‘What about Jo-Jo,’ he said cautiously.

‘Where is he, Swede?’

It was too much for him. ‘I told you to lay off!’

‘I thought you never saw me before?’

He blinked like a moth in a sudden light. His confusion was complete. I had a good chance of getting something out of him. The woman who spoke behind me must have thought the same.

‘Get out of here, mister.’

She looked like one of those Okie women you see in the pictures of the Dust Bowl in the Depression standing beside a grey and battered flivver piled with the junk that was all she owned. Her face looked like a ploughed field that had baked as hard and dry as stone in the sun. Her hair had started out blonde, and her eyes were washed-out blue. The eyes were now glacier blue, and the hair was grey and hung like limp string. Her hands were cracked like a dried-out mud puddle. But her clothes had cost a fair bundle, and the hands were clean. Her black sheath dress even had some style and taste, except that on her it looked like the shroud of a scarecrow. On her the triple strand of real pearls looked like rope. The years had left her nothing to hang clothes on but a bag of old bones and a leather skin.

‘I’ll handle it, Magda,’ Swede said.

His voice would not have convinced even me. The woman ignored him. I knew who was the real muscle in this house. Magda Olsen. The wife. She looked like Swede’s mother, but she was his wife, the mother of Jo-Jo. Magda had not had a rosy youth. She looked at me as if I were a cockroach she knew too well.

‘Forget my boy, you hear?’ Magda Olsen said.

‘What’s his trouble, Magda? Maybe he needs help.’

‘Get lost.’

‘You don’t want him found?’

‘Who says he’s lost,’ the woman said.

‘I say he’s lost,’ I said. ‘What I can’t say is if it’s voluntary or with some persuasion.’

‘Beat it,’ Magda Olsen said. She had a one-track mind, and she was brighter and quicker than her man.