I resolved to spend a few weeks building out his work into a proper theory, after which I planned to offer him second author on publication if the work proved robust. But that was the day he left, and despite all the rumours surrounding his death, no one ever really found out what happened to Elliot Asha.

So I took his work as my own, and am forever grateful and profoundly ashamed.

Chapter 34

Elliot was annoyed when he left Hoyt’s room. They didn’t know him. They didn’t know what he’d been through. He didn’t measure his life by their yardstick. He hadn’t come to Oxford to study physics out of love. He’d come because it was easy. For all his many faults, Ben had given him a grounding in the subject that was beyond compare, and Elliot had never lost his ability to see solutions others considered impossible. He’d left Hoyt one such example as a riposte to her criticisms of him as a scientist. It was a solution he’d puzzled out while considering the abstracts of gravitational theory and causal dynamics. She would make a fuss, of course, and want him to publish, but what did it matter if the stars were deconstructed a little further? He preferred them beautiful and mysterious.

He was no longer in the mood to join his crew, so he headed for the library to collect his books. He walked through the lodge and turned left up Turl Street, aiming for the old church that had been converted into the college library.

With each step his mood soured. Nothing was ever enough for these people, and while they would always ask more of him, none of them could help him achieve the things he wanted. Despite what he’d said to Hoyt and Gardner, he was interested in truth.

Ben had made him a promise once, and he was desperate to know if it was true.

Elliot approached the wrought-iron church gates, which were set in a high fence, and he opened the one on the right. He stepped into the old stone churchyard and walked towards the grand library.

He pulled one of the huge wooden doors, stepped into a tiny antechamber, produced his library keycard from his pocket and ran it over the reader beside the glass security gates. The sensor beeped and he pulled one of the gates open and stepped inside.

The librarian wasn’t at her desk, so he climbed the wooden steps into the main vaulted chamber. A run of long, broad tables formed a spine down the centre of the room, and a dozen students occupied well-spaced chairs. High shelves flanked the central table and between each pair were carrels, many of which were unoccupied. Elliot nodded at a few familiar faces. As captain of boats, he was well known within the college, but not always well liked because of some of the rowdier antics of the rowing crew.

His books were where he’d left them, in a carrel at the very rear of the church, but the space next to him was no longer empty. It was now occupied by Jessica Sealey, a girl he’d had a crush on since fresher’s week. The cloud of his encounter with Hoyt and Gardner lifted at the sight of her, and he forgot his anger.