My heart pounds against my ribcage. The truck is at a standstill, its driver’s door open and serving as a partial screen for the figures standing behind it. Two men, one wearing a cowboy hat. They seem to be arguing over something and I realize there is a third figure between them, shorter – a woman, I think instinctively. I strain my eyes to see better in the half light. Yes, Duval and Benjamín, unmistakably, and whatever their argument they appear to be settling it. Duval gently pushes the woman over to Benjamín. She stumbles, but Benjamín catches her arm and, pulling a backpack onto his shoulders from the bed of the pickup, he pushes the woman quickly in front of him along the track to his cabin. I wait, still motionless, until Duval climbs behind the wheel and rolls off, then I turn and run back along the road, my head whirling.

What the hell were they up to? Drugs? Prostitution? Smuggling? But apart from tonight’s clandestine meeting, what was there tangible to go on other than the tension that has been building up in the town like a storm that will not break? It’s the Mexican workers with their whispers and veiled looks that have made me the most uneasy. It’s the fear of the boy with the cut finger. I close my eyes and remember touching him on the shoulder, my shock at the different face under that red baseball hat – and then something catches in my throat.

Back inside the cabin I check on the still-sleeping children, then scoop the packs of photographs from the kitchen drawer and lay them on the table, making a line for each individual worker. They’re all there, Black Jeans, Gold Bling, Bank of Texas T-shirt, Red Baseball Cap, stacked in rows like a game of patience, all as normal and familiar as can be, except, except . . . not.

I begin to feel sick. It’s not the fact that the faces of the workers have changed over the weeks. Builders come and go, different expertise is required, other jobs beckon. What’s making my stomach churn is that the clothes these different men are wearing have remained steadfastly the same.

‘Ola, Alice.’ Benjamín hovers in the doorway.

My eyes graze over the woman standing beside him. She’s short and heavy-boned, with a full mouth spread with red lipstick and a face directed at her feet.

‘This is Dolores,’ Benjamín says. Behind them the morning is hot, blue. The distant mountains blurred in haze. A bird is croaking somewhere near by. Upstairs the children sleep on. It’s Saturday today. No school, no Duval, no workers.

‘She is my cousin,’ he adds, hopping from one foot to the other.

Of course she is, I want to say; and please refer to the ‘Idiot’ tattooed on my forehead.

‘Alice?’