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mile, maybe two miles away, but no more. The sea was choppy and there were no boats out there today. No one who could help me. I wasn’t a strong swimmer. I’d never make the distance. I probably wouldn’t make a hundred yards.
    I was trapped.
    I heard footsteps behind me and swung round as a sudden wave of panic hit me.
    It was Crispin. He approached gingerly. ‘Are you OK, Karen? We’ve got to hold things together.’
    He looked so lean and handsome, standing there in the wind, that my panic was replaced with a deep sadness. ‘Why did it all have to go wrong, Crispin?’ I sobbed, refusing to call him Cris like all the others did. ‘Why did we ever have to meet that bitch, Rachel?’
    â€˜Whoa, hold on. This isn’t about her.’
    â€˜It is. She’s infected everything. If she’d never been part of our group, you and I would still have been together, don’t you understand? We’d have travelled the world, got married. Had kids… Had a fucking life!’ The words were pouring out of me now. I no longer had any control over them. Over anything. ‘But instead it all went to shit. Someone killed her and it was never the same again, and I’ve been punished ever since. I lost you, and I married a man I didn’t love, and then, when I finally did have something beautiful in my life, I lost her too.’ I pictured Lily, with her round soft cheeks and infectious little laugh – only five months old when she died. ‘I lost my little girl, Crispin. My child. Haven’t I been punished enough already without all this?’
    As the knife I’d been holding all this time clattered to the decking, he took me in his arms and held me tight. ‘It’s OK, Karen,’ he whispered. ‘It’s going to be OK.’
    I wished he hadn’t called me Karen. I wished he’d called me ‘little chick’ or ‘baby’ or any of the other pet names he’d used when we were seeing each other. Karen seemed so formal. But I tried not to think about that and held him back just as tightly, my head buried in his shoulder, taking in his scent, soaking up our memories, allowing his presence to calm me.
    My sobbing stopped as the grief temporarily subsided. ‘What are we going to do, Crispin? We’ve got to find a way off this place.’
    He nodded. ‘I know, and we will. But first things first, we need to get back to the house. It’s dangerous out here.’ He looked around.
    â€˜It might be dangerous back there too. We left the back door open, didn’t we?’
    â€˜We’ve still got knives.’ He pulled his from his backpack. ‘And there are four of us and one of him, so the odds are in our favour.’
    â€˜What do you think’s happened to Charlie? Surely he can’t have done this?’ It was impossible to imagine a man like Charlie – out of shape from too much good living, and looking like Bertie Wooster in his silk pyjamas and slippers – deliberately severing the head of a woman who’d once been his friend, and using it to taunt us.
    Crispin took a deep breath. ‘God alone knows. Nothing would surprise me after what we’ve just seen. Come on, let’s go back to the house.’
    I could see the other two waiting on the beach, and I picked up my knife and walked back along the jetty with Crispin, pulling out my cigarettes and lighter from the sleeve of my hoodie and lighting up. Right now, I didn’t care who saw me smoking.
    â€˜I didn’t know you smoked as well,’ said Marla as we reached the other two. ‘Can I have one?’
    I didn’t know
you
smoked either,’ said Crispin, with a half-smile, aiming the comment at Marla, and once again I was uncomfortably aware of an intimacy between them. ‘All right,’ he continued, ‘back to the house, everyone, keep your eyes peeled and your knives out. As soon as we’re back