The playground hustle and bickering was camouflage for a genuine monster. Those who had no fear of consequences. Whose older siblings had shown them just how brutal a beating could really be. Silent and deadly, a misused phrase, but that was how she’d always thought of them. Mitch McConnaught had once got wind of the fact that another boy had been telling his friends how much he fancied Mitch. That boy had been held down in an alleyway after school and a lighter applied to his hair, necessitating skin grafts for the burns. Tricia Leigh, another quiet one everyone knew to avoid, had decided that being called weird was sufficient cause for smashing a bottle and shoving it into another girl’s forehead. No amount of surgery was going to remove the scarring. It was the ones who could watch and wait, with whom no amount of pleading made a difference. They didn’t want an audience or adulation. They wanted a quiet place, relative dark, and the time to enjoy the whimpering of their victim. Meggy stared down at Fergus and let her terror inform her decision.

‘I’m not coming down,’ she told him, ‘and you can’t reach me.’

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘You’ll keep. It’s not as if you’re going anywhere, after all. How’s it going, Xavier?’ he yelled gleefully.

There was silence from the floor above.

‘Getting tired yet, or have you just tied off the sheet? She’ll slip, sooner or later, and when she does, she could break a limb. Maybe fracture a hip. Perhaps little Meggy will even damage her spinal cord so badly that she’ll end up just like you.’

‘Don’t listen to him,’ Meggy told Xavier.

‘Come back up,’ Xavier whispered. ‘I can’t pull you. You’re going to have to climb.’

Meggy looked up at the ceiling.

‘You don’t have the strength left in your arms, do you?’ Fergus hissed. ‘How long have you been there? Not as long as Elspeth has been on this cold floor waiting for help.’ He raised a foot and allowed his toes to rest on the unnaturally bent shoulder joint. ‘Perhaps I can persuade you to join us.’

Elspeth’s shriek as he applied pressure with his foot was subhuman. Meggy was reminded of a trip to a safari park where she’d heard wolves howling as they’d fought over food.

The bedding rope jolted upwards as Xavier tried to yank her skywards.

‘That’s right, up you go,’ Fergus said. ‘You two run and hide. I’ll be up shortly.’

‘You’re a fuckhead!’ Meggy screeched. ‘A fucking bloody fuckhead!’

‘Meggy, get up here. The door’s blocked. You’ll be safe,’ Xavier shouted.

Meggy looked up and down.

Fergus giggled and wagged his finger at her. ‘You’re a bad girl.’