He hadn’t expected that. It was so unusual, and strange-sounding, with the German accent in the ‘r’.

‘Frumpy?’

‘Frumpy? Yes, I think so,’ said Karen. ‘I think this is the word. Frumpy? For instance, not-fashionable?’

‘Right,’ said Dan, bemused and offended. ‘I don’t know.’

He thought of Bea, walking in from work in her jeans and green jumper, and telling him what she’d been doing, and that he often thought how brave she must have had to be all day, and how hard-working. She wasn’t a beauty until you got her clothes off. She could have made more of herself. She was quiet-looking. That these things were failings in the eyes of this ignorant snake-necked albino-lashed arsehole – Dufour asked him something, but Karen didn’t translate, she argued back at him, in rapid French.

‘What?’ said Dan. ‘What’s he saying?’

Dufour insisted. She turned back to Dan. Her voice was neutral, but the red spots had come back, like little rashes on her cheeks.

‘He says: did your wife go with black men before she met you?’ She couldn’t meet his eye.

‘No,’ said Dan, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. ‘I was her first.’

Karen translated. He felt sorry for her. She was clearly in a dilemma. Dufour spoke. Dan’s eyes were drawn to his face, he tried, but he couldn’t look away. Karen snapped something and Dufour hardly acknowledged her. His hair lay flat on his forehead. His hooded eyes held every insult.

‘He says: do you have a thing for white girls? And I am not happy to ask you this.’

Dan smiled. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said evenly. ‘You can tell him it depends.’

Karen passed this on, more embarrassed by the second.

‘What does it depend on?’ she said, quiet as a mouse.

‘Whether the white girls are multimillionaires,’ said Dan.

Her eyes flew to his face, appalled on his behalf.

‘You can tell him,’ said Dan. ‘The only white girls I go for are minted. My wife has a shit-ton of money. And luckily she likes black cock. Result. Right?’

He was calm, he didn’t give a fuck. Dufour got up and left the room. There was a pause.

‘Two minutes,’ said Luis, from his corner, in heavily accented English.

Dan and Karen sat, not looking at one another. His detachment had evaporated. His heart was pounding. He terrified himself. He’d thought he was fine.

Dufour came back into the room holding an A4 printout. It was a photograph.

‘Is this you?’ he said in English, holding it out to Dan.

The photograph was very poor quality: a CCTV image from a petrol station. There was a car at the pumps, which could have been Alex’s Peugeot, and two men walking across the forecourt. One of them was Alex – or looked like Alex – and the other was taller, and dark, the top half of the body was a smudge, or in shadow.