Cambridge is beautiful, but that is not the whole story.

It was a town before it was a university: a town on the River Cam, close to the Fens, with the damp air, flat land and mist that still give Cambridge much of its atmosphere. The mist is part of the appeal, of course, but it also suits the place in another way. Cambridge has always been very good at making things disappear into vagueness.

The University did not arrive in an empty landscape. It settled into an existing town and gradually acquired power over it. The relationship between town and gown was not just a picturesque old rivalry involving gowns and undergraduates behaving badly. It was about authority. Who made the rules? Who enforced them? Who was protected? Who was punished?

Cambridge has always been very good at presenting control as tradition.

One of the nastier examples was the treatment of young women. The University became deeply anxious about women tempting male students and dealt with the problem in the usual way: by policing the women. Young women could be pursued, arrested and imprisoned on suspicion of associating with undergraduates. The men were, inconveniently, the reason for the anxiety. The women were simply easier to punish.

There is an irony here. Cambridge University’s own origin story is linked to scholars fleeing Oxford after violence connected to the death of a woman, possibly a prostitute, although the details are disputed. Yet Cambridge later became notorious for treating young women as a moral danger to men.

There is probably a name for that. Projection, perhaps. Or scapegoating. An institution with its own uneasy history placing the burden of male behaviour on women with far less power.

That is the Cambridge I keep coming back to in crime fiction: not because it is pretty, though it certainly is, but because it is so practised at looking respectable. The punts, chapels and colleges are part of it. So are the rules, privilege, secrecy and punishment.

For a murder mystery, that is far more useful than scenery.