Sitting down in the French and German reading room, after hanging up Marvar’s coat, Dyer unzipped his bag and felt inside. His fingers had gripped Marvar’s folder moments earlier, but he needed to touch it again, to be certain.

How fast the covering tide. From his leather-seated chair, Dyer looked down through the window, rubbing his jaw. Tilting his head, he could make out the pavement where he had been sent sprawling. A new group of Chinese tourists stood in line, waiting to cross.

The men in the car – where had they intended to take him? What did they want?

Then it hit him. The tour guide was right. They’d mistaken him for Marvar.

In yielding to his superstitious nature, Dyer had put on Marvar’s overcoat as if it would help him decide what to do with the post-it note. Instead, the coat had made Dyer a mark.

Confused, intensely afraid – it had given him a real fright – he occupied himself in setting up his laptop. He plugged it in and stared hard for a moment at the screen. Then he reached out for Professor Madrugada’s book, retrieved from where he had left it on Saturday: a stack in the main reading room, on a shelf reserved for surnames beginning with D. Opening it, he flicked forward to the page that he had marked with the white Taylorian slip, like a boarding pass. He took this out and resumed his journey into the Brazilian interior, but he was conscious of the man in the Passat, his dark blazing eyes, his foreign shout.

Dyer started when the door opened and a stocky young woman in jeans entered and tumbled her computer, charger, books, scarf, bobble hat, and a bottle of water onto the central table. Without glancing her pink round face in his direction, she unzipped her fur-lined parka and, after loudly taking it off, sighed, and walked out.

He felt the tension draining. Is that how it’s going to be? He was alone in a hostile, unfamiliar world where everyone was a potential enemy. He was like Afonso Ribeiro, left to fend for himself among the Tupi. The serpent’s hiss of the surf. The caravel in the distance a dot. He was going to have to learn a new language in order to survive.

He read some pages. The busiest hours of the morning passed. The library was his sanctuary. Here, he felt safe, unmonitored. The only thing looking down at him from the wall, above a bookcase of Encylopédie Larousse and a red metal rolling ladder, was an unexceptional painting in a tarnished gilt frame. It was of a bucolic classical scene, set high on a hill, with distant mountains below lapped in a blue haze, and showed a young shepherd, possibly Endymion, tending to the injured foot of a semi-naked woman, possibly Diana, who sat on a rock, with hunting dogs and putti hovering.