He turned to Della. ‘Are you really FBI?’ he asked her. ‘Or are you something else ? Somebody else altogether?’

‘What do you think?’ asked Della. ‘Would I have taken the trouble to blackbag a whole lot of Shearson’s papers – would I have taken the trouble to keep Shearson and Peter Kaiser prisoner – would I have done any of the things I’ve done since you’ve met me, if I wasn’t?’

‘How the hell should I know?’ Ed asked her.

‘Listen,’ Della told him, touching his arm. ‘I’m only interested in keeping Shearson and Peter Kaiser in custody until I can turn them over to the Bureau. I’m only interested in helping us all to find a safe place to hide out until this rioting and raiding is all over. That’s all. You can trust me, Ed. I mean it. You can genuinely trust me.’

Ed didn’t answer. But after a long while, he let the Venetian blind fall back into place, and he wiped the dust from his hands on the sides of his jeans.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘If you say I can trust you, then I will. But if you do one single thing to jeopardise any of the people in this convoy of ours – if you make one single wrong move – then I’m going to have to ask you to leave the group and go out on your own. You understand that? What I’m saying?’

Della leaned forward a little and kissed his cheek. The soft heaviness of her breast pressed against his arm. He could smell the particular fragrance that wasn’t perfume or soap, but just woman.

‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘I know what you’re saying, but I won’t let you down.’

‘Now,’ said Ed, ‘I want to go look for Season and Sally.’

*

The winding road up through Topanga Canyon took them on a journey of funereal fantasy – as if their convoy of wagons was wending its way through the black recesses of a mortician’s nightmare.

All the grass and all the trees had been burned to ashes, so that on either side of them they could see nothing but twisted stumps that had been reduced to charcoal, and vegetation like crumbling grey hair. The north-east wind had blown the debris across the road, so that their tyres ground and scratched on the asphalt, and threw up clouds of ash and grit.

The smell was overpowering. A strong, sour stench that blew in through their air-conditioning vents and seemed to cling to their clothes. Now and then, they drove through a thick drift of smoke, and that started them coughing, and irritated their eyes, and by the time they reached Mulholland Drive, Shearson Jones was caught in an uncontrollable fit of wheezing and gasping.

‘We’re going to have to turn back,’ insisted Peter Kaiser. ‘Ten more minutes of this and the senator’s going to asphyxiate.’