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thinking on its head.’
    His face suddenly softened and he grabbed Henderson’s hand and shook it. ‘Thank you, Inspector. I’ve felt so helpless these last few days and now I feel I can do something useful to help catch my daughter’s killer.’

SIX
     
     
     
    As a teenager from the backwaters of Woking, Jon Lehman was naive and unworldly when he suddenly found himself a student on the free and easy campus of Exeter University . For the first occasion in his life, unhindered by parental strictures and small-town sensibilities, he enthusiastically swallowed and smoked his way through all manner of illegal substances including ‘E’, marijuana and LSD. Now he was sure he was experiencing one of those nasty flashbacks his pissed-off ex-girlfriend at the time, Lisa Wilder vindictively hoped he would suffer.
    Time passed. With no idea how he got there or for how long, he was in the gents toilet, bent-double over a sink and as mysteriously as the motion in the world seemed to pause, in the next instant it suddenly came back into focus. He was immediately assailed by the sights and sounds of the loo, by the stark white sinks and tiling which hurt his eyes, the tinkling of someone pissing against the urinal which rattled his brain and the heat from the large wall radiator which was making him sweat. He felt sick.
    He turned and stumbled towards an open cubicle, his hair plastered against his forehead and his mind buzzing with the ferocity of a spinning fairground ride. He kicked the door shut and threw-up into the toilet bowl. On his knees, his head resting on the edge of the pan, he retched again and again but despite pressing the button until the cistern ran dry, he still couldn’t get rid of the nauseating smell of the curry he ate last night.
    He took off his thick, Elvis Costello-style glasses and wiped away tears that were now welling up in his eyes. ‘Oh Sarah,’ he moaned as he slowly rocked on his knees, banging his head against the hard ceramic. ‘Oh Sarah? Why you? Why did it have to be you?’
    Five minutes passed, twenty minutes, it didn’t matter and he didn’t care. There was a noise outside the door, a loud conversation between someone entering the toilet and someone leaving which roused him and wearily he got to his feet and made his over to the sink. The face in the mirror looked old, haggard even despite not yet hitting forty and the uplifting exhortations of friends who assured him the best was yet to come.
    He filled the basin and pushed his face into the warm water. It felt cosy, like a soft pillow or a large pair of breasts. Part of him wanted to stay there and drown in the dismal surroundings of a university toilet but another part of him said no, he had to go on. Slowly he walked out of the toilet, water dripping down his shirt and jacket and wiping his face with a paper towel.
    Unsure what to do next, he slumped against the nearest wall. It was almost as if he didn’t exist as he was jostled gently by groups of students, a noisy, happy throng, upbeat as they made their way to afternoon lectures, laboratory experiments or seminars without a care in the world. Two days had passed since he first learned of Sarah’s death, two days that fizzed by in a blur until today when all that was locked away inside seemed to bubble to the surface with the ferocity a tidal wave.
    Did these people walking by not know about Sarah? He wanted to say something, to go after them and reprimand them for their callousness, but soon they were gone, around the corner before the words would form. Wearily, he forced himself to move and headed upstairs.
    He walked unsteadily, as if drunk, using the walls of the narrow corridor to stop him from falling but gradually the dizziness disappeared and his sense of balance returned. When he reached the office at the end, he ignored the ‘Meeting in Progress’ sign and opened the door marked, ‘Professor Alan Stark - Department of Law’.
    ‘What the hell!’ barked an