Orla looked like she might be going pale, far as I could tell through the orange tan. ‘Me? Why me?’

Conway held the door open till Orla got up and came, widening her eyes over her shoulder at her mates. Joanne hit her with a stare like a threat.

‘We’ll talk in your room,’ Conway said, scanning the corridor. ‘Which one is it?’ Orla pointed: down the far end.

No Houlihan this time. Conway was trusting me to protect her. Had to be a good sign.

The room was big, airy. Four beds, bright-coloured duvet covers. Smell of heated hair and four clashing body sprays thickening the air. Posters of thrusting girl singers and smooth guys I half-recognised, all of them with full lips and hair that had taken three people an hour. Bedside lockers half open, bits of uniform tossed on beds, on the floor: when the screaming started, Orla and Joanne and Gemma had been changing into their civvies, getting ready to do whatever they did with their bite of freedom before teatime.

The scattered clothes gave me that shove again, stronger: Out. No good reason, no bras on show or anything, but I still felt like a pervert, like I’d walked in on the four of them changing and wasn’t walking back out.

‘Nice,’ Conway said, glancing around. ‘Nicer than we had in training, am I right?’

‘Nicer than I’ve got now,’ I said. Only a bit true. I like my place: little apartment, half-empty still because I’d rather save for one good thing than buy four crap ones straightaway. But the high ceiling, the rose moulding, the light and green space opening wide outside the window: I can’t save for those. My place looks straight into a matching apartment block, too close for any light to squeeze in between.

Nothing said whose bit of room was whose; it all looked the same. The only clue was the photos on the bedside lockers. Alison had a little brother, Orla had a bunch of lumpy big sisters. Gemma rode horses. Joanne’s ma was the image of her, a few fillers on.

‘Um,’ Orla said, hovering by the door. She’d swapped her uniform for a light-pink hoodie and pink jeans shorts over tights, looked like a marshmallow on a stick. ‘Is Alison OK?’

We looked at each other, me and Conway. Shrugged.

I said, ‘Could take a while. After that.’

‘But . . . I mean, Miss McKenna said? Like, she just needed her allergy pills?’

Another look at each other. Orla trying to watch both of us at once.

Conway said, ‘I reckon Alison knows what she saw better than McKenna does.’

Orla gawped. ‘You believe in ghosts?’ Not what she’d expected; not what she’d been looking for.

‘Who said anything about believing?’ Conway flipped a magazine off Gemma’s bedside locker, checked out celebs. ‘Nah. We don’t believe. We know.’  To me: ‘Remember the O’Farrell case?’