At sixteen, my knowledge of poisons was not as advanced as it might have been. I knew the obvious ones, of course; but so far I’d had little chance to see them in action. I intended to change that. And so I made up a compound of all the most virulent substances I could lay my hands on: mandrake, morning glory, yew. All on sale in my mother’s shop, and, if dissolved or infused into a quantity of vodka, rather difficult to spot. I bought the vodka from the corner shop; used half of it for the tincture, then added a few extras of my own – including the juice of an agaric mushroom that I had the good luck to discover under a hedge in the school grounds. I then strained the tincture carefully back into the bottle – marked now with the sign of Hurakan the Destroyer – and left it in my open schoolbag, where I was certain karma would do the rest.

Sure enough, by Break it had gone, and Scott and his friends had acquired a collective smirk and a furtive manner. I went home that night almost happy, and completed all of my six peg-dolls with a long, sharp needle through the heart as I whispered a little secret to each.

Jasmine – Adam – Luke – Danny – Michael – Scott—

Of course I couldn’t possibly have known that for sure, just as I could not have known that, instead of drinking the vodka themselves, they would use it to spike the bowl of fruit punch at the disco, thereby spreading karma’s bounty even more generously than I could have hoped.

The effects, I heard, were spectacular. My brew induced projectile vomiting, hallucination, stomach cramps, paralysis, kidney dysfunction and incontinence – affecting over forty pupils, including the six original perpetrators.

It could have been worse. Nobody died. Well, not directly, anyway. But poisoning on such a grand scale rarely passes unseen. There was an inquiry; someone talked; and at last the guilty parties confessed, incriminating themselves – and me – as each tried to put the blame elsewhere. They admitted to pushing the rocket through our letter-box. They admitted to stealing the bottle from my bag. They even admitted to spiking the drinks – but denied all knowledge of the bottle’s contents.

Predictably, the police came to our house next. They expressed a good deal of interest in my mother’s herbal supplies and questioned me rather closely – with no success. I was an expert in stonewalling by then, and nothing – not their kindness, nor their threats – could make me change my story.