Almost there. Donna Culpepper looked ahead to her destination and her destiny, the top of Beachy Head, the great chalk headland that is the summit of the South Downs coast. She’d walked from where the taxi driver had left her. The stiff climb wasn’t easy on this gusty August afternoon, but her mind was made up. She was thirty-nine, with no intention of being forty. She’d made a disastrous marriage to a man who had deserted her after six weeks, robbed her of her money, her confidence, her dreams. Trying to put it all behind her, as friends kept urging, had not worked. Two years on, she was unwilling to try any longer. Other ways of ending it, like an overdose or cutting her wrists, were not right for Donna. Beachy Head was the place. As a child she’d stayed in Eastbourne with her gran and they came here often, “for a blow on the Head” as Gran put it, crunching the tiny
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