Amber – in contrast to her manor house – had always been fairly quiet and a bit mousy. If you ended up sitting next to her on the bus to or from school, she’d want to talk to you about how many free periods you had on your timetable this term, her eyes wide, blinking fast, leaning in a little too close. But something seemed to happen to her the summer before starting Year 13 – Ellen could remember Kate, her best friend, remarking on it on their first day back. Amber had come in all done up: lots of make-up and big hair, and she’d made a beeline for Sarah Bletchley in the dining hall where Bletchley and her coven sat at lunchtime. Whatever Amber had said, she’d been allowed to sit down with the rest of them. And about three weeks later, Amber made an event on Facebook: she was having a party, and it was ‘BYOB bitchezzz’. Ellen wondered if Sarah Bletchley had had something to do with the party, specifically the wording of that invitation.

If she had, Sarah owed Amber more than an apology. Because the event had been listed as a public event on Facebook, which meant that anyone with an account could find it and come along – and come along they did. By midnight, there were about 500 people stuffing fag butts in the jacuzzi’s water jets, tearing branches from the hedge maze and vomiting in the swimming pool. Amber was blind drunk, stumbling around her own house, telling people that it was ‘cool’ because her parents were away for their anniversary weekend and not back until Sunday evening. Until James Kingston had smashed up the master bedroom’s en-suite and started wearing the broken toilet seat around his neck: a trophy for a thug. A short while later, the police turned up – one or two vans; a neighbour had called them – and shut the party down.

Amber missed a week of school and when she came back, the make-up and the hair and the ‘bitchezzz’ attitude had disappeared again, and she was plain and mousy once more. She no longer got the bus but was driven to school by her very blonde mother. The story had made the local paper.

‘I think that party ruined Amber Outhwaite’s life,’ Ellen said. ‘It was so awful.’

‘My main memory from that evening was walking into the kitchen and finding a group of lads I’d never seen before dropping plates on to the kitchen floor.’ Ben’s eyes were wide. ‘Then one of them started using a chopping board like a sort of cricket bat and getting another to bowl crockery at him so he could smash things into pieces in mid-air. I ended up half running home as soon as the police arrived.’