‘Morning, Dolly,’ I smiled as she set the radio to Classic FM and the angelic voices of the King’s College Choir filled the room. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘If I didn’t know better,’ she said, turning the volume down a notch, ‘I’d say I was a little hungover.’

‘Well,’ I laughed, ‘the fizz was pretty free-flowing yesterday afternoon.’

Dolly nodded and stirred some dissolvable painkillers into a glass of water. She must have been feeling rough. I don’t think I’d ever seen her take medication before, not even when she broke her wrist the year we became firm friends.

‘And how are you feeling about this exciting new phase of your life?’ I asked. ‘Has it sunk in yet?’

‘No,’ she said, grimacing as she took a swig. ‘It just feels like the Christmas holidays as opposed to holidays for ever and no going back.’

‘Oh, I’m sure you’ll grace them with your presence at some point. What’s in that bag?’

‘Something for you,’ she told me. ‘It was propped up against the front door and there was a note pushed through the letterbox.’

Apparently, Jemma at the café started early and, as Beamish had woken even earlier than his usual time, he’d been and got the bits and pieces I’d asked for already. His note was brief, brisk almost, and given the strange mood he’d fallen into at the end of yesterday I wasn’t surprised he hadn’t slept.

‘What is it?’ Dolly asked, distracting me from wondering what might have caused it.

‘Everything we need to tick off something I added to the Wish List after you’d gone to the bed last night,’ I grinned, grabbing the list and handing it to her.

‘Oh, how lovely,’ she smiled back, her eyes shining. ‘I haven’t made a gingerbread house for years!’

‘Me neither,’ I said, opening the reusable shopper which was stamped with the Cherry Tree logo. ‘Not since I moved into the hotel, but let’s have some breakfast first. I’ve a hankering for a bacon butty this morning.’

‘I think I’ll stick to toast,’ said Dolly, looking a little green around the gills.

After breakfast I cleared a space at the table and we set about following the list of instructions Jemma had included with the kit. Apparently, the houses had been a popular addition to the café’s seasonal market stall and as we set to, I could see why. Everything was conveniently labelled and already weighed out so there was very little for me to mess up.

‘Mum and I always used to make a house when I was little,’ I told Dolly as I began to stir the ingredients together. ‘And we would spend ages decorating it. It was never quite straight and there would always be one wall or one side of the roof which wanted to give up before the others, but we tried our best.’