Ed switched on the radio, rolling the dial between finger and thumb. There were one or two faint broadcasts, voices that were swallowed by topography and distance; but most of the time there was nothing but a heavy, colourless crackling. After ten minutes of trying, however, Ed picked up a tiny, remote voice which told him it was an emergency station, from Las Vegas, Nevada.

‘We hear that the President has recovered from his illness… and has returned to the White House to take charge of the crisis personally. We hear that several thousand people died during the past twenty-four hours from botulism… people who apparently considered the risk worth taking… And we also hear that Britain has flown two thousand tons of emergency supplies in to New York, against the express wishes of her fellow EEC members…’

They were driving now through South Pass, towards the Piute Mountains and the Mojave Desert. The heat was killing. Ed had turned the Chevey’s air conditioning to Max, but it was coughing and choking like a tuberculosis patient, and giving, out nothing but a stream of uncomfortable tepid air. Shearson was fanning himself continuously with the wagon’s instruction booklet, which he had discovered on the floor, and Peter Kaiser was sitting staring out of the window like Rodin’s Thinker on a bad afternoon. Karen, amongst the corned beef cans and the sloshing water, slept.

As they passed the Old Dad Mountains on their way to Ludlow, Ed saw a plume of dust coming up fast from behind. It grew nearer and nearer, and as it overtook the convoy, he recognised it as Dave Morton, in his borrowed Pontiac. He pulled over to the side of the road, and Dave Morton pulled up alongside.

‘You didn’t get back to Tucumcari?’ he shouted.

Dave waved his hands. ‘I got back there okay,’ he yelled.

‘Then what’s the matter? Why didn’t you pick them up?’

‘They were dead, all of them. Looked like they’d been sick or something. There was nothing I could do.’

Ed sat back in his seat. The vinyl was wet and sticky with cooled-off sweat. ‘Botulism,’ he said to himself. ‘One of those cans of food they were carrying must have been infected.’

Della held his wrist. ‘There was nothing you could have done about it,’ she told him, gently. ‘It’s a risk that everybody’s taking, right now. They took the risk, those people, and they lost. There’s nothing you can do.’

Ed stared at her, the muscles in his cheeks working with anguish. ‘Those people, as you call them, were the folks who made South Burlington what it was. Henry Carlsson. Mrs Tilsley. Keith Perks. Do you know that it was Mrs Tilsley who was the first person to tell me about the tooth fairy? And now what’s happened? She’d dead, in Tucumcari, New Mexico, of botulism. She wasn’t even allowed to die at home.’