Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
About the Author
Also by Carmen Reid
Copyright
At St Jude’s School for Girls, four friends are facing very different problems . . .
Can Gina still be happy with her boyfriend when there’s such an exciting new guy on the scene?
How will Amy survive when her rich dad’s money disappears?
What can tomboy Niffy do to make herself gorgeous?
And why is Min spending so much time in the study and missing all the fun?
Sounds like all the St Jude’s friends need to get in touch with their inner Rebel Girl this term!
Carmen Reid is a writer, journalist and mother. She is the bestselling author of How Was It For You?, Did The Earth Move?, Three In A Bed, Up All Night and The Personal Shopper for adult readers. After working in London as a news reporter for a decade, Carmen now lives in Glasgow, Scotland, with her husband and two children. You can visit her website at www.carmenreid.com to find out more. The St Jude’s series are her first titles for younger readers, and they draw on her own experiences in a Scottish boarding school.
Secrets at St Jude’s: New Girl
Secrets at St Jude’s: Jealous Girl
Secrets at St Jude’s: Drama Girl
For adult readers:
The Personal Shopper
Did the Earth Move?
Three in a Bed
Up all Night
How Was it For You?
Late Night Shopping
How Not To Shop
Celebrity Shopper
www.carmenreid.co.uk
www.secretsatstjudes.co.uk
LONG AFTER MIDNIGHT, Gina lay wide awake in her narrow dorm bed. It was her first night back at school after the Christmas holidays. Although the eighteen hours of travel which had taken her from California to her boarding school in Scotland had been exhausting, her body clock was still set stubbornly to Pacific Standard Time and she could not get to sleep.
She listened to the quiet breathing around her and guessed that the three girls who shared her dorm weren’t having the same problem. Amy had travelled to St Jude’s School for Girls in Edinburgh from her home just one hour away in Glasgow, so no jet-lag issues there. Niffy (‘my real name’s Luella, but it stinks’) had come from the creaky, ramshackle family country home in Cumbria.
Then there was Min, who had flown into Edinburgh from South Africa earlier today, but the time difference between Scotland and her home town, Durban, was only a couple of hours, so she wasn’t suffering.
The first night back at school was always weird.
The small room, the orange street-light shining behind the curtains, the narrow bed . . . everything felt so different from home. Even though Gina knew she would miss her family and the warm, outdoorsy Californian lifestyle, she was still pleased to be back. St Jude’s was her school now and these three girls asleep in their beds beside her were best friends. Yes, she still had three best friends back home in California, but after two whole terms here, the St Jude’s girls had become just as important to her now.
As Gina lay awake, looking up at the sloping attic ceiling above her head, she suddenly heard an unexpected noise. It sounded like the low rumble of a wooden window being pulled up, but she couldn’t be sure.
The ‘Iris’ dorm, which Gina shared with Amy, Niffy and Min, was up on the top floor of one of the huge old Victorian houses which formed the St Jude’s boarding house. Now that Gina was straining her ears, she thought she could hear more noises and they sounded as if they were coming from the top of the fire escape.
‘Psssst! Are you awake?’
This whisper had come from Niffy’s direction.
‘Yeah,’ Gina whispered back.
‘Did you just hear that?’ Niffy asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘It sounds like something’s happening on the fire escape outside Daffodil dorm.’
Daffodil dorm, which Gina and her friends had shared last year, had four beds, just like Iris. It was also tucked up under the sloping attic ceilings. The great thing about Daffodil dorm was that it had a window leading out onto the fire escape. On a sunny evening, the top of the fire escape was a forbidden, but nonetheless delicious, place to sit.
‘I think we should go and investigate,’ Niffy added.
‘I don’t know,’ Gina began. Wandering about the boarding house at night, for any purpose other than trips to the loo, was against the rules. She didn’t like to think of herself as a total stickler for school rules, but she didn’t like to break them unless there was a good reason.
‘But what if someone has climbed up the fire escape and is trying to get in . . .?’ Niffy whispered urgently.
Gina considered: hadn’t the noise sounded like a window being opened?
‘What if some burglar or an armed maniac is trying to get into that dorm right now?’ Niffy went on.
To be honest, if that was happening, Gina would really rather stay hidden in bed.
‘We need to go!’ Niffy said, throwing back her duvet and sitting up. She quickly pushed her feet into her slippers, then tied her dressing gown around her.
‘Stay here if you like, chicken-licken, but I’m going to take a look.’
