No reply, which is the same as yes. A dull rumble makes the floor vibrate, but these days she barely reacts to the blasting.

‘So, you got what you wanted in the end,’ she says acidly. ‘Your dream job.’

Jens shakes his head. ‘I turned it down.’

‘What? But why?’

‘We’re moving.’ He says ‘we’, without elaborating who he means. Under different circumstances she would have been interested.

‘Where to?’

Jens shrugs. ‘Somewhere where the police work is less . . . complicated. I’ve applied for a couple of other posts, so we’ll see what happens. Anyway, I wanted to thank you for trusting me. Involving me in the investigation in spite of our . . . rocky start. I’ve learned a lot from working with you.’

There is a slightly awkward silence. This whole conversation has taken Anna by surprise, and she doesn’t know what to say. Jens reddens, tries to hide it by looking at his diver’s watch.

‘I’ve enjoyed working with you too, Jens,’ she says, extending her hand. ‘Good luck.’

‘Same to you, boss.’

He holds onto her hand for a little longer than necessary, then gives her what could easily be a sympathetic smile.

*

She picks up Lisa from the hotel and helps her to load her case into the boot of the hire car. On the way home to Tabor she decides to forget her duty of confidentiality, and shares Alex Morell’s account of what happened on the night Simon died. Lisa listens carefully, and asks a couple of questions.

‘But he’s sure that neither my mum nor my dad was there when the trouble started?’

‘According to Alex, it was their departure that kicked everything off. The anger they felt towards Joe was directed at Simon instead.’

‘So, you could say that it was all partly down to my dad . . . I mean, Joe. What he did to Carina was the catalyst.’

‘Maybe, but what I gathered from Alex was that the other four had been getting increasingly annoyed with Simon all evening. Plus, they’d been smoking weed, some of them for the first time, and they’d drunk a considerable amount of alcohol, so there were several factors at work. A series of unfortunate circumstances, you could say.’

They pass the hairpin bend where they came off the road only forty-eight hours ago, and both fall silent.

‘What a terrible story,’ Lisa says eventually. ‘Five people who were close friends, who really liked one another, get into a fight on that one evening. One evening out of all those years, and everything is destroyed. How do you recover from something like that? From being involved in someone’s death? Someone you loved?’

The question is rhetorical, but because of her own experience, Anna feels compelled to answer.

‘You don’t.’

*