The Oxford City Police station on St. Aldate's was a building designed to intimidate, a Victorian pile of Portland stone and iron-barred windows that seemed to crouch on the street corner like a gargoyle. Chief Inspector Barnaby, a broad-shouldered man with a face like a weathered tombstone, kept his office on the second floor, where the radiators clanked and the air smelled perpetually of carbolic soap and cheap pipe tobacco. Ashby found him there at three o'clock that same afternoon, hunched over a typewriter with the expression of a man who despised machinery on principle.
"Lord Clement," Barnaby said, not looking up. "I wondered when you'd appear. The Master telephoned me an hour ago. Suicide, the coroner says. Accidental death by misadventure. Tidy, respectable, no inquest required. Finch is relieved. The college bursar is relieved. The parents in Yorkshire will be devastated, but they'll accept it, because they've spent twenty years accepting whatever the world throws at them." He looked up at last, his grey eyes sharp beneath bushy brows. "You're not relieved. I can see it in your face. Sit down and tell me why."
Ashby sat in the hard wooden chair opposite the desk and produced the two notes from his waistcoat pocket. He laid them side by side on the blotter, the creased paper pale against the dark green leather. Barnaby read them in silence, his lips moving slightly. Then he read them again.
"A.B.," he said. "Augustus Blackwood."
"Presumably. He admits as much. He claims the experiment is a harmless piece of theatre, a study of obedience to authority. The Learner pretends to receive shocks; the Teacher, believing them to be real, obeys the instruction to increase the voltage. The object is to determine at what point the average man will refuse to continue."
Barnaby leaned back in his chair, which protested with a sound like a wounded cat. "And did anyone refuse?"
"According to Blackwood, not one. Forty subjects, and every one of them threw every switch, right up to the red markers at four hundred and fifty volts. The screams were pre-recorded, of course. The machine is a prop. No current flows through the electrodes."
"But Harrow is dead, and you found a real inductor coil in Creed's room. With blood on it."
"Precisely. Someone turned Blackwood's harmless puppet show into a lethal reality. And the obvious suspect—the boy with the bloodstained device, the orphan with no friends and no alibi—has conveniently vanished."
Barnaby picked up his pipe and began the elaborate ritual of filling and tamping that Ashby had learned to recognise as the prelude to serious thought. "You don't think Creed did it."
"I think Creed is a pawn. Look at the pattern, Barnaby. A scholarship boy, despised by his wealthier peers, isolated and alone, recruited into an experiment that required him to memorise word pairs while another student punished his errors. And on the other side, an orphaned servitor, equally isolated, equally alone, instructed to administer those punishments. Blackwood selected his subjects with care. He chose the rejected, the friendless, the desperate. He chose souls who would obey because obedience was the only currency they had."
The pipe had gone out. Barnaby relit it, puffing clouds of acrid smoke into the already foggy air. "You're suggesting the professor engineered the murder."
"I'm suggesting the professor engineered something. I don't yet know what. But I intend to find out." Ashby rose and retrieved the notes from the blotter. "In the meantime, I need to find Arthur Creed before someone else does. Can you put out word to your constables? Quietly, of course. No official search. I don't want to spook him."
Barnaby nodded slowly. "I'll do what I can. But if the boy's guilty, Clement, if he's the one who wired up that coil and pressed it to Harrow's hand, then my duty is clear. You understand that."
"I understand," Ashby said. "But he's not guilty. He's the next victim."
The college archives occupied a narrow, windowless room on the ground floor of the Old Library, a place so thick with dust that each footstep raised a small, swirling galaxy. The archivist, a desiccated don named Pargeter who seemed to have been constructed from the same materials as the manuscripts he guarded, was initially reluctant to admit a visitor, but the combination of Ashby's title and a discreet mention of the Master's authority opened the iron grille that separated the stacks from the outside world.
"I require the personnel records for the college servitors," Ashby said, settling himself at a deal table beneath a portrait of a forgotten bishop. "Specifically, the file on a young man named Arthur Creed."
Pargeter's thin lips tightened. "Servitor records are confidential, Lord Clement. The college takes a proprietary interest in its charity cases."
"I am acting on behalf of the Master," Ashby repeated, with the patient authority of a man who had once convinced a Gestapo officer to unlock a cell door. "And I assure you, the Master's interest in this matter is considerably more urgent than any bureaucratic scruple."
