‘There is only a passing resemblance,’ said Lars, trying to be chivalrous, as ever, but giggling madly. ‘You, of course, are younger, and much more beautiful, but I think that maybe you share something in the eyes and the cheekbones …’

‘Oh, just give me a mirror, somebody, please?’

One of the local Sarah Palins (small, blond and not very convincing) took a compact out of his neat little handbag and showed Bella her reflection.

‘Noooooo!’ she wailed, instantly whipping the wig and glasses off. ‘Nooooo!’

‘Don’t worry, Belles, it’s not your face, it’s more your innate bigotry, xenophobia and stupidity that I think are the real comparison.’ Poppy was almost beside herself with mirth now. ‘You should show Andy what you look like in his glasses. You could do Democrat/Republican role-play sex games.’

‘I am never showing Andy what I look like in his glasses.’ Bella was laughing too now. ‘And if anything ever goes wrong with my eyes, it’ll be contacts all the way.’

After much persuasion (and another pitcher of Alaskan Bitch), Bella put the wig and glasses back on, and let Poppy make her face up, for the judging of the competition. She won hands down. As she received her prize – a sweatshirt with HOCKEY MOM written across the front, she saw that Poppy was taking photo after photo on her phone.

‘If you ever show those to anybody, I’ll kill you.’

‘They’re all going on Facebook tomorrow.’

‘Don’t you bloody dare! Pleeeease, Pops? Can you imagine the piss-taking I’d get from Mark? Or just about everybody we know, for that matter!’

‘Oh, all right then. Just as you’ve been the best friend ever, coming over here for me, I’ll delete them all. But can we just have one more look?’

‘And I, also?’ Lars enquired mildly.

They looked at all the photos again, laughing their tits off, until Poppy, true to her word, pressed delete.

‘I’ll have you know that a woman in Paris told me I was très, très jolie,’ said Bella haughtily.

‘You obviously weren’t wearing your glasses then. Or maybe she wasn’t!’ Poppy giggled.

‘You are such a fucking bitch.’ Bella laughed.

‘I know. But you know you love me really.’

So that had been a good night. But then there was the interminable drive through Kansas.

‘It says here that Dalhart, in the panhandle of Texas, was the centre of the dustbowl of the Great Recession of the 1930s, and still suffers from both poverty and dust storms,’ said Poppy from the passenger seat.

‘Oh, fabulous, another uplifting location,’ said Bella.

‘Hey, hey, we made it through Kansas without encountering a tornado.’ Lars laughed. ‘You should count yourselves lucky, ladies.’

‘D’you mind if I have a look at your phone, to see if Damian’s moved again?’ Poppy asked Lars for the second time that hour. Lars caught Bella’s eye in the rear-view mirror.

‘Sure, help yourself.’

According to Lars’s phone tracker, Damian had now been in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for two days. The tracker was proving absolutely invaluable. (Of course, it only showed the places where he had actually switched his phone on, which had read, pretty much consistently: road, motel, bar, motel, road, bar. The reason he had been switching it on had been to update Simon Snell, his best man, about his road trip; there was no love lost between Simon and Poppy, so he knew he was on safe ground there.)