Grant would admit there was plenty of the gory side of criminality to come in his lectures, but he was there to do a job, not to provide social ammunition. He was there to teach these cretins something useful that they could take forwards to whatever jobs they thought they’d be getting at the end of their three years of mostly partying and lazing around watching daytime TV.

‘Murder,’ Grant said again. ‘It’s a simple word, with a seemingly straightforward definition. Yet a wide spectrum of circumstances and actions can lead to murder. The big question, the one we will be coming back to again and again here, is what makes a murderer?’

Grant took another pause as he began pacing. This time it was more to fill time than anything else. He still had two minutes on the clock.

‘The question is too wide and vague for us to possibly give a sensible answer. Nonetheless, we all think we understand murder. We know what a murderer is, don’t we? We are not murderers. We are normal human beings. Murderers are something quite different.’

Grant stopped moving and stood and glared out at the students.

‘Aren’t they? Would you know a murderer if you saw one?’

A few twitches from the crowd. Grant locked eyes with a male student on the second front row who had neatly coiffed hair and thick-rimmed glasses. He at least looked like a classic studious type. He was twitchy, as though he wanted to say something but was too shy to speak up in front of the others.

Grant scanned over the rest of the rabble, the mostly blank faces. No one was going to enter the debate now, not when it was so close to the end of the lecture.

‘Ok, that’s all for today,’ Grant said.

The shuffling of bums and the slamming of folding seats was instantaneous and echoed through the large room barely a second after the words had passed Grant’s lips. The lecture theatre would be deserted before he could even say ‘suggested reading material for next week’.

Grant shook his head. When had he become so cynical anyway?

He detached his laptop from the wires on the podium then moved behind and over to his brown leather satchel and shoved the computer in. He picked the satchel up and turned, then jumped when he saw one of the students standing right there in front of him. Grant quickly realised he recognised this girl. She’d been sitting on the front row, one of the few who seemed enthralled by Grant’s words. For three weeks now she’d sat on the same seat, keenly scribbling in her notebook in between long bouts of staring at him. Not the distant and uninterested stare that many of the other students gave, either. A stare which, as flattering as it was, terrified him.