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are you getting at?’
    Sidney paused. ‘It’s nothing, I’m sure,’ he replied. ‘I am sorry to have taken up so much of your time.’
    ‘That’s quite all right. I don’t mean to rush you but I don’t think we were expecting you. We don’t have much call for clergymen in the office . . .’
    ‘And I admit that, in the church, we don’t have much call for lawyers . . .’ Sidney replied, more testily than he had intended.
    He had never taken such dislike to a man before and immediately felt guilty about it. He remembered his old tutor at theological college telling him, ‘There is something in each of us that cannot be naturally loved. We need to remember this about ourselves when we think of others.’
    On the way out of the office, Sidney felt ashamed of his rudeness. He worried about the kind of man he was becoming. He needed to return to his official duties.
    He bicycled over to Corpus and arrived just in time to take his first seminar of the term. It was on the synoptic gospels, a study of how much the life of Christ found in the accounts of Matthew, Mark and Luke was dependent on a common, earlier source known as ‘Q’.
    Sidney was determined to make his teaching relevant. He explained how, although ‘Q’ was lost, and the earliest surviving gospel accounts could only have been written some sixty-five years after the death of Christ, this was not necessarily such a long passage of time. It would be the equivalent of his students writing an account of their great-grandfather just before the turn of the century. By gathering the evidence, and questioning those who had known him, it would be perfectly possible to acquire a realistic account of the life of a man they had never met. All it needed was a close examination of the facts.
    Sidney spoke in familiar terms because he had discovered that when students were first at Cambridge they required encouragement as much as academic tuition. On arrival, those who had been brilliant at school soon found themselves in the unusual position of being surrounded by fellow students who were equally, if not more, intelligent than they were themselves. This, matched by the superiority of Fellows who didn’t actually like teaching, meant that undergraduates in their first year were often prone to a vertiginous drop in confidence. The gap between a student’s expectation of academic life and his subsequent experience could prove dispiriting. At the same time, the University itself displayed little sympathy for their disorientation, believing that those in their charge should understand that it was a privilege to be at Cambridge and they should either shape up fast or go crying back home to Mummy. Sidney therefore saw it as one of his duties to look upon the more vulnerable undergraduates with more sympathy than that shown by his colleagues, especially towards those theological students who found the rigorous investigation of some of the more unreliable biblical sources a challenge to their faith. Sidney, as in so many other areas of his life, had to ensure that those in his charge took a long view of life and held their nerve. The race was not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, he told himself. Time and chance happened to them all, and it was vital, above all, to hold a steady course.
    It was a lesson he still needed to learn himself.
     
    Although Sidney knew that he would see Inspector George Keating for their regular game of backgammon the following day, he decided that he really did need to telephone his friend, even if it might incur wrath. This it did, as the inspector had made it clear in the past that he never liked to have open and shut cases questioned and he was still smarting from England’s loss at football to the Hungarians the previous evening.
    ‘6-3! And to think we invented the game, Sidney. Wembley Stadium is the home of football and a team no one’s ever heard of put six goals past us. Unbelievable!’
    ‘I don’t know why you