‘So, who else knew her?’

‘Poor Jenny Colman, of course. She knew,’ said Jazz. ‘They’d been friends from way back. And Hugh Daneman recognised her, so Jenny said. Certainly the headmaster didn’t know. He produced glowing references from the file from her positions in Australia – notably at the same hospital where poor Freddie met his end—’

‘You’ve been on to Sydney, I presume?’ Norton interjected.

‘Yes, and the Feds about Freddie Astley,’ Jazz confirmed. ‘Mrs Smith will never smell the scent of freedom again. She was picking off the “Gang of Four” one by one. Of course, her motive for the killings was perhaps the strongest of all: the love of a mother for a child.’

‘Yes, it’s a pretty solid motive as they go,’ Norton agreed. ‘So, she took a job in Norfolk with the intention of murdering Julian Forbes?’

‘Yes. And I’m inclined to believe her when she says the temporary job coming up at St Stephen’s was a coincidence. She was in Norfolk, looking for work, and an opportunity to get rid of Forbes, and there it was.’ Jazz shrugged. ‘She may well have seen it as ironic: it suited her needs perfectly, gave her somewhere to live and also the means to kill Julian in the very place where her own son had died. According to her, Julian was the ringleader of the gang. The one she blamed most for the bullying she thought led to her son’s death’.

‘And Charlie Cavendish was a victim of circumstance,’ Norton suggested, ‘in the sense that Smith watched Rory Millar being bullied mercilessly by him, in an exact replica of what happened to her own son twenty-five years ago. She felt she had to stop it.’

‘Exactly,’ Jazz agreed. ‘The vigilante matron. Again, her motive for killing Charlie was solid. Smith was highly protective of Rory. One can understand why. His fragility reminded her of her own son, Jamie. That’s why, when she saw on the medicine log Hugh Daneman had given Rory two aspirin, just after she herself had taken two from the medicine cabinet to kill Charlie, she decided to Tippex over the record and create a false one to avoid implicating Rory.’

‘You say she walked into Forbes’s office in Norwich that Tuesday night and somehow managed to persuade him to accompany her back to the school?’

Jazz nodded. ‘He must have been terrified when she turned up. She’d been nicknamed “The Blacksmith” by the boys when she was Matron of Nelson House twenty-five years before, because of her name, nature and her jet-black hair.’

‘She sounds terrifying,’ admitted Norton. ‘Had a matron like that myself when I was at school.’

‘To be fair, I’m sure before her son died, she was a normal woman,’ Jazz equivocated. ‘And it didn’t help that her husband had been fatally injured on a shoot on the Conaught Estate when Jamie was only a few months old. The small amount of compensation Smith got from the family enabled her to send her son to St Stephen’s, where she presumed he’d stand a chance of a better future. Unfortunately,’ she sighed, ‘it turned out to be the opposite.’