‘Of course I’m awake,’ Frannie says. ‘I haven’t fucking slept since.’

Cathy blinks, surprised by her sister’s irritability. She’s usually so full of positivity. Dashing off after work to see one of her many friends. Deciding whether or not a t-shirt with a bow on the back was special enough to buy. ‘It’s a big decision, Cathy,’ she’d said smilingly, her finger hovering on the order button. Frannie is both a bargain-hunter and a spender, always finding discounts that allow her to buy the things she wants on the salary she has.

‘Join the club,’ Joe says.

‘The police were in the main villa this morning,’ Frannie says.

‘Is it too early for a drink?’ Joe asks.

That’s one of the things that they do together at home. Every single Friday, no matter what, they share a bottle of wine together, in Frannie’s open-plan kitchen. Often at her large oak table but, more often, they fold back her bi-fold doors – even in the cold – and they sit there, on the doorstep, three siblings in a row, their legs stretched out in front of them on to the patio, and they drink and talk together. They like Frannie’s house because it’s warm and smells like a home and is full of interesting things. She has two copper kettles, a weather vane that looks like a snow globe, a cuckoo clock that hoots on the hour. Cathy loves it there. ‘How do you know?’ Cathy says, noticing that Joe doesn’t seem surprised.

‘Lydia told me,’ Joe says softly.

And you told Frannie? Cathy thinks. Something about it makes her pause. Her brother and sister are so close to each other. She’s out in the cold, and she needs not to be. They need to stay tightknit to survive it.

Cathy looks at her brother. She can’t say it. She’ll sound mad, paranoid. ‘Lydia doesn’t know, I guess?’ she asks instead. Lydia isn’t a Plant. She wouldn’t get it.

‘No,’ he says shortly. ‘No, she doesn’t know. And she isn’t going to know. She’s pissed off with how much she’s had to have Paul.’

‘Paul is no bother,’ Frannie says defensively. Her face lights up, just for a second or two, as she speaks his name.

Joe is about to start planning. Cathy can tell. She knows all of the clues her brother’s body gives away. Poised, somehow, like a runner on the starting blocks, holding an intake of breath, eyebrows raised, about to speak.

So many questions need to be asked before they can start to plan. ‘Look,’ Cathy says. She pulls out a wooden chair – still with the purple crochet cushion from the previous owners – and sits opposite Frannie. ‘I think it would help to understand it properly,’ she says. ‘If we could just talk about – about exactly what happened?’

Cathy detects nothing in Frannie’s reaction. No flinching, no tension. She cups her face in her hands and raises her gaze to Cathy. ‘I pulled out on to the left, not the right,’ Frannie says. Outside, the old clock that sits at the centre of the convent chimes, ten o’clock. They pause, as though undertaking a minute’s silence, then Frannie resumes. ‘I hit him before – before I could even tell I was in the wrong place,’ she says. ‘I turned – and there he was.’