I’m beginning to think that for all its beauty there’s something mean-spirited about this part of the world. Maybe it’s to do with the land, with its jagged and sinister topography, maybe there’s a faction of the population that has become as twisted and burnt out as the trunks of the drought-ridden scrub oaks. Arizona is full of people who have drifted to the west for their own reasons: because it’s cheap, because it’s warm, because one day their trailer just broke down and they couldn’t afford to fix it. People come to Arizona from all over, crawling out of the skin of their old lives and growing a new, tougher one. Nevertheless for those who have jumped a rung on the ladder there seems to be a tendency to turn round awfully quick and take a kick at those scrabbling just behind them.

I turn the corner of the building and head towards the commercial dustbins where I’d parked the truck. Then with a small jolt of fear, stop. The setting ahead could come from a Hopper painting: the blandness of a deserted car park, the reassuring shine of a street lamp. A scene of everyday banality, yet one suddenly full of threat and menace. In the butterscotch truck, plainly visible, is the silhouette of a man. My eyes drop to the licence plates. There’s no mistake, it’s my truck all right. I stand still, unsure what to do, then slowly force myself to breathe out. People who mean you harm do not tend to sit behind the wheel of your car in full view. Your traditional psycho prefers to lie low, only making his presence known once you are driving through the back-water roads of no safe return. Besides, only two people left that meeting before I did and only one of them had been wearing a black cowboy hat.

Duval winds down the window as I approach.

‘Get in,’ he says pleasantly.

‘What do you mean, get in?’ I say, much less pleasantly. ‘It’s my truck!’

‘True,’ he says, ‘but I’m a lousy passenger.’

Slowly, I walk round to the other door, wondering whether this is a good time to resurrect my inner feminist or simply give in to curiosity.

‘Where’s your truck?’

Duval nods his head out of the window.

‘What?’ I identify his truck from the line-up of parked cars and squint at it. ‘Oh.’ The tyres are flat, all four of them. ‘Wow . . . what happened? Did someone slash them?’

Just as a blind man develops an enhanced sense of hearing, Duval compensates for his lack of words with an entire range of shoulder shifts and head movements, all of which are variations on the theme of shrug.

‘Nora?’ I persist.

‘Nora would never slash a tyre ... a throat, maybe, but not a tyre.’

‘She looked pretty angry to me.’