‘Take a look for yourself.’ He swivels the laptop and waits while Maddy peers. ‘Natasha was barely scraping along the bottom, and suddenly she’s getting good two-ones, firsts. Besides which, I confronted Mark last night and he admitted as much.’

Maddy is staring at his right hand now. ‘I see,’ she says quietly. ‘And you’ve only just noticed this?’

‘Obviously, otherwise I would have come directly to you.’ He resents the rebuke from a woman, particularly from a former lover, however distant their affair. And this is the second in as many weeks. It makes him think that Maddy isn’t as reliable a champion as he’d assumed. It’s everyone for himself when it comes down to it.

‘No one on the outside would be able to prove any of this, presumably?’ she says now.

‘I doubt it.’

‘Well that’s something.’ He watches Ince drumming her fingers across her mouth, which is something she does when thinking through a problem. Otherwise, her expression is, as always, a calm, matt surface.

‘There’s more.’

Maddy sits back and blinks.

‘Mark was also involved with Jessica Easton.’

Maddy lets out a groan and puts her head in her hands before recovering her poise. ‘How much of this did you know when I came round to your house the other evening?’

‘Nothing, obviously, or I would have said,’ Cullen says, hoping the lie lands.

‘I’ll admit I’m worried about you, Christopher. First the thing at the hospital and now this mess. How could you have missed this with Mark?’

This, he thinks. This is exactly why I kept the whole thing under my hat. She always was such a busybody even when we were together. Especially then.

She presses her lips together, fingernails drumming on her cheek, lost in thought for a while, then straightening herself upright in her chair, says, ‘I wish we could let this one slide, for all our sakes, but unfortunately we’re exposed. We’ll have to find a low-profile way to deal with it.’

‘I put it to Natasha Tillotson that she transfers elsewhere with a nice reference to keep her quiet,’ Cullen says. He doesn’t mention Tillotson’s absolute rejection of his idea. He still hopes she’ll come round. If she doesn’t, he has another, more drastic, plan in mind.

At that moment Alison enters with a tray on which sit two cups, a cafetière of coffee, a jug of milk and a bowl of sugar and some sugar biscuits and Cullen finds himself hit by an unexpected wave of sadness. If it hadn’t been for that one mistake all those very many years ago, he could have been where Maddy is now, sitting behind a grand desk in a fancy office passing judgement on her ‘inferiors’.

‘What about Mark?’ Maddy asks.