I held the grin till Orla smiled back. ‘Yeah.’ Grateful, pathetically grateful. Someone, probably Joanne, used Orla for kicking when the world pissed her off.

‘We’ve just got a few questions for you – routine stuff, no big deal. Could you answer those for us, yeah? Help me out?’

‘OK. Sure.’

Orla was still smiling. Conway slid backwards onto the table. Got out her notebook.

‘You’re a star,’ I said. ‘So let’s talk about yesterday evening. First study period, you were here in the art room?’

Defensive glance at Houlihan. ‘We’d got permission.’

Her only worry about yesterday evening: hassle from teachers.

I said, ‘I know, yeah. Tell us, how do you go about getting permission?’

‘We ask Miss Arnold. She’s the matron.’

‘Who asked her? And when?’

Blank look. ‘It wasn’t me.’

‘Whose idea was it to spend the extra time up here?’

More blank. ‘That wasn’t me either.’ I believed her. I got the feeling most ideas weren’t Orla.

‘No problem,’ I said. More smile. ‘Talk me through it. One of you got the key to the connecting door off Miss Arnold . . .’

‘I did. Right before first study period. And then we came up here. Me and Joanne and Gemma and Alison.’

‘And then?’

‘We just worked on this project we have. It has to be art and another subject, like mixed – ours is art and Computer Studies. That’s it over there.’

She pointed. Propped in a corner, five foot high, a portrait of a woman – a pre-Raphaelite I’d seen before, somewhere, but I couldn’t place her. She was only half-made, out of small glossy squares of coloured paper; the other half was still an empty grid, tiny code in each square to tell them what colour to stick on. The change had twisted the woman’s dreamy gaze, turned her wall-eyed and twitchy-looking, dangerous.

Orla said, ‘It’s about, like, how people see themselves differently because of the media and the internet? Or something; it wasn’t my idea. We turned the picture into squares on the computer, and now we’re cutting up photos from magazines to stick in the squares – it takes forever, that’s why we needed to use the study period. And then at the end of first study we went back to the boarders’ wing and I gave the key back to Miss Arnold.’

‘Did any of you leave the room, while you were up here?’

Orla tried to remember, which took some mouth-breathing. ‘I went to the toilet,’ she said, after a bit. ‘And Joanne did. And Gemma went into the corridor because she rang someone and she wanted to talk in private.’ Snigger. A guy. ‘And Alison went out for a phone call too, only hers was her mum.’

Every one of them. ‘In that order?’

Blank. ‘What?’

Sweet Jesus. ‘Do you remember who went out first?’