Not that money was ever going to be a serious issue. Unless his unmarried, fifty-seven-year-old uncle suddenly decided to start having kids, Charlie was going to inherit the family estate with thousands of acres of farmland.

He had plans for that too. All he had to do was sell off a few acres with planning permission to a developer and he’d make a bloody fortune!

No, it wasn’t his future finances; it was the fact that his tight-arsed father held fiscal dominion over him now.

He was young. He wanted to have some fun.

These were the thoughts cascading through Charlie Cavendish’s mind as, absent-mindedly, he reached for the two tablets he had taken every night since the age of five and picked up the glass of water left there for him by Matron.

Placing the tablets on his tongue, he took a generous swig of water to wash them down before replacing the glass on his bedside locker.

For a full minute, nothing happened and Charlie, sighing, continued to ruminate on the unfairness of his situation. But then, almost imperceptibly, he felt his body begin to shake.

‘What the hell . . .?!’

The shaking intensified, becoming uncontrollable, and suddenly Charlie felt his throat constricting. Panicking now, uncomprehending and gasping for breath, he managed to stagger the few steps to the door. He grasped the handle but in his increasing terror, he fumbled with it, unable to turn it before collapsing semi-conscious, one hand at his throat, his mouth foaming. Deprived of oxygen, the lethal toxins coursing through him, his vital organs gradually shut down. Then his bowels relaxed and, little by little, the young man who had once been Charlie Cavendish simply ceased to exist.

Chapter One

Robert Jones, headmaster of St Stephen’s School, stood with his hands in his pockets – a habit he constantly chastised his charges for – and stared out of his study window.

Below him, he saw pupils crossing Chapel Lawn on their way to and from lessons. His hands were damp with sweat, his heart still racing from the adrenalin, as it had done constantly since the accident.

He left the window and went to sit behind his desk. There was a mounting pile of paperwork that remained untouched and a list of telephone messages he had yet to reply to.

Taking out his handkerchief, he wiped the top of his bald head, then sighed heavily.

There were any number of potentially nightmarish situations facing a headmaster in charge of hundreds of teenage boys and girls: drugs, bullies and, in these days of mixed-gender boarding schools, the unstoppable phantom that was sex.

During his fourteen years as headmaster of St Stephen’s, Robert had dealt, to some degree, with them all.

But all these crises had paled in comparison to what had happened last Friday. This was the ultimate head’s nightmare: the death of a pupil in his care.

If there was a way to leave a school’s reputation in tatters, this was it. The details of how the boy had died were almost irrelevant. Robert could visualise hordes of parents currently shopping for boarding schools crossing St Stephen’s off their lists.