He hung the bag on a hook in the hallway. Then, grabbing the cordless handset, he sat down on the sofa in the small drawing room. He had written out the number that Lionel Updark had asked him to call ‘should you think of anything’, but this was not the number he dialled. Something – a furry tongue at the thought of him, a sensation that his throat was closing up, like when he tasted walnuts, kiwi fruit or aubergines – still stopped Dyer from turning to Updark.

Silvi eventually answered.

When he heard her voice, Dyer obeyed an instinct not to wade straight in, as he might have done with Gilles. With Silvi, obliqueness worked better. He thanked her for the sleepover, Leandro would be writing. And he had a further reason for calling …

At the other end, a suspicious ‘Yes?’

How might he get hold of Miranda?

Silvi the matchmaker couldn’t mask her delight. ‘So you liked her?’

‘That’s not quite why I want to contact her. I promised her a booklist, but I forgot to take her number. I think she was serious.’

‘Here, let me get her details. You know, I have a feeling she’s away at the moment.’

He waited for Silvi to look up Miranda’s address and telephone number (‘I don’t seem to have her email’), and wrote them down in his notebook, and her surname.

Silvi went on: ‘I still haven’t started your book – first, I have to finish Some More Silky Ways. Maybe after that, I will ask Miranda for your booklist! You must give her my special love when you see her.’

‘I will.’

‘You won’t believe this. I said to Gilles, “I know she has a lady-from-Bucharest hairstyle, very not contemporary, but I can see John getting on with that one.”’

‘Actually, Silvi, is Gilles there?’ If Dyer trusted anyone to come up with a plausible explanation for what had happened to Marvar and his son, it was Gilles Asselin.

Her husband was away, she told him in a different voice. In the Sinai.

‘What’s he doing there?’

‘Buying up the desert, I don’t know!’ He had flown off on Monday from Kidlington.

‘Back when?’

‘He didn’t say. You know Gilles. Independent as a hog on ice.’

‘I wanted to ask about Rustum Marvar.’

‘That’s so awful. God.’

‘Silvi, do you have any idea where Marvar might be?’

‘He took Samir away before lunch, before the party. He didn’t stay even to say hello, I never saw him.’ Her tone was self-exculpatory. She had told the story before.

‘You’re positive it was Marvar who picked him up?’ Or had Marvar already been taken at this point by the Iranians, the Israelis or someone else, and had they collected Samir as leverage over him?