‘Your brother told me about you,’ he said. ‘He said his sister was amazing. And a shrink. I said, that’s hard to believe, a good shrink.’

‘I’m not one,’ she said with her eyes closed.

‘Good to know. Shrinks are assholes.’

That’s true, Bea thought, she’d never met a psychiatrist she liked.

‘Be cool to be one, though, right?’ he said. ‘Right? Sticking those labels on you. Schizophrenia. Psycho-affective disorder. Psychosis. Dissociative disorder. Narcissistic personality disorder. Borderline personality disorder.’

She opened her eyes and tested the nerveless fingers of her right hand,

‘– on the border,’ he was saying. ‘You’ve got one foot in Mexico. You could still make it home. Want to know my personal favourite?’

He waited.

‘Want to know?’ he asked again, taking his eyes from the road. ‘Dysfunctional. This is a dysfunctional relationship. You have a dysfunctional family.’ He looked at her.

‘So?’ she said.

‘So? Functioning is a basic, Beatrice. Functioning is the bottom fucking line. Even the toilet at your brother’s fake hotel over there functions –’

He laughed. He was on a roll. He was free-falling, loving the sound of himself. She didn’t listen. She let her head fall against the door frame. She watched the reflections on the glass. She pictured Dan, lying beaten on the grass, by the hotel. She imagined the police finding him. The car swerved and lurched, in a rhythm.

‘It borderline functions, anyhow. Assholes –’

He stopped talking. Or else she couldn’t hear him. Her swelling eye was closing. She heard a rattle. It was a familiar sound, but she couldn’t place it. She opened her eyes and saw his hand in front of her, holding a plastic pill bottle.

‘You want something?’ He rattled it again. ‘I said, you want something?’

‘No.’

‘Make it easier on you.’

‘No.’

‘It’s your call. Your brother loved his pills, didn’t he?’ He whistled. ‘Said he wasn’t drinking then he drank. Said he wasn’t taking pills then he took them. You know I didn’t meet him in Paris, right? I lied, I’m sorry. I’ve never been to Paris. I met him in a bar. Not far from here, in fact –’

‘What are you going to do?’ she asked, to stop him talking about that. She didn’t want to know.

‘After this? Move on. New car. I’ll be sorry to lose this one,’ he said. ‘But hey, get another, right?’

He laughed out loud with the sudden realisation of his good fortune.

‘My God,’ he said, ‘I don’t even want to look. How much is in there? It’s like a fucking dream. A dream! It’s like it was meant, running into Alex. Real out-of-the-way place, too. It was just totally random.’