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pulling my ass out of the fire.
    “I’ll need a Warrant.”
    The Warrant was the official piece of paper issued to prefects and other kids on special duties. It gave you permission to go anywhere in the school any time you wanted.
    “Don’t push your luck, sonny,” the Shank growled back. He used “sonny” in the same way as the Greek god Cronus used it, and he ate his kids alive.
    “If you want the truth, then I need the paper.”
    The Shank thought for a moment, then opened a drawer and took out a neat stack of pre-printed A5 pages. He signed one with a fancy fountain pen and handed it to me.
    “Don’t make me regret this,” he said, icily.
    I was out of there just in time to hear the buzzer go for the end of the morning. Yeah, I’d been bluffing when I told Vole that I knew who’d done the deed on the sticks, but I meant to convert that bluff into a straight flush. And I knew exactly where to start looking.

CHAPTER FIVE
G OD S AVE T HE Q UEENS
    THE walk back to the toilets gave me the chance to think about the Shank’s threat. It was bad. It was really bad. I was like a cow with a cut leg in the Amazon river, just waiting for the first piranha to get a sniff of the blood.
    The Queens, or rather the Drama Queens, to give them their proper title, were the most powerful gang in the school. Their reach was longer, their grip tighter even than the prefects’. Their origins lay in the drama club that put on the twice-yearly school plays, but they’d grown beyond that. Way beyond.
    To begin with, the Drama Queens had been a force for good. A refuge for all those out of step with the brutalities of everyday life in our school. For every star milking the lights out in front of the audience, there were twenty back-stage toilers: mousey, timid, but proud to play their part, however small, in the creation of something beautiful.
    But then the drama club had been allocated a budget, and where there is money, corruption will grow, like mushrooms on a dung heap. Yeah, the Queens got greedy. Greedy first for the sake of their art and the prestige it brought them. But then just plain greedy.
    The productions became more and more lavish. Stage sets began to grow, aping New York skylines or Indian jungles or Parisian ghettos as the show demanded. The orchestra swelled – we’re not talking about three kazoos and a triangle here, but something big enough to put on Wagner’s
Ring Cycle
with a side order of Bizet’s
Carmen
. The costumes bloomed in gaudy extravagance. The stage was filled with light and glitter.
    All very pretty, but it was never a good idea to get on the wrong side of the Queens. They looked after their own. If you messed with one Queen, you messed with them all. And if you got in the way of the juggernaut, then you were going to get crushed.
    The Queens had fought a long turf war with the other main gang in the school, the Lardies. The Lardies were a sort of overweight mafia, and they controlled the supply of junk food to the kids who couldn’t swallow the “healthy option” menu that the New Regime slopped onto their plates. The war between the Queens and the Lardies ended in a sort of compromise, with each gang finding a niche. But nobody doubted that the Queens had inflicted the deepest wounds. For now Hercule Paine, the leader of the Lardies, was content to lick those wounds. But revenge, as they say, is a dish best served cold, and then rammed down your enemy’s throat so it chokes them to death.
    Even though the Queens were now about much more than drama, drama was still at the centre of their world. Except that something rather strange had happened. Back in their glory days, the Drama Queens had put on two fresh shows every year. But now it was always the same two. The Christmas panto was
Cinderella
, and the summer show was
The Wizard of Oz
.
    Oz
, in particular, had become a kind of totem, a symbol. More than that, it was like those blood sacrifices performed by the Aztecs and other