A door banged somewhere in the flat, making them all start. A moment later, a girl in a pure white towelling dressing gown and fluffy blue slippers appeared in the kitchen and shuffled over to the sink. Long dark hair obscured her face.

‘Leah, I’m so sorry – I didn’t realise you were here, you should have come out – you could have joined us—’ Callum was embarrassed.

Leah produced an apple from the pocket of her dressing gown. ‘S’okay, I was sleeping.’ She squeezed a generous blob of Fairy Liquid into her palm and began to wash the apple under the tap.

Chris looked at Tamsin, who crossed her eyes and grinned at him. He stifled an urge to laugh. Leah squirted another dose of Fairy Liquid onto her apple. When she put the bottle back down on the kitchen counter, two tiny oily bubbles puffed out, twinkled, burst. They were all watching her.

Callum stepped awkwardly towards her. ‘Erm, Chris, this is Leah, my flatmate, Leah, this is Chris, a friend.’

Leah took a clean tea towel from a drawer and dried her apple on it. At last she turned to face them.

‘Hello, Chris. Hi, Tamsin.’

She was very beautiful. Her glossy hair hung from a neat centre parting, two straight sheets of onyx that reflected the kitchen lights. Apart from one flat, irregularly shaped mole on her right cheek, her biscuit-coloured skin was blemish-free.

‘Uh, hi,’ said Chris. ‘Actually, I’m just going, but, er, nice to meet you.’

Leah smiled unconvincingly and bit into her apple.

Five

Like all small, enclosed communities, Denham Hall – where Callum had now been working for nearly a year – had its own mores and cultural codes. At the core of the school’s identity was a nostalgia – fiercely subscribed to by most of the pupils – for the rigours of the bad old days. Many children in the top two years remembered the previous headmaster and his deputy speaking Latin together over lunch and in the corridors. Corporal punishment had ceased only when it was made illegal in 1999, a fact often repeated among the pupils with a mixture of horror and pride.