“But there was no love lost between you, was there?” Charlie asked.

“No, but that didn’t mean I was glad to see him dead. Sure, we’d had our disagreements in the past, but not the sort you’d even swing a punch about, never mind push someone out of a tenth-floor window. If I went around killing everyone I thought was sexist or racist, that hall in there would be littered with corpses.”

Charlie scribbled furiously on the back of one of the Conference Chronicles he was carrying. With a shock, Lindsay realized it was a different edition from the morning one she’d seen in the conference office earlier.

“By the way,” he said, “rumor has it that the forensic lads have found traces of blood in one of the shower cubicles on the tenth floor.”

“Really? Do we know whose blood?” Lindsay asked eagerly.

“No idea. But it sounds serious. The Daily Mail guy was saying that they’d found a couple of splashes on the shower curtains, traces between the tiles on the wall and some in the drains. So maybe they’ll have to get into DNA testing and take blood samples from all of us.” Charlie sounded like he couldn’t wait to get in the queue for the needle.

“What do you think, Sophie?” Lindsay asked, adding, for Charlie’s benefit, “She’s a medic.”

Sophie shrugged. “Depends how much blood they found. I suppose if Jack cut himself on a major artery as he went through the window it might have sprayed his killer with blood. More likely, though, whoever pushed him cut himself or herself on a shard of glass. Frankly, I can’t see them running DNA tests on anyone other than a prime suspect, though. The test costs far too much to run a screen through the whole conference. Besides,” she continued, “it could have nothing to do with the killing. Maybe someone who was having a heavy period had just used the shower.”

Both women tried not to grin at Charlie’s look of shocked squeamishness.

“Yeah, well, thanks,” he said unenthusiastically. “I don’t suppose you saw any blood-stained killers heading for the showers?”

“No, I didn’t. Besides, everyone was either asleep or so pissed that a naked murderer covered in blood could probably have run from one end of the campus to the other without anyone noticing,” Lindsay said.

“And you didn’t see anyone else who might have had anything to do with it?”

Again, that niggling feeling of having noticed something she couldn’t quite get hold of came back to Lindsay. Not for the first time, she wished she’d stuck to her new habit of sobriety. “No,” she said hesitantly. “At least . . . as I came out of the lift, I had the impression of someone turning the corner, but nothing I could positively identify.”