When I got home from school, my mum asked, ‘How was your first day?’ etc, etc. I said it was fine. I didn’t want to explain about Scorpus and his gang. It made me feel embarrassed, even though it wasn’t my fault.

I was seriously worried about going back to school the next day. Mrs Protheroe had got us together with Scorpus and made him give the stuff back, which he did, with his face fixed in a sneer. He said he was only messing about, and she said she hoped there would be no repetition of the incident, or Scorpus would be in serious trouble.

So that might sound all right, but outside the classroom Scorpus had looked at us and said, in a low, fierce voice like he was acting the part of a baddie in a soap, ‘I told you two losers if you told on me I’d kill you. And I always keep my word. See you after school.’

Our last class was History with Miss Spiggins, which was close to the main entrance, so we were able to get out of school fast and run all the way home before Scorpus appeared. So, OK, that was a result. But we couldn’t keep dodging him for ever.

It turned out we’d picked the absolute worst person in the school to get on the wrong side of. Really. It was like making an enemy of Doctor Doom or Darth Vader or someone. Scorpus was a terror. A legend. He was the hardest kid in school, and last year he’d been suspended for assaulting a teacher. His dad was a well-known local hard case. He’d just come out of prison after doing time for breaking a man’s jaw in a pub and then breaking the nose of the copper who came to arrest him. So I didn’t want my mum and dad going up to the school to complain and get a meeting with Scorpus’s parents so they could tell them off in their posh voices using lots of long words. I had a feeling that wouldn’t exactly help.

So when my dad got in from work that evening and asked me how it was, I told him it was fine too.

‘They didn’t eat you then?’ said Ben, scratching his head.

‘No, not yet,’ I said.

My dad sat back in the armchair and sighed. ‘I’m glad your first day at school went well, Sam. Wish I could say the same about my day at work.’

‘Why?’ my mum said. ‘They didn’t . . .?’

‘They did,’ my dad said, in this deep kind of gravelly voice he uses when he’s being dead serious. ‘Roger Haggerston said the restructuring is going to take place next month. And my department is . . . vulnerable.’