In the summer of 1968 Rose leaves Kentish Town for the United States. Together with a sinister man known only as Washington Harold, they travel across the country in search of a Dr Wheeler.

The journey of odd couple of Rose and Harold mirrors that of Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign as the country stands on the brink of paranoid disintegration. In the extract below, they go to a drive-in and watch the classic noir thriller The Third Man, directed in 1949 by Carol Reed. Desperate to finish it before she died in 2010, The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress was Beryl Bainbridge’s eighteenth and final novel.