For Belle the pain was well worth the extra publicity it would generate for a cause dear to her heart, enabling her to support it publicly without raising any questions about why she cared so much.

Knowing that she was the one pulling the strings didn’t take the sting out of her thigh, though. And out here, in the rarefied air of the mountains, spending her time with people who’d financed themselves, who were doing it without any of the publicity circus that inevitably surrounded a breakfast show queen putting herself at the sharp end of fund raising, she was beginning to feel like a fraud. The kind of celebrity who’d do anything to stay in the spotlight, the kind of woman who’d put up with anything to stay in a hollow marriage, because without them she’d be nothing.

She pushed away the thought and said, ‘If you think this is about the children, rather than ratings, Claire, you are seriously overestimating the moral probity of breakfast television.’

It was the ratings grabbing report-to-camera straight from the day’s ride-the never-less-than-immaculate Belle Davenport reduced to a dishevelled, sweaty puddle-that the company wanted and the media were undoubtedly relishing. Why else would they have sponsored one of their own to come along and take pictures? But after a week it seemed that honest sweat had got old; now they wanted blood and tears too.

Today they’d got the blood and no doubt that was the image that would be plastered over tomorrow’s front pages and, when she got home, she’d shame them into a very large donation to her cause for that.