People are very suspicious, you know; always so quick to believe the worst. I’d only revealed to Miss McRae that I’d been abused by a member of staff. She was the one who’d assumed who it was; she was the one who brought it all out. And of course, St. Oswald’s has always been a windmill for boys to tilt at. At her request, I told the police. Everything but the man’s name. That I couldn’t—wouldn’t—say. That one I left to someone else. Someone more charismatic.

I never really believed we’d win. Perhaps that was the problem. But stories are like weeds; they grow. You can never stop them. And the story that was meant to blow Poodle out of the water became something more sinister. A boy had disappeared for a week in December of ’81. Another boy had drowned in the pits. That death had been ruled accidental, but now, with these new allegations of corruption at St. Oswald’s, the Malbry authorities saw their chance to link one with the other. The Malbry Examiner, never a friend of what it sees as a privileged institution (and never mind those scholarship boys from dirt-poor backgrounds, whose fees were paid by the St. Oswald’s Trust), had always loved to publish the worst. Now its pages were awash with rumour and hysteria. The Nutter affair was brought out again, with a whole lot of new theories. And when my tale was made public—they started making connections.

Had Charlie Nutter been lured away during Christmas of ’81? Had Harry Clarke corrupted him? Was Harry Clarke the member of staff who had traumatized me so badly that I could not even say his name?

Miss McRae was supportive throughout. She searched my personal history. She sought out my old school friends. One of them was Poodle, who violently denied the suggestion that he had been abused as a boy. Yes, he and Harry had had a relationship. But it had never been sexual—at least, not until Poodle was twenty-one, and legal. Poodle’s parents denied this, of course. Poodle had been brainwashed. And when I told them the story of what I’d seen that Christmas, through the window of Harry’s house—

Mr. Clarke was a charismatic teacher, said the Malbry Examiner. Like many sexual predators, he was outgoing and popular. Was he charismatic enough for even his victims to deny that he had abused them? Could this reluctance to speak out be some kind of Stockholm syndrome? Or was there a more sinister truth lurking behind that old story? And, yet more enticingly, could the death of Lee Bagshot now be linked to a suspected pedophile?