Gina sighed, pulled her own duvet back, then put on her slippers and dressing gown. She did not like the idea of confronting a burglar one tiny little bit, but she didn’t like the idea of Niffy having to confront one on her own either.
‘OK,’ she agreed.
But Niffy was definitely going to go first.
The two girls tiptoeing out of the Iris dorm looked very different from one another. Gina was dainty, pretty, blonde and tanned. She was wrapped in a delicate silk kimono with fluffy pink mules on her feet. Niffy was tall, gangly, all arms, legs and unruly brown hair, bundled into some shabby brown tartan dressing gown, which had probably once belonged to her big brother.
Together, they crept out of the dorm, shutting the door quietly behind them. The hallway glowed faintly with the night-lights which picked out the fire exits. Without hesitating, Niffy made straight for the door of the Daffodil dorm. She took hold of the handle and began to push the door open.
Gina stood behind her friend, her heart hammering nervously in her chest. She did not like this, not one little bit, but she couldn’t stop herself from looking over Niffy’s shoulder into the darkened room.
It was totally silent and still. Gina could make out the four beds in the room. Three girls, wrapped in duvets, seemed to be fast asleep. The window at the fire escape looked shut.
But then, all of a sudden, one of the duvet bundles sat up and hissed, ‘Niffy! Is that you?’
‘Yes,’ Niffy answered.
The two other duvet bundles sat up too and someone snapped on a side light.
‘For Pete’s sake, go away!’ the first bundle, now very obviously Milly from the Lower Sixth, instructed.
‘Why?’ Niffy asked, all fired up with curiosity.
‘Go away!’ Anthea, one of the other dorm members, repeated.
‘No, she’s OK, she can stay if she wants,’ the third girl, Shyanne, chipped in.
‘You know Gina, don’t you?’ Niffy asked as she stepped into the dorm, revealing the friend standing behind her.
‘Gina from California? Who goes out with Dermot at the Arts Café? Yup, we know her,’ Shyanne replied.
‘Hi,’ Gina said shyly, not sure if she liked being known for just those two things.
‘So what’s going on?’ Niffy wanted to know. ‘We heard a noise . . . it woke us up. We thought you were being burgled or kidnapped – something exciting.’
Milly got out of bed. She was already wearing her dressing gown. ‘Something exciting is about to happen,’ she said. ‘We just thought you were the Neb about to catch us red-handed.’
At this mention of the fearsome woman who ruled the boarding house, everyone felt a little shiver of nerves.
But nevertheless, Milly went over to the fire-escape window and threw it open, letting a blast of cold January air sweep through the room.
Anthea crouched down by the side of her bed and pulled out a neatly rolled coil of bright-blue climbing rope.
‘If you’re running away, you won’t need a rope,’ Niffy pointed out. ‘There is a fire escape.’
‘Very funny.’
‘So what are you doing?’ Niffy had to know, as two of the three older girls stepped out of the window, on to the top of the fire escape and began to tie the rope to the stair-rail.
‘Shhhhh!’ Milly insisted. ‘What time is it?’ she asked in a whisper.
Shyanne glanced at the clock beside her bed and whispered back, ‘Twelve fifty-six.’
‘Four minutes till delivery,’ Milly said, ‘and we’ve definitely put the hook end down in the garden, haven’t we?’
As the girls checked over the rope arrangement, Gina and Niffy looked at one another.
What on earth was going on? Delivery of what?
‘What’s happening? C’mon. Give us a clue!’ Niffy pleaded, determined to wangle something out of someone. ‘And where’s Laurel?’ she asked next, pointing at the empty bed. ‘Broken something skiing?’
The two older girls came back in through the window and half closed it against the wind. They were obviously waiting for something to happen in the garden.
‘Is someone coming? Is something arriving for you?’ Niffy asked.
‘Yes!’ Milly said with exasperation. ‘Just keep very quiet. At one a.m. exactly – I don’t want to miss it.’
‘And Laurel?’ Niffy asked again in a tiny whisper.
For a moment no one replied. Gina bumped against Niffy’s arm to try and give her the message to be quiet.
But then Anthea blurted out: ‘Laurel’s not here because her parents ran a building firm and it’s finally gone bust. She was really worried about them last term and then, over Christmas, well . . . they told her they couldn’t afford to send her back to St Jude’s. So she’s going to some day school in Aberdeen now.’
‘That’s tough,’ Niffy whispered, shaking her head in sympathy. ‘That is really tough. I spent half a term at a comprehensive last year and no one there was very pleased to see me.’
