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Hello and welcome to Spectator Out Loud, where each week we choose some of our favourite pieces from the magazine and ask their writers to read them aloud.

I'm Patrick Gibbons.

For this special episode of Spectator Out Loud, we feature Slipshot, a short story that featured in the Spectator's Christmas edition by Sarah Perry.

The story follows an academic task with reconstructing a disturbing incident involving two long-standed colleagues

whose close friendship unravels under the weight of envy, illness and something harder to explain.

Reading her short story now, Sarah Perry.

It was months before the difficulty with Marnie and Addison was talked about or even alluded to.

The site of their names in emails circulated around the department was enough to cause a pool

to settle on everything, like ash from fires only just put out. Besides, the nature of the

difficulty, that was the word we all used, was both so opaque and so distressing we'd have had trouble talking about it, even if we'd wanted to.

It fell to me to piece things together.

My brief from Helen was simply to satisfy the university that nobody in the department was to blame.

It fell to me because I am,

she tells me, part of the furniture, unremarkable, functional, predictable. She forgets my tenure began not with quarterly budgets and voluntary redundancy schemes and so on, but in the School

of Arts and Humanities and with a thesis on

the novels of Iris Murdoch. What I'm getting at is that in addition to gathering evidence

from emails and text messages and conversations with colleagues, I have taken some liberties here and there,

...