Equinox

'Then we should proceed. Follow me.'

Landsdown led them across the quad and through a doorway that took them to a long narrow passageway with many doors to left and right. At the fourth door on the left the three men stopped. Landsdown removed a key from his breeches and turned it in the lock. Taking hold of the door handle, he eased it round and pushed gently.

Directly ahead of them stood another door. This was open and through it they could see a steep, narrow stone staircase leading down into darkness. At the top of the stairs a torch was positioned in a wall bracket. Landsdown lifted it and stepped forward into the opening.

They went down a short flight of steps and found themselves in a room filled with racks and shelves containing many hundreds of bottles of wine, port and brandy: the college wine cellar. Landsdown took them to the far end of the vault and stopped at the wall. It was cold and wet to the touch. Landsdown ran his palm slowly across the wall. He held the torch close to the stone but seemed to be guided more by touch than by sight. After a moment his hand stopped moving and his finger looped around a small dark metal ring, its circumference no greater than that of a guinea coin. He pulled it firmly and they all heard a sound like a heavy weight falling. Very slowly, a panel opened in the wall to reveal an opening no broader than a man's shoulders.

Landsdown turned to his companions. 'Well, gentlemen, our evening's work is about to begin. Are you ready to proceed?'

Chapter 18

At five a.m. Philip's house possessed a particular charm that had been largely absent from Laura's life for at least two decades. In Greenwich Village, five a.m. was not so very different from any other hour. From her apartment she could hear traffic noise, including sirens and the blare of car horns, throughout the day and the night. It was background mush and she only really noticed it when it was no longer there. Here, in this sleepy Oxfordshire village, in the pre-dawn, the cars of New York were as real to her as Pinocchio.

Laura had a woollen wrap around her shoulders and tried to warm herself up by the Aga as the kettle boiled. Then, with a hot cup of strong coffee in her hand, she walked through the hall into the main sitting room with its low-beamed ceiling and bowed leadlight windows. The floorboards creaked and, conscious of Philip and Jo asleep upstairs, she closed the door behind her. She turned on a couple of lamps and walked over to the fireplace. There was some

residual heat there from the night before when Tom had been over and they had worked out so much about the dates of the murders — the ones that had already been committed and the ones she felt sure would come. Indeed, if her ideas were correct then another young woman somewhere not far from here would now be lying dead, her body probably still undiscovered.

Sipping her coffee, Laura paced around the room, gazing abstractedly at the pictures Philip had on his walls. There were three of his mother's paintings, fantastic bold blocks of colour with tiny spindly figures standing in the foreground: figures that seemed to be on the verge of being overwhelmed by some nameless horrible thing. These paintings would not have looked out of place in a Manhattan duplex or a Milan studio, and perhaps, she mused, a few could be found there too.

When it came to art, Philip had eclectic tastes. Close to his mother's modern paintings he had hung Victorian oils and even a couple of early 1940s landscapes. On the same wall beside these could be found a few of his favourite photographs, mainly abstracts taken in the mid-1980s. And to cap it off he had hung with them some ancient-looking family portraits, figures from the nineteenth century, great-great-grandparents in bonnets and wing collars.

Tom had said something in passing last night that

Laura had taken little notice of at the time, but now it was clamouring for her attention. She sat down and stared at the grey ash and embers in the fireplace. Then she had it. Tom had described the five-body conjunction. 'That is so rare,' he had said. 'It's only happened maybe ten times during the past thousand years or so.'

'Of course,' she said aloud. 'Of course. Ten times during the past thousand years or so. Which means it must have happened a few times in the not-too-distant past.'

Jumping up, Laura walked over to the computer. Finding Netscape, she pulled up 'History' and scrolled down to open the home page for almanac.com

Tom had left her his password in case she needed it and, recalling what he had worked through the previous evening, she typed in information at the prompts and pressed 'enter'. Taking a sip of coffee, she watched the screen changing until a new page appeared. In a box near the bottom of the screen entitled 'Five-body conjunctions AD 1500–2000' she could see a list of three dates: 1564, 1690, 1851.

Laura smiled to herself and drummed her fingertips on the desktop. Then, returning to the keyboard, she exited the website, called up Google and typed in: '1851 + Oxford + murders'.

The results were disappointing. In its inimitable way the search engine had dredged up a medley of what seemed like spurious links to the three words. Top of the list was material on the Great Exhibition of 1851. Lower down came references to the murder that year of a policeman in South London. Other pages offered insights into the Oxford Dictionary definition of murder, books published in 1851 with the word 'murders' in the title, and a left-field entry offering a gateway to the work of an American acoustic pop duo called Murder In Oxford.

Google had turned up more than two thousand links to the three words, and Laura was determined not to give up. The two pages that followed were filled with ephemera, more Oxford Dictionary links and plenty more about the Great Exhibition. On the verge of trying some other combination of words, Laura scrolled down to links 60–80 and something caught her eye. Halfway down the screen was a link that read: 'Victorian Psycho? Brother Norman thinks so.' She hovered the cursor over the link and clicked.

It was a garish amateur site and a lot of the material appeared to be bordering on the delusional. Called Brother Norman s Conspiracy Archive , its creator — Norman, Laura presumed — seemed obsessed with the usual topics: Roswell, the Kennedy assassination, Princess Diana's death in Paris, the CIA plot to blame an innocent Bin Laden for September 11. She had seen it all before and ignored the blaring titles along the left-hand margin that promised 'New Revelations that will Rock your World'. Scrolling down impatiently, she found a title that held some promise. 'Oxford Slaughter: A Victorian Charles Manson?'

Disappointingly, it consisted of no more than three paragraphs. In breathless prose, Brother Norman described the scant facts known to conspiracy theorists. Three murders in Oxford, England during the summer of 1851. Three women killed and mutilated. Could it have been a young Jack the Ripper almost four decades before he turned up again in East London? Was it a conspiracy propagated by the British Parliament? Or were there Satanist overtones?

Feeling tired suddenly, Laura rubbed her eyes and drank the last of her coffee. If there had been a series of murders in Oxford in 1851 wouldn't she have heard of them? She looked at the screen without really seeing it, letting the thoughts meander through her mind.

Maybe the murders had been forgotten. How thorough were police investigations in those days? Would the killings have been reported methodically? Was there a local newspaper in Oxford over a century and a half ago?

There were so many questions and so few answers. Worse, every time Laura thought she was peeling back a tiny corner of the mystery more puzzles would fall into her lap. All she had were pieces of the jigsaw, oddities that did not fit together. Indeed, they were pieces that seemed to have come from completely different jigsaws, and all she kept turning up were new chunks of these puzzles that appeared to have no link to any of the others. She considered delving further into other conspiracy websites but felt little inclination.

But she was convinced now that some contemporary murderer was working to some weird astrological agenda, and, if Brother Norman was to be believed, something not too dissimilar had happened at the time of the last conjunction and perhaps the time before and the time before that. And the link was astrology, the occult, some crazy alchemical connection. Laura's years of experience following New York City homicides and corruption could offer no help. But as she stared at the blue screen and Brother Norman's words drifted out of focus, she knew exactly what her next move should be.