‘Poor Laurel,’ Gina sympathized. She had worries about family finances too. She knew her mom and her step dad, Mick, were hoping for a really big deal to come off for their software company.
As Gina’s mom, Lorelei, had put it: ‘Baby, if this happens, we won’t need to worry about money for a while, just about making a great product. But if the deal doesn’t go through . . . we might have to look at making some cut-backs.’
‘It’s one o’clock now,’ Shyanne said, pointing at the bedside clock.
Milly pulled the window further open again and stuck her head out to listen.
The other girls in the dorm all crowded towards the window too.
There was definitely a sound coming from the garden . . . someone was down there and that someone seemed to be making a faint clinking noise.
Gina and Niffy looked at each other with raised eyebrows. Both suspected that the Daffodil dorm was about to get a delivery of bottles. Both guessed that there wasn’t exactly going to be mineral water in those bottles.
In another bedroom, way over on the far side of the boarding house, but with a window facing onto the back garden, someone else was now waking up. Someone else who was also sure she had heard something in the garden.
This someone was definitely not going to be amused that bottles full of booze were being clinked in the St Jude’s boarding-house garden at one o’clock in the morning on the first night of term.
Mrs Norah Knebworth, housemistress at the boarding house for seventeen years, opened her eyes.
She looked up at the ceiling of her small ground-floor bedroom and wondered what it was that had woken her. Once again, she heard some sort of unusual noise coming from the back garden.
She listened hard and then sat bolt upright. She was now certain that she had heard clinking: the unmistakable kind of clinking that bottles make when they bang together as someone tries to walk with them.
Bottles? Bottles!! Only one kind of bottle would be trying to make its way through the boarding-house garden well after midnight.
Mrs Knebworth raised her formidable bulk from the bed. Even in a ruffled pink and white nightie with a neat regiment of foam curlers organized through her steely blonde hair, she looked like a mighty force.
Putting her feet into sensible sheepskin slippers, designed to keep the chill of draughty Victorian floors at bay, she hurried over to her bedroom window. She peered through the chintz curtains and right there on the back lawn, underneath the long washing line where jeans and sweatshirts often flapped on breezy days, she saw something which made her mouth drop open with astonishment.
Not even ten metres from her bedroom window – the cheek of it! – was a teenage boy. In his hands was a large shopping bag, and attached to the bag was a length of rope.
Mrs Knebworth’s beady blue eyes followed the rope up to the window at the top of the fire escape. There, in the dim light coming from the Daffodil dorm window, she could see two girls who were holding the other end of the rope.
This was just unbelievable!
Girls were trying to smuggle in booze, right under her very nose! How did they think they were going to get away with this?
Mrs Knebworth, who had grown up in Edinburgh’s very respectable Morningside area, and who had never once even thought about breaking a school rule back in the days when she had been a St Jude’s girl, was outraged. In fact, she was properly furious.
It wasn’t just that these thoughtless girls in Daffodil dorm were in serious trouble; no, it was the fact that when things like this happened at the boarding house, it reflected very, very badly on Mrs Knebworth. And if stories like this got out into the wider community, well, they reflected very, very badly on the school.
She wasn’t going to stand for that. Not for one moment.
Her fingers were at the window catch. She intended to throw the window open and bellow out into the garden: ‘Hands up, you’ve all been caught!’
But she thought it through for a moment. The bag was still in the boy’s hands. He would run off with it. The dorm window would shut, the lights would go off and everyone would deny everything. Even though she had seen it with her own eyes, she wouldn’t be able to prove anything.
No. She wouldn’t open the window and shout out, she had a better idea. Quickly pulling on her dressing gown, she decided to hurry as silently as she could up to the Daffodil dorm. That way she would catch everyone involved red-handed.
Mrs Knebworth sped out of her bedroom, past her small bathroom and through the private sitting room which she kept so neatly that whenever anyone was invited inside, they found it hard to believe that the housemistress really lived there.
Now she turned into a hallway and began to hurry down the long locker-lined corridor which connected this building to the second big house where, up in the attic, Daffodil dorm could be found.
Unfortunately, Daffodil dorm was many, many flights of stairs from the ground level and Mrs Knebworth was a large woman, approaching sixty, who had never been much of a keep-fit fan.
No matter how outraged and how furious she felt, she couldn’t propel herself up the stairs as quickly as she would have liked.
But she was going to get there in time, she told herself as she pulled herself up the second flight by the wooden banister. She was going to catch them in the dorm with all their contraband, she thought, as her breathing grew a little wheezy on the third set of stairs. Oh yes, she was!
