At Griff’s insistence, Bea called her brother Ed, in Tokyo, and told him. Ed, the first proud son, his father’s reflection. After Ed, Alex had been a disappointment before he spoke his first word. Ed, with his smooth passage through prep school, Eton, his East Coast college, Goldman Sachs. It was one o’clock in the morning in Tokyo. She woke him up. She could hear his wife, Elizabeth, in the background.

He immediately exclaimed, No, no! – then started to cry, and when he couldn’t speak any more Elizabeth came on the phone and Bea told her what had happened, too.

‘I’m so sorry, Elizabeth,’ she said, stripped back to her compassion for a woman she hardly knew, six thousand miles away. ‘I’m sorry to wake you up like this, I’m just so sorry. We thought you should know. Would Ed like to speak again?’

‘Tell him I’ll call him later,’ Griff said.

And when she’d finished with that he had her call the gendarmerie, in Bourg-en-Bresse, to draw from them an estimate of when they would be finished with Alex’s car, but they would tell her nothing. She called Hélène Guerin again. She was given reference numbers. Addresses. London numbers.

‘My brother Alex was in an accident this morning. He’s dead.’

Each time she said it it was new. Dan gripped her hand, he touched her shoulder, but Alex was not his brother. She felt far away from everything.

She imagined Alex driving parallel to their speeding car. She seemed to see him looking, keeping pace. He was only half in love with death, and he had relished the skirmish. He had not wanted it. He can’t have meant to die. Little fuckers keep me up nights, snacking on mice. I want them out.

It could take until after the weekend to know when his body would be released, then they would bury him. Or burn it.

11

11

Paligny village and the road back were as empty as ever. Apart from passing a blue car travelling at speed in the opposite direction, they saw nobody. Unlocking the front door and walking into the hotel, it did not feel like there had been a death. It felt like somebody had just left. The four of them who were left made their way through the evening like crash victims themselves. It was strange to eat and walk and talk, and even stranger to go to bed, such a passive, trusting thing to do. They had seen chaos but there was no matching response, only the ordinary, and the flimsy boundaries of time. At eight o’clock, eat. At ten o’clock, go to bed. In the landscape of catastrophe there was the brushing of teeth and toilet paper.