‘It isn’t, Will. Let me enjoy my anonymity while it lasts. The scandal will follow me here soon enough. You won’t want to know me then.’

‘Where did you used to go?’

‘St Anne’s.’

‘Private! Very nice too!’ Will grins.

‘It isn’t,’ she snaps. ‘It’s a piss hole. You reckon just cos people have got pots of money they aren’t total scumbags?’

‘No … I guess not. Sorry.’

Another explosion rocks the ground, louder than the last.

‘They’re evacuating the centre of town!’ Kris Tring yells over to them, his telephoto lens trained on the fire. ‘Police taping everything off. God knows what they’re expecting.’

‘Probably time we got shooting,’ April says, pointing at Will’s camera on the stones between them.

Right now, Will has no interest in doing so, but he climbs to his feet nonetheless. He looks along the beach towards the Martello tower. That conversation with Nain plays again in his head. She did not predict the library’s demise. She didn’t know it was April’s safe space. Or rather she did, in the same way someone who gets several numbers right on the lottery has predicted the result. Chance. Probability. She also reckons her carer is poisoning her, and that’s definitely not true. And Mr Arbuckle is certainly not stealing her electricity because he doesn’t even live next door to her any more. Not to mention the hundreds of other nonsensical things she’s said in the last few months. It’s coincidence – nothing more.

But still … Will looks at the menacing tower with its two narrow slot windows.

You’re up there, right up at the top of the Martello tower. With your friend.

‘What you staring at?’ April asks.

‘Reckon there’s a way of getting into the tower?’

She sizes the place up for a moment, a grin seeping across her face. ‘Love your thinking, Will.’

He follows her as she stamps across the stones.

‘Only one way to find out,’ she says.

They step up from the beach on to the thick wall that surrounds the building. Will follows as April lowers herself into the narrow gap between the wall and the tower itself. The ground is thick with seagull crap as they follow the curved path round.

‘We breaking in?’ Will asks, excited and petrified in equal measure.

‘I think we owe it to ourselves to at least try,’ April says. ‘Don’t you reckon?’

This is not the sort of thing Will Parks does. But everything’s up in the air right now: the town’s burning, he’s chatting with a girl, and a tiny part of him is open to the idea that something even weirder than those two things is going on. It feels like a day in which the rules don’t apply.

‘Gimme a leg up,’ she says.