They arrived in the entrance lobby to discover a very irritated Ronnie, wearing a quiet little Roksanda Ilincic number in bright turquoise with wide diagonal pink stripes. She clearly felt that as mother of the bride there should have been a string quartet, or at the very least a piper, to celebrate her arrival.

‘I took the Eurostar to Paris!’ she fulminated. ‘Two hours late because some idiot decided to jump under the train. Honestly, they might think of the people it was going to inconvenience.’

‘I suppose if you’re going to kill yourself, you tend to forget the social niceties,’ Sophie almost said, but decided to make a diplomatic fuss of her instead. ‘Ronnie! It’s so great you’re here! Your flowers are amazing. We’ve put them all somewhere cool where you can arrange them in peace.’ She didn’t add that just at the moment, ‘somewhere cool’ was the dungeon. ‘By the way, what are the enormous square boxes that came with them? We didn’t have time to open those.’

‘Onyx vases. Essential for the Old Master look I’m trying to achieve.’

Sophie took a deep breath and tried not to imagine what a huge onyx vase would cost.

‘Is everyone here?’

‘Everyone except your mother,’ Sophie replied briskly, not wanting to mention the arrival of her ex, Bill, and his wife Maureen. ‘But she is in Bratenac. Funny, though, she’s been rather a long time. I do hope everything’s all right. Perhaps you’d better call her?’

As she spoke, they heard the sound of a car skidding to a halt on the gravel. ‘That’ll be her now. She’s always been a fast driver.’

They trooped out of the front door and down the right side of the grand stone staircase, which Nicky would walk down tomorrow as a bride, to find a hysterical old lady in the courtyard beneath. Despite the heightened emotion, she looked very smart, with newly coiffed hair as if she’d just walked out of a hairdresser.

Which was exactly what had happened, as they soon discovered.

‘Veronica! You won’t believe it! I drove past this salon with a terrific offer and I couldn’t resist popping in. I left the cake in its cool box in the boot, absolutely fine, and I must have not put the lid back on – and look what’s happened to it!’

They all peered into the box to see what now resembled a ruined castle that had been attacked by an enemy bent on razing it to ground. What made it even more poignant was that it was this castle.

‘Oh dear,’ murmured Meredith, not entirely tactfully. ‘What a host of enemies couldn’t do to the château in four hundred years, a shampoo and set in Bratenac has achieved in a couple of hours!’