‘Rubbish! I’m only lying here turning walnut – in terms of colour and wrinkles, I should add, ha!’ said Victoria. She sounded as if she might have had one or two Aperol Spritzes too, Robyn thought, although perhaps that was just her holiday mood seeping down the line. ‘So how are things? Life treating you well?’

‘Ah . . .’ Victoria had never been a person you could bullshit, whether it was about lab results, student grades or matters of the heart. ‘Actually, no,’ Robyn replied frankly, leaning against the wire fencing and pretending to be scanning the horizon for rule-breaking teenagers. ‘Let’s just say things have been better. John and I . . . well, you might have heard, actually. He’s run away to Scotland with a former student. Which is . . .’ She tried to find a polite way of ending the sentence, until she remembered who she was talking to, ‘well, it’s completely shit, basically.’

‘Oh, mate. I did hear a little bird squawking about some terrible goings-on. What a prick, eh? What a bastard.’

‘Yes,’ said Robyn, ‘but I wasn’t ringing to talk about him, I was ringing to—’

‘Do you remember I went through it myself? Shitty ball-ache of a husband doing the dirty on me, the most horrendous dragged-out divorce in the history of all-time marriage disasters?’ Victoria gave a snort down the phone.

Robyn did have a vague memory, now that Victoria mentioned it, of when she’d first started work in the department, and hearing a story about Victoria going down to one of the labs and smashing up loads of equipment. She’d written it off as a college myth at the time, but maybe the two were connected. ‘Grim times,’ she replied with feeling.

‘I’ll say. But hey, please tell me you’ve taken some revenge on the bastard. You have, haven’t you? It’s the only satisfying, fun thing about the whole rotten, stinking business.’

‘Um . . . well . . .’ said Robyn, not wanting to sound like the weedy sort of person who would just catatonically accept a husband’s atrocious behaviour as their lot, even though that was pretty much how she’d gone about it so far. ‘Not exactly.’

‘I sent my ex-husband an envelope of scrambled egg through the post every day for a whole month, because I knew the smell of egg made him vomit,’ Victoria went on, hooting at the memory. ‘He went mad, of course – oh, he was livid about it, but did that stop me? Bollocks, did it. Anyway, enough about that. He’s lost most of his hair since then – ha! – and I’m now married to the most divine woman on the planet, so we’re all square.’