“Okay, so you’ve been out to Taliesin West, you’ve seen the…stumps, those big pillars of the Pauson House, all that’s left of them. What else?”

Robin smiled sportingly, and absorbed the fact that he was a tourist among many others. “No, I’ve only just arrived.”

“First stop the Blue Coyote. A man who knows what he’s after.” Sylvan slapped the bar lightly. “I could do a lot of that kind of research. Same again please, Ronnie,” to the turning barman. “And another beer?”

“I’m fine,” said Robin. “No, I’ve been out to the ruins of the Ransom House today.”

Sylvan paused and nodded. “Yeah. That’s serious. I never saw that. You know, if you’re in school here, you get to do all of that stuff. I remember the day he died, old Frankie Lloyd, and the teacher comes in for art class and tells us with a real catch in his voice, you know?, “ladies and gentlemen…” We were all pretty upset.” He looked at Robin with a wistful pout, as if he still needed consoling. “So how the hell d’you get out there? You got four-wheel drive?”

“I got an Indian from the reservation to drive me,” said Robin, still proud of his initiative.

“Wo-ho! And you lived to tell the tale?”

“Just about, yes…” – and now he was uneasy about grudges and feuds, the hardened candour with which a local hopes to disabuse the naively fair-minded newcomer. He wouldn’t tell him about the sand-trap. “No, he was great. Just a kid.”

Sylvan looked at him with concern. “Well you were lucky, man. Cos I’m telling you, they are the worst.”

It was true that Victor had been an unsettling driver. But he’d also been clairvoyant. In the moment or two that Robin disliked Sylvan he saw how beautiful he was; and surely available to him, completely at his pleasure, if he said the word. He had to frown away the smile that rose to his lips on a kind of thermal of lust.