After skimming the chapter one final time, Fleet started flicking through the rest of A History of Beaconsfield College. As he did so, another image caught his eye – this time a face peering out at him from one of the pages. It was Callum Richardson himself, he thought at first, before dismissing the notion as a trick of his mind. He’d only seen Richardson’s features in somebody else’s because the man was so prominent in Fleet’s thoughts. And yet when he leafed back to the page that had caught his attention, he saw the resemblance was indeed uncanny. And the caption beneath the image explained why: the man in the photograph was Callum Richardson’s father.

Fleet knew from his conversation with the school chaplain that Richardson senior had contributed financially to the school, but he’d failed to understand how large those contributions had been. It was no wonder the headmaster had been so worried about crossing James Richardson’s son. It turned out that not only had Richardson senior been a Beaconsfield alumnus himself, he’d also rescued his alma mater from financial collapse, single-handedly restoring it to its former glory. An entire chapter in A History of Beaconsfield College was devoted to him – more pages even than to the fire. For James Richardson, clearly, the success of the school he’d attended as a young man had turned into a labour of love. He’d even bequeathed Beaconsfield a substantial portion of the inheritance that would otherwise have gone to his son – an inheritance, Fleet recalled, that Callum Richardson had later renounced.

All of which made Fleet wonder: what effect did his father’s association with Beaconsfield have on how Callum Richardson viewed the school? Richardson had told Fleet that Melissa and Lance had been obsessed with trying to get the school shut down – but was he the driving force behind their hostility? It would seem to fit with the general pattern of their friendship. And when it came to Richardson’s relationship with his father, he clearly had issues of some kind. The drink and drugs he’d been so fond of in his twenties spoke to that: an early sign, perhaps, of his determination to turn his back on his family, which he later demonstrated so publicly.

On the other hand, if Richardson had felt the same way as Melissa and Lance, why had he drawn attention to their animosity towards the school in the first place?

Friday 25 October, 12.37 p.m.

Fleet left the library no clearer in his thoughts than when he’d walked in. He made his way back to the front of the school, passing through the entrance hall with the huge wooden engraving of Beaconsfield’s coat of arms, and out into the grounds, before taking the long way around the building towards the woods.