The blue-and-red capsules he had taken from Ranch’s cabinet were in a vinyl side pocket of the wash bag, still wrapped in the same sheet of tangerine toilet paper. He had not looked at them since that afternoon in the Valley, though he had often brooded on them, their nearness inspiring dark and melodramatic thoughts. There were three of them – one slightly larger than the other two. Sex and death. Or nothing at all, nothing but a crooked doctor’s invention, or some story dreamed up by Ranch to amuse the girls, so that even now he was down there in the annexe with Rosinne and Jo-babe, laughing at how the soap-opera guy had fallen for his spiel. Shoulda seen his eyes pop! Man, he just wanted to eat them right there!

Yet something in the sheer improbability, the fantasticalness of it all, suggested to Larry that the pills were precisely what Ranch had said they were, and that somewhere in Las Vegas there was a man with the necessary lethal knowledge to prepare them. But whatever the truth of it, this was the perfect occasion to be rid of them, right now, as they flew over one of those dwindling zones of the planet nobody pretended to own. Yet even as he imagined them spilling almost weightlessly from some duct in the plane’s gleaming underbelly, he was watching his hands carefully wrap them again and return them to their pocket in the wash bag. They were an asset he was not yet prepared to relinquish. Soon, of course, very soon. But not yet.

Going back to his seat, he watched the film continue its run on a score of angled screens. There were bonnets and carriages, and English hills of surpassing loveliness. The gentlemen frowned at each other and bowed, while the ladies waited for secret notes to be passed.

Ella, her colouring book on her lap, her crayon held in the tenseless curl of her fingers, looked as though sleep had caught her very suddenly. Sister Kim smiled and nodded. Larry thanked her. Her smile widened.

‘I know what you are,’ she whispered. ‘At convent we have television too, sometimes.’

‘Will you say a prayer when we land?’ asked Larry.

She said that she would. ‘Jesus is pilot,’ she said.