He wanted her to be curious and ask him about Alex. She wouldn’t. She didn’t need to know. She didn’t want to be the one to invite him to relive it. She wouldn’t give him that. She looked out of the window.

‘So guess how much I paid,’ he said. ‘Guess.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Bea.

‘C’mon, guess.’

That’s got to be sixty grand’s worth of car, Dan had said, looking out at the BMW from the window of the hall. She shifted to make her collarbone grate, so the stabbing pain would take her feelings.

‘C’mon,’ he said. ‘Ballpark.’

‘About sixty?’ she answered from her pain, anaesthetised.

‘Nice guess,’ said his distant voice. ‘I’m impressed.’

‘Was I right?’

‘Almost! It was sixty-four three-fifty. It’s a very high-spec vehicle. Alex had a hundred with him.’

She imagined Alex, freed up by alcohol, telling Russ all about his hotel in the bar – she couldn’t remember the name of the bar. She couldn’t remember where the police had said it was. Oyonnax. The Bar Jeanne. In Oyonnax. Or Justine. Alex would talk, trying to impress Russ with his hotel, and how Griff had sent him on a secret mission. She shifted her feet on the carpet. She felt the lightness of the empty plastic bottle in her hand. She went back to her pain.

Cars passed with faces in the windows. They could not see her behind the tinted glass.

‘You know we can’t relax yet, right?’ he said.

‘What?’

‘We’ve got to get clear first.’

He examined the satnav on his phone, held down beside the seat, so she couldn’t see. It seemed pathetic to her, as if she had any way to stop him. He must feel very weak.

‘Almost there,’ he said.

She drifted. She saw the BMW on the road from high above, one car, zigzagging on the network of roads, and then all the other thousands and millions of cars, ants in a maze, blind and intent. She saw Alex, driving back from Switzerland. She saw herself and Dan, waiting to meet the police outside the Hotel Paligny. Sitting on the steps.

The sun was low in the sky behind the car. It cast golden light onto the rising slopes. The road climbed and curved ahead into the Jura.

‘I’d like to see more of the Alps,’ Russ said.

On either side of the road, tidy houses like children’s models were dotted over the foothills of the mountains, and thick pine forests crowded the ridges, and poured in swathes down the empty slopes. The grass was very short, everywhere, like AstroTurf. The land grew wider and bigger. Mist gathered on the high ground to their left and the narrow roads wound on and climbed up into the mountains. Bea had begun to shiver, her joints stiffened around their damage. She felt sleepy.