I sat up. He was pointing upstream, where the water plunged into a bigger rock pool between two vertical rock faces. Jake was standing on the rocky edge of the cliff in swimming shorts, perhaps twenty feet above the pool. The water was icy clear below him but the drop was narrow, with an overhang on both sides and slabs of jagged granite all the way down.

Izzy and I scrambled to our feet.

‘Jesus,’ Izzy breathed.

Even Russ sat up, squinting at the teenager perched on the rock face.

‘Teenagers,’ he said, with a hint of envy in his voice. ‘Think they’re bloody invincible, don’t they?’

Jake raised his fists in salute, like a boxer at the end of a fight. ‘Tombstoning, baby!’ he shouted.

Jennifer emerged from the trees behind him, her face a mask of anger and fear. ‘Jake!’ she shouted, advancing towards him. ‘Don’t you dare!’

I glanced down and realised, abruptly, that Ethan was holding his phone up, filming his brother.

‘What’s tombstoning?’ I asked, just for the sake of something to say.

‘Kids jumping off rocks,’ Izzy said quietly. ‘Normally into the sea.’

‘My God, he won’t actually jump, will he?’

The margin for error was very small. If he launched himself too far across he would hit the rocks on the far side; not far enough and he’d smash his back on the overhang below him. And even if he made the gap, he might break his legs on the bottom of the pool if it wasn’t—

Jennifer grabbed her son’s arm and hauled him back from the edge.

Chapter 27

27

Russ

Russ sneaked a look at his mobile while his daughter counted up their scores, scanning a handful of work emails and taking a quick look at the FTSE100: nothing too startling in the markets today.

Someone – some massive sadist – had included Hungry Hippos in the collection of board games at the villa. As every adult knew, Hungry Hippos was the loudest game ever invented, every round a frantic ear-splitting forty seconds of BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG, with plastic smashing against plastic as the players tried to get their hippos to gobble up more balls than the opposition. The noise was like a machine gun, a pneumatic drill – it was like putting your head inside a steel bucket and having people hurl golf balls at it, especially the frantically competitive way that Odette played. Russ still had painful memories of games against his daughter at 5.30 last Christmas morning, a truly catastrophic hangover making the noise sound as if someone had set off a string of firecrackers inside his skull.

Still, Odette loved it, and that was the main thing.

‘I have nine balls and you have twelve,’ she said sadly. ‘You win again, Daddy.’