The Fairway Players’ Sleep Out
The Fairway Players’ Sleep Out
Kevin and Sarah-Jane MacDonald
Kevin
The second I saw you something clicked. An instant connection.
Nicky-Rose
Kindred spirits. Twin stars. Did she notice you were late in?
Kevin
No chance. She’s in her own world.
Nicky-Rose
Sure? Don’t want to cause drama. Same next Sunday?
Kevin
Sooner if you like.
It could be that they met to discuss work or the play but equally this could refer to a sexual liaison.
That might explain Kevin’s growing confidence in challenging Sarah-Jane, and also his insecurity over her describing Mark as attractive; he knows firsthand how easily affairs can start.
At the sleep out, Issy observes that Nicky-Rose sat with Kevin when SJ went home.
Then she sees Kevin escort Nicky-Rose to the door and speak with her in the foyer, a moment we now know is connected to an email NR receives from her former business partner, Trina Neale.
Lucas
On April 25 we see that Lucas is under pressure from both Amelia and Georgia.
Fran hints that the Stibsons had a rocky start to their relationship.
Fran works with former prisoners via a charity and as far back as January 3, in response to Kevin’s request that she doesn’t bring any more troubled characters to the group, she says:
Fran
A quick heads-up—on Monday, best not mention how we met, or about Lucas and his trouble.
The Stibsons are mid- to late twenties, which is young to settle down, but not too young to have been in trouble with the law, served time, and decided to make a fresh start.
Lucas is rumored to have worked in the City, despite being a club manager now.
Issy remembers him “high as a kite” during group counseling sessions.
Has he really left his checkered past behind?
Joyce and Nick are uneasy that Barry is working for Lucas.
Is it suspicious that Lucas doesn’t rush to his injured wife’s side until after the club closes?
Georgia
Lucas’s cousin is twenty, younger than the Stibsons, and if Issy is correct, is pregnant and hiding it from Amelia.
Various sources note that she was eating a lot, feeling sick, and that her jeans no longer fit (hence wearing pajamas all the time).
It seems she’s confided in Lucas, who is keeping Georgia’s secret; blood is thicker than water.
Amelia is clinging to the hope Lucas will ask Georgia to leave, or that Georgia will get a job and want to move out of what sounds like a crowded and difficult living situation.
They surely won’t be able to hide the truth for long, and Georgia will be even harder to evict.
The relationship between Georgia and Amelia has worsened over the course of this correspondence. Georgia refuses to go to the hospital with Amelia when she’s injured, nags Lucas to bring her a door key, and makes a joke about amputation, at a time when that was a real possibility for Amelia.
Amelia
One’s sympathy goes out to Amelia. She’s stuck.
Dependent on Lucas and won’t look for a job herself because she feels uneasy about Georgia’s presence in her home.
Her pleas for understanding have not so far resulted in Lucas taking action.
She confides in Fran, increasingly so, and then Issy, who accompanies her to the hospital.
The fact Amelia was asleep under the light when it fell emphasizes her run of bad luck.
Fran
Firstly, I would like to note the codependent relationship triangle between Fran, Amelia, and Lucas.
Fran is their counselor and mentor. They look to her for support, advice, and often practical assistance.
At first this appears harmless, but increasingly borders on inappropriate.
The word “meddling” comes to mind. These are grown adults and Fran has her own life and issues.
In her email to Reverend Josh on January 7 she says:
I want to help make positive change, but then find myself simply patching over the consequences of negative behavior, without impacting the underlying issues.
We can find ourselves sleepwalking into situations and before we have a chance to “wake up” the door slams and we’re trapped.
She is aware of the pitfalls of helping others, but it hasn’t helped her avoid them.
Then we come to her relationship with Reverend Josh, a married father of two young girls.
An affair might appear to be little more than exciting gossip, but the reality is that people get hurt, not least Fran herself, who finds Emma’s guided meditation about love to be overwhelming.
I’ve included a separate paragraph on this below.
Nicky-Rose
On April 25, in her email to Dustin, Carol Dearing observes that Nicky-Rose was likely depressed when she arrived in Lockwood:
There are times you only see the whole picture when you look back on it, not when it’s actually happening.
I know now that when Nicky-Rose first arrived she was depressed.
Something happened in Barbados and she has no intention of ever telling me what it was.
I suspect a love affair that fizzled out.
I hear her on the phone at night sometimes, talking about money.
The calls are so late they must be with someone in a different time zone.
