‘Not enjoying the soup?’ Caroline asks as Fran lowers her spoon.

‘I feel horrendous.’ She presses her hands to her head and massages her temples. ‘I thought I felt bad this morning but it’s getting worse. I need to lie down in a darkened room, possibly forever.’

‘It could have been worse; you could have ended up swinging from a rope like Kate. Oh my god, the look on her face as she fell, and that scream!’

It’s a conversation they’ve had multiple times but Fran still feels a jolt of glee at the memory of Kate launching herself at the platform, wobbling on her toes and then tipping back like a felled tree.

‘Couldn’t have happened to a nicer woman. Where is she anyway?’

Caroline cranes her neck to look back towards the kitchen area. ‘Vanished. Hopefully disappeared into a well of her own despair.’

Fran looks at her friend admiringly. The woman has balls the size of watermelons. Not only had Caroline insisted on returning to the retreat rather than going to the hospital after their near drowning, she’d also turned down a bribe that would have significantly eased her financial situation. She’d told Fran about the previous evening’s conversation with Kate in hushed tones when they were squeezed together on the back seat of the minibus, en route to the Wilderness Adventures site. Caroline hadn’t actually disclosed how much money Kate had offered her to put her story to bed, but it said a lot about her moral fibre that she’d refused.

‘Hangover or no hangover,’ Caroline says, putting down her spoon. ‘You still have to go to your one-to-one.’

‘Again?’ Fran groans so loudly that Phoenix, sitting beside her, asks if everything’s all right.

She dismisses him with a wave of her hand and leans in towards Caroline. ‘What difference will it make if I go or not? Surely you’ve got enough on them both now.’

‘Have I?’ Caroline raises her eyebrows. ‘Kate’s a devious bitch who tried to buy my silence but there’s no evidence pinning her, or Tom, to Jenna’s murder.’

Fran flinches at the word murder. It’s the image it conjures in her mind that’s so distressing: of her sister, standing on the cliff edge, dehydrated and disorientated after having survived the sweat lodge, only for someone to sneak up behind her and attack her. She only hopes it was swift, that she would already have been lost to the world as she tumbled into the sea.

‘You’re shivering.’ Caroline touches a hand to Fran’s arm. ‘Would you like my jumper?’

Fran stares in horror as Caroline plucks at the hem of the white, fluffy monstrosity she’s wearing. ‘No, no. I’ll get a wrap from my room.’

‘Geri,’ Tom calls from across the table as she stands up. ‘Don’t forget our session in fifteen minutes.’

Fran smiles tightly. ‘No danger of that.’