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put her finger to her lips.
    "Sshh. You'll wake them. Nothing's the matter. Just happy to see you, that's all."
    Now it was his eyes that welled with tears.
    "Diane?"
    "What, darling? What is it?"
    "I don't want to go to boarding school."
    He started to cry and that started her off again. She gathered him up in her arms and he buried his face in the warm scented softness of her neck. And they clung to each other and wept.

Chapter Two
    ASHLAWN PREPARATORY School for Boys was an imposing Gothic mansion in red brick, complete with ramparts, ornate turrets and various reputed ghosts. It stood on a low hill in twenty acres of parkland planted with oaks and cedars and girdled by a six-foot wall topped with barbed wire of ambiguous purpose. The mansion had been built by a Victorian industrialist who had risen from the slums of Birmingham to make his fortune in the colonies, a fortune which he promptly lost, whereupon the building, intended as a monument to his elevated social standing, became instead, for the next seventy years, a home for the mentally deranged.
    During the First World War the clientele was expanded to accommodate a hundred and twenty shell-shocked soldiers and only when the last of them had died or otherwise departed were its decaying corridors and dormitories modestly refurbished as a school. There were smarter, more expensive prep schools in the county to which the sons of established upper- and middle-class families were dispatched. Ashlawn was for the more transitional, both upward and downward, whose social aspirations or pretensions outstretched their means.
    For the benefit of the outside world and fee-paying parents, the impressive iron gates, adorned with the school crest and motto, Semper Fortis, were regularly repainted and the half-mile meander of driveway rigorously weeded. But in the darker, more remote reaches of the mansion itself, where parents were less likely to stray, little had changed in half a century. The flaking gloss paint, in shades of institutional brown and pale green, remained untouched; the original pipework clanked beneath the worm-ridden floorboards; the iron-framed beds, painted in chipped black enamel, still had slots for the canvas straps that had once restrained the unruly; and the wooden benches of the dank and fetid changing room still bore the etched initials of the demented and the desperate.
    For the new arrivals, or newbugs, as they were not so affectionately known, fresh faced and swamped by their oversized uniforms, the changing room was one of Ashlawn's most fearful places. One of the first things they discovered was that this was the chamber to which boys were summoned after lights-out for official beatings by the staff and, at almost any other time, for less official but much more inventive torture by the school's many bullies. The walls above the engraved benches were lined with neatly named pegs and wire cages where the boys kept their sports kit. The air was laced with the smell of wet and putrefying socks. Except for a grimy skylight in the adjoining shower room, the only light came from a single bare bulb that dangled from a fraying cord.
    It was here that Tommy Bedford, three days and three miraculously dry nights after his arrival, now stood in his baggy knee-length rugby shorts and spotless white shirt, trying to untie the laces of his rugby boots. They had been knotted tightly and intricately to the wire of his cage and his fingernails were bitten too short to free them. His games group was being supervised by the house tutor, Mr Brent, who Tommy already knew was the strictest and meanest of all the masters. The other boys had already set off for the playing fields and, as the echo of their voices faded from the corridor outside, panic was rising in his chest.
    "Naughty newbug. Going to be late for games, aren't we?"
    Tommy didn't yet know many of the older boys but he knew this one. Everybody knew to steer clear of Critchley. And of his henchman, Judd, whose