There was a reason we’d gone through all this. Dolores had only just arrived for work when the familiar white patrol vehicle had driven up the track to the cabin. I stopped at the window, relieved Winfred would have news of Duval. It was three days since breakfast in the M&M and there had been no word from either Duval or Benjamín since. But it hadn’t been Winfred adjusting his shades and hat in the wing mirror of the patrol truck, but Emilio Chavez. For a short moment I stared at him in surprise, then I bolted down the stairs to the kitchen.

Dolores was dreaming at the stove, her head in a cloud of cinnamon and chillies. The whole cabin was steamy with the visceral smell of frying meat.

‘Quick!’ I’d whispered and she turned in alarm. ‘Go upstairs. Hide! ¡Escóndete!’ But she merely shrank against the counter and it wasn’t until I’d uttered the magic word ‘migra’ that she straightened up and her limpid brown eyes began to churn with fear.

A few minutes later Emilio Chavez was sitting at the table and I was wondering whether this was a social call, or something more sinister. I bustled round the kitchen as noisily as possible, crushing coffee beans, clanking mugs in and out of cupboards, worried that at any moment Dolores’s not inconsiderable body mass might induce a telltale crack in the ceiling boards, and knowing that with both children at school any noise coming from upstairs might be construed as suspicious.

Chavez had been meaning to come for some time. He wanted to be sure we were okay.

‘Yes, of course we are. Why wouldn’t we be?’

‘Alice, there has been an incident on the border.’

My heart started beating a little faster.

‘Yesterday we received a tip-off. A truck, abandoned in the desert. We quickly dispatched officers with water and medical supplies.’ Chavez shrugged wearily. ‘It’s always this time of year, with the temperatures rising, that these “trucks of death” are found.’

I nodded. I’d read about this in the papers. Mexicans abandoned by their smugglers. A dozen, fifteen people left to die of heat exhaustion and suffocation. ‘In this case, though, there were only two individuals locked inside,’ Chavez said.

I started to feel sick. ‘Who were they?’

‘Smugglers. A coyote and his driver.’

Benjamín and Duval. I stared fixedly at a knot of wood on the table’s surface. Why else would Chavez have come?

‘Were they . . . dead?’ I could hardly bring myself to say it.

‘Dead?’ He sounded surprised by my concern. ‘No. In need of water? Certainly.’

I raised my head to find him looking at me keenly.

‘Are you okay? You’re very pale.’

‘Yes, sorry, it’s just a little hot today. So what happened?’ My heart was still beating at 78 rpm instead of 33.