‘Basically, yes. Pretty much. Sexual misconduct with a student, at any rate. That’s how it works. You could probably get away with murder and keep...’ He put his hand to his forehead. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Bad taste. That was stupid of me.’
‘That’s all right. Go on.’
‘Well, what I was meaning to say was that, in today’s climate, it’s the most heinous crime there is in the teaching environment. Next to plagiarism, perhaps. It not only has overtones of rape, but it also touches upon abuse of power and betrayal of trust. Put those things together and they can be a powerful combination. Very hard to forgive or forget.’
‘Or disprove?’
‘Practically impossible. Yes. I’m not saying that Gavin was a complete innocent, and he was certainly foolhardy, but in all the time I knew him, which admittedly was only two or three years, I had never known him behave in any other way than as a gentleman towards the opposite sex. He was, in fact, rather shy.’
‘So what actually happened? What was his “sexual indiscretion”?’
Lomax shrugged. ‘That’s just the problem. Nobody knows. They haven’t installed CCTV in all our offices. Not yet. Gavin said he put his arm around the Vernon girl to comfort her when she cried after failing an important test. She said he made a pass at her and indicated that if she slept with him, he would make sure her test result was modified accordingly.’
‘That’s it? But where’s the evidence?’
‘That’s all there is.’
Annie felt her jaw drop. As a victim of serious sexual abuse herself, she was hardly sympathetic towards predatory males, but even she could hardly believe that a man could lose his livelihood based on such flimsy hearsay. ‘That’s not evidence,’ she said. ‘It’s her word against his.’
‘I know. That’s my point. She could just as easily have been lying.’
‘Why would she lie?’
‘Search me. But it’s a possibility. Teenage girls, even when they’re nineteen, as Kayleigh Vernon was at the time, can be very confused emotionally, and very vindictive.’
‘And Kayleigh was both?’
‘I don’t know her well enough to answer that question. All I can tell you is that Gavin told me he got the impression she had been sort of flirting with him all term, you know, making innuendos, making eyes, leading him on, teasing, that sort of thing. He admits to putting his arm around her because she was distressed, which, whatever else you might say, was really his biggest mistake of all. Whether she took it as a sign of his affections and felt affronted when he rebuffed her...’
‘Is that what you think happened?’
‘I think it’s more than likely, and I think Gavin should have been given the benefit of the doubt, but as I said before, in this present climate, there is no benefit of the doubt.’
‘But if he thought she was leading him on, might he not have responded, and might he not have misread the signals?’
Lomax nodded glumly. ‘That’s also possible. But she didn’t say he attempted to assault her; she said he tried to blackmail her into having sex.’
‘What was the girl like?’
‘Ordinary enough, as far as I know. Unexceptional. No one ever claimed she was a slut or a trollop, or anything like that. And Gavin was certainly no Lothario.’
‘What happened to the girl?’
‘Kayleigh? She graduated eventually. I don’t know where she is now.’
‘And the other complainant?’
‘Beth Gallagher? Gone, too. Now, she was a troublemaker. She was also Kayleigh’s best friend. It was very likely she egged Kayleigh on in her pursuit of Gavin, if indeed such a pursuit did occur, perhaps with the goal of humiliating him, and that she came out in her friend’s defence when the going got too rough.’
‘She lied, too?’
‘That’s not what the committee or the board believed.’
‘But is it what you think?’
Lomax stared down at his cluttered desk, as if mentally rearranging the objects on its surface. ‘Yes,’ he said finally. It was more of a sigh than anything else. ‘She said he let his hand “accidentally” brush across her breast in his office when they were discussing an essay she had written.’
‘So again it was her word against Gavin’s?’
‘Her word and Kayleigh’s. Two to one. He didn’t stand a chance.’
‘Did either of them have any motive for hurting Gavin Miller?’
Lomax hesitated before answering, and Annie got the sense that he was quickly making a decision on just how much to tell her, that he was probably going to hold something back. She filed away the reaction for later. She often found it was good to have a little unexpected ammunition in your arsenal for a second meeting, should one be necessary. ‘No,’ he said finally. ‘As I said, I think it was just an adolescent game, a cruel game that got out of hand. Beyond a certain point, there was no turning back.’
‘They could have retracted, told the truth.’
‘It wasn’t an option. If they did that, they would have been disciplined. They might have lost everything they had been working towards.’
‘Did Mr Miller try to get in touch with either of the girls later, to berate them or ask them to come clean about what they did?’
‘Not that I know of. If he did, they certainly didn’t report it to the college, and he didn’t tell me.’
‘Were their parents involved?’
‘Well, I assume they knew about it, of course, but they played no official role.’
‘Any further incidents?’
‘What sort of incidents?’
‘Involving Gavin Miller and the parents, for example, or the girls’ boyfriends, older brothers. Anything of a violent nature, threats made, that sort of thing?’
‘I never heard of anything like that. Look, I’m not an expert on this. There’s a lot I don’t know.’
‘I’m aware of that,’ said Annie. ‘But I’d appreciate it if you’d just bear with me and answer the questions as best you can. Did Gavin complain officially about his treatment?’
‘I believe he did put in a formal complaint and appeal after his sacking, but it went nowhere.’
‘Climate of the times?’
‘Exactly.’
‘There was no publicity about the incident or the dismissal. Why was that?’
‘It was what everyone agreed to at the time,’ Lomax said.
‘Even Gavin?’
‘Especially Gavin. Some members of the board made it quite clear to him how his name would get dragged through the mud in full view if it ever became public knowledge.’
‘So that’s why he never went to the press?’
‘Yes. Oh, there were rumours, of course. You can’t keep something like that a complete secret. But they died down. Gavin’s name and alleged offences were never made generally known.’
‘And the girls?’
‘They didn’t want their private lives splashed all over the morning papers, did they?’
‘Was there anything more to all this?’
‘Well, I’ve always thought the college had a hidden agenda, that they wanted rid of Gavin anyway, and this was their golden opportunity.’
‘Why?’
Lomax struggled. ‘Gavin was a bit of an outsider. He didn’t quite fit in. He marched to the beat of his own drum, and he didn’t always follow college guidelines in matters such as curriculum and set texts and so on. He often couldn’t be bothered to attend departmental meetings. That sort of thing. The college is a pretty conservative institution, on the whole, and Gavin was a bit of a maverick, not to mention politically left of centre.’
‘I thought all academics were lefties?’
‘Not here.’
Annie paused a beat. ‘Were either of the girls involved with drugs?’
‘I never heard anything about drugs.’
The answer had come too quickly and was too definitive, Annie thought. And Lomax didn’t look surprised enough by the sudden change of direction in questioning. More ammunition for a later interview, perhaps. She made some notes and sipped some more coffee before it went cold. ‘Not much more to go, now, Mr Lomax. I’m sorry to rake up all this unpleasantness, but we need to know.’