‘It’s Rhosilli beach on the Gower,’ I said, swallowing down a sense of rising confusion. ‘The picture was taken when Birgitta and Charles spent a weekend together, cocooned in the flat above the garage at her mother’s in Oxwich. They fed heartily upon the love they felt for one another, and on the way home they stopped for cockles and laver bread at Mumbles Pier, the wireless playing “Groove Me” as a lifeboat was retrieved. They said they loved one another, and they meant it: A tightening in the chest; a sense of euphoric oneness.’

‘How can you know all that?’ asked Jonesy.

I held my head as the frustration welled up inside me.

‘I don’t know how I know it,’ I said, ‘don’t know if I dreamt the Polaroid, or if I’m placing it in my memory now, or  . . . dreaming about something I couldn’t know about. Look over there.’

I pointed to Birgitta’s painting on the wall, the one of the beach in the Gower, with the wreck, and the orange-and-red parasol of spectacular size and splendour, below which were the two figures.

‘I dreamt I was there as Charles, with Birgitta, just as you see in that painting. But then details in the dream come true, and I can’t tell if I can see stuff that happened to other people or if I’m patching holes in my memories with whatever is to hand.’

I could feel myself shaking and wanted all this to be over – in whatever fashion it could. Roscoe Smalls had taken the Cold Way Out when the blue Buick came calling. He hadn’t been supremely brave or a miserable coward. He’d just wanted out of it, in any way he could.

She asked me to outline the dreams, which I did as quickly as I could.

‘So let me get this straight,’ she said when I’d finished. ‘You met Don Hector in the blue Buick dream?’

‘I was him in the blue Buick. He had a rattle in his chest, his vision felt faded, and there was a sense of a numbness down his left-hand side. He spoke French more naturally than he spoke English, and he found solace in a place he used to go with the Buick: an oak tree with the trunk piled high with stones. When they came to take him he told them they’d get nothing even if they tried to get into his dreams. He’d relinquish only the blue Buick moment and said he’d leave a night terror – hundreds of disembodied hands – to put anyone off trying to read him.’

‘Nasty. Anything else?’

‘Yes – Don Hector gave the cylinder to Webster.’

‘The cylinder? Webster was given the cylinder?’

I nodded.

‘And you know this because—?’

‘Of my dream, yes.’