‘You’re hurt,’ she says, with what sounds like genuine concern.

‘You should see the other guy.’

She beams. ‘Oh, you’re a fighter.’ She puts her hand on my knee. ‘I like that. Strong, brave. A good man to have around.’

I hope her hand doesn’t move any higher. She’ll realise she doesn’t interest me. She’s not Thistle.

‘Are you nervous?’ she asks. ‘It’s okay to be nervous.’

‘A little,’ I admit.

‘It’s funny, isn’t it,’ she says, ‘what scares people and what doesn’t.’

‘What scares you?’

She sighs, a long stream of air from pursed lips. Even her breath smells sweet. Peppermint.

‘Intimacy,’ she says.

‘I used to have that problem.’

‘Really? Tell me, how did you overcome that?’

‘A woman kind of overcame it for me,’ I say.

‘Aha.’ She winks at me. ‘This woman. Is she still around? It’s all right if she is.’

‘No. I screwed that up.’ But maybe I can fix it. You’re the key.

‘I’m sorry.’ She squeezes my knee. ‘Don’t worry. You’ll find Sleeping Beauty very forgiving.’

We drive further and further east. Eventually the car crosses the border into Louisiana. The sign says: BIENVENUE EN LOUISIANE. Cindy takes a turn towards the dump.

‘Is this where she is?’ I ask.

‘No, sorry. This is just a precaution.’

She does exactly what she must have done with Biggs. We drive through the gate—it opens automatically for her car, like Gomez said—and she leads me over to the shipping container full of archive boxes. The one where I found Biggs’s blood.

He must have been nervous at this point. Maybe even getting scared. Wondering if he’d made a terrible mistake, one he couldn’t come back from.

Cindy unlocks the container with her own key. We walk into the darkness. She turns on the little desk light.

‘I need to borrow your phone,’ she says. ‘It’s a privacy thing. Sleeping Beauty is old-fashioned—she doesn’t like cell phones. We’ll come back here to pick it up, after. Okay?’

I wonder if Sleeping Beauty is Cindy’s alter ego. You can’t tell if someone is crazy just by looking at them, but the way the light casts a shadow across half her face, revealing only one unblinking eye, makes madness seem possible.

‘I left my phone at home,’ I say.

She smiles patiently. ‘Come on.’

‘For real,’ I say. ‘I don’t like being beholden to it.’

She holds my gaze, her pupil huge in the dark.

‘I have to check,’ she says. ‘Do you mind?’

I spread my arms and legs wide, like a frequent flyer about to get tested for explosives.

She slowly runs her hands up and down each of my legs, gently squeezing. Then she touches my arms, my chest, my hair, my back. Finally she cups my ass and my crotch.

‘I apologise,’ she says.