‘Yeah, and it was all looking great – our first Category A, done and dusted. But then you insisted on going toe-to-toe with her. And look at the outcome. You letting your face get messed up could’ve set us back weeks. No wonder we got put back on Category B. But last night he was well pleased, trust me. After you’d gone up to bed, he said we’d made a chance out of nothing, thought on our feet, improvised …’

Alyssa couldn’t help feeling miffed about that as well. Okay, it had mainly been Ivana’s improvisation – she herself had only been called in by phone at the last minute. But they’d still pulled it off together. She was the one who’d struck the fatal blow. She was the one who’d come up with the idea to lift one of those eroded stone lids in the Victorian section of the churchyard and lay the meathead and his kit-bag to rest on the bones of some granny from the 1870s. She was the one who’d thought to use the fire-extinguisher from the church porch to wash the blood off the steps and path. And yet she was the one who’d been sent to bed while the old fella called Ivana in to offer his congratulations.

This was often the way of it, though. The two sisters were the same age, their births separated by a single hour, and had shared exactly the same life experience, and yet somehow Ivana had fallen into the role of leader and Alyssa into that of follower. She didn’t like it, but she accepted it because it seemed to be the natural order of things. Plus, Ivana was near enough everything Alyssa wanted to be. The younger-girl-by-one-hour loved her older sibling greatly and admired her even more.

‘And you know what he’s like,’ Ivana continued. ‘He’s especially happy when a plan comes together. And I mean a real plan. Not just brute force and ignorance. He didn’t like the Cunningham cock-up, but last night he reckoned we thought on our feet and basically snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.’

Alyssa pondered this again, the realisation of what it meant, and the subsequent excitement, only dawning on her with gradual, painful slowness. ‘Seriously, Vana? That’s it … we’re done on these practice runs, we’re actually going live?’

Ivana nodded again, still excited. ‘I think we are, doll!’

‘Tonight?’

‘Why else get us back in now?’

‘He can’t wait to retire … that’s all it is.’

‘And does that bother you?’

‘Does it bloody hell!’ Alyssa punched the dashboard. ‘I’ve been waiting for this ever since we left school.’

Chapter 27