Mr. Anderson’s eyes flickered towards the defiant Alex Curry, who was sitting up now in his bed, leaning his forearms on his knees. “So what are you going to do, Anderson? Belt me? Just fucking try it.”

A mean little smile crept across Mr. Anderson’s lips. “You’ll see,” was all he said. And he turned towards little Tommy, with the acid of contempt in his voice. “I don’t admire boys who clype on their friends. I’m sure that’s a lesson you will have learned before this night is out.”

He flicked out the lights and pulled the doors shut, and there was a long silence before Tommy’s frightened voice trembled in the dark. “I didn’t mean it, honest.”

And Alex Curry’s growled response. “Ya wee fucker!”

Mr. Anderson was right. Wee Tommy learned that night, the hardest way possible, that telling tales on your peers was not acceptable behaviour. And most, if not all, of those who had raised their hands were taught similar lessons.

As for the rest of us, we could only await with trepidation whatever retribution Mr. Anderson had planned for us in the morning.

To our surprise nothing happened. The tension in The Dean was palpable over breakfast, a strange muted dining room with inmates and staff alike afraid, it seemed, to speak. By the time we left for school, marching in pairs down the hill to the village, a little of the anxiety had lifted. By the end of the day we had almost forgotten about it.

We returned as usual, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary, except that Alex Curry was gone. Left The Dean for good. And then we got to the dorms. Which is when we realized that the sacks of belongings which sat at the end of each bed were gone. All of them. I panicked. My mother’s ring was in my sack. I ran down the stairs full of fire and indignation, only to bump into the janitor in the corridor below.

“Where’s our stuff?” I shouted at him. “What’s he done with it?”

His face was the colour of ashes, almost green around the eyes. Eyes that were filled with anxiety and guilt. “I’ve never seen him like that, Johnny,” he said. “He came out of his apartment like a man possessed after you’d all left for school. He went around the dorms and collected all the sacks, making me and some of the others help him.” His words tumbled out of his mouth like apples spilling from a barrel. “He gathered them all together down in the basement, and got me to hold open the door of the central heating furnace while he threw them all in. One at a time. Every last one of them.”