As she spoke she glanced away from the road, a mannerism, not a way of looking at where we were going. I was tense all over, rigid with anticipation of some catastrophic accident in this hostile and unpredictable landscape. I wondered briefly: she spoke in code. Was I the ‘off-island 6/17’ she was with? An instrument on the dash revealed the outside temperature to be -24°C. Neither of us spoke to each other. I felt incapable of words. Frejah was obviously not entirely concentrating on her driving, but appeared relaxed and expert. Something else was coming through on the headset. ‘Ya, Harsent . . . no, I said no. Get it done.’

A few minutes went by, then she pulled off the headset and pushed it under the dash. Both hands back on the steering wheel.

Finally, she said: ‘You haven’t said anything since we left the city.’

‘You’ve been taking messages.’

‘There won’t be any more until I decide. I can catch up later. Or this evening. What’s on your mind?’

In fact, her hairline control of the car was what was on my mind. She exuded confidence, while I felt every muscle tensing.

I said: ‘If this is your car, what do you normally use it for?’

‘Watch this.’ She reached forward to one of the gadgets attached to the top of the dash. ‘See that truck coming towards us?’

In fact I could barely see it in the wintry haze, a dark shape in the distance ahead, lumbering up a long hill towards us. A head-up display flashed on to the interior of the windshield, almost like a three-dimensional image from virtual reality. It was a close-up of the truck. The licence number appeared superimposed brightly above the image, as well as the driver’s name, his address at work, his goods operator licence number, the current tachograph data, the quantity of fuel remaining in the tank, the weight and axle distribution of the payload. The truck was travelling at just above seventy kilometres an hour.

‘He has rear axle overload, and he’s using an unregistered turbo booster to get up the hill,’ Frejah said. ‘Want me to haul him over?’

She touched another device. The truck disappeared from the HUD, replaced by an apparently close-up image of the car in front of us, travelling in the same direction, still some distance ahead. While I looked at the new image the truck with the weight overload and turbo booster roared past us. It was emitting a stream of dark smoke. Frejah said nothing about that. The image of the car ahead revealed the same sort of information as had appeared for the truck, but in addition there was a space for a list of existing driving misdemeanours against the driver. In this case the driver was a woman (I learned her name and address), and she happened to have a clean record.

Frejah turned off the image.

‘You’re a cop,’ I said.