She nodded.

‘And I don’t believe in coincidences.’

She nodded again, but Tom couldn’t tell whether it meant she didn’t believe in them either or whether she was just humouring him.

‘Someone runs us off the road. The fan disc’s stolen. The fire. All in the space of a few hours.’

‘If we hadn’t …’ She tailed off and her eyes overflowed with tears that left silver rivers down her cheeks under the harsh white light.

Tom reached for her unthinkingly, then hissed in pain when he touched her, and snatched his hand back. ‘Ness …’ He stopped. There was nothing he could say to make it better because it wasn’t getting any better. Anything he said would be meaningless noise.

To his surprise, the boy got up and sat on the oak bench beside Ness, awkwardly putting a consoling arm about her shoulders, even as he slid ice across his brow and lips.

Tom nodded his thanks at him, then carefully put his hands back into the ice and sighed in relief.

Ness snuffled quietly into the boy’s shoulder, then palmed her eyes hard and sat up straight again. The boy got up and left the room. The dog sensed him go, woke up and tottered after him.

‘This ice is melted.’

‘You should go to a hospital.’

‘I just need some aspirin.’

‘Please, Tom …’

He sighed and took his hands out of the bowl. Iced water dripped across the stripped oak table, making big ugly marks, then onto the cracked lino as Tom walked to the back door.

When he got there he had to look pleadingly at Ness. Slowly she stood and opened it for him, then followed him out into the night, which was lit up with orange on two fronts – one of the dying flames, the other the rising sun.

18

THE NEXT TWENTY-FOUR hours passed in a haze for Tom. Ness drove him to the tiny cottage hospital where he drifted in and out of a drug-induced sleep and where, every time he woke, the long white voile curtains seemed to be blowing softly in the breeze, even though the air never reached his heated skin.

His hands burned, and when doctors and nurses touched them, he swore at them, which shocked them into silence and left them thin-lipped with disgust. Even through the haze, Tom was beginning to realize that when it came to profanity rural South Africa did not have the same experience or tolerance of it as urban LA.

Sometimes Ness was there, sometimes she wasn’t. Sometimes she read to him from the local paper: Sakkie Mulder’s prizewinning bull, Justus, had written off a motorcycle and injured its rider on the road to Oudtshoorn; baboons had stolen new science equipment from De Aar primary school; a truck had overturned on the N1, killing three giraffe it had been transporting to a private reserve near Stellenbosch.

She read all the stories in a monotone, giving each one equal weight; only the lowering or arching of an eyebrow gave him any clue as to her opinion of each tale of woe. The nature of the news added to his feeling of unreality.

She held his phone to his ear while he told Pete LaBello that he’d been in a car crash while on holiday. He’d be late back. Pete didn’t sound like he was missing him, had been missing him, or ever would miss him. He said something about Lenny Munro but Tom was too tired to take it in.

Then Pete added grimly, ‘When you get back, come to DC. We need to talk.’

Tom agreed because it was the easiest thing to do. He had a rough idea of what Pete needed to talk about and he couldn’t imagine it was going to work out well for him, so he shoved it to the back of his mind. He was good at denial. Air-crash investigation, being a dick, and denial. Those were his things.

And listening. Who’d told him that? He was good at listening too, apparently. Tom couldn’t remember any supporting evidence for that one, but he was prepared to annex any possible good qualities anyone had ever attributed to him and add them to what was an admittedly paltry store.

He drifted in and out of drug-induced sleep but whenever he was conscious the twin subjects of the fan disc and Ness made him equally crazy with frustration – one mental, the other physical.

With his hands useless bandaged blobs, he figured he had more chance of resolving the mental itch, so tried hard to think more often of the fan disc: who had known about it? Where had they taken it? Had they identified its importance already or had they waited for him to do it for them? If he’d stayed in LA, would Pam, her team and blunt old Lettie Marais still be alive?

