The guilt Fran felt consumed her. She took two weeks off work, drove the two hour round trip to visit her parents daily and sat silently in the living room as her mother sobbed and her father stood silently at the window until she could bear it no longer. She booked a flight to Gozo, secured a room in the same hotel that Jenna had stayed in and, after dumping her suitcase in her room, headed out to the scrubland outside the hotel boundaries. She expected to find police standing around the small stone circle where the sweat hut had been erected, or at least yellow and black tape, cordoning it off. But there was nothing, and no one, there. Three people had died eleven days earlier and there was no sign that a crime had been committed. As a bitterly cold wind blew off the sea, forcing her to wrap her cardigan tighter around her body, she inched her way to the edge of the cliff. She knew it was high – she’d circled around it on Google Earth, viewing it from every possible angle – but she hadn’t anticipated how small and vulnerable she would feel as she dropped to her knees and, fingers quivering, reached for the edge. She craned her neck, trying to look down, but the angle of the cliff meant she could only see knuckles of white rock and moss, not the sea below.

The wind whipped at her hair, twirling and twisting it, as she shifted on her belly, pulling herself closer and closer to the edge. Gulls circled in the sky above her, shrieking and cawing, as though warning her that danger was near. Now it wasn’t only Fran’s fingers that were shaking, her whole body was juddering, her heart pounding. It’s not safe, her brain screamed at her. The cliff could crumble. You could die. But another part of her, a bigger part, told her to keep moving. The Gozoian police had sent out boats as soon as Jenna was reported missing but no body was found in the deep, navy sea. The current was too strong and she’d probably been pulled into the depths. The chances were she’d never be found. But what if she could? What if, right now, Jenna’s lifeless body was nudging the rocks below? As Fran weaved her fingers through the grass at the edge of the rock, searching for something solid that she could grip to pull herself closer to the edge, a deep male voice cut through the whistle of the wind.

‘Hey! Hey! What you doing?’

She felt hands grab her ankles and twisted around to discover a tall, thickset man yanking her away from the cliff edge.

‘So dangerous!’ he barked as he released her ankles. He had a full beard, streaked with grey, a green bobble hat and a walking pole, abandoned on the ground beside him. ‘What the hell were you thinking?’