I check the banks of windows either side of me. No one is heading in this direction yet. As if creeping up on a wild animal, I walk silently towards my desk, my heart thumping. Crouching, I ease the drawstring back and take my laptop and phone out of the way. I lift the pillow from the plastic tub tucked beneath it. I open the lid. That homely aroma of Gramps’s shed hits my nostrils as I stroke the scrunched-up newspaper packing. It’s a happy smell, entirely out of place in this room. It is the scent that accompanied a decade of Sunday mornings and school holidays spent building stuff from scraps. I think of the two-thirds-built beach buggy leaning up in the corner of that shed. I’m saddened by the thought of Gramps and me never getting to blast it across Camber Sands as we’d always planned. For a moment, I can’t quite remember why the project got sidelined.

I look from the mechanical egg timer to the clock above the door. In under an hour, I should be cranking the dial round.

The contents of the tub had become almost innocent in their familiarity this morning: the offcut of steel tube, the dissected camera, the timer, the two lengths of blue wire. But in this room they’ve become alien.

‘You still here, Morcombe?’ Dimi Kyrkos asks as he lurches into the room. ‘What the fuck you doing hiding under your desk?’

I reassemble the package in two seconds of blind panic, then scramble to my feet and search for a believable excuse. I don’t find one.

‘Why do you always look so terrified, Morcombe?’ he says. ‘Take a chill pill, man.’ His shirt is undone almost to his waist, a tanned, waxed six-pack on show to the world.

I step backwards and stumble into the desk behind me. My gaze settles on his hands with their many sovereign rings. They are the hands that grappled at Sophia’s breasts in the alley.

‘Marvellous piano solo,’ Matt Alford says, laying on a posh voice as he enters the room behind Dimi. He pats at his heart. ‘Got me right here, Morcombe. It really did.’

Dimi laughs, but it’s not a mean laugh – it’s like he thinks he’s sharing a joke with me. ‘Silver Foxton’s face,’ he says. ‘You should’ve seen it. Didn’t have that part in his assembly plan, did he? You definitely need to play us out more often.’

‘Can’t believe you carried on playing after blowing chunks everywhere,’ Matt says. ‘Legendary behaviour, Morcombe.’

Dimi steps behind the teacher’s desk and turns Mr Clark’s chair upside down. ‘Just a little last-lesson prank,’ he tells me. ‘No need to go grassing on anyone, Morcombe.’

‘Give us a hand,’ Matt says with a wink. ‘And try not to puke all over us.’