‘It’s been ringing and ringing,’ she puffed. ‘I didn’t think you’d want me to answer.’

‘No, you were right,’ he said, and disconnected the handset. He felt some reason to do this that he could not define.

‘I’ve made up your bed,’ she went on. ‘Oh, and a fresh duvet cover for Leandro,’ tuning her voice to a more pleasant note. But she was very behindhand, she said, having taken her boyfriend to the bus station for a job interview in Bicester. She still had to empty the washing machine, hang out Leandro’s damp football kit to dry, iron two of Dyer’s white shirts, sew on a button, hoover downstairs. She might have been reciting a crime sheet.

A fly was buzzing against the windowpane. Dyer checked his watch. Twelve fifty. ‘Then I’ll get out of your way.’ He was hungry all of a sudden.

Chapter Twenty-five

THE OLD BOOKBINDERS HAD BECOME more popular since Dyer’s arrival in Oxford, and at lunchtimes it was packed. A French couple had bought the pub the previous spring. In lieu of pickled eggs and the local malt, plus, on certain days, a disreputable-looking unnamed battered fish, a blackboard advertised moules marinières, croque-monsieurs, steak frites and, all this week, a prizewinning wheat beer.

He glanced warily at the faces. The usual customers: French and Italian students in knee-length coats; middle-aged Brexit voters from the council houses and barges; on stools at the bar, a local divorcée and a retired professor of Spanish, one looking dreamily up in the air at the paper banknotes, denominations from foreign countries, that a previous landlord had pasted to the ceiling, the other at the TLS open on his brown corduroy lap.

Dyer pushed his way to the counter and ordered half a pint of bitter and a ham-and-cheese baguette from a narrow-faced woman drying glasses.

‘I’ll be through there,’ he told her, accepting his change.

Taking his beer, Dyer ducked his head under the beam and passed into the lower-ceilinged room at the back. A rectangle of daylight slanted through the open door, pointing the way to an unoccupied table.

He put down his glass and, leaving his scarf to guard the seat, walked back through the pub, to the loo.

On his return five minutes later, he smelled something familiar.

Dyer had sat down before he noticed a figure in the corner. Her blonde hair bound up, she looked around like a girl in a foreign town, smiling.

‘Hi.’

Bone-coloured jacket. Slim green jersey pulled tight. His face became different when he recognised her.

Now he was able to place it, that giddying odour.

His voice said the name whose lips, he realised, he had not stopped thinking of.

‘Katya.’

She accepted his kiss, cheek forward, not moving.

‘This is unexpected – what are you doing here?’

She seemed to be thinking.

‘I wanted to see …’

He waited. ‘What?’