They continued along Trinity Lane, between more ancient brick buildings.
‘Anyway,’ said Strike, ‘when we left the squat, which I remember as being about a day later, I nicked all the bloke’s Latin books.’
Robin let out a shout of laughter: she hadn’t seen that coming.
‘There was a copy of Catullus in there,’ said Strike. ‘You ever read any Catullus?’
‘No,’ said Robin.
‘It’s filthy – I knew, because there was English on one side and Latin on the other. It’s basically sex, buggery, blow jobs, poems about people Catullus didn’t like being arseholes, and his infatuation with a woman he called Lesbia, because she was from the island of Lesbos.’
‘She presumably wasn’t…?’
‘No, she liked men, a lot, according to Catullus. Anyway, I didn’t ever want to be patronised by any fucker spouting Latin at me again, so I used the bastard’s books to learn enough to get a GCSE two years later, and memorised a ton of quotes.’
Robin started to laugh so uncontrollably that Strike began to laugh too.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘You learned Latin to prove a point to a man you were never going to meet again?’
‘He patronised me,’ said Strike, who was still grinning, but couldn’t really see why she thought his behaviour unusual. ‘And I’ll tell you this: there’s nothing like Latin for slapping the fuck out of people who think they’re better than you. I’ve used it several times to good effect.’
‘This is a whole new side of you,’ said Robin, trying with difficulty to suppress her laughter. ‘I should’ve told you no gentleman can hold his head up until he thoroughly understands sheep reproduction. You’d probably have run off to get a degree in it.’
‘No offence to your father,’ said Strike, grinning, ‘but if you need a degree to understand how sheep reproduce, you’ve got bigger worries than whether you’re a gentleman…
‘I used Latin on Charlotte, the night I met her,’ he added unexpectedly, and Robin stopped laughing to listen. ‘She thought I was just some oik, obviously, but she was humouring me because she wanted to piss off Ross when he came looking for her at the party. They were dating and they’d rowed – she was trying to make him jealous.
‘Anyway, she was studying classics,’ said Strike as they entered Senate House Passage. ‘She told me she loved Catullus, expecting me not to have heard of him, so I reeled off Catullus Five, his first love poem to Lesbia, in its entirety. The rest is history: sixteen years of fucking pain. Appropriate, really, because Lesbia led Catullus a right fucking dance… Is this it?’
Gonville & Caius College towered above them, its arched entrance barred by a black iron gate and its ornate face of dun-coloured stone defying the modern world represented by the surrounding shops. Three statues of unsmiling fourteenth- and sixteenth-century men stared down at Strike from their niches. A stretch of brilliant green lawn was visible through the bars of the gate, and more golden buildings surrounding it. What appeared to be a porters’ lodge was unoccupied: there was no sign of any human.
‘Locked,’ said Strike, trying the gate. ‘Obviously. Shit.’
But then, while they were still staring through the bars, an Asian woman in her thirties came into view, dressed in white linen trousers and a T-shirt, and carrying a laptop bag. Before she could pass out of sight, Strike called through the locked gate,
‘Excuse me? Hello? You know Vikas Bhardwaj, don’t you?’
He was certain she was one of the people he’d just seen in the picture of Vikas’s research group, and sure enough she paused, frowning slightly.
‘Yes,’ she said, approaching the gate.
‘We’re friends of his, we were passing through and thought we’d surprise him,’ said Strike, ‘but he’s not answering his phone. You wouldn’t happen to know—?’
He saw her gaze move from him to Robin and back again. As Strike would have guessed, the presence of Robin seemed to convince her he was harmless.
‘Have you been to his rooms?’ she asked.
‘We thought his rooms were here,’ said Robin.
‘No, no, he’s over in the Stephen Hawking Building.’
‘Ah, of course,’ said Strike, feigning exasperation with himself. ‘He told me that. Thanks very much.’
She smiled briefly and turned back into the college. Robin was already looking up the Stephen Hawking Building on her phone.
‘It’s a long walk. It’d make sense to go back to the car and drive there.’
So they retraced their steps, and after a short journey in the BMW arrived at a modern S-shaped building in pale grey stone, surrounded by a garden in which heavy-headed roses bloomed amid a mass of greenery. A sign asked visitors to visit the porters’ lodge, but a dreamy-eyed, long-haired man had just opened the main door, so Robin called,
‘Excuse me, we’re friends of Vikas Bhardwaj – could we come in with you?’
The long-haired man held the door open in silence. Robin had the impression of somebody so deep in their own abstractions that they barely registered what they were doing.
‘Which way is Vikas’s room, would you happen to know?’ Robin asked. ‘We’re friends of—’
The long-haired man merely pointed left in silence, then passed out of view.
‘He shouldn’t have done that,’ said Strike as they passed a portrait of Stephen Hawking. ‘You don’t just let people into a building like this.’
‘I know,’ said Robin. They’d tightened security around her old halls of residence after the attack on her, but still people left the main door propped open for friends.
‘OK, this is wheelchair-friendly,’ said Strike. The floors were smooth and the slightly curved passage into which they turned wide, with white doors appearing at intervals.
At the far end of the corridor a tall, thin white man and a short black woman appeared to be examining something on a wall.
‘No names on doors,’ said Strike. ‘Let’s ask them. If they don’t know, we’ll start knocking.’
When they heard Strike and Robin’s footsteps, the man and woman looked around quickly. Both their expressions were anxious, even scared.
‘Would you happen to know which is Vikas Bhardwaj’s room?’ asked Strike.
‘It’s this one,’ said the woman, pointing at the door beside which she was standing, to which was fixed a brief, typed note in large letters that enabled both Strike and Robin to read it quickly.
Gone to Birmingham. Back Monday.
‘Who are you?’ asked the man.
‘I’m a private detective,’ said Strike.
Robin knew exactly why he’d said it. Something was wrong, she could feel it: the fear in the faces of the pair facing them, the note claiming Vikas was where they knew he wasn’t and the faint, unpleasant smell in the air, which reminded her of Josh and Edie’s old room in North Grove, where a dead rat had been quietly decomposing in a jar. Her heart had begun to race: it knew what her mind didn’t want to accept.
‘You were supposed to be meeting him?’ Strike asked the frightened-looking pair.
‘Yes,’ said the woman.
‘Has someone gone to get the porter?’
‘Yes,’ said the man.
Neither of them seemed to doubt Strike’s right to pose these questions, and that in itself was confirmation that both knew something was badly wrong.
‘Does he normally type his notes?’ asked Strike.
‘Yes,’ said the woman again, ‘but that’s not his font. He always uses Comic Sans. For a joke.’
‘He’s not answering his phone,’ said the man.