“Listen, Camilla—”

“Don’t ‘listen Camilla’ me, give me my phone, you thieving cow! I should’ve known better than to let myself be talked into this ridiculous break. To think it was me who persuaded Greg that you were a reasonable, rational person who could be trusted to rent his property. Never again.”

“I’ve hidden your phone outside, you won’t find it in here. I’ll return it when you’ve told me what I want to hear.”

She screams and storms out the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

I open it and follow her downstairs. The door to her bedroom is wide-open. The chair I was sitting on lies on the floor.

Camilla is clutching her car keys. “If you won’t give me my phone, I’m still getting far away from you.”

“You’re drunk,” I say.

“I don’t care,” she says.

“Do you want to hurt someone or worse, potentially kill another person? Are you trying to get yourself sent to prison? Think of Louise, think of someone else other than yourself for a change.”

“I need to get away from here.”

“Let’s go for a drive. I’m insured to drive other cars. You tell me what I want to hear. I’ll give you back your phone as soon as we’re done.”

She stares. She really is quite drunk.

“You gave me such a fright creeping into the bathroom like that,” I say. “I might need to be close to a hospital to get the baby checked out. I’m feeling a bit panicky, suddenly a bit too cutoff from everywhere.”

It’s not a complete lie, I did feel a twinge of pain as I walked downstairs.

It does the trick.

“Let’s get in the bloody car then. But I want my phone.”

“As soon as we get back, I promise.”

We both climb into her car. I have to adjust the seat and move it quite far back so that I can fit in behind the steering wheel. Luckily, her car isn’t dissimilar to Stuart’s, which I’ve driven on occasion. I press Record on my phone (for what it’s worth) and place it down by the side of the driver’s door, out of her reach, then adjust the rearview mirror.

It’s now dark. I drive down the empty lane, properly aware for the first time just how isolated the moor is and how easy it would be to get lost.

“I’m listening,” I say, to give Camilla a prompt.

She looks as if she might pass out asleep. It’s definitely not what I need her to do.

It’s eerie, surrounded by darkness, apart from the headlights. I reach a crossroads. Left or right? I opt for right. Camilla stares out of the passenger window into nothingness.

“All right. We killed Charlie accidentally on purpose. Is that what you want to hear?”

My legs go weak. “Go on.”

She tells the same leaving-the-party story I’ve now heard before, followed by the taking-of-the-boat one.

“Charlie and I had a fight.” She speaks in a monotone. “Over you. He wanted to go back and find you. He said lots of vile things to me, he had a real mean streak. We fought. He wanted to turn the boat around, he threatened to jump overboard and swim back to shore. He wanted to tell you the truth about us, tell you he was sorry. I mean, who did Charlie think he was? He let me believe that I was special, that you and he were all but over. Then, out in the middle of the bloody ocean when we’re off to romantically watch a sunset, after he’d let you storm off as if he didn’t have a care in the bloody world and after I’d risked our friendship, he does a complete about-face. I didn’t deserve to be treated like that! Nina started yelling at me, too, saying that she’d been put in a shitty position. Like it was all about her! Charlie stood really close to the edge. Nina yelled at him to step back.”