So all of the male students had been eaten by beautiful women at various points in the past.

However, in reading Kayla’s journal, Murray only knew that the other students had all disappeared without a word of explanation. He was not aware of their final fates.

The next morning Murray rode his bike from his own village to the more infamous one and passed a newsagent on the way. The headline on the stand out the front said, “local found dead in meadow”. To Murray’s surprise, the photograph of the victim clearly identified her as Kayla, whose personal files had included a number of photographs of herself. It occurred to him that she would have taken her knowledge of time travel to the grave, if Murray hadn’t decrypted the folder containing the office computer copies of her personal files. His first conclusion was that Kayla had changed her mind, and decided to use one of her time travel techniques for some reason, and that it had caused her death. Perhaps she had travelled a few days or weeks into the past, and died upon reaching the past. After that, she would have existed for a few days or weeks in two aspects, both going about her life alive up until the point that she decided to time travel, and lying dead in the meadow after having time travelled.

Murray saw no point in sharing his speculations with anyone. Kayla was dead, and no revelation of the time travel techniques would bring her back, unless somebody were to risk their own life to go back in time to save her, which could well just cause the subsequent time traveller to die for the same reasons .... if time travel was even the definite cause of her death. As things stood, Murray was sitting on multiple methods of the greatest scientific breakthrough of the century, and yet they were apparently too unsafe to attempt. He decided to study the entire Time Class Lecture Notes file and see if he could work out what might have caused the unexplained disappearances of the male students, and possibly the death of Kayla. Night after night, he read the entire file through at home after work, until he had memorized the contents well enough to have scored 100% in any exam that Sandra might have given her students on the course content.

He decided that time travel was not worth risking until he had learned the answer, and put it out of his thoughts. From then on, he would come home from a day of legal clerical work, and spend his evenings reading books, or watching movies on videos. During the course of his working experiences, he began to make a number of observations about Norman Tesoriero’s interactions with his clients. One morning, Murray was called into Norman’s office to witness the signing of an elderly lady’s will. He knew he was not imagining the fact that Norman’s verbal and body language towards the woman was conveying a strong sense of Norman seeing her as a silly old lady.