The way she looked at him. With those eyes. It seemed to Dyer that she was concentrating closely on what his answer would be. In that instant, she was a very good imitation of a pit viper.

He felt, as if someone had taken him by the elbow and steered him round, that he saw her properly for the first time. A mighty current of sadness flows through him. He remembers Vivien’s words when he told her about meeting Nissa at the photographic exhibition. ‘Exhilaration, my dear, is the warning of disaster.’

Right now, he doesn’t want to know if Katya is working with Gennady, or if Gennady has made her do this, or how Katya knows Whitton’s most intimate thoughts, or if she slipped something into his half-pint of Old Empire while he was in the gents at the Bookbinders so that she could later search the house. Something had switched off like the TV in his boarding house on Saturday nights. From the boundless distance of six feet, she shrank and shrank until she was a small flash on a dark screen.

‘No,’ he joked, retrieving his underpants, wanting to cover himself, his head still spinning and groggy, ‘the only thing Marvar gave me was a hangover.’

Katya stared at him intently, absorbing what he had said, and then her eyes were swimming away and she was muttering in a language that he didn’t understand. She looked as if she was rewriting something inside herself. Her hardened grey eyes were embers. Something enormous was reflected in them, like the glow of a distant city at night, but she was paying no more attention to Dyer than if he had been a games bag of wet muddy socks or the dead bluebottle on the carpet that had escaped Magda’s hoover.

‘We’d better go and fetch our boys,’ he said.

She pulled off Marvar’s coat and picked up her jersey and underwear and started putting them back on.

He dropped her at the school gates, waiting for her to get out before he drove on to find a parking space.

‘Bye, then.’

‘Bye.’

They didn’t kiss.

It was one of Nissa’s quarrels with him, how he said goodbye without operatics.

Chapter Twenty-seven

DYER DROVE TWICE DOWN CHADLINGTON Road before he found a parking spot. He sat in the car, wound down the window.

The shock. The first sensation is numbness. Then a sharp, burning sear.

It was biting his insides. Her pale nipples, that spectral coat, her eyes hating him. Lacerated, he no longer feels transparent; she had hurled a stone into him – everything was shattered. Beneath the fractured surface, shapes dart off.

‘The brutal fact is, my dear, she’s taken you for the most monumental ride,’ is what his aunt would have said.