said honestly. ‘But I’ve been looking into Rebecca’s background, and I was interested in finding out more about the death of Adam Rowley.’

‘Any reason why in particular?’

‘From what her parents said, she had a very strong reaction to his death – strikingly so, considering they weren’t in a relationship. Not formally, anyway.’

‘Is that it?’ The retired policeman had a crease between his eyes that was on the verge of deepening into a frown.

‘Not quite. I spoke to a few of Rebecca’s friends from college after the memorial service. They had some … interesting things to say.’

I had doubled back to talk to the pub-goers once I’d left the Haworths. I had found a group that had shrunk to six, including Mike the designated driver who had a sparkling water in front of him, loud-mouthed Leo and Debs, who was, I had to concede, a bit of a drip, but who had been only too pleased to talk about Adam Rowley. Leo had spent a long time telling me how much he and his friends had adored Rebecca, though none of them had been able to persuade her to go out with them. I admired her taste.

‘Go on,’ DCI Garland said.

‘According to them, the rumour in college was that Rebecca knew something about what happened to Adam Rowley. He was a bit of a lad and he had a reputation as a heartbreaker – lots of girlfriends, lots of one-night stands. Rebecca had had a crush on him for years, and a couple of weeks before he died, she “got her man”, as one of their friends put it.’ That had been charming Leo, removing his nose from a gin-and-tonic to speak. ‘It didn’t go anywhere and she couldn’t come to terms with the rejection. The gossip was that she had become obsessed with him – couldn’t be in the same room with him without bursting into tears. After he died, she fell apart completely. No one actually said she was responsible for what happened to him, but there was a lot of speculation, not that I give that too much weight. All I got from her friends was hearsay. I mean, he drowned, didn’t he? Wasn’t it an accident?’

DCI Garland folded his massive arms across his chest. ‘Could have been. Wasn’t. Not that I could prove it, mind you. The coroner decided to record an open verdict but he was fairly clear that it was probably an accident – the boy had been drinking and he’d taken a handful of drugs. By all accounts he was off his face that night. All I can tell you is that Adam Rowley was a shit, and if my daughter had been seeing him, I’d have been seriously tempted to kill him myself.’

I raised my eyebrows. ‘That bad?’

‘That bad.’ Garland opened the file and took out a glossy eight by ten photograph which he skimmed across the table. ‘This was Mr Rowley. Butter wouldn’t melt.’

It was a blown-up detail from a larger picture and the contours of his face were slightly blurred, but the poor quality couldn’t disguise the fact that Adam Rowley had been a beautiful young man. His black eyebrows were straight over deep blue eyes and his hair was short, revealing nicely shaped ears. He had high cheekbones, a lazy grin that showed white, even teeth and a square jaw that saved him from looking too pretty. But what really made me jump was the striking resemblance he bore to Gil Maddick.

When I looked up, Garland was looking at me quizzically. ‘Problem?’

‘She had a type, that’s all. Go on. Tell me about Adam.’

‘He was twenty years old when he died. Twenty years and two months, to be exact. And I’d say he’d spent every moment of his life causing trouble. He was bright enough. He was studying maths, so he’d have to be. And he played tennis to a very high standard – if he hadn’t been so busy having a social life, he could have played for the university, I was told.’ Garland shook his head. ‘He had an eye for the ladies, no question about it, but what Rebecca’s friends didn’t tell you was that he had a couple of nasty STDs, and he knew it, and he always refused to use a condom. He said it was the best way to make sure they never called him again when he dumped them.’

I made a note to check Rebecca’s medical history to see if she’d had any problems with sexually transmitted diseases, as Garland went on.

‘He liked to play with people too. We found a chart in his flat when we searched it. He’d made a note of each of his … conquests, I suppose you’d call them, and gave them marks out of ten. Double points if they were already in a relationship and he’d persuaded them to cheat. Triple points if he could persuade them to do things that a normal person like me would consider degrading. There were pictures of some of them, taken without their knowledge I have no doubt. He treated them like dirt, you see, and laughed about it with his friends, and I didn’t warm to him, I have to admit.’

‘So what happened? How did he die?’

‘Have you been to Latimer College yet? Do you know where it is?’ When I shook my head, he licked his thumb and went through the file until he came to a map of the city. He turned it around and pointed. ‘This is the college, here, at the far end of the High, just before Magdalen Bridge. The Cherwell is the river, here.’ He traced a line down the side of the city. ‘One branch of it runs right alongside the wall of Latimer and it actually cuts through the grounds here.’ He tapped his pen on the page. ‘This is where we think Rowley went into the water. The body wasn’t found for seventy-two hours. The Cherwell flows into the Thames here, not far from Latimer College, and the corpse had gone with it. It bobbed up again at Goring-on-Thames, just this side of Reading. We were lucky it came up at all. The river takes a few every year that go all the way to the sea.’

‘So what makes you think he went in at Latimer? Were there marks on the ground?’

‘No sign of a struggle and no damage to the riverbank, but then he didn’t have a mark on his body, give or take a few abrasions that most probably happened after his death. One way in and out of college and the night porter swore he hadn’t seen him leave. I trusted his word. He was a good man, Greg Ponsett. Ex-Navy. If he said it, he meant it.’ Garland sighed. ‘He’s dead now. Lung cancer.’

