‘Yes,’ says Honor, glad to have the silence broken. ‘A few days ago my daughter’s best friend tried to kill herself then another student in the same department threw herself off the Clifton Suspension Bridge. The university seems to think that the first was an accident and the second a one-off. The head of student welfare was very evasive with me. And I’m worried, obviously, that they haven’t put in enough safeguards to stop it happening again. It doesn’t fill me with confidence to know that the woman responsible has form in covering up suicides among the student population, or, at least, not taking them very seriously.’

Waiting until she has decanted the berries into cut-glass bowls and handing round the cream, Anne says, ‘I found my old file in the attic. Alex, darling, will you make us some coffee and I’ll go and fetch it.’

At the word ‘darling’ Alex swallows and, flushing, lays his napkin down and rises from the table. ‘I’ll put my best man on to it.’

Moments later, Anne returns with a cardboard file and, sitting, begins leafing through a pile of handwritten notes. ‘Back then I did most of my notes the old-fashioned way, in a reporter’s notebook. I can show them to you but they won’t make a lot of sense unless you read shorthand?’

Just then Alex returns carrying a tray on which sits a full cafetière, three mugs and a carton of milk.

‘There was quite a lot of stuff that didn’t make it into the paper because I couldn’t substantiate it. Things were so different back then. People didn’t talk about sexual assault in the way they do now. It seems students were always having affairs with tutors and no one batted an eyelid unless something went terribly wrong. Which, obviously, in this case, it did.’

She scans her notes for a few minutes, flipping the pages of her notebook.

‘Oh yes, I remember now. The suggestion was that Reynolds had somehow persuaded or coerced several male students into sexual activity. All that only came out later, after the boys died. Reynolds denied it, of course. I’m not sure he was ever even questioned by the police.

‘Midland University first insisted that they didn’t know the boys had killed themselves, though I later discovered that they’d sent a representative to the coroner’s hearings, so evidently they did know and decided to lie about it. Then they tried to paint the first student as unstable and mentally unwell and suggested that his death began a sort of unstoppable chain reaction.’

‘You disagree?’ Honor asks her.