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warbling voice mounted a scale whilst a female chorus ladelled sugar into the backing vocals.
    “What is it?”
    “It’s the soundtrack to my working life. What you can hear is Demis Roussos, with The Demis Roussos Phenomenon, the only EP to climb to the top of the UK hit parade in 1976. Demis spent just one week at number one, but after that we’ll have Kiki Dee and Elton John demanding we don’t do anything untoward to their hearts, then ABBA will be resurrected to inform us of the age and temperament of the Dancing Queen. When we were still at the planning stage for life inside St Margaret’s I begged Miranda to bring forward the freeze date by just a couple of months so we could have The Clash and The Ramones, but she thought them redolent of a social upheaval that might disrupt the therapeutic atmosphere. Demis may only have lasted from the 17 th to the 24 th July in the real world, but here he plays on a loop for a week every new term. You wouldn’t believe the royalties we pay his estate. It’s like working behind the counter of a shop at Christmas for all eternity, with Let it Snow playing on repeat. If it turns out this Ali chap went on a rampage, and you’re short a motive, my money’s on Demis.”
    “I’ll bear it in mind,” Oates said.
    They entered a second court, a small functional space compared to the grand open vistas of the main body of the school, where the students had their accommodation in a mix of Victorian brickwork and sixties concrete and glass. Charles explained that each guest had their own room. Outside one of the staircases was a rope of old-fashioned blue police tape, and a young officer was chatting to a couple of the students who had gathered there.
    All the time, Charles kept up his friendly patter, and Oates continued to resist the insinuation of his camaraderie. Charles rebounded from each rebuff with the clumsy enthusiasm of a teenage suitor. As Oates walked past the stout dormitory walls, the spa felt like a fairytale palace – the cold queen, her oafish jester, and her personal army of ex-special forces in blue overalls.
     
     
    O ATES LEFT C HARLES to supervise the conversation between the young policeman on guard outside the stairwell and the small crowd of students. The first flight of stairs was wide, but the second flight was half a ladder, a skinny little passage between the walls. He could smell death about half way up, the heavy metallic odour of spilt blood. By the time he arrived in the room, the SOCOs had already set up the Oracle and taken their readings.
    The tripod, with its various sensors and lenses hanging like mechanical fruit from its limbs, stood a few feet from the body. Tiny sound waves probed the wounds, and the cameras fed the pattern of the blood spatter back into the program. The thermometers registered the ambient temperature of the room and of the corpse. Further instruments probed the stiffening of the joints, and the degree to which the blood had settled in the lower veins and arteries. When all the data had been stored and processed Oates and his fellow officers gathered around the screen to watch the preliminary analysis. In the simulation the bright orange figure of the assailant entered the picture from the left of the screen, and brought the knife down on Prudence Egwu.
    The murder weapon, which lay now on the floor beside the dresser, was a distinctive African knife with a bone handle. As the scene played out, the computer registered the vital statistics of the attacker – height, six foot. Weight, 90 kilos. Probability male, eighty-six per cent. Probability age range eighteen–thirty-five, sixty per cent. Oates frowned in irritation at the data lines. He had specifically told the SOCOs to switch off the probability metrics, because it was bloody obvious that most violent crime was committed by young men, but there was a homicidal old lady or two in the world, and seeing the odds in black and white made it harder to spot her.
    On the