‘I’d like to read his statement,’ I said, hoping that the detective might take the hint and just give me the file.

‘Nothing in it. Just like there’s nothing in any of the other statements in here.’ He riffled the edge of the pages with his thumb. ‘They closed ranks as soon as the police became involved. No one was talking. All I know about Adam Rowley, I got off the record from staff and students. And it didn’t matter anyway, because I couldn’t prove it was murder in the first place.’

‘But you think he was killed.’

‘I’m sure of it.’ Garland’s eyes were steady on mine. ‘No question.’

‘It could have been suicide,’ I suggested.

‘Not him. He was in love with his life. He had everything going for him. He was doing nicely with his academic work so there were no problems there, he’d lined up a traineeship at a bank to start the following September, he’d bought himself a ticket to go around the world during the summer – he’d just applied for a load of visas the day he died – and he had no money worries. Suicide definitely didn’t fit.’ Garland shook his head. ‘It was the way it happened that made me sure it was murder. He wasn’t averse to taking drugs, but there was absolutely no reason why he should have been looking for sedatives on the thirtieth of April. May Day is a big deal in Oxford. The kids stay up all night so they can head down to Magdalen Bridge at dawn and party. Nightmare to police. If he was on something, it would have been coke or speed. Not diazepam.’

‘So what – someone drugged him without him knowing it?’

‘That was my theory. Or they told him he was taking uppers. Then, when he was nicely out of it, they rolled him into the water and let the river do its work.’

‘Who did you have in mind, though? Not Rebecca.’

‘I doubt it. I met her, you know. Interviewed her. She was broken up about it, but she wasn’t the sort to be capable of murder. She’d have confessed if she had done it. She was that type. Too nice for her own good. In fact, apart from his family, I’d say Miss Haworth was one of the few people who were actually sorry Adam Rowley was dead.’

‘So who then? You must have had some ideas.’

‘I did. I do. But I don’t want to put them into your head.’ He closed the file with an air of finality and pushed the whole lot across the table to me. ‘I know you want to look at this yourself. I’ve been indulging myself, talking about the old case, but this one stuck in my mind. You go through the paperwork and come back to me. Tell me what you think.’

‘How long have I got?’

‘That depends,’ Garland said seriously. ‘How worried are you that the person who killed Rebecca will kill again?’

I had chosen to view the retired detective’s last question as rhetorical, but as I walked back up St Aldates with my head bent against the cold, and the file – which was too big to fit in my bag – clutched to my chest, I found myself wondering about the possible suspects. Really, there was just the one suspect in my mind. And that person was unlikely to have been too concerned about what happened to Adam Rowley. This trip had all the makings of a classic waste of time, but I had never been able to leave a mystery alone, and like Reid Garland, I was convinced that there was more to the student’s death than had been proved.

There was a coffee shop about halfway along the High Street and I took refuge with a giant mug of coffee and a bun, sitting in the steamed-up window where I could watch the passing pedestrians and count the buses that thundered up and down the curving street, looking exotically modern against the medieval backdrop. The coffee shop was packed with students, all eking out their drinks and talking at the tops of their voices. Peaceful it was not, but I was warm for the first time since I’d arrived. I had an hour or so to kill before I had to present myself at Latimer College, and it seemed like a good idea to read up on Adam Rowley’s untimely death while I had the chance.

Garland had written a lengthy case summary for submission to the coroner’s court, thirty pages or so of typed narrative on what had happened to the student. I skim read it, looking for any nuggets of information that the retired DCI had forgotten to share with me. Adam was from Nottingham, the younger of two sons, and his father was a doctor. He had won every possible scholarship during his privileged journey from private prep school to public school and then Oxford, where he had continued his high level of academic achievement and managed to find time to dally with more than a few of his fellow students. He had spent his last morning alive in college, in his room. First-year and third-year students were accommodated within the college itself, and he had occupied what Garland had described as a particularly nice room on the first floor of Garden Building overlooking the river. The scout, a kind of housekeeper who looked after his staircase, had spoken to him at ten to eleven, when he had been going out to a tutorial in another college. He had eaten lunch in hall on his return to college, then divided his time in the afternoon between the college library and the junior common room. At six, he had eaten dinner in hall. (Garland appended a note here to explain that dining in hall was free for scholars – Rowley had qualified by doing well in his first-year exams and took full advantage of the perks.) He had been in the college bar at eight o’clock and stayed there until it closed at half past eleven. The college bar was heavily subsidised and had been running a promotion: all spirits reduced to a pound a shot and mixers for free. It had been, Garland suggested delicately, a busy evening, and most of the students had been thoroughly drunk by the end of the night. Various all-night parties had been taking place across the university, and the sole exit from the college, the porters’ lodge, had been busy. As Garland had told me, the porter on duty had affirmed that Adam Rowley hadn’t left, and CCTV from the lodge appeared to confirm that. None of his friends had seen him after the bar closed. No one had known where he was planning to go. He had been invited to three different parties and it appeared that everyone had assumed he had gone out. But instead, it seemed, he had gone back to his room.