And then, nightmarishly, the BBC had picked it up, and now the whole thing was in the school’s search results. For a private school, which needed parents willing to pay school fees in order to survive, reputational damage was an extremely serious problem. Old Faithful was no one’s fault. But once you got to Walden’s level, things that were no one’s fault were still your responsibility.

“We considered your points very carefully,” the Chair said. “You made some forceful arguments—as did David, of course.” Walden and David had met before this meeting to go over every single headline they needed to hit. It was always a relief to have a good Head in your corner. “I want to say, on behalf of the board, that we are all impressed by your dedication to your students.”

What had become very clear, in the course of the investigation, was that the governors expected someone to take the fall for what had happened. It had been indicated—not very subtly—that since recruiting a qualified Director of Magic halfway through the academic year was going to be very difficult and expensive, they were happy for the blame to be put on a pair of reckless young people from troubled backgrounds. Someone had said that, ‘troubled.’

Walden had not been in the meetings twenty years ago. Perhaps someone had said the same sort of thing about Charlie.

So she and David fired back: our duty of care. Our mission. Our school’s long and noble history as a safe haven for young sorcerers with nowhere else to turn. Our institution’s charitable status, said David solemnly, and got some nervous looks: ‘charitable status’ was a tax issue. And then Walden had looked around the room and reminded herself that most of the governors were people who sincerely believed in the importance of Chetwood School and the mixture of magical and academic education it provided. Plenty of them were alumni. Not a few had children at the school. They were frightened. It was a shutting-the-stable-door kind of fear. They wanted to act, at once, in a way that would make them feel like they had done the right thing.

Let me tell you about Nicola and Mathias, she’d said.

The sob stories had worked on some of them. The magic words ‘Oxford candidate’—Nikki had put in her application at the start of October, and Walden thought her chances were good—had worked on others. And then they’d invited Laura Kenning to come in and give her final account of the incident, along with her analysis as Chief Marshal.