The road from Fall River Lake leads down to Fall River itself, and joins up with the east-west highway which runs through Keighley and Augusta and back into Wichita. But it’s a wiggling series of hairpins, through rocks and pines and deceptive tunnels of light and shade, and the thin strip of blacktop is patchy, uneven, and often cambered the wrong way.

Ed glanced in his mirror as they sped beside the lake. Through the frosted rear window, he could see the flash of headlights as the Chevy wagon came after them. He said to Della, breathlessly, ‘They’re right in back of us. Why don’t you try to pick them off when we take the next right-hand curve?’

Della shook her head.

‘Why not?’ yelled Ed. ‘They’re trying to kill us!’

‘Maybe they are, maybe they’re not,’ said Della. ‘They’re trying to catch us, more than anything. But I don’t like to shoot at people unless I really have to.’

Ed lost his concentration for a moment, and the Lincoln barely made it around a long left-hand curve, its tyres screaming in a falsetto harmony that went on and on, until Ed couldn’t believe that he was going to be able to hold on to the car any longer. He was plastered in sweat by the time the road took a twist in the opposite direction, and they were driving downhill through a shadowy archway of pines.

He checked the mirror again, and the lights of the Chevy Suburban were still behind him, although further away now. Nobody in their right mind would have taken a curve at that speed on purpose.

‘Listen,’ said Ed, as he piloted the Lincoln down a fast slalom of alternating bends, ‘They’re chasing us, they’re shooting at us, and you don’t think you really have to shoot back?’

‘I want Peter Kaiser alive,’ said Della. ‘He’s going to be a material witness to this fraud, and he’s more susceptible to legal pressure than Shearson Jones.’

In the back of the car, lolling from side to side as the Lincoln howled around curve after curve, Shearson Jones said, ‘So that’s who you are, my gingery angel. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, incarnate. No wonder they gave me such a cock-and-bull story about you when I asked them to check you out.’

Della twisted around in her seat. With her loosely-tied emerald-green bathrobe and her upraised pump-gun, she looked like some kind of comic-strip Dragon Lady, all silk and cleavage and sawn-off rifle. As he glanced across at her, it occurred to Ed, noi for the first time that night, that she must be naked under that wrap.

‘You know something,’ he said, as he spun the Lincoln through a steep-sloping S-bend, ‘this must be the craziest night of my life.’