“Only if you sing them to lure children into your van,” said Rhys’s date. Her name was Ana with one n, and he said he’d met her “on the social media.” Given that like many of Rhys’s dates she was bizarrely hot and carried herself in a way that suggested she had incredible body confidence, I suspected he’d met her on one social medium in particular. “Otherwise, it’s just singing.”

Beside me, Oliver had that gleam in his eye he sometimes got when he switched into good-at-joining-in mode. “What if you’re singing, but a child hears you and gets lured accidentally?”

“You’re the lawyer,” Rhys Jones Bowen pointed out. “You tell us.”

“Well, I think it would be hard to establish mens rea, but you still might have to answer some very awkward questions.”

“No children’s songs,” Barbara Clench repeated.

“What if we do the dirty version?” asked Rhys. “Wouldn’t be a children’s song, then.”

I was getting sucked in. One more question and I’d be trapped in a vortex of inanity I couldn’t escape. “Is there a dirty version?”

“There’s always a dirty version.” Rhys was speaking with the certainty of a man who knew most of them.

Schlooop went the vortex. “But…wheels on the bus? What is it? Like, the penis on the bus goes flip, flip, flop?”

Rhys shoulder-nodded. “Something like that, yeah.”

“I am certainly not singing the dirty versions of any children’s songs.” Barbara Clench had a bit between her teeth, and normally in this kind of situation I would get rapidly out of her way. Except I couldn’t because we were stuck in a moving vehicle.

Professor Fairclough had been staring out of the window, largely ignoring us—or at least processing everything we were saying on a higher level. Now she praying-mantised her head back towards the rest of us. “I’m not sure I do know the words, actually.”

“How can you not know the words to the wheels-on-the-bus song?” I asked.

“How can you not know the Latin name of the common fruit fly?” returned Dr. Fairclough.

Oliver leaned over to me and whispered, “Drosophila melanogaster,” in my ear.

“Drops Ophelia Melanie Jaster?” I tried, which earned a sharp hmmph from the professor.

“To be fair,” said Ana with one n, “the lyrics are a bit controversial.”

“Why?” I wondered aloud. “Is there some hidden meaning to ‘The wipers on the bus go swish, swish, swish’ that I’ve been missing my whole life?”

She laughed. Honestly, she probably laughed more than the joke deserved, but she was clearly on wedding date behaviour. “No, it’s just that a lot of kids these days learn their nursery rhymes from YouTube videos, so they get the American version.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. “What’s the American version?”