‘All right, I’ll take it. Did you manage to get Ms Smith to go to student welfare?’

‘No but she promised to go home. She seemed to have calmed down a lot, she didn’t give any sign of being ill.’

He takes a deep inhalation. Nothing he can do about the girl now. At least she’s off campus. He swivels the screen back to its usual position and scrolls down Nevis’s student records to the appropriate text box and types in ‘Student made several appointments for welfare consults which she did not keep. Student welfare reached out but student was non-cooperative. Faculty confirmed that student had been underperforming and seemed depressed and anxious.’ Keane will welcome the intervention, he thinks, since it covers both their backs. In any case, he’ll square it with her later. He is about to close the file when his eye is drawn to a familiar name. Under next of kin. He peers and re-reads and peers again. The words grab hold of him like a sickness. That name. Can it be the same one? Frantically he taps out of the university database and searches for Nevis Smith’s social media feeds. Sparse; the girl evidently doesn’t use social much. He searches for images, and up pops a photograph of Nevis on the deck of a narrowboat with a broad grin on her face and a plant pot in her hand. Standing beside her also smiling is a familiar figure from his past. So he was not mistaken. He feels his shoulders tighten, his belly turning over. So it was Honor Smith he’d passed by in the street the other day. Not some ghost set free by his own dark impulses. A real-life woman, the mother of Nevis. He sits back and bites his lip, hears himself snort. So, Honor Smith, still out to get him, too cowardly to come forward herself, using her nineteen-year-old daughter to set him up, to exact her revenge. Well that explains everything.

They won’t be smiling when I’ve done with them.

The light on his desk phone blinks, and his mind zooms back into the present and Veronica. All the difficult, demanding women. He picks up.

A voice thunders, ‘What’s going on? I just tried your mobile but it’s saying the number is unavailable.’ He can’t decide whether she’s angry or afraid.

‘I dropped my device in the sink,’ he says in an emollient voice. He’ll get a new SIM card tomorrow.

‘You need to come home right now,’ Veronica says coldly.

‘If it’s that salesman again…’ he says, carefully.

‘No, not that. I’ll tell you when you get here.’