‘Why on earth would they have wanted the school closed down?’

Richardson paused for a moment before answering. He tilted his head. ‘Where were you educated, Detective Inspector? A state comprehensive, I would imagine. Which I don’t mean to sound in any way disparaging.’

And yet he managed to make it sound exactly that.

Fleet allowed his silence to be his answer.

‘Well,’ said Richardson, ‘if you’ve never been to boarding school yourself, it would be hard to comprehend quite how dispiriting it can be. To be shown – not just told – that your parents don’t want you around. Melissa in particular felt like she was being punished. For who she was. For what she wanted to be.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She had ambitions to become an actress. Either an actress or a photographer. Her father was determined that would never happen. She was to be something respectable. Something he could brag about to his friends. He was a bit of a control freak, by all accounts. I know for a fact he used to hit Melissa’s mother. It wouldn’t surprise me if he hurt Melissa physically as well.’

There was something knowing in Richardson’s expression that Fleet didn’t care for. ‘What about Lance?’ he asked.

‘Lance was at Beaconsfield on a scholarship. It was so far away from the world he grew up in, it was as though his parents had sent him away to a different planet. He didn’t adjust particularly well.’ Richardson gave a sniff, whether in sympathy or contempt, Fleet couldn’t tell.

‘So you can understand, Detective Inspector, why Melissa and Lance hated Beaconsfield as much as they did. The school became a symbol to them: a physical representation of everything that was wrong with their lives. With their entire existence, in fact. Some days it would be all they talked about.’

Fleet thought back to his conversation with Nicky. She’d described boarding school in very similar terms, he recalled.

‘Are you suggesting it ever turned into more than that?’ Fleet asked. ‘Into more than just talk, I mean.’

‘Again,’ said Richardson, ‘you would have to take that up with Melissa and Lance.’

Fleet couldn’t escape the feeling that he was being played somehow – nudged down a path that Richardson wanted him to follow.

‘Would you be willing to provide a DNA sample, Mr Richardson?’ said Fleet, changing tack. ‘Purely to allow us to eliminate you from our investigations, of course.’

He didn’t think it worth mentioning how unlikely it was that any workable DNA traces would be recovered from the crypt where Ben’s body had been found. The scene of Lance Wheeler’s murder would hopefully prove a different matter, but as the news of his death was still to get out, it was only his killer who would know to be concerned.

‘Gladly,’ said Richardson, apparently without hesitation. ‘Anything I can do to help.’