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place?
    Twenty minutes later a cart came along, and he hitched a lift back to Oxford with the farmer who was driving. Several times along the way Sherlock tried to ask the man about the house that he
must have passed, but each time the words caught in his throat. He just didn’t want to raise the subject.
    After twenty minutes of silence, it was the driver himself who spoke first. ‘You ought to be careful, wandering around them woods.’
    ‘Why is that?’ Sherlock asked, thinking that the man was going to raise the subject of the strange house himself. Instead he said, ‘Folks are saying there’s some kind of
creature wandering around. I don’t give it much credence myself, but other people say they’ve seen it – some godless thing that’s been made out of bits of dead bodies, all
sewn together. They even wrote to the local newspaper about it, but nothing happened. Like I say, I’ve never seen anything, but I still wouldn’t wander around them woods by myself. You
never know.’
    ‘I’ll be careful,’ Sherlock said. He remembered the man he’d seen in the carriage that had driven into the strange house. His wrists had been marked with scars. Had
someone glimpsed him in the shadows and drawn the wrong conclusion? ‘Thanks for the warning.’
    Back at his lodgings, Sherlock had time for a quick wash and a change of clothes before dinner. Three of the other lodgers were absent – probably eating in college – and Sherlock
shared a quiet meal with the theologian, Thomas Millard, and the mathematician, Mathukumal Vijayaraghavan. Nobody had very much to say, and Sherlock went straight to bed afterwards.
    Coming out of his bedroom the next morning, he bumped into the lanky Paul Chippenham coming down the stairs.
    ‘Got anything on today?’ Chippenham asked, pulling on his jacket as he passed Sherlock.
    ‘Nothing,’ Sherlock admitted. ‘I thought about taking a look around Oxford – maybe going out on the river. What about you?’
    ‘Lectures,’ Chippenham called over his shoulder. ‘We’re doing gross anatomy – the structure of the skeleton and the arrangement of the internal organs.’
    ‘I thought you were studying natural science?’
    ‘Biology is part of that, and anatomy is part of biology. We’re running a book on which of the students gets sick first and has to leave.’
    Sherlock’s brain spun for a few moments. Lectures in anatomy? That sounded fascinating.
    ‘Could I come along?’ he called after the student. The sound of the words coming out of his mouth surprised him, but a moment’s thought confirmed his split-second decision. Why
limit his subjects just to logic and mathematics, and why limit his teachers just to Charles Dodgson? Why not take advantage of all the teaching that Oxford had to offer?
    Chippenham looked back up the stairs, frowning. ‘I don’t see why not,’ he said finally. ‘There’s usually spaces at the back. Just don’t draw attention to
yourself, don’t ask any questions and don’t, really don’t, be sick.’
    ‘I promise,’ Sherlock replied.
    ‘We need to get a move on though. I’m late as it is.’
    Sherlock followed Chippenham down the stairs and out of the house. The older student ran down the street, round the corner and towards the imposing facade of the college, with Sherlock doing his
best to keep up. He waved at the Head Porter, Mutchinson, as he passed, and the man saluted smartly back. Chippenham ran around the edge of the lawn and ducked through a side-arch, with Sherlock on
his heels. They were both panting by this time. Sherlock glanced up to where he remembered Dodgson’s rooms as being, but there was no sign of the man at his window. Another two archways, and
diagonally across a paved quadrangle, and then Chippenham was rushing into a narrow doorway and up some stairs.
    At the top of the stairway, a door opened on to a lecture theatre. Sherlock had been expecting something like one of the classrooms back at Deepdene