Easier to fret about Marvar’s overcoat. Dyer couldn’t leave that in the Taylorian – the librarian would inevitably associate it with him. Even though the coat had made him a target, he still felt responsible for it, a connection. ‘Shula had it made for me before I came here.’ The knowledge that Magda was about to arrive galvanised him to go and fetch it.

The overcoat would be too bulky to fit in his shoulder bag, but not into Leandro’s canvas games bag. Quickly, Dyer emptied out the mud-encrusted socks, shirts, shorts into the washing machine.

As he pitched the soap pellet into the back of the drum, he remembered when a speculative North Oxford mother had congratulated him on being a modern father. He’d got that from his mother, he told her. ‘She did the taxes, my father cooked.’ When she died, he had needed to mother himself, and now he had to mother Leandro. He wasn’t shy of doing this, it was just another role.

He turned on the washing machine and repacked into Leandro’s canvas bag: Marvar’s plastic sandwich bag containing the folder with the post-it note; his own eleven handwritten pages of their interview; his laptop; the collection of poems he’d been reading.

After writing out a list of tasks for Magda, and leaving three £10 notes on the table, he opened the door and walked out.

In the favela, to avoid muggers, Dyer took a different route every day. For the first time in Oxford, he changed his itinerary, not walking up Little Clarendon Street, but down Canal Street, over the pedestrian bridge, along the tinder path. Coming this way made it easier to observe if anyone was following.

He stares into the unflowing canal. It’s like going back fifty years. He’s twelve. He and Rougetel are walking into town along the towpath so that they won’t be caught by Slimy or Jumbo. Rougetel’s parents live abroad, in La Paz, where his father works for a telephone company. He’s the younger brother Dyer never had, clever, unconventional, independent, who helps him with his prep, with whom he can play truant.

A quick twenty-minute walk had brought Dyer out into Hythe Bridge Street.

He checked over his shoulder as he turned into Worcester Street. How many times in the street or passing by in a car had he noticed someone he knew without them suspecting that he was watching; how many times had he been noticed by someone who chose not to make themself known, like a trout that had gone for his fly and he didn’t see it?

Not recognising any of the faces, he continued up Beaumont Street, past the Ashmolean, into the Taylorian.

He breathed out to see no peroxided head behind the counter.