‘The tone of his work had begun to progress,’ said Huber. ‘To become more conceptually challenging.’ He stepped over to the corner where a large flat leather art case was propped up against the wall. He snapped it open, flicked through the contents and selected a painting. I could see it was different before it was fully out of the case. The colours were dark, angry. Huber turned and held it across his chest so I could get a good look.

Curves of purple and blue suggesting the curved roof of a tunnel while emerging, as if from the shadows, was an elongated inhuman figure sketched with long bold strokes of black and grey paint. Unlike the faces of the people in his earlier work this figure’s face was full of expression, a large mouth twisted into a gaping leer, eyes like saucers under a sleek hairless dome of a head.

‘As you can see,’ said Huber. ‘His work has much improved of late.’

I looked back to the painting of a sun-dappled windowsill – all it was missing was a cat.

‘When did his style change?’ I asked.

‘Oh, his style didn’t change,’ said Huber. ‘The actual technique is remarkably similar to his previous work. What we’re seeing here is much more profound. It’s a radical shift in, I want to say the subject, but I think it goes deeper than that. You only have to look at it – there is emotion, passion even, in that painting that you just don’t see in his earlier work. And not just that he was looking beyond his comfort in terms of technique—’

Huber trailed off.

‘It’s happened before,’ he said. ‘You get these young people and you think they’re showing you one thing and then they take their own lives and you realise what you thought was progress was quite the opposite.’

I’m not totally heartless, so I told him we thought suicide was unlikely. He was so relieved that he didn’t ask me what had happened – which is a square on the suspicious behaviour bingo card in and of itself.

‘You said he was looking beyond his comfort zone,’ I said. ‘What did you mean?’

‘He was asking about new materials,’ said Huber. ‘He was interested in ceramics, which was a bit unfortunate.’

I asked why and Huber explained that they’d had to stop using their onsite kiln.

‘Every firing is expensive, you’ve got to be producing quite a large amount of work to justify running it,’ he said, obviously embarrassed that economic reality had crept into the college.

I was thinking of the shard of pottery that had been used as the murder weapon. I asked whether they had a kiln at the new campus and could James Gallagher have been using that?