‘On Sunday night, I received an email from Saul Achembe. I’ve printed it off, but if you want access to the actual thing I’m happy to give you my password.’ She slapped a printed sheet down on the table. ‘I saw online this morning that he’s been killed, and I can only assume that this is connected.’

Singh picked up the email and read it aloud.

‘Dear Jane, I want to start by apologising to you. I’m sorry I didn’t take you seriously last term when you thought something dodgy was going on. Once the governors removed you I didn’t see the point in continuing the investigation you’d asked me to do, but given recent events I thought I should look into it again. The video itself hasn’t been uploaded anywhere I can find, but when I was looking I found some emails between a student and a member of staff. I know the police have found messages backed up to Steve’s account between him and Leon, when he was posing as someone called Joe, but these are between a different student and a different staff member. They’d been deleted and buried pretty well, but I managed to retrieve them all, and it’s pretty unpleasant stuff. I’ve been having a dig around in Steve’s account and he’s got some hidden files with all of this in – he found out about it too, and I think that must be why someone killed him. His files were dated the day of the trip, so he must have been preparing to confront them himself when he was murdered. I’m not going to mention any names right now, but I’ll be speaking to the police tomorrow, and then hopefully this whole thing will be over. All the best, Saul.’

Forest took the email from Singh and read it over again. ‘Well, it looks like Saul found our killer’s motive. What the hell has been going on in this school? One teacher sending illicit messages to students is bad enough, but a second one?’ She turned to Jane. ‘Why do you think he wouldn’t tell you the names of the student and the staff member?’

Jane threw her hands in the air. ‘I have no idea! Maybe he was worried in case he was wrong, and he’d put it in writing? Maybe he was worried someone else might read it. He sent it from his school email account, after all.’

‘Or maybe he wanted to give this person a chance to come clean, not realising they’d make him their next victim,’ Forest muttered. ‘Would someone else be able to access his emails?’

‘I expect so, if they knew what they were doing. This system was never particularly secure. It would have cost money to tighten it up, and the governors controlled my purse strings far more than people realised.’