Just then a draught flusters the geranium cuttings. She pulls the tray over to the other side of the table where the air is warmer and still and is aware of Alex’s eyes on her. ‘I remember that. They say it’s easy to get it on the street now. Students take it to stay awake for essay deadlines.’

‘Ah yes. In my day it was speed. I guess there’s always something.’

‘But you have to take a lot for it to be seriously damaging. It’s not a drug you’re likely to accidentally OD on.’

Another pause follows while the two of them take this in. Then Alex says, ‘I looked through my notes of editorial meetings. Anne did some digging and discovered that all the students were taught by the same academic, a professor on the verge of retirement called Arthur Reynolds. I googled him. A while after the suicides some allegations of sexual assault emerged. The university allowed him to retire. There was a court case but Reynolds died before coming to trial. There was some suggestion on the web that he’d killed himself, but I couldn’t confirm that.’

‘I sense you’re going somewhere with this…’

Alex holds up his hand. ‘Guilty as charged.’ Leaning his weight back and rocking gently on the back legs of his chair, he goes on. ‘Listen to this. Professor Reynolds had a young female academic working under him at Midland who’d been his PhD student. After he took retirement, she became head of department. Anne interviewed her and she was mentioned at our editorial conference but none of that interview made it into the final piece, not least because she was absolutely adamant that Reynolds was innocent of any wrongdoing and didn’t appear to be terribly upset about the deaths of the boys, which I remember thinking was odd at the time, particularly since they were students in her own department. There was no suggestion that she was involved in any of the sexual assaults, but if you think about it, she had to have known about them. Reynolds was a prolific predator and she worked very closely with him for a number of years and did very well from her association with him.

‘Anyway, the moment I saw her name I had a feeling that I’d come across her more recently. Nothing I could pin down but I’m used to going with my gut, so I checked her out on Google to see what she’d been up to. Turns out her career took a meteoric rise after Reynolds, though so far as I could see she didn’t do any of the things that academics generally do to get ahead, like publish or appear on TV or whatever. I was right about her name being familiar though. I’ve seen it from time to time in the local rag here in Bristol.’

‘And?’