‘Oh?’ As he walks back to the desk with the coffee cup it is hard to prevent his hand from shaking. He takes a seat and pushes the coffee towards her, waits for her to put it to her lips before saying, ‘What kind of thing?’

‘One of Satnam’s essays. It’s on data integration in bioinformatics. She must have printed it out.’

A lump catches painfully in his voice box but he manages to keep the smile on his face. He swallows, hard. No cause for alarm just yet.

‘Oh?’ he says, in what he hopes is a casual tone. Not that she’ll notice, he suspects, though it never hurts to put on a good show of ignorance. ‘If you give it to me, I’ll make sure Dr Ratner sees it. You focus on your coursework.’

‘It’s been graded,’ she says.

‘Really?’ he says, with a feeling of foreboding. ‘I don’t recall marking it myself.’

‘But you teach the bioinformatics module.’

‘I do, yes.’ An anxious thread spirals its way up his spine.

‘She told me she got a first.’

‘I see,’ he says, his throat closing. He slides the paper from the desk and takes a cursory look to buy some time. He has no need to remind himself. The second year undergrad proof, a stochastic differential equation for a transcriptional regulatory network in saccharomyces cerevisiae, simple brewers’ yeast, and below it several lines of code enabling the calculation to be done from numerous different sample sets, both neatly typed and heavily annotated in red pen.

‘Are these Dr Ratner’s corrections?’ he asks, puzzled. Who corrects papers by hand these days?

‘No, they’re mine. You don’t have to look very hard to see that the maths is all wrong. So is the coding.’

Cullen scans the page, checking Nevis’s corrections, aware of her gaze on him. Yes, of course. That would seem contradictory and odd. He imagines Nevis taking the paper to Ratner or even to Keane or Madeleine Ince, the same innocent, wide-eyed enquiry on her face. No, that won’t do. Something in his head resolves and clarifies. He takes a few deep breaths and reminds himself that he is the Dean.

‘Oh that’s right, I remember now, she was having trouble with a few of the concepts. I gave her a couple of review sessions.’ Handing back the paper, he says, ‘Evidently this is an early draft. I do recall handing a batch of papers to Dr Ratner, so I expect the final draft was among that batch. Gosh, well spotted!’

He watches her soften. She is thinking, applying logic, weighing up the probability of his explanation.

‘Don’t worry about it. Easy mistake to make.’ He smiles, reassuringly. ‘But if you’re concerned, why don’t I call Dr Ratner now and ask him to confirm.’

‘It’s all right,’ she says.