Glancing up the street, I remembered the sports car I kept seeing the previous day. Should I tell Singh about it? I thought about it for a few minutes but decided against it; it was probably just my mind playing tricks on me.

‘No DI Forest today?’ I asked, getting into the passenger seat.

‘No, she’s gone to Steve’s old school. There are a few questions she wanted to ask,’ he said as we pulled away.

‘What about?’ I asked, my curiosity piqued.

He gave me a sideways look before replying. ‘I shouldn’t really be talking to you about this.’

‘And when has that ever stopped you?’ I teased.

‘Forest would kill me if she knew how much I talk to you,’ he said.

‘Well she’s never been my biggest fan.’

This brought a laugh, and I nudged him gently. ‘What did you find out?’

‘The staff at his previous school were happy to talk to us about Steve, and the accounts of him as a boss were quite different from some of the ones we’ve heard here.’

‘That’s no surprise,’ I said. I had told him the previous day what Saul said to me about Steve working everyone too hard.

‘Well it seems that this wasn’t the first school where he’d done that. There were several complaints about the way he treated staff, and the expectations he had, to the extent where he was accused of bullying.’

‘Wow. That’s pretty serious.’

‘He’d only been here for three months, so it’s possible he’d only just started to get settled, which could explain why nobody was willing to speak negatively about him. By the sound of it, at his last school it was a gradual but sustained wearing down of people’s spirits and goodwill. They had a high turnover of staff by the time he left, because a lot of people didn’t stay there for long under his management. One of the senior members of staff told me that she suspected him of giving less than favourable references for those who spoke out against him, but there was no proof of that.’

Singh had been watching the road as he spoke, but now glanced at me. ‘It gets worse, though. There was one man, a teacher, who was struggling with a lot of personal problems. He ended up taking drugs, but came clean to Steve and asked for his support in getting himself back on his feet.’

‘What did Steve do?’ I asked, with a feeling of foreboding.

‘Sacked him instantly, reported him to the local authority saying he was unfit to work with children, and told the police he’d been driving under the influence of drugs.’

‘What happened to him? The other teacher?’

‘He killed himself,’ Singh replied quietly.