Bye-bye, Kim old girl.

Fine. So it was pretty much over by then anyway. My fault. My fault. I had contracted the virus of cynicism. It’s a kind of flu of the soul. It fed on me like a cancer. It hollowed me out. It finished me off. Because there was no agenda. I was a pragmatist. I wasn’t political. I didn’t … I didn’t feel that stuff (the heart, the gut, the soul) so much as want to … Let’s put it this way: I was a surfer. Just a surfer. I was never the wave.

But now I’d been voided. I was a blank. I’d been silenced. I had no means … no way of getting the information out there. It wasn’t even as if I cared about the information, as such (no agenda, remember? No great battle between right and wrong, no sense of a profound moral and political injustice having been done), I just cared that I couldn’t … had been … was straitjacketed, was disgraced. I was helpless. Helpless. I just wished there was some way of … a means to … some way to reach out and … and share what I knew with the world. Not because I needed to … but just because I … because I …

Who knows?

Vaquero is actually a transliteration of cow man. Not cow boy (note). Cow man. I told Mr Pemberton this as I clambered to my feet and brushed myself off.

He seemed astonished that I was unhurt. In truth, I was quite astonished. Not so much as a scratch on me! And my suit – apart from a tiny tear on the seam of a pocket – was fine.

I went on to tell Mr Pemberton how the cowman had been rendered obsolete, virtually overnight, by the invention of barbed wire in 1873. I said, ‘It was the New Mexican equivalent of enclosure. You know – when the British landed gentry eradicated the right for peasants to graze their livestock on common land?’

‘I do know what enclosure is, Mr Huff,’ Mr Pemberton assured me. Then he apologized for speeding. Then I apologized for kissing Miss Hahn. I tried to explain, once again, how I wasn’t … it wasn’t … I’d just been trying to stop her from … from talking. He seemed to find this strange. He said, ‘I thought you wanted Miss Hahn to talk.’

I said I was beginning to suspect that I had developed a series of unconscious phobias in relation to Miss Hahn and the book. That being around Miss Hahn made me feel a deep sense of panic. I also said that the secret she’d told me was about the four digits – the 4.0.0.4 – not about … well … and that I would treat the information that he had shared with me – about her ‘relationship’ with Bran Cleary – with great sensitivity and discretion.

He responded to this statement in an emphatic manner (arm waving, reddened cheeks etc.) but was rendered inaudible when a nearby bird-scarer started to quick-fire, indiscriminately. He suggested (a series of hand gestures) that we climb back inside the van. I refused. I said – in as polite a way as I possibly could – that I would never knowingly get into a moving vehicle with him again. Not ever. I then added that I didn’t intend this to be a criticism of his driving, per se. But I think it was obvious that this is exactly what it consisted of. A devastating criticism of his driving. Per se.