Gerry could hear the sounds of an old empty house, sighs and creaks from tired woodwork. It smelled of urine, dust, crumbled plaster and rotten wood. “Why didn’t you talk to us before?’” she said. “Then Mimsy wouldn’t have had to die.”

“I couldn’t. None of us could. After a while you just get to thinking there’s no way out. You give up. It’s easier to do what they say. But then Mimsy got killed and that changed things. She was my best friend,” Jade said in a hushed and trembling voice. “And they killed her. We didn’t know they were going to do that. When it’s your best friend, you have to do something, don’t you?”

“Who killed her, Jade?”

“They did. The ones I just mentioned. Or their cousins.”

“Why? You’d better explain it all.”

“I don’t know why. Mimsy must have got upset about something they did or wanted to do. She had a temper. And there were . . . like certain things . . . things she just wouldn’t do. Sometimes you couldn’t reason with her. Mostly she was fine, but if something set her off she could be a real pain in the arse. Maybe she even threatened to talk or something. I don’t know.”

“Someone gave her ketamine, Jade. That might have had something to do with it.”

“Maybe. K can be nasty stuff. I don’t know. All I know is they did it.”

“How did you get into all this?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” Jade said, with an edge of contempt in her tone. “You probably had a normal life—nice parents in a nice house who sent you to a nice school and gave you nice meals and nice clothes. It’s not like that for everyone, you know. They were kind, they gave us things, they made us feel like we belonged, told us we were pretty. We chilled with them. It was only later, when we’d gone too far, that things changed. Then there was no way out.”

“How did it all start?”

“Me and Mimsy met Sunny and Faisal down at the takeaway on a school lunchtime. Sunny’s the oldest. The ringleader, I suppose. He was friendly. He gave us a free pop and a slice of pizza each and we just, like, chatted. He seemed to understand. He fancied Mimsy, you could tell. No pressure. Not then. Just nice.”

“What did he seem to understand?”

“Us. How we felt about things. What a fuckup our lives were. How nobody cared about us. How bored and alone we felt. All that stuff.”

“How old were you then?”

“Fourteen.”

“And Sunny?”

“He’s old, more than thirty.”

“This happened when?”

“Last summer. I can’t remember exactly when.”

So it had been going on for a year, Gerry thought. “What happened next?”