‘Murder. A simple word. A simple concept. Stop any passer-by in the street and they could tell you what it means. But you have to pay close attention to the definition to really understand the word.’

Professor Steven Grant paused for dramatic effect and looked around the grand lecture theatre. The room in the redbrick building on the University of Birmingham campus could hold close to two hundred people, but today there were barely forty. And half of those looked on the verge of sleep.

‘Murder,’ he said again. ‘Can anyone give me a definition?’

Many faces in the room remained blank. Just three hands went up. Grant chose the young man sitting on the back row.

‘The unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another.’

Grant was actually impressed, even though it was a simple question.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘So let us think about that. Unlawful. Because there are circumstances where a human being can take the life of another lawfully. Which circumstances?’

‘War,’ someone shouted out.

‘Yes. And?’

‘Capital punishment,’ said a young woman on the front row. Grant held her eye for a second.

‘Yes. Anything else?’ No more volunteers this time. ‘In particular circumstances, self-defence might be lawful killing too.’

One or two nods.

‘Ok, and the next part of the definition: premeditated. Because killing someone accidentally or through negligence or otherwise unintentionally isn’t murder. Murder requires some level of intention and forethought, whether it’s days, weeks, months, or even just seconds.’

Another pause. No reaction from the room.

‘And the final part? The killing of one human being by another. An animal killing a human isn’t murder, just like a human being killing an animal isn’t. Cruel and unlawful, very possibly, but not murder.’

Grant stared out at the room, from student to student, assessing who was paying attention. Not many of them, it seemed. The first year undergraduates in front of him were a mishmash from the law, psychology and other social science degree programmes on offer at the university. The module Grant was leading was relevant for all of their studies, but he could count on his fingers the number of students who sat through his lectures with genuine interest.

What more did these overprivileged, self-important millennial brats want from him? Perhaps they’d spotted the criminology module (which, to be fair, was heavily weighted towards the macabre, given Grant’s area of expertise) in the university brochure and seen an opportunity for morbid voyeurism, a chance to learn about some of the most gruesome crimes in modern history so they could revel in the horrific potential of human beings while chatting away to their chums over a pint of beer or a glass of cheap wine in the pub, and were now disappointed that they were actually there to learn.