Cosy enough to curl up in, the third-year common room. Storybook stuff. I knew better, I’d seen it on the board in black and white and every slap-sharp colour, but I still couldn’t picture bad things here: someone being bitch-whipped out of a conversation into one of those corners, someone snug in one of the sofas longing to cut herself.

Big squashy sofas in soft oranges and golds, a gas fire. Vase of freesias on the mantelpiece. Old wooden tables, for doing homework. Girls’ bits and bobs everywhere, hairbands, ice-creamy nail polish, magazines, water bottles, half-rolls of sweets. A meadow-green scarf with little white daisies hanging off the back of a chair, fine as a Communion veil, rising in the soft breeze through the window. A motion-sensor light snapped on like a warning, not a welcome: You.  Watching you.

Two alcoves of built-in bookshelves. Ceiling-high, every shelf layers deep in books.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ said Conway. ‘They couldn’t just have a telly?’

A spill of high voices down the corridor, and the door banged open behind us. We both whipped round, but the girls were smaller than our lot: three of them, jammed in the doorway, staring at me. One of them giggled.

‘Out,’ Conway said.

‘I need my Uggs!’

The kid was pointing. Conway picked up the boots, tossed them over. ‘Out.’

They backed away. The whispering started before I got the door closed.

‘Uggs,’ Conway said, pulling out her gloves. ‘Fucking things should be banned.’

Gloves on. If that book and that key existed, the prints on them mattered.

One alcove each. Finger along the spines, skim, scoop the front row of books onto the floor and start on the back one. Fast, wanting to see something solid rise to the surface. Wanting it to be me who found it.

Conway had spotted the stare and giggle, or felt the shove in the air. She said, ‘Watch yourself. I was taking the piss out of you, before, but you want to be careful around this lot. That age, they’re dying to fancy someone; they’ll practice on any half-decent fella they can get. See that staff room? You think it’s a coincidence all the guy teachers are trolls?’ She shook her head. ‘It’s to keep the crazy level down. Few hundred girls, hormones up to ninety . . .’

I said, ‘I’m no Justin Bieber. I’m not gonna start any riots.’

That got a snort. ‘It doesn’t take Justin Bieber. You’re not a troll and you’re not sixty: good enough. They want to fancy you, great, you can use that. Just don’t ever be alone with any of them.’

I thought of Gemma, the Sharon Stone leg-cross. I said, ‘I’m not planning to be.’

‘Hang on,’ Conway said, and the sudden lift in her voice had me on my feet before I knew it. ‘Here we go.’