‘He did tell to Brian – our butler – that he was Samir’s father. And the camera on the gate, Gilles has seen the pictures. He says for sure it’s Marvar.’

‘He was clearly in a hurry,’ mused Dyer. ‘Maybe they had to catch a train. Or a plane.’

‘Maybe.’ But her voice was not believing. Samir and Marvar had only been missing for a few days, yet she was imagining terrible things. ‘Samir – I remember him waiting in the hall as if just now he is before my eyes.’ It could have been her son. It could have been Pierre. ‘Jean, if you learn anything, tell me. Please.’

They promise to pass on anything they hear.

Dyer had become more guarded on the telephone after his touchline conversation with Gilles about surveillance. He took the same precaution when surfing the internet, and had entered no further searches for nuclear fusion. It would have been suspiciously out of character, though, for him not to have shown an interest in Marvar.

Already that morning he’d googled Marvar’s name. There was no report of a kidnapping. No suicide pact. No missing father and son jumping from Clifton Suspension Bridge.

He telephoned the Oxford Mail, the Oxford Times, BBC Oxford to ask if any bodies had been found.

Nothing.

In Dyer’s heyday, the Updarks of this world counted on correspondents like him to tell them what was going on. Uncertain which way to turn now, Dyer behaved as any retired journalist might do when unable to verify a story, one furthermore that he still had to sort out where to place. He called his old newspaper and asked for Nat Royter.

Cub reporters, they had joined in the same year. Nat’s ambition – which he achieved – was to be the political correspondent. He was one of very few survivors from the former regime, following the paper’s sale to a thirty-year-old Qatari billionaire and champion of Brexit domiciled in Minorca.

They had met in the new Pimlico premises not long after Dyer’s return from Rio. Through a blue flame, over a warm glass of calvados, was the last occasion they had seen each other, on the eve of Dyer’s departure for Brazil. That was thirty-five years before. This time they had to settle for a snatched coffee in the lobby. Money was so tight in the newsroom, Nat said ruefully, that he couldn’t leave his desk for long, and definitely not for a three-course lunch at Clarke’s.

‘They’ve given me the foreign desk too,’ he said, ‘bless ’em.’

‘That would have pleased Frank,’ said Dyer, recalling the bald, wry features of their first foreign editor.

‘Frank Tullover,’ murmured Nat. ‘He who taught us: “Why is this person telling you this?”’

‘That, and: “Always justify your expenses in the second para.”’