‘Marvar?’ To hear the name spoken was a shock. He wasn’t prepared, he had been hoarding it to himself. It made real again everything that he feared.

Dyer didn’t catch what he mumbled, but Katya construed it as encouragement to face and tell him.

No one had seen Samir or his father for two days, she said. The flu, is what everyone had thought. ‘It’s been going around.’

‘I know.’ But he couldn’t pay attention. Behind her was the sandpit. There is sometimes one pose which endures. Marvar, sitting on the low wall, shoes in the sand. Looking at his fingertips as if the grains on them came from a desert.

She tossed a glance at the group behind him. ‘They are telling me it wasn’t flu.’

Katya was about to say something else, but then her son appeared and she thought better of it.

‘Ah, Vasily.’

His hair was trimmed short as if his mother had cut it. He nodded at Dyer. ‘Leandro is coming. I just saw him.’

He was less sullen than Dyer remembered.

Days earlier, Dyer had enquired about Vasily’s behaviour towards him. Leandro, ever surprising, replied: ‘Oh, Vasily’s all right.’ It reminded Dyer that Leandro didn’t judge, kids protect each other. It still worried him, though, that Leandro might be identifying with the bully, and this was more about Leandro saying: ‘Back off, Dad, let me deal with it.’ Dyer knew that he would have to play out his concern. What he was observing was a process, a necessary step in Leandro re-establishing his footing with Vasily – although their friendliness hadn’t yet extended to having Vasily over or going to his place.

On the other hand, his son’s friendship with Samir had not advanced as Dyer would have predicted. Leandro’s twinge yesterday that he might have passed his flu on to Samir had yielded to a more pragmatic view. Too bad. Tough luck. These things happen in sport. If you worry about the friend you gave flu to, you’re sunk, you’re never going to win, was Leandro’s casual new attitude.

‘I was off games for four days, remember. He’ll be back soon.’

‘What if he isn’t?’ Dyer had responded angrily, thinking of what might have happened to him instead.

Because what was becoming clear: a common cold was not the reason for Samir’s absence.

‘What are they saying?’ Dyer asked Katya. It was one thing Marvar being abducted by hostile forces who would doubtless use horrible means to extract the information they wanted out of him, but for an eleven-year-old to be part of this was unthinkable.

Her face stiffened. She spun round and looked at him with the same expression that Vivien used to put on to say Not in Front of the Children.