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burns.
    After a couple of hours, he stops at a rest area to eat the meat pie which Carl’s mother gave him, savouring it, the perfect pastry melting in his mouth, the meat juice running down his chin and onto the front of his short-sleeved shirt.
    He remembers a picnic in Cornwall, a family summer holiday just before his mother left: beef and onion in pastry with a forkhole pattern, lukewarm in a greasy paper bag; sitting on a cliff in blazing sunshine, looking at a lighthouse and listening to his father going on about the old beacon built by a notorious wrecker, a plunderer of stranded ships.
    He returns to the motorway and drives until the end of the afternoon when he realises that he has missed his turning some way back. Unable – on the motorway, in between junctions – to turn around, he presses on, going in the wrong direction, accelerating.
    Futh recalls sitting in the passenger seat of Angela’s car with a UK road atlas in his hands, looking on the map for the place names he saw signposted at each motorway exit they sped past, and it dawning on him that he was taking them the wrong way round the M25. He grew anxious but kept quiet, wanting to be mistaken, to be going the right way after all despite the mounting evidence to the contrary. Angela said, ‘This doesn’t feel right,’ but still he said nothing, putting off the moment when he would have to admit his mistake, when they would have to come off the motorway and go all the way back, and meanwhile just making things worse.
    By the time he arrives at Hellhaus, it is dreadfully late. It is dark as he parks his car and walks up the street with his suitcase on wheels, heading towards the centre of the small town.
    He has wondered whether this Hellhaus has similar origins to a Hellhaus he knows of in Saxony – the ruin of a structure sited at the intersection of forest paths, used in its day to see and signal the whereabouts of escaping game. But when he turns a corner and sees the hotel, he understands why it has this name, which translates as ‘bright house’ or ‘light house’. Whitewashed and moonlit, it is incandescent.
    He feels again the tipping sensation he has experienced on and off since leaving the ferry. It feels like his soul is sliding out and then sliding back in again. His insides feel like the jelly in his father’s hot pork pies oozing through cracks in the crust.
    He trudges up the final incline, exhausted from driving and hungry again, the hotel a beacon before him.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Perfume

    When the door opens, letting in the cool night air and some noise from the street, Ester turns towards it. A man walks in, a thin, pale man with thinning, mousy hair. He carries an anorak over one arm, and with the other he is pulling a suitcase on wheels. The door closes quietly behind him and the exterior sounds are shut out.
    She stays sitting on her stool, tidying pieces of orange peel into the saucer of her coffee cup. The man comes to the bar, approaching the new girl, the little wheels of his suitcase clackety-clacking over the floorboards. ‘Futh,’ he says to the girl, ‘I’m Futh.’ The girl looks at him, asks him in German what he wants. ‘Ich bin Futh,’ he says.
    When the girl continues to look blankly at him, he turns and looks around the room. Ester, who has been waiting for him all afternoon and all evening, lets him come to her. Clackety-clack, clackety-clack, goes his suitcase over the wooden floor, clackety-clack like a train, trundling to a stop. He stands in front of her, and she regards him, this man with gravy on his chin and on his shirt and even on the crotch of his trousers. ‘I’m Futh,’ he says again in English. ‘Someone’s expecting me.’
    Ester climbs down off her seat and walks over to her desk. He follows her, chattering away. He says, ‘Are you Ester?’ She would prefer something more formal but lets it go.
    She ticks his name off in her ledger and takes his key from a row of small hooks on the wall.