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her notes from the desk at the back. She paused, her features still with thought. In that moment she appeared to him like a white marble statue of a pagan god, dredged from the earth, cleaned, restored and put on gleaming display in a modernist museum.
    She was layered with time – on the surface, a freshness borne of recent attention. Beneath that, an aged thing who had absorbed more than a natural lifetime of human experience, who had watched a century of history accrue from behind her impassive beauty. Underneath it all, as with the ancient gods, there was a bedrock layer that predated her creation, a force of nature to which she had given a human face. As Oates turned to walk down the stairs after Charles, he realised he did not have the requisite learning to reference the symbols in her neat dress and well-groomed hands, and he wondered what it was she embodied for those who worshipped her: wisdom, hunting, lust or war.
     
     
    C HARLES WALKED AHEAD of him down the stairs, and he managed to restrain himself from talking to Oates until the two of them had passed through the narrow doorway into the great court. Supper was over, and the students were dispersing in twos and threes from the dining hall. The long evening was drawing in, and lights glowed in the high Victorian Gothic windows of the chapel, the bulbs of chandeliers showing warmly through stained glass.
    In the fresh air with Charles’s giggly curiosity beside him, Oates felt again like a schoolboy who had emerged unscathed from the headmaster’s office after an interview about some crime the two of them had committed together. He knew he would have to work hard to retain his suspicion of the ebullient public relations officer, and so when Charles asked him how fierce the old woman had been he remained non-committal. Charles however had correctly judged the atmosphere when he put his head around the door, and with his prior knowledge of Miranda he seemed to intuit exactly the nature of their exchange.
    “She can be quite evangelical about what we do here. Bloody hard work for a PR man like myself, to keep the wheels on when the boss goes all starry-eyed. Still, never a dull day. And she’s got more of a personal interest.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Well, in perfecting the Treatment, obviously.” Charles pulled his plump cheeks back in a parody of Miranda’s youthful skin.
    “She suffers from this… Tithonus Effect?”
    “She’s never talked about it. You’ve met her, she never talks about anything outside of her work. But I would have thought so, wouldn’t you?”
    “How old is she?”
    “Oh, DCI Oates! You should know better than to ask that of a lady! But I should say it’s a safe bet she was bent over her textbooks in these very halls when you and I were mere glimmers in our fathers’ eyes, and peering into the human soul whilst we were trying to figure out what the big and the little hand do.”
    As they passed under the old gatehouse that housed the school reception, Oates found himself marvelling once again at the sheer size of the spa. A further street opened out beyond, with a couple of students milling around in the light of the streetlamps. Another groundsman was positioned just outside the gate. He had one of the long mechanical arms which council cleaners use to retrieve rubbish from hedgerows, and he was using it to pick up a dead swallow from the gutter. Oates had seen three of the groundskeepers now, and they all had the same bearing, the indelible imprint of a life spent in the military.
    They crossed the road, and just before they entered a doorway on the other side, Charles put a hand up in front of Oates’s chest, bringing him to a halt. He cocked his head and grimaced.
    “Do you hear that?”
    Oates listened. From a window somewhere he could hear music. It had the unmistakable sound quality of a record-player, speakers turned outwards on the summer night. He didn’t recognise the song, a seventies lounge-ballad. A man’s