‘This thing is killing me,’ the bigger man said, and took off his incongruous neck warmer. A metal grid separated them from the front, where a third man started the vehicle wordlessly. The fact that these men spoke English sank into Erin’s terrified brain along with a million questions at the same time, some important, such as what these people wanted to do to them, and other rather irrelevant ones, like where they could have bought a woollen cowl in this weather or why anybody would want to cover their head with a mixture of purple and green stripes.

She squalled. The man sitting on top of her yanked the cowl off his head with the urgency which extreme heat gives, slapped her backside and told her to shut up.

‘I can’t!’ she whimpered. ‘It’s a cramp, a cra...

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