What do you mean, gone?’ said the headmaster. ‘We were, umm, well, briefly distracted,’ said Grusom. ‘And when we stopped being distracted the body had vanished.’ ‘Maybe it just wandered off,’ said the headmaster. ‘Have you checked the grounds?’ ‘It was dead,’ said Avid. ‘How could it wander off?’ ‘My dear young lady,’ said the headmaster, ‘you are forgetting that this is a wizard school – several of our students have been dead for years. In fact, if a student fails their exams, they can re-do the whole year as a corpse so that when they get to the next year, they haven’t got any older.’ Avid nodded, blushing slightly, partly at the idea that some of the things wandering around the school could be dead, partly due to the memory of writhing around on the floor in hysterics, partly because of where the magic beans that had fallen down her blouse had ended up,34 and partly from feeling stupid at losing an entire dead body. ‘Bodies don’t just vanish,’ continued the headmaster.
