Breslin grins. ‘How did he put it? His usual type is more “casual” than Aislinn? I’m sure they’re all very nice girls, but my God, I wanted to march the whole lot of them into some makeover show and tell the stylists to bring out the heavy artillery.’ He heads down the stairs at a jog. ‘You know those godawful hairy ethnic hoodies that students used to wear back in the nineties, to show you they were planning to go backpacking in Goa someday? I swear the last ex was actually wearing one of those.’

‘They give us anything?’

‘Yes and no. All of them say Rory was a perfect little gentleman: never hit them, never yelled at them, no controlling behaviour, no jealous rages, no turning nasty when he didn’t get his way, none of that.’ He turns down the corridor and cracks the door of Incident Room E, the shitty ex-locker-room. Empty. ‘In here.’

He holds the door for me. I get the message: in here, where I would be already if it wasn’t for Breslin helping me out. The place is hot and still stinks of sweaty gym gear; the tiny whiteboard is stained where someone used the wrong kind of marker, and all the chairs look sticky. I don’t sit down.

‘But here’s the interesting part,’ Breslin says, closing the door behind us. ‘Two of the exes, including the most recent one, say they dumped Rory because he was too intense. One girl’s exact words were “too full-on”; the other one said he was “taking things way too quickly”. I thought she was being coy, but it turned out she wasn’t talking about sex: she had no problem shagging his brains out on the second date, God bless her. The young people nowadays don’t know how good they’ve got it.’

‘So what was she talking about?’

‘Basically, by the time they’d been seeing each other for a few months, Rory was starting to think this was some great epic romance, while the girl was still deciding whether she even wanted a serious relationship. She says she really liked him, but she was only twenty-four; she was just looking for a few laughs and some intellectual conversation – she’s doing a PhD in Russian literature – with plenty of sex thrown in. She wasn’t ready for someone who kept talking about how amazing it would be to go around the world together.’ Breslin examines the wall by the door, flicks away a speck of something and leans against it. ‘So she dumped him. The other girl said the same thing, give or take. I keep hearing how women are dying for a guy who’s not scared of commitment, but it looks like Rory might be a little too much of a good thing.’