‘She cuts Villy girls’ throats and drinks their blood.’ This prompted more giggles.

‘I don’t believe she exists? I’ve never seen her, and I’ve been here since I was thirteen?’

‘No, seriously, though, she doesn’t—drink blood or anything like that. But she does only come out at night.’

‘That’s totally understandable? I’d be too ashamed to come out in daylight if my face looked like that.’

‘She starved herself, right, and once all the fat had gone from under her skin, her face collapsed and she was left with the face of, like, an eighty-year-old hag. That’s pure truth, man.’

‘She’s a Villy legend.’

‘The oral storytelling tradition,’ one of the girls said in a mock deep voice, and they all screamed with laughter. Simon guessed they were aping one of their teachers.

‘Shut up, poo-brain! If I lose my exeat privs thanks to you, it’ll be pure tragedy.’

‘No way are we getting curfed for helping a policeman.’

‘Shut up and let me tell him. He hasn’t got time to waste listening to you two infants. We don’t know for sure . . .’

‘We so do. I heard Miss Westaway and Mrs Dean talking about it.’

‘It might all be scurlyest rumours.’

‘You mean scurrilous. Scurlyest isn’t a word. I apologise on behalf of my intoxicated housemate,’ said the girl nearest to Simon. ‘It’s so not a rumour—it’s the scandalous truth. Scary Mary had a boyfriend who dumped her, right, and she was so miz she tried to kill herself. Hanged herself in Garstead Cottage.’

‘And he was there too, the boyfriend,’ one of the other girls chipped in.

‘Oh, yeah, I forgot that bit. Yeah, she made him go round for the whole closure thing.’ The girl Simon thought was called Flavia—unless he’d got mixed up, and she was Tasha—drew invisible quote marks in the air. ‘And when he got there, she was standing on the dining table, with a rope round her neck, attached to the light or something . . .’

‘A chandelier! It was a chandelier!’

‘Yeah, right. In a cottage?’

‘I heard it was a chandelier.’

‘Whatever. So, like, he called an ambulance and she was rushed to hospital, but on the way there in the ambulance, she died—like, majorly died. And she had no heartbeat or oxygen going to her brain for three whole minutes . . .’

‘It was ten minutes . . .’

‘No one comes back to life after ten minutes, babes. I’ve seen Scary Mary—she’s odd, but she’s not a veg. What was I saying? Oh, yeah: the ambulance people brought her back from, like, beyond death, and she was supposed to be brain damaged, but she wasn’t. She was, like, totally fine. Except she wasn’t, because that was when she turned into Scary Mary. She changed her name.’

‘Stop,’ said Simon. ‘What do you mean? Changed it to what?’

‘Mary Trelease.’