They file out, thanking her. It’s nice. They look earnest, and grateful – even the sullen girl, and the one with the contouring. She finds herself agreeing with Paula – nice kids. They do strike her as very different from her interns, though; they seem built according to a different set of instructions.

She tries to think about the current crop. She doesn’t actually know where they went to school. Her editorial assistant sorts it out.

The last student out of the room is the tall girl. She kept her seat as everyone else left. When she does leave, she passes close by. She has the most astonishing eyes, Titch thinks. They are far apart in her face, and have a cool, distant blankness to them. The girl keeps them fixed on Titch until she’s walking past, staring her down for just a little too long, with a kind of insolence that’s at odds with her mild face. Not rude, though – just a raw interest in looking, without the awareness that someone might look back. When the contact breaks, the girl gives no sign that anything unusual has occurred.

Sometimes feelings can be like scents. You pick them up instantly, viscerally, but you can’t always identify them. You can’t put a name to them, even as they seem the most vivid callback imaginable to a time you also can’t quite name. Titch feels something, an echo, a taint. Something of the longing and pain of being young, something between envy and admiration, between spite and adoration.

The girl is gone.

‘Thank you for that,’ says the teacher. ‘You were brilliant. They got so much out of that.’

The teacher isn’t much older than his students, jacket and thinning hair notwithstanding. Eagerness radiates from him. When she was at school she would have mocked him remorselessly.

‘I just hope I was of some use,’ she says, sounding as awkward as she feels.

He nods. ‘Of course, of course… Would you like to see some of their work?’

She hopes the teacher doesn’t notice her hesitation. But, ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘That would be great.’

He leads her to the wall. She smiles politely at the badly mounted images, mock double-page spreads for a magazine. Then she looks closer.

The boy is there. The boy in the grey hoody. Standing in a note-perfect scene of urban decay and peeling wallpaper, chin up to show a thin and childish neck, staring straight at the camera. Broken plates litter the ground around him, and his pale eyes are round and serious.

She feels again in her chest that tight, strange sense of threat and possibility.

After the talk, Alisha walks round to the bank of grass at the front of the school. The sun is out. The spring warmth of it is getting stronger by the day. From there, you can see the fells rising above the town. Faint currents of cooler air still curl around the sunny spots, and underneath them, the bank is tinged with damp.