I knew she was right. Just as I also knew that she had little savings … and I only had maybe fifteen thousand left in the retirement fund I was endlessly dipping into whenever the Uber money didn’t go far enough to cover all our bills.

‘I’ve got my passport with me,’ Klara said. ‘We need to go somewhere and sleep. We need to get rid of these clothes and buy new ones. Then if you can get me to LAX I can get a flight somewhere out of America.’

‘Where will you go?’

‘I’ll decide that tomorrow. You should come with me.’

‘No passport.’

‘You might want to get one now. Fast.’

Though still in deep shock, Klara was now going into that rational mode of hers. She was trembling. She sobbed when she spoke. But I could see she had her mind set on an exit strategy – and I was determined to get her out of the States as soon as possible.

‘I don’t think I should turn on my phone,’ I said.

‘Nor mine. We should get off the interstate. You think she had navigation installed in the car?’

‘She never said.’

It suddenly struck me that we were talking about Elise in the past tense.

Klara began to play with the touch screen in the center of the dashboard. She tapped away, telling me she was going to find a route that avoided all highways.

‘If Kelleher or the cops or anyone else is looking for this car they are going to be setting up a dragnet on the main roads. On reflection maybe we shouldn’t head back just yet to LA. Maybe I should fly out of San Francisco.’

‘Okay then. Back roads to San Francisco. But I’ve been up for too many hours. And you didn’t sleep much …’

‘Didn’t sleep at all.’

‘We need to pull over and crash,’ I said.

‘But if some backwoods cop sees our car parked on the side of the road – and the blood all over us …’

‘You have less on you than I do,’ I said, seeing that it was just Klara’s T-shirt that had the remnants of Amber’s terrible wound. ‘If we could find something to cover all that … and a motel where you can drive right up to the rooms …’

‘Pull over for a moment.’

‘Why?’

‘There’s a big junk car lot over on the right. I need to get rid of the gun.’

Indeed there was one of those graveyards for rusted and abandoned vehicles on the side of the road. I stopped in front of its entrance. It was chained. There was one of those playground fences around it. Though it was pitch-dark we were lucky that there was moonlight tonight. Klara made a quick tour of its perimeter.

‘No camera surveillance. And no barbed wire. Then again who would want to steal junk cars?’

‘You’d be surprised.’

‘I’m going over.’