MILLY AND SHYANNE were taking the strain on the rope. They were tugging together, and slowly the heavy bag was starting to travel upwards.
‘Why didn’t he just come up the fire escape?’ Niffy asked Anthea, who was standing beside her and Gina at the dorm door.
Anthea was holding the door slightly ajar, so that any strange or worrying sounds could be heard.
‘Maybe he thought this would make less noise,’ Gina whispered back.
‘Then he should have wrapped those bottles up in tea towels,’ Niffy replied. ‘I’m surprised the whole blooming boarding house hasn’t woken up.’
‘Shhhh!’ Gina urged, and for a moment everyone in the room froze.
Thud, thud, thud . . . It was faint. It was still far away in the distance, but: thud, thud, thud . . . it definitely seemed to be getting closer.
‘Someone’s coming up the stairs!’ Niffy exclaimed. ‘QUICK!!’
Milly and Shyanne yanked at the rope, then Milly reached over and grabbed hold of the bag. ‘RUN!’ she hissed at the boy and waved her arms about to give him the idea.
Thud, thud, thud . . . There was no doubt that the footsteps were growing closer, and every one of the girls had a horrible feeling that there was only one person in the boarding house who had such a heavy tread.
Shyanne and Milly hurried back in through the window and pulled it shut behind them. Anthea ran over and snatched the bag from Milly’s hands. It was packed with a jumble of goodies, but it was immediately obvious that three bottles just visible from the top had to be dealt with immediately.
Anthea grabbed hold of the bottles and looked frantically around the dorm for a hiding place.
Thud, thud, thud . . .
If this really was Mrs Knebworth – the Neb – then she was just seconds from bursting through the fire door at the top of the final set of stairs.
‘Give them to us!’ Niffy instructed.
Anthea ran over and handed the bottles, not to Niffy, who was still holding the door open, but to an astonished Gina.
Gina almost let them slip from her hands with fright. Why was she being landed with this? She was the one who had wanted to stay in bed and keep out of it all.
She didn’t need to be told what to do though: she fled from the scene, straight to her dorm and jumped into bed, taking the two bottles of wine and one of cider with her. Then she lay there, terrified, wondering what was going to happen next.
Niffy tried to escape too. She let go of the door, turned on her heel and ran after Gina towards the Iris dorm. But right behind her, she heard the horrible screech of the fire door opening on its spring-loaded hinges, then the outraged voice of the Neb called after her: ‘Luella Nairn-Bassett, just where do you think you’re going?!’
Niffy froze.
The Daffodil dorm door banged shut, and the faint light visible underneath it went out.
Niffy turned and faced the Neb in the dim light of the hallway.
‘You will come with me into Daffodil dorm and you will all tell me just exactly what has been going on up here,’ Mrs Knebworth hissed furiously, her pink quilted dressing gown and foam curlers not diminishing her many terrifying qualities in the slightest.
Even in this light, Niffy was sure she could see the steely blue gaze coming from the Neb’s narrowed eyes.
This was one of the rare occasions in Niffy’s life when she couldn’t immediately think of anything to say. Niffy had been at boarding school since she was eleven and she’d grown up with a prank-playing big brother, so she was usually very, very good at inventive excuses, brilliant tricks and spectacularly good fibs. But here in the hallway at 1 a.m. with a furious Mrs K facing her, Niffy’s mind went stubbornly blank.
For a moment, she wondered if she should say this was nothing to do with her – she’d just got up because she’d heard a noise.
But she had a feeling Mrs Knebworth wouldn’t believe her.
The housemistress reached for the Daffodil dorm door handle. ‘Follow me,’ she barked at Niffy.
The dorm was in darkness with the three girls in bed, just like it had been when Niffy had opened the door earlier. But Mrs Knebworth was not in the mood for any pretence; she reached up and snapped on the overhead light.
Suddenly Daffodil dorm, with its gaudy new pink and yellow wallpaper, was starkly visible.
‘Get up!’ Mrs Knebworth commanded. ‘Don’t even pretend for one moment that you’re not awake!’
Reluctantly Milly, Anthea and Shyanne sat up in their beds and looked at the housemistress nervously.
‘Where is that bag?’ Mrs Knebworth snapped. ‘Don’t bother denying it; I saw a boy out in the garden with a bag not three minutes ago.’
She walked over to the window and threw it open. The blue rope was still hanging from the rail of the fire escape.
