Away from the centre the streets were wrapped in foreign-seeming air – air that warmed and yellowed the night without transforming it. You expected to hear cicadas, catch sight of your own shadow on a curved stucco wall behind which growths of palm or jacaranda further enclosed a shuttered domain. But all you found was the usual holly tree and dirty pebbledash, and in the mossy driveway an unreliable British sports car from the 1970s or a short-wheelbase Land Rover bought for a gap-year tour: some late-adolescent project abandoned under its green tarpaulin fifteen years before, as the globalised economies, running out of new services to sell one another, preoccupied themselves with their own decline.

Holding up the pocket drive like a permit, Anna made her way round to the rear of the house. She found the main window dimly lit, as if by a source somewhere else in the house. When she pressed her face against the glass, everything was exactly as she had seen it last: rippled green lino; a roll of carpet propped up in the corner opposite the door; and on the table the little pressed-tin Mexican box containing a downscaled human skull nestled in scarlet lace. An old sofa, loose-covered in what might have been chintz, now faced the table. On it sat two women, short, heavily-built and dressed in black clothes, each with an identical Harrods shopping bag resting on her knees. Anna could hear their voices, but not what they were saying. After a few minutes a thin indistinct figure appeared in the doorway, pushing a wheelchair. It was the boy who had offered her Lost Horizon.

Brian Tate looked worse than ever. His upper body, no longer able to support itself, sagged forward against the chair’s nylon restraints; his skull – bald, ulcered and fragile-looking, as if the bone had thinned year-on-year since Michael Kearney abandoned him to his doomed interpretation of their data – had fallen so far to one side that it rested on his own left shoulder. His mouth was permanently open. One eye was closed, the eyelid drawn down, the cheek beneath sagging; while the other, as blue as a bird’s egg, looked brightly at the wall, the window, the Mexican box with its curious contents, whatever he happened to be facing. It was alive and focused, but it was only an eye: it wasn’t necessarily connected to anything. In his lap lay a greasy brown paper bag. The boy parked the wheelchair next to the table, facing the sofa. He set the brake carefully, forced a white 1960s motorcycle helmet and ski-goggles on to Tate’s head – a process which involved some physical effort – then sat down cross-legged on the floor.

‘There,’ he said, conversationally: ‘He’s here.’