“OK, so we’ll head straight for the ceramics tent,” Luke addresses the group. “Jane will approach Raymond, along with Becky, with the rest of us on standby.”

There was a bit of a tussle last night about who should accompany Mum to accost Raymond. Janice reckoned she was Best Friend, but I countered with Daughter. Then Suze suggested, “Couldn’t we all go?” but got shouted down. Anyway, I won, on the grounds that whatever Raymond says about Dad, good or bad, Mum and I should hear it first.

The only person who wasn’t remotely interested in meeting Raymond was Alicia. In fact, she’s not even coming to the county fair. She says she’s arranged a meeting in Tucson. A meeting in Tucson? I mean, honestly. Who arranges meetings in Tucson?

Well, I suppose people who live in Tucson do. But, you know. Apart from them.

I don’t believe this “meeting in Tucson” story for a minute. Alicia’s up to something, I’m convinced of it. And if I could, I’d keep tabs on her. But I can’t, because: 1. I have to go to the fair, and 2. She’s already left for the day in a limo.

Suze is sitting on a chair made out of a barrel, hunched over her phone, frantically texting. Presumably she’s texting Alicia, because they’ve been apart for, like, twenty minutes. She looks absolutely deathly, and I want to put an arm round her or shake her out of her cloud of misery. But I don’t even dare approach her. Not only is Suze not my three-A.M. friend, I think dolefully, she’s not even my nine-A.M. sitting-five-feet-away friend.

“OK?” Luke interrupts my thoughts. “Everyone ready? Ready, Jane?”

“Oh, I’m ready,” says Mum, with a meaningful, almost ominous look. “I’m ready.”

—

We hear the fair before we see it. There’s music blasting as we snake along in the queue to the RV park. Once we’re parked we have to buy passes, and then we have to find the right entrance, and we’re all quite hot and bothered as, finally, we make it through Gate B.

(You’d think Gate B would be next to Gate A. You’d think.)

“Goodness!” says Janice, as we all look around. “It’s very…fulsome!”

I know what she means. Everywhere there’s something bright or blaring or plain extraordinary. There are tents and stalls as far as the eye can see. Every loudspeaker seems to be playing a different tune. A blimp above us in the sky reads WILDERNESS COUNTY FAIR, and beneath it soar a couple of helium balloons, silver dots against the blue, which must have been let go by mistake. A troop of cheerleader-ish girls in aquamarine costumes is hurrying into a nearby tent, and I can see Minnie watching them in awe. A man leads a massive woolly sheep past us on a rope, and I instinctively take a step back.

“Bex!” Suze rolls her eyes. “It’s only a sheep.”

Hmph. She may say “only a sheep.” But that animal has huge curly horns and an evil eye. It’s probably the prizewinning exhibit in the killer-sheep event.