More often than not, though – especially when Ness thought he was asleep and closed her eyes in the chair beside his bed – the fan disc receded and the thought of her drove him quietly insane.

They still hadn’t spoken about the almost-sex, but she touched him sometimes and made longer eye-contact, often breaking it with a secret smile, so he guessed they were okay. He sure as hell wasn’t going to ask and give her the opportunity to evaluate just what she might be getting herself into, just what he had to offer. What he was prepared to offer.

He looked at her now. It was around ten p.m. and the only ward in the little hospital was almost silent. In this strange place in this strange, dry, harsh land, she was an oasis of cool and beauty. She sat in a sagging armchair she’d had to manhandle through from another room, her knees drawn up and swung to one side, her bare feet tucked under her; one arm was propped against the chair back, cradling her head, the other lay, palm up, in her lap, silently begging.

Tom shifted his head a little so he could more easily follow the lines of her calf to where her slim legs disappeared under the cream linen of the simple shift dress that made her look like a waif in a perfume ad. His eyes lingered on the shape of her thigh through the dress and a jolt of electricity ran through him. He let out an involuntary groan at the sudden memory of her strong legs wrapped around his waist, the skin of her inner thighs like silk under his fingers.

He squeezed his eyes shut but it didn’t help. When he opened them again, Ness was staring at him, although she hadn’t moved. ‘Okay?’ she whispered.

He nodded. If you could call having a persistent hard-on with no means to relieve it okay, then he grudgingly guessed he was.

She uncurled and stretched like a cat and he ached as he watched her breasts rise against the linen, then disappear again. She leaned forward and he looked at her cleavage, seeing the pale breasts dissolve softly into darkness. She became still and finally he realized she was watching him watch her.

Busted.

He swallowed.

Shit. He was behaving like a teenager. She was leaning forward now, probably to slap him.

Instead Ness put the flat of her hand on his bare chest. He felt his breathing become laboured and shallow, like he’d forgotten quite how. She didn’t move her hand, but gently extended her thumb and ran the nail across his right nipple.

Tom bit back a moan and shifted. He flushed when the movement made Ness glance down at him. The thin sheet did nothing to hide his feelings.

She trailed her fingers down his ribs carefully, as if counting each one on the way to his hip; she circled his hip bone once and then Tom watched in tight agony as her hand swept downwards, pushing the sheet away. She touched him tentatively and he whimpered as his injured hands tried reflexively to ball into fists of control.

But fists and control were beyond him.

He lifted his head to see himself, dark and hard in her pale hand.

If ever he was going to tell a woman he loved her, this was the moment, he thought dizzily.

So he bit his lip hard, threw his head back and let Ness do whatever she wanted with him.

And she wanted to do plenty.

*

The next day – just as the doctors were reducing his pain meds, out of what Tom could only imagine was spite – a cadaverous man, in an ill-fitting dirt-blue uniform, came into the room. He ignored Ness and came round the bed to stare down at Tom. ‘I’m Sergeant Konrad, Mr Patrick.’ He was five ten but looked six two, due to his extreme thinness. It seemed the Karoo undernourished its residents with a dry glee.

Konrad’s greying hair was slicked across his pate with something that made it flat and shiny, and he had small, pale eyes and wet lips under a scrappy moustache. His uniform consisted of a short-sleeved shirt and matching shorts, into which his knobble-kneed hairy brown legs disappeared in strict parallel, as if they would never come together in the perspective of his pelvis. He wore long blue socks, dusty black shoes and a black leather Sam Browne belt, with a small revolver tucked into a hip holster.

Tom thought he looked like a poorly armed Malaysian postman.

Konrad pulled up a chair and sat down. He took a battered little notebook from his breast pocket, but never bothered opening it, or even getting a pen out. ‘The fire,’ he said. ‘What can you tell me?’

Tom glanced fleetingly into the beady blue eyes and failed to detect any spark of real intelligence. ‘Not much. We weren’t there at the time.’