The file, when it arrived, was a slim manila folder tied with faded red ribbon. Ashby untied it with careful fingers and began to read.
Arthur Creed had been admitted to St. Ethelburga's in Michaelmas Term of 1948, at the age of nineteen. He was an orphan of the Blitz, the sole survivor of a bomb that had destroyed a foundling hospital in Stepney. The explosion had killed forty-seven children and three nurses. Arthur had been pulled from the rubble after fourteen hours, deafened and half-blind with dust, clutching the hand of a dead infant. He had spent the remainder of the war in a series of foster homes, none of which had kept him longer than six months, and had eventually been assigned to the college under a charitable scheme for educating "deserving orphans of the late conflict."
The file contained letters of reference from three foster families. Ashby read them in sequence, and with each page, a darker picture emerged.
From Mrs. E. Thistlewaite of Reading: "The boy is quiet and obedient, but there is something unnatural in his silence. He does not play with other children. He watches them, always watching, as if he is waiting for the bomb to fall again."
From Mr. J. Hardwick of Swindon: "Arthur is a hard worker, I'll give him that. But he has a temper when pushed. Last month, a neighbour's dog frightened him, and he struck the animal with a piece of kindling. The dog survived, but I sent the boy away all the same. I have my own children to think of."
From Reverend T. Moulton of Banbury: "I had hoped that a Christian home might heal whatever wound the war left in this child. I was mistaken. He is not wicked, precisely, but there is a blankness in him, a hollow place where a soul should be. I have written to the college authorities to warn them. Arthur Creed will obey any instruction given with sufficient authority. He is a vessel waiting to be filled, and I fear what will be poured into him."
Ashby closed the file and sat for a long moment in the dusty silence. The portrait of the forgotten bishop stared down at him with painted eyes that seemed, in the uncertain light, to hold a warning of their own.
A vessel waiting to be filled. It was a terrible phrase, and a terribly accurate one. The boy who had been pulled from the rubble had been hollowed out by tragedy, and in the years that followed, the world had poured nothing into that hollow but rejection, fear, and a desperate, aching need to belong. Blackwood had seen this. Blackwood, with his cold, clinical eyes and his machine of pain and his forty obedient subjects, had recognised in Arthur Creed the perfect instrument.
But an instrument for what?
The answer, when it came, arrived not in the archives but in the person of a young woman who intercepted Ashby on his way back to Canterbury Quad. She was small and pale, with dark hair pulled back in a severe bun and the threadbare uniform of a college bedder—one of the invisible army of women who scrubbed the floors and lit the fires and emptied the chamber pots of Oxford's scholars. She stood in the shadow of a buttress, twisting a handkerchief in her hands, and when she spoke, her voice was barely above a whisper.
"Lord Clement," she said. "I must speak with you. It's about Mr. Creed. And about the other one—Mr. Harrow. I was there. I saw."
Her name was Gwendolen Morley, though she went by Gwen, and she had been employed at St. Ethelburga's for three years, ever since the father of her child had vanished into the anonymity of a passing regiment and left her with a daughter to support and a reputation that rendered her unemployable in any respectable establishment. The college had taken her on as an act of charity—or, as the bursar had put it, "because we can pay her half what we'd pay a man." She lived in a damp basement room off the kitchen quarters with little Lily, now aged four, and she survived on the thin gruel of institutional tolerance.
"I clean the laboratory," she said, her eyes darting nervously toward the college gates. "Every Tuesday and Friday, after Professor Blackwood has finished his work. Last week, on the Tuesday, I came early. The experiment was still running. I saw Mr. Harrow in the chair, the one with the wires. And I saw Mr. Creed at the machine. But it wasn't like the professor said. It wasn't pretend."
Ashby led her to a bench in the Fellows' Garden, a secluded spot where the yew hedges muffled the sound of passing footsteps. "Tell me exactly what you saw," he said.
Gwen took a shuddering breath. "Mr. Harrow was screaming. Real screams, my lord, not the recorded kind. I've heard a man scream before—my father, when the cancer took him. You don't forget that sound. And Mr. Creed was crying. The tears were running down his face, but he kept pressing the switches. One after another. I saw his hand shaking, but he couldn't stop. He kept looking at the professor, and the professor kept nodding, and Mr. Creed kept pressing the switches."
