‘Why youbeing so kind?’

‘I have no choice.’

‘Are you the Second Coming?’

‘Not quite.’ He smiled. It was an amazing smile, bursting from the golden beard like a crop circle in a cornfield, the eyes momentarily bright as sycamore buds. Then it was gone. He unbuckled his vomit-covered trousers, peeling them off to reveal thin, muscular legs and surprisingly garish orange boxers. ‘Hurry up; I need to get in that shower.’

The bath had sides slippy as oiled steel and the room kept moving around. No sooner had she wobbled upright than she fell back. He reached down to help her, but she slipped again, almost taking him with her.

‘Look away,’ she said, scrabbling to pull her own jeans off, which meant she could use them for grip to stand on. As she finally stepped out onto the crumpled towel on the floor, she swayed light-headedly, closing her eyes, fighting back another wave of nausea.

Two hands steadied her before a folded towel was pressed into her arms. ‘Well done. Now find dry clothes.’

Pax wasn’t sure how she made it into the bedroom, or how she discarded her top, but she realised she was just in her bra and pants by the wardrobe and the Viking was under the shower. She hoped he wasn’t a mad rapist, or a third member of Binkers’ gang carrying on the bet. She hardly cared. She’d been in much closer scrapes than this and survived. All she needed was sleep.

Making her way across the room to crash straight into bed, she fell over his bag, a stack of clean white T-shirts spilling out. It was a relief to unspring the wet bra and pull one on. What the hell. She wriggled out of her sodden briefs and dragged on what she took to be a pair of joggers. Familiar stitched suede patches settled against her knees, Velcro grazing her ankles. They were breeches.

At the bottom of the bag was a pair of shiny German riding boots.

Eyes drooping, but determined to stay conscious long enough to find his ID, she dug clumsily in the side pockets, locating only a battered paperback and a tube of sugar-free gum. In lieu of toothpaste, she crunched through one and then regretted it, stomach balling up in protest.

A black Puffa was thrown over the back of the chair. She weaved over to it, cannoning off the desk. In a pocket, she found a credit card and cash. She read her own name, Mrs Patricia Forsyth, and started in woozy surprise, forgetting that he’d picked it up when it had fallen from her jeans pocket in the bar. Well, he was welcome to steal her identity; she wasn’t going to have it much longer. And he’d be lucky to get anything out of the overdrawn joint account. He’d chosen the wrong victim to target tonight. And while he was washing off her DNA, she had him bang to rights. Not that she felt like calling the police.