‘These girls are innocent!’ Denial is her first instinct. Viola’s voice bounces off the high, white ceiling as hands seize her, pulling her back. Deception comes next. ‘Leah Cedars did it!’ she yells. ‘You all heard her in the harbour last night, threatening to kill. She did it! She did it!’

‘Leah had nothing to do with it!’ Saul speaks loudly. His is one of the pairs of hands that restrains Viola; Diana Crane is the other. The Earl sits abandoned by the doorway.

‘Don’t listen to him!’ Viola exclaims. ‘He probably helped her do it!’

The three men of the Council watch this protest as if beholding a strange and gratuitous invention.

‘You stop this!’ Saul demands, pushing his face close to Viola’s.

‘Leah Cedars did it!’ she hollers.

Saul shakes her fiercely. ‘You stop this! You stop this!’

There is a skirmish in the lobby; all attention is drawn to the door. If Viola needed any further proof that she is powerful, it arrives; she has evoked a presence with the mere mention of a name. Leah Cedars blunders in, disoriented, as if she’d expected to pass through that meeting-room doorway and find herself somewhere else.

Saul drops Viola’s arm. Like a magnet, he is drawn to Leah, desperate to usher her from this place, but the bottleneck of people in the lobby behind her will not let this happen.

The human tide is at the door.

They shove one another forward, and the school receptionist, the doctor’s wife and the librarian can no longer hold them back. This meeting will be public, come what may.

Viola wrenches her other arm free and careens into the middle of the room, barging past the three men of the Council who do not know which way to move: towards Viola, towards Leah, towards the advancing people who now line the walls and fill the corners. The Eldest Girls pierce Viola with insistent stares, imploring her to shush, but she will not. She feels a thrill, a new impetus, at the increase in her audience. There is nothing left to lose. If she is to die, then let it be like this, in defiance.

‘Saul helped her do it,’ Viola bellows, ‘because he is fucking her!’

She hits the F hard, raising a hiss of disapproval from the women present. Viola laughs, the sound bubbling up unbidden. In the midst of all this, still a swear word is outrageous?

‘I knew nothing of the body until this morning.’ Leah Cedars’ voice comes loud but robotic, as if speaking is a new skill for her. ‘The girl came to my house to tell me that the Eldest Girls had…’ she swallows hard ‘… killed Mr Hailey.’

A wild note of alarm peals through the gallery.

The handsome coycrock teacher! Dead?

‘No!’ objects Viola from the middle of the room. ‘She lies!’