I wonder if it’s about the house? Was she a joint owner with the chap who went to Indonesia?
And what happened to her share of the money?
Because one thing’s for sure, there’s none left now.
On February 11 Nicky-Rose tells Sarah-Jane:
Just want some FUN, SJ.
We’ve seen evidence of an affair between Nicky-Rose and her brother-in-law, Kevin.
Is this NR’s idea of “fun”? Is the newfound happiness Carol talks about the result of Nicky-Rose throwing herself into the play, or her affair with Kevin?
She wonders about her love life in Bridgetown, yet NR’s emails to her former boyfriend there, Stuart Kinsella, seem cordial, unlike her correspondence with Trina Neale.
Her first email dated June 17, 2024, says:
You have no soul, no light or life in you, and I wish that every imaginable horror and suffering, short of death, finds you and does its worst.
This initially felt like a reference to the financial “crimes” and document forgery that Nicky-Rose accuses Trina of. But the final email and its attachment—a newspaper cutting about a missing dancer whose return to her ship might have been forged—throws a new light on the Twin Star story.
Nicky-Rose appears to be a complicated character. We see her nurture a relationship with Issy, much to Sarah-Jane’s confusion:
Sarah-Jane
I mean why are you with Issy Beck? I told you what she’s like. She’s not your type.
Nicky-Rose
Maybe not when I was fifteen. Now I find the quiet, shy, awkward girls far more interesting. They watch and listen. And they’ll do anything for their friends.
We’ve already established that Nicky-Rose took documents from the company’s offices in Bridgetown and has hidden them in Kevin’s safe. Note Trina’s words in her email of January 4:
Every single document implicates YOU.
I have no suggestions as to how or why the owners of an entertainment company would be involved in the disappearance of a young woman.
Both Issy and Sarah-Jane notice that Nicky-Rose isn’t herself at the sleep out.
She seems engrossed in her phone, doesn’t have anything to eat, then leaves after midnight.
Carol catches her downstairs, still on her phone.
It can be inferred that she’s reading the newspaper clipping Trina sent about the Tiffany Ramirez case moving from a disappearance at sea to a disappearance in Bridgetown.
Isabel Beck
In some ways this is the same Issy we first met in 2018.
She’s shy, lonely, and socially awkward, prone to attaching herself to others.
She is especially attracted to those she sees as more popular than she is, regardless of whether that friendship is reciprocated.
Her childlike focus on herself is offset by her desire to help others, although I wonder how much of that is wrapped up in her longing to be noticed.
Having said that, she appears to have matured. She is now aware of her propensity to become obsessive and tries to recognize and understand that impulse for what it is. In her journal entry for April 26 she writes:
They told me in group that if I can sense I’m going back to my old way of thinking, I should remember how those feelings always pass. That means they aren’t real feelings, because if they were, they’d stay.
At the start of this case, Issy has already been obsessed with Fran and some of that interest in her remains, albeit laced with bitterness at having been rejected.
However, over the course of these months, we see her attachment transfer to Nicky-Rose until she claims to feel nothing when she looks at Fran.
Another development is the journal Issy uses to record her thoughts—a more acceptable way for her to express herself than the long, unsolicited emails she was wont to send in the past.
One thing that hasn’t changed is that Issy is a keen observer of others. Nicky-Rose made an excellent choice in enlisting her as an extra pair of eyes and ears. The question is, will she be able to keep Issy at bay, given what we know about her inclination to meddle in other people’s lives?
Fran and Father Josh
At one point, Father Josh rejects Fran’s attention. In his email on February 18, he says:
It’s always lovely to speak with you, but as much as I enjoy our chats, as parish priest I need to focus on what’s best for the wider church community.
That email is noticeably shorter than the others he’s exchanged with Fran, and he ends it by saying he looks forward to seeing her onstage during play week later in the year.
However, in the second batch of correspondence, we learn through the Walford family—who seem keen to get Nick together with Fran—that Fran deleted her dating profile months ago.
At some time between February and April 2025, Fran’s relationship with Father Josh was rekindled.
One can’t help wondering what happens next, now Issy has discovered Fran’s secret.
The falling light
Kevin chooses The Hollow partly because a murder takes place onstage.
Was what happened to Amelia an attempted murder?
Celia tells Kevin the light must have been sabotaged, because Joel would never leave a bolt loose or a chain undone.
If so, was Amelia the intended victim? If not, then who, and if so, why?
Charlotte
Wow. Thank you. Here are my thoughts.
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