‘I’ll be sure not to,’ I say caustically, only too aware of the curdle of bad egg still in my stomach. ‘And you are . . .?’

‘Duval,’ he says.

He is not what I am expecting. For some reason, I had Duval pictured as one of the guys who worked in the hardware store in Ague; a skinny, dungareed, mountain-biking type with fuzzy orange facial hair measured in yards and a cloth pouch of tools round his hips. Duval is not particularly skinny, neither is he young. Late forties at a guess. Unusually for Arizona, where it is de rigueur to sport one of three moustache types – the ‘walrus’, a droopy style popular with those on the road to baldness and generally accompanied by a ponytail; the ‘mariachi’, a neat cube which bristles proudly on the upper lip of many local Mexicans; or the ‘rodent’, so named for its resemblance to some large piece of marsupial road kill which has been peeled off the tarmac and reattached to the face with no particular attention to form, hygiene or aesthetics – Duval is clean-shaven. In fact he looks more like a cowboy than a builder.

A cowboy builder then.

‘Do you want some coffee?’ I open the door into the cabin.

Duval shakes his head no, but I go to make some anyway in an attempt to buy a little time. Outside the kitchen window icicles drip and melt, shadows fall across the rounded contours of snow-covered boulders. Duval lays his hat on the table. Underneath it, his hair is dark and flattened down with sweat. ‘These the plans?’ He pulls the scrolls towards him and smoothes them across the kitchen table with a dusty forearm. He studies them briefly, then, taking a pencil from his shirt pocket, crosses out the entire back section of the boarding house.

‘Feel free to write on those,’ I say dryly.

He continues without comment.

‘So you’re the Duval who did all the original renovations on this cabin?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You were contracted by the Toronto owners?’

He circles another section. ‘You’ll want to minimize grading here.’