Bea sat up and dusted off her arms, looking down at the money. The plastic sleeves were wrinkled and reflecting. The money looked dreamlike. She knelt in front of it and eased a block from the top layer. Hundred-euro notes. There was another layer the same underneath. She pulled at the corner of the plastic envelope. It came off easily, and the slab of money slid out onto her palm. She sat there, holding it. It was about five centimetres thick, with a white paper band around the green banknotes. They were stacked so perfectly it was almost smooth-sided. She lifted it and smelled the metallic, inky smell, a cleaner smell than money usually had. She traced the silver strip with her fingertip and tilted it to the light, watching the rainbow colours of the hologram glint and change, like scales. She slipped the stack back into its sleeve and pressed it into place. She stared at it as her bruises came into focus, her sweat cooled, and the dirt on her skin began to itch.

Bea wiped the snake trap so the duvet wouldn’t get dirty, and sat on the bed with the money. There were three blocks lengthways, and four across, in three layers. Thirty-six blocks of hundred-euro notes. She couldn’t count how many notes were in a stack without breaking one of the paper seals but she guessed maybe two hundred. Two or three. So, each block was about twenty thousand euros. There was around eight hundred thousand euros on her bed. It was roughly equivalent to twenty years of her salary, or, for her father, petty cash. She should go and tell Dan. He was searching for nothing.

She put the flat of her hand on top of the money. She felt warmth and static coming off the plastic. It was as if it were alive. One banknote had value, you could buy things with it – food, clothes – but a box-full felt different. It had power. She should tell Dan. But she didn’t get up or call for him, she sat, looking at the money.

Once, when she was a child, her nanny had left her looking at the comics in the supermarket for a moment, to go outside and chat to a friend. She remembered standing there, as people walked past, happily waiting, and looking at Sylvester the Cat. Her eyes had drifted to the shelf above, to a newspaper, and a photograph of dozens of drowned cattle, lying in a heap. The dead cows were stacked, limp and bony, like unlit bonfires. The picture next to it was worse. She saw people wading through water, with a landslide of debris behind them that had been their homes. Shocked beyond words, Bea stared at the people, waist-deep in water, and at the dead cattle, and then looked around for help, thinking everyone walking past must be stopping and staring too.

‘What happened?’ she said. ‘Look.’