It wasn’t much of a fire, in the end; out before the fire brigade came. We even managed to salvage most of the stock, though the ceiling was blackened and the place stank of smoke. It had been a rocket, the firemen said; a Standard rocket poked through the letter-box and set alight. The policeman asked me if I’d seen anything. I said no.

But the next day, I began my revenge. Claiming sickness, I stayed at home, and plotted, and worked. I made six little dolls from wooden pegs. I made them as realistically as I could, with hand-stitched clothes and faces carefully cut out of that year’s class photograph and glued into place below the hair. I named them all, and as the Día de los Muertos approached, I worked and schemed to have them ready.

I collected stray hairs from coats on pegs. I stole clothing from the locker room. I tore pages out of exercise books, ripped tags from satchels, raided bins for used tissues and removed well-chewed pen-lids from desk-tops when no one was looking. By the end of the week I had enough material of one kind or another to invest in a dozen peg-dolls, and on Hallowe’en, I called in the debt.

It was the night of the half-term school disco. Nothing had been said to me officially, but it was well-known that Scott was taking Jasmine to the disco, and that if I was there, there would be trouble. I didn’t intend to go to the dance, but I certainly intended trouble; and if Scott or anyone stood in my way, then I could guarantee that they would get it.

You have to remember, I was very young. Naïve, too, in many ways, though not as naïve as Anouk, of course, or indeed as prone to guilt. But I came up with a two-pronged revenge; one that satisfied the demands of my System whilst providing a solid underpinning of practical chemistry that would add authority to my occult experimentation.