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Monkey Guts was by all accounts the ugliest girl in school. That her true name was Monica Gedde was seldom remembered, except by teachers that called out her name; a rare occurrence. Like the students they avoided her like the plague, ostensibly out of pity but in actuality because they couldn’t abide the girl’s mien and feared that their true feelings might inadvertently show.
Chief Inspector Lorne Michaels’ son David, however, was of that rare breed that harbour no such prejudices. This is not to say that he accepted the girl as being part of his immediate surroundings the way he would a clock, a chair or a cocker spaniel, as did the more benign of his compatriots. Far from it. Though he hid the fact, he was sensitive to aspects of the girl and her nature that the others were blind to, though he hid his true feelings and kept his observations to himself.
David and his family, meaning his parents and three younger siblings, Janice, seventeen, Sabrina, fifteen, and Danny, seven, and for his mother an unexpected but smugly pleasing afterthought, had only just moved to Mid-Yorkshire from their former home in Scarborough, a large and comfortable house in which seven generations of the Michaels family had faced the cold northern bite of the English Channel.