Michael was more resourceful than me. First, he switched on the radio beside my bed. It was tuned in to Radio One, and quiet R and B covered the sound of his breathing. Without waiting for an invitation, he moved with surprising speed, his portly frame bouncing lightly, and hid himself behind the blank canvas on the easel. His arm reached around from behind the white square and pulled a second picture, a landscape that had been turned face out against the wall, against the thin stand to cover his legs. This irritated me greatly, as the picture in question was a pencil sketch for a larger oil, showing the detail of the stone statues above the majestic colonnade of the college library, and I was quite pleased with it. I did not have time to register any dissent, however, as at that moment there was a knocking on the door, a sound that managed to convey polite urgency by its insistence.

I took my dressing gown from the back of the door and slipped it over my naked chest. When I opened it, I found one of the college porters waiting outside. Despite the coolness of the night he was sweating, the beads collecting under the brim of his bowler hat, and he was breathing heavily from the climb up the stairs. The porters were the college security, the gatekeepers and the guards, and I could never quite tell if they were my servants or my masters. They wore black waistcoats and bowler hats that made them seem like the vengeful spirits of a past century.

‘Sorry to bother you, sir, but I wondered if I might come in and have a look out of your window?’

‘Sure,’ I said. Though his words had been couched as a request, they were delivered as an order. I had already resolved not to lie for the man hiding in the corner of my room. If asked point blank whether or not I had seen him, I would say that I had. I had no wish to compromise myself with the college authorities, and I sensed from the porter’s grave and pressing manner, and from Michael’s bluff desperation, that he was in quite serious trouble. However, I was still too much a schoolboy to grass on a fellow student without good cause, and I saw no reason to volunteer the information. The porter crossed the room, climbed up on the chair by the desk and thrust the upper half of his body through the window. He looked left and right along the line of the roof, and then called down to an invisible colleague in the court below that it was no good, they’d got away again.

He pulled back into my room and apologized for disturbing me. He was about to leave, but I found my curiosity piqued, and saw an opportunity to make my hidden guest squirm a little for his presumption. I asked him whom he had been hunting.