‘It would make your ears burn, beautiful. He loves you. Man, does he love you. But we, the whole Dalhart community, we love that guy. Tell me you didn’t do it with his old friend Ben?’

Suddenly the Hell’s Angel looked at Lars, menacingly. ‘You ain’t Ben, are ya? Don’t look much like him, from what my friend Damian say-ed.’

‘No, no, my name is Lars. Damian is my good friend. I am from Sweden.’ Lars got out of his seat, drawing himself up to his full 6 foot 7, and proffered his hand.

‘Sweden? My wife is from Sweden,’ said the Hell’s Angel, shaking Lars’s hand in his equally enormous, but somewhat more calloused one. ‘Hey, Gunilla,’ he shouted over his shoulder. ‘Got one of your countrymen round front here.’

A ridiculously pretty blonde woman, also in full leathers, appeared from behind the bar. Smiling, she started to talk to Lars in Swedish. Poppy and Bella stared at them, trying (with unsurprisingly minimal success) to follow what they were saying.

Eventually, the gorgeous Swedish Hell’s Angel smiled sweetly at them and said, in the deepest US hick accent that one could possibly imagine:

‘Sorry ’bout that, ladies. I don’t have many opportunities to talk to people from the ol’ country. How’s about I get some schnapps for y’all?’

Riding along in their automobile, the three Musketeers sang along to Chuck Berry at the tops of their voices. Despite their schnapps hangovers, they were enjoying the route to Albuquerque from Dalhart more than they had enjoyed any of the roads so far. Truth be told, they were probably all still pissed, but Poppy and Bella had absolute confidence in Lars to drive them safely to their destination.

‘Look!’ Poppy squawked, pointing at Lars’s phone. ‘He’s still there! Still in that bar! I love the fact that my husband’s such a bloody drunk!’

‘Can’t blame him for staying there,’ Bella shouted over the music, cracking open the third beer of the afternoon. ‘This is a bit more bloody like it!’

And it was.

The Texas-to-New Mexico highway was proving an awful lot more satisfactory than the Midwest one, road trip-wise. All around them was scrubby desert dotted with proper, multi-pronged cacti, some of them even taller than Lars. Bella half expected Clint Eastwood to leap out from behind one and start shooting at them. In a good way. The rugged Sandia Mountains glowed terracotta in the distance as the sun started to set.

Ah, yes, the sunset. They had ended up getting so drunk with the Hell’s Angel and his Swedish wife that none of them had surfaced until midday. Poppy had been furious with herself, until she’d seen that Damian was still in his motel room in Albuquerque.

‘Oooh, we’re on his tail, we’re gonna get him,’ she now shouted with glee.

‘You do realize, Pops,’ said Bella, ‘that there’s absolutely no fucking way we’d have found him without Lars’s brilliant phone-tracking thing?’

Poppy turned around in the passenger seat and stuck her tongue out.