Leah heard voices in Leighton’s office, so she waited outside and managed to resist the urge to pace the corridor. She hadn’t got a minute’s sleep. They had spent half the night in the waiting room at the police station and the other half on sofas at friends’ houses. Keira’s death persisted in playing over in her mind, that ear-splintering scream still ringing in her head like the replaying of a nightmare. She had seen her fall, and now she couldn’t erase that sight from her mind. Keira had bounced like a rag doll from the bathroom roof to the yard below, her body landing with a thud that had seemed to echo into the night.

When she closed her eyes, she could see her friend lying lifeless on the patio slabs. She wondered whether the image would ever fade.

The department was quiet. The exams were finished and a majority of students were now thinking about heading home for the summer, if they hadn’t already done so. Leah wasn’t going home, she’d decided months earlier. There were too many things she could be doing in South Wales – productive ways in which her time could be spent, rather than whiling away the summer months back in Devon – and going home had never really been an option anyway.

But in the aftermath of Keira’s death, she wondered whether leaving for a while wouldn’t be such a bad thing. The house would be filled with the memory of her friend, each room consumed by the echoes of her voice and her laughter. She already felt haunted; she didn’t know whether she’d be able to stay here on her own.

The door to the office opened abruptly, startling Leah from her thoughts. A male member of staff – one of the tutors who’d taught her on a modern European fiction module – emerged from the office and gave her a second look as he made his way past.

‘Hi,’ Leah said.

The man nodded but said nothing.

Leighton was sitting at his desk, a half-eaten sandwich and a cup of tea in front of him. He looked up at her, his face unable to disguise his response to seeing her yet again in his office. He had apparently assumed that the end of the exams would mean the end of her too.

‘I might get to finish these papers this side of Christmas,’ he said with a sigh. He put his pen down on the desk and held her stare, his expression reading like a question mark.

Leah hovered by the door. ‘Sorry … shall I leave you?’

‘No, it’s fine,’ he said, pushing his chair back from the desk. It was clearly far from fine. ‘What do you want?’

Leah’s face fell. She didn’t like him when he was like this – cold, unwelcoming, as he was most of the time. Yet the more distant he became, the closer she wanted to get. He seemed to treat all his students this way, and she wondered what he was even doing there. He didn’t seem to like lecturing; he didn’t seem to like the students – not the majority of them, at least. Perhaps he was bitter, she thought. Not for the first time, she noticed the titles that sat on the bookshelves that lined his office. There were the classics, the texts that featured on the various modules he must have taught over the years; there were theoretical studies on the authors who were at the top of his list of apparent preferences. Among them, almost hidden if you weren’t looking for them, lurked his own titles – his brief foray into novel-writing that had resulted in lacklustre sales and what must clearly have been a disappointment for him after such obvious faith in his own creative abilities.

‘I take it you’ve heard about last night? Everyone seems to know already.’

Leighton pushed his sandwich aside and ran a hand through his dark hair. ‘Yeah, bad news always travels quickly. It’s terrible. Do they know what happened?’

Leah sat in the chair opposite him. If she waited for an invitation to sit, she’d be there all afternoon. She studied his face, trying to find the signs of the softer him she knew existed somewhere behind the stern exterior.

‘I know what happened,’ she told him. ‘I saw her fall.’

She didn’t think for a moment that Leighton was interested in any of this, but she didn’t have anyone else to talk to about it. Jamie had gone to work after speaking to the police, and Tom had been called to the station later that morning. She didn’t really want to talk to either of them anyway. The atmosphere had been frosty in the house for a while before Keira’s death; now, it had turned to ice between them.

Leah herself was due at the station within the next hour. Although they’d given statements the night before, the fact that they’d all been drinking meant the police were asking for them again, sober this time. She had known they would all be reinterviewed. She supposed it was part of the procedure, under the circumstances.

What were the circumstances, though? Keira had fallen, hadn’t she?

‘That must have been awful.’

She hated the sound of his insincerity. In fact, it made her angry; a pulsing sensation that she felt in the depths of her stomach, churning like acid burn. He didn’t really care about her. He didn’t care about any of them. He hadn’t cared when she’d been upset before … why would he start now?

‘It was. I haven’t slept all night … I can’t get her out of my head. You know when people talk about things happening in slow motion, like in a film, or an out-of-body experience? That’s what it was like. I saw her fall, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it. I felt so helpless.’ She paused. ‘Have you ever felt like that?’

Leighton’s eyes narrowed. He had no sympathy for her – that much was obvious. He just wanted her out of his office. Men like him took what they wanted, when they wanted, and they could never see why they should be held accountable for their choices. Their actions.

She wanted him to hold her, but she realised they’d gone beyond that long ago.

‘Term’s over,’ he said, as though she needed reminding. ‘You shouldn’t be here.’

She leaned on the desk, disturbing the paperwork waiting for him. ‘It’s like that, is it?’ she asked, unable to keep the disappointment from her voice. ‘So I do what over the summer, exactly? Wait for you to contact me?’

The photograph of Leighton’s wife and two daughters that sat at the corner of the desk had been disturbed with the rest of his things, so that it was turned towards Leah as though to taunt her. She had seen it before: his wife, blonde and glamorous; his two daughters, Isobel and Olivia, younger versions of their mother, both of them picture-perfect. How could he keep that image there, Leah wondered, facing him every day – their beautiful faces looking out at him, watching him – when he knew what he was guilty of?

‘I think that’s probably for the best, don’t you?’

She figured it was a rhetorical question, but she wasn’t going to just accept it. ‘So we go about things on your terms then, when you say so?’

Leighton’s jaw flexed. ‘Leah, these buildings are a ghost town during the summer. You keep showing up here, people are going to get suspicious. Is that what you want?’

She bit her lip. To be honest, she wasn’t sure the idea of people finding out the truth really bothered her too much. He was the one with a family. He was the one who had to go home every evening to his wife and get into bed with her knowing he was lying to her. It was his neck on the line, not hers. When she thought about it – which she had, often – she realised she really didn’t have much to lose.

‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s not.’ She stood from the chair and made a point of reaching for the photograph to turn it back to where it had originally faced. Leighton watched her do it. He might have had the good grace to at least look ashamed, embarrassed – something – but no, he was far too self-assured for that.

‘You’ll be in touch then?’

Leighton nodded. There was a knock at the door; not waiting for a response, the person on the other side clattered into the room, almost falling into Leah.

Anna Stapleton, the creative writing tutor, was dressed in her standard faux-boho fashion, all floor-length floral skirt and more cheap jewellery than an Argos catalogue. She seemed to exist in a haze of perfume, suffocating anyone who had the misfortune to get too close. ‘Oh, sorry – I didn’t realise you had company.’

‘Actually, Leah’s just leaving.’

Anna gave her a smile, which Leah returned.

‘I’ll leave you to it then,’ Leah said reluctantly.

She left the office and pulled the door shut behind her. She waited a moment in the corridor, absorbing the promise that had been made. She knew Leighton had been telling the truth when he said he’d be in touch.

He was always back in touch.