He wove in and out of the people, ignored by everyone, and eventually found himself exiting the throng and entering a corridor that led off the entrance hall. The Headmaster’s study was a few yards down. He paused on the threshold, drew a breath, dusted down his lapels and knocked on the door.

“Enter!" boomed a theatrically loud voice.

Sherlock twisted the doorknob and pushed the door open, trying to quell the spasm of nervousness that shot through his body like lightning. He had only been in the Headmaster’s study twice before — once with his father, when he first arrived at Deepdene, and once again a year later with a group of other pupils who had been accused of cheating in an examination. The three ringleaders had been caned and expelled; the four or five followers had been caned until their buttocks bled and allowed to stay. Sherlock — whose essays had been the ones copied by the group — had escaped a caning by claiming that he knew nothing about it. In fact, he had known all along, but he had always been something of an outsider at the school, and if letting the other pupils copy his work got him tolerated, if not accepted, then he wasn’t going to raise any ethical objections. On the other hand, he wasn’t going to tell on the copiers either — that would have got him beaten and, perhaps, held in front of one of the roaring fires that dominated the dormitories until his skin began to blister and his clothes to smoke. School life was like that — a perpetual balancing act between the masters and the other pupils. And he hated it.

The Headmaster’s study was just the way he remembered — vast, dim, and smelling of a combination of leather and pipe tobacco. Mr Tomblinson was sitting behind a desk large enough to play bowls on. He was a portly man in a suit that was slightly too small for him, chosen presumably on the basis that it helped him believe he wasn’t quite as large as he obviously was.