She wouldn’t mind so much if any of it made sense, but what crime has Saskia actually committed? Championing Beth in their community? Worrying about her? Beth was so cross with her after taking that phone call at the school Christmas show, but for what? Mentioning that she’d overheard Beth talk about a trip to Heathrow? London’s biggest airport is hardly an embarrassing destination; Beth was probably just arranging to pick Simon up from his flight home from Dublin.

In fact, didn’t she say he was getting back today? A sense of shame fans out inside Saskia’s chest and she drops down onto the naughty step. Is Beth at Heathrow now? She imagines her friend’s phone ringing in the brightly lit airport concourse, the look of concern on her face when she sees it’s the school calling, and then the guilt when she has to admit that she’s not close by. That she’s taken the school at its word and delegated her children’s care to them. Do you even get phone signal in an airport these days? Perhaps Saskia should call her after all, check her line and offer to collect Ava until Beth can get back.

But what if Beth’s not at Heathrow but at home, has even picked Ava up already? Would she think Saskia was calling to pry, or to demand some sort of praise for saving Ava in the first place?

Saskia rubs her fingers against her temples. God, it’s not like her to be so indecisive.

A thought suddenly flashes up in her head and she whips her phone out of her back pocket. She can’t believe she didn’t think of it earlier; she knows exactly how to find out where Beth is.

Saskia has had access to Beth’s location on Google Maps for months. Beth was reluctant to share it initially – almost offensively so, Saskia remembers thinking at the time – but her pink BP dot still appears every time Saskia opens location sharing on the app, so she must have forgotten to remove it. They’d been invited to see an up-and-coming band at some obscure venue in Camden – the drummer was the step-nephew of a mum at school – and Saskia had decided that she couldn’t let a trip to north London go by without catching up with some old work colleagues. The detour meant that she was alone and lost in NW1 as the gig was due to start, hence asking (or more accurately, begging) Beth to share her location. The band turned out to be incredible and, helped on by a few pints of snakebite (Saskia’s idea), they were dancing like groupies by the end of the night. Perhaps that’s why the map sharing thing slipped Beth’s mind.