Equinox

The response came back with surprising speed.

'Cool,' Tom said.

'What is?' Laura asked, unable to make head or tail of the data.

'The moon entered Aries at 3.47 a.m. on 21 March.'

'That could be exactly the time of the second murder.' Philip was clearly impressed.

'Monroe was sure of the time?' Laura asked Philip.

'He said his forensic team believed that the murder had taken place between four and six hours before I got there. That was just before 8.30, so the murder must have been sometime between 2.30 and 4.30 a.m.'

'Tom, with this software you can track any of the planets as well as the moon?' Laura asked. 'Yes.'

'We need to find out if any of the planets are going to enter Aries, and when. Can we go through each one?'

'I can do better than that,' Tom replied. 'I can tell you the movements of all the planets as far into the future as you want.'

'Don't exaggerate, Thomas,' Jo said lightly. 'Only until the year AD 3000.'

Philip gave a snort of laughter, but Tom ignored her and tapped the keys, answering a succession of questions at the prompt. After a few moments he hit the SEARCH prompt again and pushed his chair back from the terminal. 'OK, do your stuff,' he said.

It took longer this time, but after perhaps twenty seconds a new screen filled with diagrams and lists of numbers appeared.

'What does it tell us?' Laura asked impatiently.

'I'm getting there’ Tom replied. He scrolled down, peering at the screen, then closed his eyes, lost in concentration. 'Jesus!'

'What?' Philip said.

'This is really something.'

'Will you please. .' Laura hissed.

'Sorry. Every so often you get a conjunction of planets-'

'When the planets line up?' Philip interrupted.

'Yeah, when two or more heavenly bodies — the moon and the planets — appear to line up as seen from the Earth. Getting a conjunction of two planets or a planet and the moon, say, happens quite often — that's called a three-body conjunction. Getting a four-body conjunction is rarer — it only happens every few years. A week from today, early on 31 March, at a few minutes after midnight to be precise, the moon and three planets will be almost perfectly arranged to form a five-body conjunction with the sun. That is so rare it's only happened maybe ten times during the past thousand years or so.'

Laura was the first to react. 'So that means three planets are going to enter Aries during the course of the next few days?'

'Yep.'

'You can find out which?'

'I already have,' Tom replied and pointed to the screen.

'Venus, Mars and Jupiter, in that order.' 'When?'

'Jupiter, just after midnight on 31 March; Mars, a few hours earlier, the evening of 30 March; and Venus … let me see,' he muttered, scrolling down. 'Venus passes into Aries tonight, at eight minutes past nine.'

Chapter 14

Cambridge: the evening of 10 August 1690

John Wickins had come up to Cambridge in 1663 and now it was as familiar to him as his mother's face. He knew every turn of every lane, every plant and every weed that sprang forth from the paving stones on his regular walks. He knew every college Fellow and each townsman who crossed his path. He had enjoyed many of the same routines for almost three decades: he bought his books at the same shop, filled his inkwell from the same stationer's, had his clothes tailored in precisely the same way by the same, now elderly tailor, and he purchased his snuff from the same dealer who had first procured it for him twenty or more years earlier. But now he was leaving, and the place no longer seemed the same.

Wickins had been in great haste, and had hired a horse to make the journey back from Oxford that day. Arriving at dusk, he had handed the reins to

the stable boy and the horse had been fed and watered in the college stables. It was an unusual luxury to allow himself, but he had big plans and he could not waste time on overcrowded snail-like coaches. There was no denying that he was excited by the prospect of the new position offered him, the rectorship of St Mary's, Oxford. It was an opportunity he could not let pass. Now was the time to make the break from Cambridge and all that his life there entailed.

Of course, that meant leaving Isaac Newton. Wickins and Newton had had a very odd relationship. They had met during their first term, each of them miserable and less than enamoured with the majority of the other students. Each had arrived expecting to fall into a challenging whirlpool of learning, but instead they had found that very few students cared for anything but drinking, gambling and whoring. He and Newton had similar backgrounds: each had been raised within the lower gentry. Wickins's father had been a schoolmaster, Newton's father had died before Newton was born and his mother had married a local vicar. Neither of them had the slightest thing in common with most of the young men who had gone up in their year. Many of these had been the sons of wealthy landowners and successful merchants; but even those clots had been better than the laziest and stupidest of all students — the vile offspring of the nobility whose families paid for the academic success of their sons.

Wickins crossed the quad of Trinity College and entered under the archway leading to his staircase. He was walking slowly, almost as though he was trying to put off the inevitable. He had experienced some good times here in this great city. He could admit that most of his life had been a mundane routine comprised of study, then his theological researches. But these had been interspersed with times helping Newton with his scientific work, copying texts for him, assisting whenever he could. During those periods, he could tell himself with confidence that he had come closer to the great Isaac Newton than any other man had ever come. Then there had been times when physical need had brought them a unique intimacy, actions about which they never spoke and kept locked away from the world. And, of course, there was always the real purpose to his living in such close proximity to the man, the reason he had first been encouraged to meet Newton and befriend him. Newton, he had grown to understand, was the most dangerous man alive.

Wickins reached the door to their rooms, fished his key from the pocket of his tunic and turned it in the lock. The hallway and the rooms leading off to left and right were cast in gloom. Warm air blew through an opened window at the end of the hall. The door to his bedchamber was closed, but the one to the right, leading into Newton's room and beyond that to his laboratory, stood ajar. It was unusually quiet. The only sound came from a pair of thrushes nesting in an elm tree just beyond the opened window.

Now that he was there, Wickins suddenly experienced a great swell of uncertainty about his plans. This was his home. He felt secure here. Was he doing the right thing by throwing it all away and chasing after a new life in Oxford?

He felt sure that his mission in Cambridge was now over. The work had been of great importance and he could not have left any sooner. So, about this at least, he felt no guilt. The conjunction of the planets was due the following night, 11 August, and it was clear that no one was about to try the experiment. If Newton was not preparing for it, then nobody else would have the ability, the knowledge or the ambition to do so. Wickins's friends in Oxford had been watching for tell-tale signs, but there appeared to have been nothing suspicious going on there. They had learned of one murder the previous week, but it was clear to them that the girl had died at the hands of her lover who had then killed himself. Or, at least, that was all they had managed to ascertain. But even his friends had to admit that many crimes could be easily covered up and that they could never know for sure. Most crucially, though, Wickins thought as he removed his shoulder bag, jacket and hat and placed them on the hooks in the hall, the ruby sphere was almost certainly safe in its repository. And no alchemical genius had emerged with the ancient codes and Hermetic knowledge to acquire the precious thing.