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now you know where you’ll be brought if anything should happen to you.”
    She might never have heard less comforting words, Parva thought as she walked back through the grounds. The infirmary was located beyond the residence blocks at the far end of the campus, presumably to provide its patients with a quiet environment for them to recuperate in. It might also provide an ideal environment for anyone who wished to carry out any secret activities for which they would prefer to remain undisturbed.
    But it seemed as if there were a lot of places like that around here. And there certainly didn’t seem to be that many pupils. Apart from a couple on her arrival, the only girls Parva had seen all day had been in her biology class this afternoon. Perhaps everyone was keeping a low profile after what had happened, she thought as she made her way to the staff common room.
    The door was panelled in oak and actually had ‘Mistresses Common Room’ in gothic gold script on the plate. It took a bit of a shove to get in open and, once Parva was inside, she found herself coughing as she waved away the fog of cigarette smoke that greeted her.
    “Is that the new girl?”
    There was a clatter of snooker balls followed by the rumble of what sounded like several of them being potted at the same time. An arm clad in tweed extended a hand from the gloom, to be followed by the rest of the grinning, corpulent woman it belonged to.
    “Amanda Plumridge - pleased to meet you.” Her grip was almost crushing. “Maths and history.” She grimaced. “I know, it’s not a very good combination, is it? But pure mathematics was my degree course at Oxford and history’s always been a bit of a passion of mine so I thought, why not make the best of it and teach both? You’re bilge, aren’t you?”
    Parva wasn’t quite sure what to say to that. “Biology,” she replied, to be rewarded with a slap on the back.
    “Always called it bilge in my day. You know, makes you think of water filled with all the kinds of creepy crawlies you chaps like to play with. Worms, bugs, slime - that sort of thing.”
    “It’s not exactly that.”
    “Of course not! I’m sure there’s a whole stack of other stuff as well, including all that gooey bodily stuff best not mentioned, eh?” Amanda lit another one of the cigars that must have been responsible for the cloud that still hung heavy in the room. “Although nowadays you have to tell these girls something or they get into all kinds of trouble. Oh I’m sorry - would you care for one?”
    Parva politely declined the offer of a cigar so large it would probably have choked her. “I don’t smoke,” she said.
    “You will once you’ve been here for a few months,” said Amanda confidently. “Either that or pick up some worse habit. You’ll need something to help keep you sane.”
    “How long have you been here?”
    Amanda took a deep breath and then blew smoke over Parva’s head as she thought. “Must be coming up to three years, now. Good God, it still feels like yesterday that I arrived. In fact until you turned up I was pretty much the new girl around here myself.” She gestured behind her. Now the cigar was close to her, the fog bank further back in the room was starting to clear. Parva could see that the walls were panelled in the same wood as the door, and that the rear of the room was indeed taken up by a green baize-covered snooker table. No one was playing. There were, however, a couple of forms slowly becoming visible as the smoke cleared. Each was seated in the sort of comfortable-looking armchair’s Parva’s maiden aunt used to keep close to the fire.
    “Denise has been her for at least five years, haven’t you, Denise?”
    A middle-aged woman with curly grey hair looked up from a battered paperback copy of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment , gave a grunt, and then went back to her reading.
    “Denise McCulloch teaches English literature,” Amanda whispered. “As a consequence she’s