Crash: The Collector’s Edition. Chris Beckett

revenge against me. Her eyes lingered on the black confetti scattered across the bonnet and seats.

      ‘Were you badly hurt?’ she asked. ‘I think we saw each other at the hospital.’

      I found it impossible to say anything to her, aware of the almost obsessive way in which she brushed her hair across her cheek. Her strong body, with its nervous sexuality, formed a powerful junction with the dented and mud-stained car.

      ‘I don’t want the car,’ she said. ‘In fact, I was appalled to find that I have to pay a small fee to have it scrapped.’

      She hung around the car, watching me with a mixture of hostility and interest, as if admitting that her motives for coming to the pound were as ambiguous as my own. I sensed that in her refined and matter-of-fact way she was already trying out the possibilities I had opened for her, examining this instrument of a perverse technology which had killed her husband and closed the principal avenue of her life.

      I offered her a lift to her surgery.

      ‘Thanks.’ She walked ahead of me. ‘To the airport, if you could.’