Lowewood Academy

I put the video down again and sighed.  It was truly enough to make one despair.  Man’s inhumanity to man might be a cliché, but the callous cruelty which schoolgirls are sometimes capable of inflicting on each other is rarely seen outside the teaching profession.  Even so, in my many years I had never seen the depth of vicious exploitation which was now revealed to me.  It had been a long day….

First Celia Matthews had arrived unannounced in my study.  She was uncharacteristically subdued, incoherent and evasive, mumbling what appeared to be in the nature of a confession.  I had divined that she had been bullying Jessica Davies, using corporal punishment when it wasn’t strictly necessary, and doing “other things” which Celia seemed unwilling or unable to describe more definitively.  It was only after Miss Bellend had brought in a note saying “Richard Farthingdale is ready to see you after you’ve seen Celia, and I’ve got something to show you before you do anything else”, together with a hastily scribbled message from Matron informing me that she had Jessica Davies in the Sanatorium bearing the marks of having been tortured, that I realised I had a major incident on my hands.

There followed a painstaking, and painful, investigation.  First Miss B and I watched the video together.  The lighting was poor, and some of the action took place outside of the field of view, but nevertheless it was clear enough what was going on.  It would have been difficult for anyone to watch, but the knowledge that we were looking at something which had only just taken place, in our own school, made my blood boil.  There were the beginnings of tears in Belinda’s eyes as we set off to the Sanatorium.

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I handed the note to Miss Bellend, who didn’t even look at it. “They are expecting you,” she said, smiling sympathetically, and nodded towards the Headmaster’s office. “Go right in.”

They? I wondered. I didn’t have to think too hard about why I’d been summoned to see Mr Shaftebotham on Tuesday morning - my front-page adventure in “The News of the World” had been the talk of the whole Lowewood since the weekend - but I did wonder why he needed to take me out of the lessons for it.

“Here you are, Corwin,” said the Headmaster as soon as I entered. I barely opened my mouth for a greeting, when from my right there came another, familiar voice, which made blood rush to my face:

“Hello, Ned.”

“Hello, Father,” I stammered. “Headmaster.”

The sight of my father here at the school derailed me as much as, say, if Mr Shaftebotham showed up for breakfast back at home in his gown and slippers. I avoided the obvious question of “what are you doing here”, even though I was surprised. I though I’d had my bollocking over the phone on Sunday, and it had taken a lot not to hang up, or to put the phone down carefully and have a nap while Father ranted at me for dishonouring the family.

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“Well, if it isn’t my old friend Pippa Beaumont.”

 I jumped.

It was Saturday evening and I was in the library, on my own (or so I thought), pillaging the shelves in the history section.

I turned to the speaker – but I knew that voice.

“Hello William,” I said, “What brings you to the library on a Saturday night? I’d have thought you’d have better things to do.”

It’s true. Whilst Saturday evening found me knee-deep in study, preparing for my history essay on Mary Tudor, I would have assumed that the younger De Lacey brother would have had other, more fun ways to occupy his time – like working his way through the Lower Sixth girls, who seemed to be occupying rather a lot of his attention these days.

“Well, there’s rubbish on TV and there’s not much going on in the Lower Sixth  common room, so I thought I’d take a wander around and see what else was going on,” he replied, smiling disingenuously.

Ah, that smile. It could still make my stomach flutter, but I knew that there would never be anything between me and William. Apart from the fact that soon he’ll have more notches than bedpost, I’d also found out that he’s actually engaged (via Alex, who heard it from Ned), which had come as a bit of a shock. I was starting to feel really sorry for his fiancée. Did she not know what kind of a sleazebag she is due to be married to?

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