"You're certain the shocks were real?"
"The smell," Gwen said, her voice dropping even lower. "There was a smell in the room, like burning. Like meat left too long on the stove. I've smelled it in my nightmares ever since."
Ashby felt a coldness settle in his chest, the familiar chill of a suspicion crystallising into certainty. "Did you speak to anyone about this?"
"I tried. I went to the dean, the next morning. He told me I was a hysterical woman who didn't understand scientific research. He told me to mind my floors and keep my fancies to myself." Her hands tightened on the handkerchief. "I thought—I thought if I said nothing, it would be all right. But now Mr. Harrow is dead, and Mr. Creed has gone, and I'm afraid. I'm afraid for myself, and I'm afraid for my Lily."
Ashby reached out and placed a hand over hers, a gesture so unexpected that Gwen flinched. "You were right to come to me," he said. "And you were right to be afraid. But you are not alone in this. I give you my word, Mrs. Morley, that I will get to the bottom of this business, and no harm will come to you or your daughter. In the meantime, I want you to stay in the public areas of the college. Do not go anywhere alone, and do not, under any circumstances, enter the laboratory again. Do you understand?"
Gwen nodded, a fragile, frightened gesture, and then she was gone, vanishing through the garden gate like a shadow retreating from the sun.
Ashby remained on the bench for a long time, watching the autumn leaves drift down from the copper beeches and thinking about the nature of obedience. Mill had written that liberty was the birthright of every Englishman, that the only justification for coercing a fellow creature was to prevent harm to others. But Mill had never sat in a basement laboratory watching a machine click through its red switches. Mill had never been Arthur Creed.
At six o'clock, he walked to the library tower and climbed the narrow spiral staircase to the top floor, where a single room looked out over the college quadrangles. The door was locked, but the lock was a simple one, and the silver-topped cane concealed more than a blade. Inside, the room was sparsely furnished: a desk, a chair, a telephone, and a wall of books on the history of experimental psychology. On the desk, a leather-bound journal lay open to the most recent entry.
The handwriting was Blackwood's, the same precise, calligraphic script that Ashby had seen on the notes. He read the entry, and his blood ran cold.
"Subject Forty-One: Arthur Creed. Selection criteria: orphan, social isolate, history of trauma-induced compliance, pathological need for authority figures. Hypothesis confirmed. Subject obeyed all instructions, including the administration of what he believed to be lethal voltage. The cognitive dissonance between his moral instincts and his obedience imperative produced extreme emotional distress, as measured by galvanic skin response and cortisol levels. This distress was, however, insufficient to override the authority imperative. Conclusion: the human conscience is a weaker force than the need to belong. When the soul is hollow, anything may be poured into it. Including death."
Beneath this, written in fresher ink, was a single line that made Ashby's hands tighten on the journal.
"Subject Forty-Two has been selected. The experiment will continue."
And then, from the courtyard below, a scream split the evening air—a woman's scream, high and terrified, cutting through the quiet of the quadrangle like a knife through silk.
Ashby was down the stairs before the echo had died, his heart pounding, his cane gripped tight in his hand. He burst through the tower door and into the quadrangle, where a small crowd had already gathered around the fountain at its centre. He pushed through the knot of students and dons, and there, floating face-down in the shallow water, was the body of a man.
The body was dressed in the rough serge uniform of a college servitor. The hands, spread wide in the murky water, were blistered and burned, the flesh peeled back in the distinctive pattern of severe electrical trauma. And pinned to the back of the sodden coat, written on a scrap of paper in that same terrible, calligraphic hand, was a note.
"I tried to refuse. But the machine was real. I am sorry. I am sorry. I obeyed."
It was not Arthur Creed. The body was older, heavier, the face when they turned it over bearing the weathered lines of middle age. But the hands told the same story as Peter Harrow's hand, and the note was written in the same ink.
The experiment had claimed its second victim. And somewhere in the gathering darkness, Arthur Creed—pawn, instrument, vessel—was still walking, still breathing, still waiting for the next command.
Ashby looked up at the library tower, at the dark window that looked out over the quadrangle. A light was burning there now, a single electric bulb glowing amber against the gathering night. And behind the glass, a shadow moved—a tall, thin shadow that might have been watching, and waiting, and smiling its faint, ironic smile.
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