A few minutes before seven the first few people began to arrive, with a fairly even mix of wariness and enthusiasm, and by five past it was standing room only. As expected, the Old and New Sides had naturally drifted to different halves of the barn, and so the first thing Alice did was instruct everyone to find someone from the opposite side to them and say hello.

‘That’ll wheedle out the troublemakers,’ she whispered, eyes scrutinising the stilted interactions now taking place.

Once she’d called everyone to order and gone through some ground rules, most of which involved trying to prevent violence from breaking out, the first item on the agenda was to agree the purpose of the committee.

Alice nodded at the manager from the Old Side off-licence, who was waving his hand in the air.

‘Can you state your name and then make your point, please?’

‘DJ Vapes.’ He paused, glancing around to absorb the room’s admiration for his cool name before realising that it didn’t exist, and hastily carrying on. ‘Er, isn’t the purpose to rebuild the bridge? I thought that was obvious,’ he said, revealing a remarkable change of heart since he’d thrown Alice out of his shop.

‘Surely that’s only part of it?’ Ziva replied. ‘There’s no point rebuilding the bridge if the village is still divided.’

This elicited a murmur of approval.

‘Well, yeah, but we have to start somewhere,’ DJ Vapes said. ‘You can’t just tell people to get over it, forgive and forget and that’s that. We need a project like the bridge to get people working together again.’

‘We aren’t planning on building the bridge with our own bare hands!’ another man said.

‘Why not?’ an older teenager called, huddled at the back with a small group of similar aged boys. ‘Save us some money.’

‘Raising the money, applying for planning permission or whatever else needs doing, that’ll be where we work together,’ Ziva said.

‘How about a massive party on the bridge once it’s finished?’ a younger woman suggested, bouncing a baby on her hip.

Lots of people liked that idea, throwing out suggestions for local businesses to provide food and drink, and entertainment, maybe even to make it an annual event.

‘Okay, that’s all fantastic, just what we’re looking for,’ Alice yelled above the growing enthusiasm. ‘But we’ve got a long way to go before we can start thinking about that. I’d like to invite Malcolm Blackthorn, chair of the Ferrington Parish Council, to come and fill us in on some details.’

‘The Parish Council?’ several people asked, faces scrunched up in confusion. ‘Since when did we have one of those?’

‘Since the 1894 Local Government Act!’ Malcolm retorted, coming to stand beside Alice at the front of the barn.

‘Well, of course we wouldn’t know anything about it, if it’s run by Old Siders!’ a man who had ambled in ten minutes late snarked.

‘Jase!’ Alice warned. Jase opened his mouth and raised his hands in a ‘who, me?’ gesture. Despite the straggly nondescript hair and slouchy tracksuit bottoms, he oozed the kind of cocky charm that some women seem to find irresistible, and I could understand why Alice had been drawn to him.