This was enough of a distraction for Jeremy to move. We spun back to see that he’d knocked the grate of the fireplace over with a clatter and armed himself with the poker. Juliette moved towards him, but he swung it in an arc and she pulled back. He still had nowhere to go, but he was swishing the cast-iron weapon through the air with abandon.

‘I could have just left you here,’ he hissed. ‘Up until now, I might have. After Lucy, I thought I’d done enough to disappear. But now that I know that I was left to fight on my own. That I was abandoned, discarded. By you.’ He was talking to all of us, but glaring at Audrey. ‘At least we’ll burn together.’

He lunged with the poker, and everyone flinched, but he was plunging it into the fire. Using the rod as a lever, he flicked a giant, flaming log onto the carpet. It landed on the floor with a thud, sending fireflies of sparks into the air. We all held our breath. Juliette had told me her father built the guesthouse in the late forties, which meant it was held up by timber, shortcuts and asbestos: the walls may as well have been matches. Some of the carpet fizzed, browned, but it was too damp to catch; the log just sat there smoking. We all went quiet, Jeremy looking forlorn, the rest of us marvelling at how uninspired his getaway plan was.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, one of the books on the wall exploded. A single spark had carried, lighting the crisp leaf-dry pages.

It figured. These books were perhaps the only things in the resort, me included, that weren’t damp to their bones. I wish I could tell you the book that exploded was Jane Eyre (it would be fitting, considering what’s about to happen) but it just wouldn’t be true.

Once the first book went up, the rest went too, one by one, like popcorn in a microwave, jolting into flames as sparks leapt. Some, I suspected, seeing as it was almost spontaneous, merely caved to the peer pressure of the books around them. And then the walls were blazing. The floor steamed, drying out, and then glowing spots formed in the dry patches.