They were standing by the front door, and he could hear a rumble from upstairs, a kind of dragging sound. And when he turned the key and pushed the door, the sound got louder, an urgency to it now. His heart was beating a little faster as he called out: ‘Hello? Who’s there?’

He followed the sound upstairs, aware of Ursula close behind him. It was coming from Melissa’s bedroom, and as he reached the door, the noise inside grew frantic, a muffled shouting, a tremulous shake against the wall. He felt his hesitation, and then pushed the door open quickly.

His mouth fell open.

Behind him, Ursula Ford said: ‘Sweet God in Heaven.’

They came now, like a procession. Bracken led the way, brisk and important in her black professorial robes, eyes darting about at the girls – her charges – alert for errant behaviour. Sasha next, head up, shoulders back, a regal wounded air as she absorbed the attention. Finally, Beth, head bowed – the penitent. She felt the brief hush come over the assembly hall as they moved through the crowd to the place at the centre of it – a microphone, three chairs.

‘Come Holy Spirit, open our hearts …’ they recited in unison, and Beth felt her mouth forming the words, but there was no pulse of meaning in it. The school prayer echoed around the hall and up to the ceiling, and Beth felt herself to be at the centre of a blizzard of words. They rose up around her, swarming into a mass. One of the doors on to the courtyard had been left open and the curtain billowed in the breeze.

Mrs Bracken was speaking now, sermonizing on the values of loyalty and kindness, the importance of friendships, and Beth thought that there were different types of loyalty, different sorts of friendship.

‘I’ll watch out for you,’ she’d told Callum.

And when she’d texted him to check he was okay, and he’d responded: Nowhere to go. I need help. – hadn’t she shown generosity? Compassion?

‘Are you sure this is cool?’ he’d said, looking around the little house, the brown furniture, the chenille bedspread. ‘Won’t your parents mind?’

‘It’s nothing to do with them,’ she’d told him, watching as he set his rucksack down on the floor. ‘This is my house. Mine.’

The last time she would sit in this hall, the last time she would feel the hum of other bodies around her, breathing the same air as all these girls, inhaling the mingled smells of sweat and deodorant and dust and, distantly, the mown grass of the pitches outside.