‘But we can get a later flight, or go tomorrow … next week, even!’

‘Babes, don’t you see?’ Judith carried on. ‘My mother’s gonna need looking after. There’s no way I can leave her.’

Lana sighed. ‘It just feels so … I dunno … final.’

Judith hugged Lana tight. ‘You and Catrin, you’re gonna have a brilliant time. And I want at least ten postcards, OK?’

Lana nodded, too choked up to speak. The trip they’d been planning so meticulously for a year had been smashed apart in a matter of minutes. It was all so unfair.

‘Come on,’ said Gareth quietly. ‘You better let Catrin know.’

There was no point in saying any more. Lana nodded and climbed back on to the bike, clinging to her boyfriend even harder now, for comfort.

4

Judith

According to the ambulance team who’d brought her in, Patricia Harris had been found collapsed on Coed Celyn high street at ten o’clock that morning. Walking home from her shift in the kitchen of the Sandringham Hotel, she’d ‘felt this overwhelming pain in my arms and chest and thought oh God it’s happening again.’ The ambulance arrived within minutes of a passer-by calling 999 from the shoe shop outside of which she’d fallen, and when the paramedic did the usual medical-history interrogation, Mrs Harris had explained she’d suffered three cardiac arrests over the past ten years. So the chances were this was no ordinary fainting or low-blood-sugar incident.

‘Stay with me, darlin’, will you?’ Patricia had begged Nolly, the student nurse. ‘Just until my family get here.’

Nolly hadn’t dared say no. She found Mrs Harris to be both terrifying and fascinating: a fifty-one-year-old white female, a little below average height at five foot three and a little above average weight at ten stone two, attractive in a jaded, defeated sort of way – with a face that had definitely seen better, sexier days. The grey roots of her far-from-natural auburn hair were defying the home-kit colour she so rigorously applied each month, peeping through her scalp as if to say, You can’t escape us, lady! Her make-up was dated: a heavily shaded top lid and false eyelashes that appeared to have been recycled several times. Her lipstick looked like it had started the day a frosty peach, and the deep-red varnish on her nails was tired and chipped. She reminded Nolly of the 1960s lampshade in her grandmother’s best room.

But her main fascination with Mrs Harris came from the fact that the doctor could find nothing wrong with her, even though the patient insisted she was dangerously ill. After carrying out an ECG, and checking her blood pressure and oxygen levels, there was no sign whatsoever of any problems with her heart. So Patricia was told to take it easy and visit her GP if she felt unwell again. She complained that she couldn’t stop shaking and would someone please find her a wheelchair as she feared she may collapse if she tried to walk.