Someone close by heard her coughing fit and she was handed a bottle of water. She savoured the coolness against her throat, but kept some of the liquid to wash the dirt from her hands. Two of her acrylic nails were peeling away and she pulled them off. Her chest hurt, and the stitch in her side had returned, but compared to some of the others, she was fine. She was going to walk away from this unscathed. The worst was over, and she had done as much as she could.

11

The sky had darkened to sapphire with enough light left in the day to pick out the skeletal forms of oaks and beeches stripped of their leaves by the storm. Victoria Park had taken a battering in the last few days, but on the day of the anniversary, the clouds had parted and the wind was no more than a despairing last breath.

Leanne was loitering by the bandstand, some distance away from the crowds concentrated around the sound stage that had been erected hurriedly on the playing field that morning. Claudia had been extremely fortunate not to have her plans blown away by seventy-mile-an-hour gales, and some might say she led a charmed life these days, but perhaps she deserved it. Claudia certainly looked as if she had the world at her feet as the lights came up and she stepped onto a stage that wouldn’t look out of place on a field in Glastonbury.

Unlike any festival Leanne had ever been to, the crowd stilled; a solemn reminder that they weren’t there to be entertained. They were there to remember and, as Leanne scanned the horizon, she searched for the glow in the sky that had been a forewarning she had initially ignored a year ago. She pushed her face into the scarf wrapped around her neck and breathed in the scent of damp wool to force the memory away. She was cold to the bone, but not numb. She could feel the collective pain of the crowd. There wasn’t a single person in Sedgefield that hadn’t been touched by the deathly fingers of the fire.

‘I would like to start by saying that we shouldn’t be here,’ Claudia said, her voice remaining sharp and clear as it was amplified across the park. ‘But it might be more appropriate to acknowledge the people who should be here with us. Our friends and neighbours, our parents, our brothers and sisters. Our children.’ Overcome with emotion, she pressed her fingers to her mouth. An eerie silence pressed down on the crowd as they waited patiently.