Tara kept her eyes fixed on the road ahead, but mentally started sweeping up and down the local streets, trying to remember if she’d seen any ancient wells. She wasn’t even aware there’d been a monastery, let alone a miraculous spring. Although … Bishop’s Road. Huh. That was the annoying thing about David. He got her brain working.

‘Do you want to tell Hero?’ she asked, despite herself.

They were almost out of the residential terraces, and nearing the outlying shops of the high street. A lone hi-fi specialist, a Polish grocery. Tara tried to steer him down her usual shortcut through an alley full of bins, but David had already set off on the long way round and was fishing in his pocket for his pedometer.

‘Come on,’ he said, when she grumbled, ‘if we’d started our pedometers back there, we could have got a thousand steps in before lunch!’

‘Oh, good. So I can have lunchtime off?’

‘Absolutely not! Don’t you want to beat Lionel and Emily in the Step Challenge?’

‘Of course I do,’ Tara admitted through gritted teeth, because she did.

After three weeks of Jacqueline’s ‘teambuilding’ Step Challenge, Team Eminel were leading the star chart by a clear margin of 45,000 steps, despite Lionel the homeopath’s dodgy hip and his lifelong opposition to what he called ‘the tyranny of shoes’.

‘We’re never going to overtake them if we don’t find some extra steps somewhere,’ David continued. ‘I saw Emily in the park yesterday, whipping the poor chap on. I didn’t realize anyone could move so fast in Birkenstocks.’

‘Well, that’s Emily for you. She could start a competition in a flotation tank.’

‘What I don’t get is why she picked Lionel,’ David mused. ‘They don’t seem particularly friendly?’

‘She didn’t pick him.’ Tara was distracted by the buttery smell of fresh croissants drifting from Juliet’s Bakehouse. ‘Jacqueline engineered the pairings.’

‘Engineered?’

‘Oh, it’s one of her missions – trying to build bridges between the traditional counsellors and the alternative therapists.’ The croissants were on a two-for-one deal. How bad was it to have croissants for lunch? If she skipped breakfast? ‘I mean,’ Tara carried on, totting up the calories, ‘we’re only paired up because we were last back from lunch and the numbers aren’t even, otherwise you’d probably be striding out with someone who thinks you can cure cancer by putting a fragment of a crab claw under your pillow.’

‘Ha!’

Tara was jolted out of her croissant-gazing by the sound of David’s unexpectedly snorty laugh, and realized she’d probably said a bit too much.

‘So there’s some tension? In the Centre?’

Tara hesitated, unsure of how to reply. David was on the Credibility side of the chasm, surely? One of Us, not Them? What could be more Establishment than David’s wall of qualifications? His books?