His eyebrows shot up and in the moonlight she was sure he gave her a tiny complicit wink and a nod of his head – nothing that anybody else would ever have caught, but magnified by their twin telepathy. At that moment he was the spitting image of their father, how Meredith remembered him on the sidelines of her numerous races at sports day, smiling a smile just for her, not jumping up and down and almost aggressively urging her towards the finish line like the other dads did, but a calm, encouraging presence that gave her that final burst of strength – that helped her to give it her all; to not quit, to stay focussed on the goal.

And now Pete was giving her that signal.

This was it.

She was about to turn and run at Caitlin and Graeme, yelling, hoping that the element of surprise would give her that split-second advantage, but before she did, Pete suddenly groaned, stopped walking and collapsed on the roots of the pine tree they’d been passing beneath, lying motionless. Everything in Meredith instinctively wanted to run to him – but then she remembered the wink. He’d done it on purpose as a distraction.

Graeme was slightly behind Caitlin, holding the torch. Caitlin’s arm – the one holding the gun – dropped very slightly as she exclaimed with surprise.

‘Oh, for—’ she began irritably as Meredith spun a hundred and eighty degrees on her heel and charged her, holding up the curved tool like a claw, screaming a banshee-like howl and launching herself at her, stabbing blindly with the claw until she saw the gun slip out of Caitlin’s hand. Caitlin too sank to the ground, growling with pain and fury.

Meredith and Graeme simultaneously lunged for the gun, but luck was on Meredith’s side – it had dropped very slightly closer to her than to Graeme. She was able to grab it and aim it right in Graeme’s face, stopping the confused, angry man in his tracks.

Graeme and Caitlin must have both assumed that they would meet no resistance from the twins, Meredith thought; that she would be just as fearful as she’d been the time before in the van. A moment of triumphant adrenaline surging through her as she backed away towards Pete’s prone body, to get out of reach of Caitlin’s arms, where the woman lay flailing like an upended turtle.

In the moment before Graeme switched off the torch, Meredith saw that Caitlin was covered in blood: face, chest, head. For a moment she couldn’t believe that she had done this; she didn’t remember being that frenzied, but the preceding moments had been a blur of rage and self-preservation. She’d floored her, and it felt good.