I told him I had to go and when I checked the log after, I saw that the call had lasted almost eight minutes, which was the typical duration of our exchanges, a duration to which I now instinctively kept. Eight minutes a call, weeks or months apart. Everything I needed to know about my father, I could find out in that time.

After my father’s call, and after almost getting run over in the street, I made my way back to Caber’s place with Linus and Buddy. All the houses in Caber’s neighbourhood belonged to people with money, but Caber had one of those ­rich ­people’s houses designed to elude attention. It was built on top of and down the leeside of a hill, so that from the street, all you could see was a set of monastically steep stone steps climbing to the entrance of a narrow black building overgrown with foliage and hardly bigger than the unwelcoming slab of the featureless front door set into it. It looked more like some sort of utility building than a home of any kind. But that was only the view permitted from the street. Once you climbed those steps and got inside the house, all was changed. The interior was vast and multilevelled, following the grade of the hill down which it was built in interlocking tiers, each room meticulously appointed and ultramodern. I had been living there, minding the dogs, ever since Caber fled north, and it still felt more like a hotel at which I was the only guest than anything resembling a home.

Nicholas Caber was a famous writer. By which I mean he was famous for a writer; every writer knew who he was and perhaps one in every two hundred civilians you mentioned his name to might recognise it, though they may not be sure from where. If they did not know his books, they tended to know at least one of the several movies made out of his books.

Caber wrote novels, stories, plays, screenplays. He’d been writing for decades. In interviews he had always credited his career to nothing more than ‘my doglike indefatigability. When I write a bad book, I write another, and when I write a good book, I write another,’ and by now he had ascended to that level of general renown where they stop giving you prizes and start giving you medals. Where an embassy might invite you for dinner twelve thousand kilometres away because the wife of the ambassador loved your last book.