‘Oh, that is easiest promise I have ever made. I promise you, Mr Movie Star. I promise.’

And she started to kiss him again.

Chapter 22

‘We’re not in Kansas any more, Toto,’ said Poppy, as Lars drove the hired Cadillac across the state line into Texas.

‘Thank fuck for that,’ said Bella, and Poppy and Lars both laughed. They had left their motel in one of Kansas City’s grottier suburbs at around nine o’clock that morning and had been driving for just over nine hours, only stopping for a fairly disgusting lunch of fatty sausages and other cold meats, unadorned by any form of vegetable matter. The miserable grey sky had spat on them all day, and the landscape had been unremittingly dull: miles and miles (and miles) of flat, flat terrain. At one stage they had driven for three hours without seeing a single tree.

‘Bloody hell, Lars, you were right about the Midwest,’ Bella had said. ‘Why would anybody in their right mind choose to drive this way, when you’ve got the lakes and Rockies in the north, and New Orleans and all that romantic Charleston and Mississippi stuff in the south?’ Her grasp of US geography was fairly hazy, but she’d been looking things up on her iPhone to kill the unutterable tedium that was driving through Kansas.

‘You mean all that romantic Charleston and Mississippi lynching stuff?’ said Poppy. ‘It looks to me as if old Jack K was desperate to get back to NY and pretty much drew a straight line across the States …’

The day they’d left New York, they had stopped for lunch at a diner on the outskirts of Washington, DC. Over cheeseburgers and fries, Lars had grilled Poppy comprehensively about Damian’s route.

‘You say Kerouac, huh?’

‘Yup. As I said, he has deeply adolescent arrested development.’

‘So let’s see …’ He looked at the list that Poppy had written out in her curly turquoise handwriting. ‘New York City, Washington, DC, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Indianapolis, St Louis, Kansas City, Dalhart, Albuquerque, Prescott, Los Angeles …’ He looked up at Poppy.

‘Poppy, you are aware that this is the way Kerouac came back from LA?’

‘What?’ Bella looked from Lars to Poppy, not understanding. ‘What’s going on, Pops?’

‘Yeah, yeah, I know. The route he took to LA involved Chicago, Des Moines, Denver, Salt Lake City etc., but I just know that Damian was much more interested in the whole Midwest thing. I just know that that’s the way he’s gone …’

‘Oh, come on, Pops, this could be a complete wild-goose chase.’ Bella was starting to get angry now. ‘You told me you knew. It sounds to me like it could be one of two routes (even if he is doing the Kerouac thing, which is sounding increasingly tenuous, I must say), and it’s more likely to be the one we’re not taking. For fuck’s sake …’

‘Don’t for fuck’s sake me. He’s my husband, I know him.’ Poppy stuck stubbornly to her guns.