Taking advantage of his client’s cancellation, Harry rang Theo and when he heard he was at Bath University, asked if he could join him.
‘Come on up. You can be the good cop to my bad.’
‘Who are you interviewing?’
‘Lorraine Brown’s students. It’s been a bit like herding cats but we’ve got most of them together.’
Theo handed Harry a list of all the students Lorraine had taught. ‘Any familiar to you?’ Harry looked at the lists of names once, then he read through them a second time.
‘There’s no Vera Wang here.’ He explained what Wren had told him.
‘She might be protecting someone,’ Theo suggested.
Harry thought back to his conversation with Wren, and Ethan and Cabe listening. His realising he couldn’t trust anything they said. ‘I’ll talk to her again.’
‘And I’ll check to see if Vera Wang is a registered student here.’
Lorraine had had around forty students who she taught en masse in a lecture hall but her tutorials and workshops were given to smaller groups, with a maximum of twelve attending at any one time. Harry joined Theo part-way through his talking with the second group in one of the classrooms. The tables were nicer than the ones Harry remembered from his uni days here, with beech tops and lacquered bullnose edges. The hard-wearing blue and grey carpet looked the same, as did the polycarbonate chairs, but the twin screens were new along with the audio-visual equipment.
He’d met Dave at Bath Uni, but where Harry had taken his psychology degree into a therapy role, Dave had moved into sports psychology, and now worked in the university’s Sports Training Village with some of the top athletes in the UK. They’d shared a house on St Kilda’s Road with three other students, all male, and when Harry remembered those days they were a happy blur of parties and pub crawls, endless nights of caffeine-fuelled study and meals of baked beans on toast.
Even when Harry started going out with Nicole, he and Dave would still go to the pub, watch TV, go to the rugby together. Until Nicole organised a picnic one summer’s day. She’d packed a basket with food and wine, and when Dave had joked about his missing out on a spiritual experience – Solsbury Hill wasn’t just a place near Bath, but a song by Peter Gabriel – she’d invited him. The three of them had traipsed to the top of Solsbury Hill where Nicole had spread the picnic blanket and they’d spent the afternoon looking over Bath, getting drunk on cheap rosé and discussing everything between Jung and Freud’s differing conceptions of the unconscious to whether Galaxy Minstrel chocolates were better than Maltesers. It had been a defining moment for the three of them, and in their last semester, they became pretty much inseparable.
Now, Harry put his memories aside to listen to Lorraine’s students. Nobody had seen Lorraine nearly getting run down three weeks ago. Nobody had any idea if she had any enemies. Eventually, having watched Theo question the last group, Harry’s curiosity grew.
‘Nobody seems to have a bad thing to say about Lorraine,’ he mused out loud.
‘So?’ a young woman remarked. ‘She was really nice.’
The students nodded. They were a mixed bag, their ages ranging from early twenties to fifties. All were doing an MA designed to help them write a novel that they hoped would eventually be published.
‘She accused one student of cheating,’ Harry said. ‘I heard it caused a bit of an upset. Apparently Lorraine publicly humiliated them. That wouldn’t have endeared her to her student, would it?’
‘Cheating’s a stupid thing to do,’ the young woman snorted. ‘Nobody’s going to publish your novel if you’ve plagiarised it.’
‘Were there any rumours you heard about Lorraine?’ Harry pressed the group. ‘Anything nasty?’
‘Like what?’ This time a man spoke up. Around Doug’s age, in his late thirties, he was apparently writing a historical crime novel.
‘Like anything,’ Theo said, looking at each student in turn. Most held his eye, but the young woman fixed her gaze on her feet.
‘Gemma?’ Theo prompted the young woman.
‘There was something,’ she admitted.
Theo and Harry waited.
‘But it’s so horrible, and so obviously untrue, I’d rather tell you privately.’