When June busied off down the corridor, Claire typed up everything she could remember of the conversation, of June’s form of words. She didn’t put June’s name on it. She didn’t know if June would want to be named. She’d have to find that out. Her mind was swarming. Imagine breaking this! Oh, and she was angry, she was angry too, on June’s behalf and all the other scouts’ behalves – but she had to focus.

She opened a new document and began to draft the story. Should it be about the incident itself and the college’s failure to investigate? Or should it be bigger, wider – endemic sexual assault, fear of constructive dismissal? Excitement carried her a long way, through the next hour or two. It would go national, surely. There was an insatiable appetite for stories about the university in the national press, especially with sexual assault in the mix. And what happened to June had been serious. It had maybe been – probably – rape. But lack of attribution or corroboration: that could be a problem.

She phoned Duncan. ‘How well do you get on with your scout?’ There was a rustling sound, a groan. ‘You’re still in bed, aren’t you?’

‘I am resting,’ Duncan said. His voice was muffled. ‘I fucking hate that word.’ He meant scout. Claire hated it too, if she thought about it. As if the cleaners weren’t employed, were just gleeful volunteers, overgrown children, who cleaned toilets for nothing more than the privilege of attaining little coloured badges of experience to sew on to their overalls. And yet there was something appealing about it, too. The term scout was itself a little badge, one that Claire had been proud to collect.

‘I know,’ she said, ‘I know, but can I talk to her?’

‘Is this for your article? You’ve gone off catering and now you’re on cleaning?’

‘Something like that,’ she said, cagily. Duncan’s scout was Duncan’s, after all.

Irina was a morose Polish girl with no shoulders and a tiny gold cross in her clavicle notch.

‘I don’t know nothing about that,’ she said, emptying Duncan’s bin of chocolate wrappers and tinfoil from the kebab van, the orange grease clinging to it. She tutted. ‘Rubbish you eat!’

‘Claire was gonna write something about that, weren’t you?’ Duncan said. ‘About all the rubbish we eat round here.’

‘Yes! These students don’t eat no vegetables, they don’t drink no water, it’s all kebabs and chocolate and beer, all the time. It’s crazy. Why do you want to come here to work so hard and feed your brains with all that rubbish? This is what you should write.’

‘But Irina, these other stories, you haven’t heard anything like that?’

Irina snorted. ‘Of course. If it’s men, if it’s women’ – she made a strange gesture with her left hand – ‘that’s what happens.’