Duval had been born on a cattle ranch in New Mexico. His father was a tight-lipped but upstanding citizen who’d inherited the property from his own father, a conservative east-coast businessman who’d decided in a single act of spontaneity to take advantage of the free market and availability of public lands for the grazing of livestock in the west and headed there with his twenty-three-year-old bride. Every skill Duval truly valued he learned from the cowboys, both Mexican and English, who worked on the ranch. He had these old boys to thank for being immensely practical with his hands, for breaking in a colt, speaking Spanish; but he told me later that everything he learned about fighting he taught himself. He’d been schooled locally and post-college had applied to the University of California, which he got into on the quota system before spending a year cowboying down in Mexico – more than anything to escape his father’s overbearing personality.

Mexico changed him. Its utter corruption, its relentless poverty. Disenchanted with the greed and privilege of developed America, his sympathies lay increasingly with the people of its peripheral borders. Once he was in college their faces came back to him like black and white photographic stills. Farmers in the strawberry fields. Indian women on street corners. Children sleeping under blue tarpaulins. He wrote to Estella as a form of absolution for the first love affair, the one that carries so many hopes and expectations but eventually comes down to the memory of innocence lost – a feeling of guilt for promises made and forgotten. He’d never known for sure whether she received it until the day he’d walked into that INS office and found himself face to face with the small Mexican with the broken jaw who’d stared at the floor as Duval read the fading piece of paper. He’d never known about his son until Benjamín raised wary eyes to his. ‘You help me,’ he’d whispered, ‘and I will tell you about the child.’

I shake myself. The house has been quiet for a long time. Downstairs, I open the oven and haul out the heavy skillet. A shoulder of pork has been slow-cooking all day. Underneath the lid, the liquid bubbles gently. The fat from the meat has melted into the juices and the onions and chillies have caramelized at the bottom of the pan into a sticky delicious gunge. Dolores’s puerco con chiles poblanos. I put it back in the oven and look out of the window in the direction of the schoolroom where the workers would also be hungrily waiting for their food.

Estella’s story had been harrowing, shocking. I had so many questions, but it hadn’t seemed like the right time. I’d turned the horse away from the grave, not knowing what to do, what to feel.

‘What is it that you want from me?’ I’d asked Duval.

‘Fair warning.’

‘For what?’