‘This was the pulley, so where is the bag?’ the Neb demanded.
She turned and faced them, crossed her strong arms under her terrifying bosom and stared her frosty, furious stare at each of the four girls in the room in turn.
‘Aha!’
One of her hands shot out and she pointed at the incriminating item. She’d spotted it badly hidden under Milly’s bed.
Without any hesitation, she marched over and pulled it out.
‘Right, what have we got here?’
She yanked the bag up, placed it on Milly’s bed and began to examine the contents.
She unpacked one small bunch of pink roses, a box of chocolates, a jar of strawberry jam and a paper bag which turned out to contain three chocolate croissants.
‘Where’s the contraband?’ the Neb demanded. ‘I heard the clinking of bottles when this bag was being lifted up. And I think we all know exactly what that means.’
‘No, there weren’t any bottles,’ Milly insisted. ‘It was a friend of mine . . . my boyfriend, in fact . . . and he was just trying to be romantic.’
‘Ha!’ Mrs Knebworth spluttered.‘No one goes to this much trouble for romance. The sooner you girls find that out, the better. You were smuggling in booze. I know it. I heard it. Now, open up your chests of drawers while I search the cupboard.’
Niffy stood very still beside the dorm door, wishing that she’d not got involved with this. It so wasn’t worth it. The only thing inside that shopper that was of any interest to her right now was the bag of croissants. She wouldn’t mind snaffling a couple of those and then heading quietly back to bed.
But she had a feeling the Neb was not going to leave without a very, very big fuss. Look at the bossy old battle-axe, rifling through drawers, searching under beds and all through the cupboard. Bent double over the drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe, Mrs Knebworth in her quilted dressing gown looked like a baby-pink, over-upholstered sofa.
After a long and full search of every nook and cranny in the dorm, the Neb finally had to admit that she was not going to unearth any offending bottles.
She got up from her knees, dusted herself down and told the dorm furiously, ‘Don’t think for one moment that I’m going to leave it here! So far, I’ve only found chocolates, flowers and pastries. But I saw the boy, I heard the clinking! And when I find the bottles . . . Oh yes, I will find them, mark my words, then you will be in such trouble, you won’t know what’s hit you. In the meantime’ – Mrs Knebworth’s eyes narrowed and she looked at each face in turn – ‘you are all gated for three weekends.’
THE TERRIBLE, PIERCING wail of the boarding-house siren tore through Iris dorm at 7.30 the next morning. It was so loud and so unexpected that Amy and Min both jumped out of their beds feeling panicked. But after the adventures of the night before, Niffy and Gina found it much harder to get up, despite the terrible racket blasting from the speakers in the hall.
All four girls headed for the big, communal bathroom to splash warm water on their sleepy faces – Niffy and Min – or cleanse, tone and moisturise – Amy and Gina.
Then drawers were opened, backs were modestly turned and the four climbed into the clean and folded St Jude’s uniforms which had been untouched for the three weeks of the Christmas holidays.
No school uniform could ever be lovely, but the St Jude’s uniform was particularly disgusting. For a start, it was green. Not bottle green or army green, but somewhere sludgy between the two. There was a baggy, pleated skirt, which only looked reasonable if it was several sizes too small. Then there was a cardigan, which again had to be worn shrunken if you didn’t want to look like a librarian.
A boring white shirt and either green tights (yuck) or green woollen socks (yeurrrrgh) completed the look.
Both Niffy and Amy, who had been at St Jude’s since they were eleven years old, looked at home in their well-worn uniforms. Min and Gina’s skirts and cardigans still looked too big and too neat. So Gina rolled up the waistband of her skirt to shorten it and pushed her knee socks down to mid-calf. At least that way she exposed some tanned Californian leg and didn’t look like a total nerd. She also messed up her blonde hair a bit and fixed a glittery clip into it. There were no boys at St Jude’s so it wasn’t worth applying make-up and going all out, but Gina still wanted to look cool.
Amy, fully dressed now, pulled open her bottom drawer to get her school shoes and was astonished to see two bottles of wine and a bottle of cider lying in there.
‘There’s three bottles of booze in my drawer!’ she exclaimed. ‘Who put those in there?!’
Gina and Niffy exchanged a guilty look.
‘Sorry,’ Gina began. ‘Niffy and I got caught up in this thing with the Daffodil dorm last night and . . .’
‘What thing?’ Amy asked. She sat down on her bed, tossed her blonde hair over her shoulders and set her pretty face to quizzical. ‘Last night? When? In the middle of the night? Why didn’t you wake us?’
