“Don’t acknowledge me and don’t look at me.” Al crouches at my side. She picks up a teaspoon and peers under the table as though looking for the rest of the cutlery. “I know Isis asked you where you got the knife and you didn’t grass me up.”

“Of course I didn’t. Al, I need to tell you about Leanne. She’s—”

“Sssh.” She presses a hand over my mouth. “You need to be careful, Emma. Isaac’s started shagging—”

“Everything okay, Al?” Kane puts a hand on her shoulder and peers round her to look at me. His eyes travel up and down the length of my body, pausing as his gaze reaches my breasts. “I thought you were supposed to be helping me kill the goat for the Pokhara party?”

“Yeah, I am.” Al jumps to her feet, the teaspoons in her hand.

“Let’s go, then.” Kane spits on the floor. It lands millimetres away from my hand. “There’s nothing worth hanging around in here for.”

I stare after Al as she walks out of the room with Kane, his arm casually slung around her shoulder.

Chapter 41

Chapter 41

No one comes into the girls’ dorm to tell me that the Pokhara celebration has started, but they don’t need to. Shouts and laughter drift up from the patio, and the smell of cooked goat and a bonfire fills the room. With Isis, Cera, Raj and Sally all shut in Isaac’s study, it was easy for me to slip unnoticed from the dining room and into the girls’ dormitory. My plan, after Kane ferried Al off to the goat enclosure, was to find all my stuff, pack my backpack and hide it somewhere so I could grab it later. But it had gone. It had all gone – my mattress, my backpack, my sleeping bag, everything. There were three empty mattresses on the left hand side of the room, presumably for the new guests, and all the other mattresses had been pushed together to make space for them. There was no gap between Daisy and Al’s things, no sign I’d ever slept on a mattress between them, no sign I’d existed at all.

I found my mattress, sleeping bag and towel crumpled up in a corner of the shower block, sopping wet. My backpack had disappeared, along with my underwear and swimming things, but I found a pair of my shorts and a T-shirt poking out of the top of Daisy’s backpack, and a skirt, two T-shirts and several pairs of socks under Cera’s sleeping bag. I stuffed all my clothes into a dirty laundry bag I found in a corner of the dorm, and squeezed it into the small gap between the ceiling and the cistern above one of the toilets.

My plan is to get Al on her own then leave when everyone has passed out after the party.