‘A stupid thing,’ he says, not wanting to admit the truth: he got too drunk and took his increasingly frustrated feelings out on a guy who didn’t, at the end of the day, deserve it. He’s furious with himself. But he feels lonely, too. He keeps thinking about Katerina taking his photo when he was down on the floor that way, how not-sorry she seemed about it. Why would she do that? She disappeared right after, so he couldn’t even call her out on it. He’d found his own way back to the hotel. He has the niggling feeling that he was set up or fell for a trick somehow, that Katerina invited him out with the exact notion of gaining information on him. It’s an awful thing to consider, but he’s sure he isn’t wrong.

‘Let me look at you,’ Evie says, reaching out for the ice pack. Duke pulls away.

‘It’s fine,’ he says.

Malcolm pulls a face and says, ‘Imagine if that nose is broken. We’ve got mere days left. So what, for the last scenes of the shoot he’s going to look like the Mummy, all bandaged up?’

Evie looks horrified. ‘Not to mention making sure you’re actually okay,’ she says pointedly, and Duke shrugs.

‘That’s showbiz, baby.’

They fuss around, all taking seats near each other until Duke sees Magda walk into the lobby too, arm in arm with a man who is staring at him. Duke stares back. The man lifts a hand.

‘Markus,’ he says. ‘We met in the snow blizzard.’

Markus? Duke realises with a drop of the stomach that it’s the guy from the service station that day. It feels like a lifetime ago. He’d thought Evie was flirting with him and iced him out, and then eventually had been able to have Evie all to himself, setting up for that date in the store cupboard … He steals a look at her. She looks away, too quickly for Duke’s liking. He needs to talk to her. Something has gone wrong, here – because of his own stupid ego – and he might still be able to rescue it from the gutter.

Clive is suddenly there, too, coming out of a side room where the cast and crew doctor sees people.

‘Jesus,’ he says, bandaged up from his fall earlier. ‘You look worse than I do, Duke. What happened?’

‘Off the record?’ Duke says. ‘I have no idea.’

Clive chuckles.

‘You okay, man?’ Duke asks.

‘Just about,’ he says, wincing. ‘Gotta say though, I think this was my last hurrah. My whole life flashed before my eyes as I fell down that mountain.’

Duke thinks ‘mountain’ is a bit of a stretch – it was a big hill at most – but doesn’t interject with as much.