It was Jessica who broke the news to me. Jeremy had phoned her from home. Post-mortem logic leaves no room for the subtleties of relationships, and the doctors first called Francis’s father, and then Michael, who had been paying the bills. We found out indirectly. I noticed that morning that Jessica was not at the library, but thought little of it. I took our morning cigarette break promptly at eleven-fifteen expecting to find her in the courtyard, but she wasn’t there. She came and met me at my desk in the main reading room, a long even pine surface with a green leather top and enough space for twenty crouched bodies. The light in the room came from huge plate-glass windows high up in the vault that showed regular slabs of slate-grey sky, and the warm glow of hooded reading lamps bouncing off books on the tabletops. In this odd mixture of warm and flat light, of multiple shadows from above and below, her face appeared gaunt, her eyes swollen and red. Her blonde hair was tied up, but several strands had escaped to form a dingy halo around her forehead. She asked me to come outside with her, and when I headed for the corridor that led to our smoking hangout she took my arm and pulled me gently in the other direction, towards the huge art-deco doors of the foyer. We walked out into the lifeless day. The wind was up, and it carried the voices of girls from the hockey pitch, crying to one another like gulls. Jessica led me around the back of the library, and presently we were walking away from Cambridge, through the gates of the playing fields and on to the flat, unbroken grass. Her bones felt as brittle as a bird’s through the thick layer of her coat. As we trudged across the dull green reach of turf she told me what had happened, and the tears she had feared in public rolled down her cheeks. My eyes were watering from the wind.

At first, I could not think of anything to say. In the end I patted her on the shoulder and said, ‘At least now no one will know.’

‘What do you mean?’ she asked, knowing already but unwilling to believe.

‘I mean that now he can’t tell anyone what we did. We’re in the clear. I’m just trying to find some good in this . . .’

Jessica looked at me, with the wind blowing the stray strands of her hair around her face, and her ears and the rims of her nostrils chilled a coral pink. She studied me for a moment in disbelief, and then slumped, almost falling. I tried to hold her to support her, but she shook me off. We walked back to the library in silence. On the steps outside she kissed my cheek, and smiled at me, finding kindness, a sole survivor thrown from the wreckage. ‘I’m sorry, James. You’re obviously in shock. Come and see me tonight, OK? Just call if you need anything before then. It’s not our fault. We did everything we could.’