If only it were that easy to leave the moment of discovery behind, but the event is tattooed on his brain. The awful humiliation of discovering Ratner and … well, her name hardly matters … in his lab in that … unmistakeable condition and him not having had a clue. Then, after the girl had fled, having to listen to Ratner’s lies. It had never happened before, would never happen again, he loved his wife and kids, blah blah blah. Naturally he’d gone straight to the girl’s records and there it was. The numbers never lie. Incontrovertible evidence that not only had Ratner been fucking the girl, but he’d been paying for her services. Natasha Tillotson was a poor student; Cullen had taught her in a remedial maths group last summer in which she’d had to be reminded of the basic principles of probability. But in every module run by Ratner she’d come out with a good 2:1. Combing through past examination results Cullen had picked up on a pattern of misbehaviour: perfectly unremarkable students – all female – who’d graduated with surprisingly high marks. He’d been head of the department for five years at that point and it had taken the encounter with Ratner for him to wake up to what had been going on under his nose. A terrible failure of oversight. It was his job to spot anomalies and extra-curricular activities. But he’d missed Mark Ratner’s affairs, the uplifts in his favourites’ grades, along with clear evidence that this had been going on for years. Why? He knew the answer to that too and it was another failing of his, he realised – a tendency to pay attention to the academic performance of only the really gifted students; boys (and it was, in his estimation, mostly boys) who reminded Cullen of himself.

He wonders if he should have moved against Ratner the moment he stumbled on him in flagrante delicto in his lab. He’d considered it. A decade ago, five years even, this would hardly have mattered. Faculty affairs with undergraduates were almost a perk of the job. But the landscape has changed post #MeToo. It would all calm down, of course, and revert back to normal eventually, but right now was not the time to be flagrantly flouting the rules. If he’d gone to Maddy back then she would have supported him so long as he had not put her own position in jeopardy. She would still support him now, but he wasn’t convinced that she wouldn’t report the infraction to the Board of Governors, if only to save her own skin if it all came out. The Board might well take a dim view of Cullen’s management of his team and his failure to spot the anomalies in his students’ grades.