Min shook her head. ‘Don’t think I’d have wanted to get involved.’
‘What happened?’ Amy persisted.
‘Believe me, you were better off in bed,’ Niffy said.
She and Gina gave their friends a quick update on last night’s events.
‘The Neb’s on the warpath, she knows these bottles are somewhere – and you’ve put them in my drawer!’ Amy spluttered when she’d heard enough. ‘Thanks a lot!’
‘Well, she couldn’t risk putting them in your suitcase, Min,’ Niffy chipped in, ‘in case of the stowaway spiders. Black widows . . . button spiders, violin spiders . . . I know just what can come back in luggage from South Africa.’
‘Nif!’ Min protested. ‘That was two whole years ago, and it was a harmless house spider, just a bit bigger than the ones you’re used to.’ But she was laughing at the memory. Niffy had screamed the dorm down and brought Mrs K running when a very dozy, squashed black insect had crawled from Min’s suitcase at the start of her second term.
‘Uhhhh!’ Niffy shuddered at the memory. She was an outdoorsy, adventurous type, but big fat hairy spiders . . . they were her weakness.
‘You weren’t involved, Amy, so I thought she wouldn’t look in here,’ Gina justified herself. ‘I wasn’t trying to get you in trouble or anything.’
‘Our first night back,’ Min sighed, ‘and you’re already in trouble.’
For a moment, Niffy looked annoyed. How typical of goody-two-shoes Min. Min was never, ever in trouble, of course. There she was, hair all neatly brushed and held back with a school hairband, skirt the exact regulation length, earrings the correct tiny little studs. Min had probably done extra homework during the holidays.
‘Swot!’ Niffy said, but she shot Min a smile before adding gloomily, ‘Even though the Neb didn’t find the booze, me and the Daffodils are gated for three weekends.’
‘Unbelievable!’ Amy said. ‘So just how are you planning to get to your hockey training sessions?’
Niffy, who had been chosen to play in the Scottish Under-Seventeen team, gave a shrug.
‘Hopeless, totally hopeless,’ came Amy’s response. ‘Well’ – she turned her attention back to the three bottles – ‘we can’t have the booze anywhere in this room. As soon as we set off for school, you can bet the Neb will be up here combing through our cupboards and our drawers like a demon. No sooner do we step out of this building than she will be searching high and low for that stuff. Sit,’ she instructed her friends, ‘and think! Where in this building will she not look?’
For several moments, they sat in silence, then their thoughts were interrupted once again with the terrible wail of the siren calling them to breakfast.
‘I’ve got it!’ Amy exclaimed, jumping from her bed. She wrapped the bottles in a hand towel and headed out of the dorm with a curious Niffy hot on her heels.
In the big bathroom – empty now, as almost everyone was heading downstairs to the dining room – she stepped into a toilet cubicle, carefully set her towel package down on the floor, then lifted the lid of the cistern.
‘Hold,’ she instructed Niffy, handing her the porcelain lid.
The toilets were old-fashioned, from the Seventies or Eighties, with deep, water-filled tanks. So Amy could easily slide one of the wine bottles down into the water. Then she pulled the flush, just to make sure that everything still worked as usual.
She replaced the lid and told her friend, ‘One down, two to go.’
‘Genius!’ Niffy replied.
‘Gated on your very first evening . . . that should be a record, except last term Gina was gated as soon as she set foot inside the building,’ Min reminded them.
‘Yup,’ Gina confirmed.
The four friends were walking together along the path which connected the boarding house to the main St Jude’s school building. Lots of other boarders in school coats and woolly hats were hurrying along the same path as well. It was only a five minute walk, but in the raw January weather, it still felt too long.
There were never more than about a hundred boarders at St Jude’s. The rest of the school was made up of day pupils. Every day, from every corner of Edinburgh and its surrounding towns, three hundred day girls filed into the imposing three-storey stone building of the senior school.
‘Did you see Angus at Christmas?’ Amy asked Niffy, so unexpectedly that Niffy blushed a frantic shade of pink.
‘No!’ came the surprised reply.
‘No?’ Amy asked. ‘Why not? I thought you two were mad about each other. I thought the only thing that was keeping you apart was the fact that unfortunately he’d gone on a French exchange programme.’
‘Huh!’ Niffy said, and didn’t look as if she was going to offer any more information, so Gina stepped in.
‘What’s up?’ she asked. ‘I thought you guys were going to try and get together in the holidays?’