I didn’t answer because it was obviously a rhetorical question and she was going to tell me. ‘They come in the billfolds of tourists,’ she said. ‘Maybe not much at a time – a dollar here, a ten-dollar bill there, maybe twenty dollars cashed for chips in a casino right here on Campanilla. But there are one hell of a lot of tourists, Kemp, and the dollar bills stack up.’

‘How high do they stack on Campanilla?’

‘Oh, brother,’ she said. ‘This place is real popular with Americans. Ten flights a day from Miami. In a year they leave behind maybe thirty million dollars in bills. Is that a high enough stack for you?’

I was surprised. I hadn’t thought it would be that much, probably because I hadn’t thought of it at all. Now that I did, I could see that it was probably true. Given enough of a tourist flow from the States, and given that every tourist had a few dollar bills in his wallet, then the dollars had to accumulate somewhere. I knew the Americans had a law about how much US currency could be taken out of the States – I had a feeling it was $100 a head – so Bette’s estimate of $30,000,000 would require just 300,000 tourists a year. The reality was that Campanilla had more than twice as many American tourists as that. Bette’s estimate could be low.

‘So that’s where your twelve million dollars are coming from,’ I said.

She was getting excited. ‘Imagine it. Twelve million bucks in currency. They can’t record all those goddamn numbers – in fact, I know they don’t. Singles, five-spots, ten-spots, twenty-spots – all spendable and untraceable.’

I said casually, ‘How are you going to hoist it?’

Maybe I was too casual; maybe I should have joined in her excitement. She became wary. ‘That’s my business,’ she snapped. ‘You don’t need to know.’

But she needed a plane, and that was a clue of sorts. What was Salton’s plane to be used for? The getaway? Perhaps. But it was still here at El Cerco. I had heard the engines and it hadn’t taken off, so it was still here. How were they going to transfer twelve million dollars to Salton’s plane while it was still at El Cerco?

Jill said, ‘So you killed my husband just for money.’ Her voice was dead.

‘Just for money,’ said Bette. ‘You can say that nice and easy, can’t you? Money doesn’t mean anything to you because you’ve never been without it. You ever wanted anything, you said, “David, dahlin’, I want a fur coat, a diamond bracelet, a new sports car.”’ She did a bad parody of an English accent. ‘And then David would say, “Sure, honey, just pick out what you want.” You had everything a woman could want. So don’t look at me with those freezer-green eyes and say “Just for money”.’