As for the rest of it, Farley didn’t find the knife, or any evidence of a struggle at the tree house. I was dismissed as a liar. I was labelled a grass. Everyone said so.

A week after the Easter holidays, the four of them came back to school. The Mackies wanted me dead. They weren’t going to fail again. And now they had everybody on their side.

2.29 p.m.

I strut across the field. Mr Clark is following me. Behind him, twenty-three students trudge in a disorderly line. I know Sophia can’t see me, but I imagine her watching, everything about me adjusted for her attention: the swagger of my hips, the barrelling of my shoulders, the look of a man back in control. These are the moments that go unseen – when we are all that we can be.

I’m no longer asleep. But, like waking from a nap on a sunny afternoon when everything is hazy and calm, the colours look wrong. The grass at my feet is emerald green, vibrant and glowing. It is cut with a dead straight line that leads from my feet to the classroom door. Our Portakabin, the main school building, those famed five oak trees that tower over the entrance, they are black like charred ruins against the deep turquoise sky.

‘Did Mr Foxton say how long he’d be?’ Mr Clark asks as he steps into the classroom behind me.

‘He said he’d be here in a minute,’ I tell him. I look into his eyes as I say it. The tone is perfect.

There’s no suspicion in his face, no raising of the eyebrows, no suggestion that this might be one of my little stories. ‘He didn’t say why he wants to talk to you all?’

‘Just passing on the message,’ I reply. The touch of irritation I apply to my voice is perfectly judged as I amble to my desk.

‘Sorry about this, lads,’ Mr Clark says as everyone slumps into their chairs. ‘Mr Foxton will be with us very shortly, I’m sure.’ He collects up the remnants of his own destroyed seat, which are still scattered over the front of the room. ‘No need for him to start asking awkward questions in the last hour of school, eh?’ he says as he squirrels them away in the textbook store cupboard.

It provokes another chorus of Who Ate All the Pies. This time, I don’t join in. I’m looking at the clock. On schedule, I’d have left the room by now. I’m behind. I need to get things moving.