‘Alice ... ma’am, see here ... I hope you don’t think I’m speaking out of turn but, well, I ... well ... I understand you were involved in an er ... well, an incident a few days back.’

‘Me?’ I frown. ‘No.’

‘Robbed I heard.’

‘Uh . . . no.’

‘Scared pretty bad too.’

‘Nope.’ I shake my head. ‘Not me.’

‘And well,’ he persists, ‘it made me feel all the worse for not paying you a visit sooner.’

‘Look it’s very kind of you, but it’s simply not tr—’ I stop as it finally occurs to me what he might be referring to. But how had he heard? I’d hardly mentioned it to anyone . . . well, except Benjamín, of course, who, as soon as I delivered the description of the dog, had sucked in his breath and put a hand to his jaw. ‘Mal de ojo’ he whispered awfully. ‘Mal de ojo.’

‘What is that? What do you mean?’

‘It is the evil eye. Is very bad, Alice.’ He looked shaken. ‘Very bad.’

‘It was just a dead dog, that’s all.’

‘Noh, noh . . .’ he said vehemently, ‘the mal de ojo causes illness, Alice . . . sometimes,’ his voice sank lower, ‘la muerte . . . death.’

However, I couldn’t see Benjamín as a confidant of Jeff Hogan so it must have been Sue, to whom Emmy had blurted out, ‘Mummy got burgled,’ as soon as we arrived at school yesterday, whereupon I’d been obliged to tell the whole story.

‘That’s too bad,’ Sue commented. ‘But you know, Alice . . . all this used to be theirs.’ She made an expansive sweeping gesture with her hand.

‘All what?’

‘Arizona, California, Texas, everywhere. It all used to belong to Mexico before we took it away from them. We stole from them, they steal from us.’ She dipped her head. ‘I believe it’s fair that they should take back what’s rightly theirs.’

‘Well I’m not sure you could argue that my half-pound of Cheddar and that jar of pickles were rightly theirs, but let’s not quibble about details.’

‘Alice,’ Sue said firmly, ‘did you know that our government has never even formally apologized to the Native Americans? Chaos will endure as long as there is no proper stewardship of the earth.’

Hogan waits, twisting his hat nervously through his fingers.

‘You’re talking about my shopping getting stolen, right?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ he says gravely.

‘Okay, well, yes,’ I concede. ‘But it was no big deal.’

Hogan shakes his head. ‘Mrs Coleman, you’re being brave and I admire you for it but, believe me, I know just how frightening these things can be.’

‘Really, Mr Hogan, it’s fine.’