They were professionals who had known what to look for. While Dyer and Paula ate their chicken burgers and listened to Leandro enthuse about how Nelson’s fleet, sailing perpendicularly, had carved a breach in Villeneuve’s horizontal line of ships, someone had entered the house and gone over it with the finest toothpick.

Dyer totters, unbalanced, across the orange tiled floor and slumps onto the sofa, causing its cheap wood frame to squeal.

Not simultaneously, but almost, he experiences a pang for Marvar’s missing overcoat, before relief floods through him. The horrible hook had been yanked out of his mouth. He wasn’t free, yet, but the tension had slackened, he had secured a breathing space.

For the moment, he and Leandro were safe.

Because whoever had stolen the coat had also taken one of Marvar’s two spare post-it notes.

A long time ago, Dyer had read that when being pursued by an elephant you must shed an article of clothing in the hope that the animal will stop in its tracks and attack it. You have then a chance of gaining ground. To throw his anonymous pursuers off the scent, this is what Dyer had done: he had left them another post-it note covered with abracadabra.

They would have their energies consumed in cracking Dyer’s code. He had concocted his deliberately misleading algorithm out of a verse by Basil Bunting, substituting letters for numbers, and introducing a few capital letters from the two last stanzas of Bunting’s 1932 poem ‘Chomei at Toyama’. Whether or not Dyer believed in Rustum Marvar’s claim for fusion – and the stubbornmost part of him resisted – his own formula, based on a Baconian code picked up during his stint as a postgraduate, was no more nonsensical in his eyes than Marvar’s original. Plus it had the merit of being based on something that Dyer could understand.

I have renounced the world;

have a saintly

appearance.

I do not enjoy being poor,

I’ve a passionate nature.

My tongue

clacked a few prayers.

It was the poem he had been reading in Rio when the hand of a young woman touched his shoulder.

Chapter Twenty-eight

THE FIRST WEEK OF MARCH. Walks to school. The streets are sniffing spring.

In the Bon Croissant, they are sharing scurrilities: ‘Dyer’s carrying on with Katya.’

‘He can’t be, her son bullied his son.’

‘No kid gets dumped by his mother like that.’

‘She’s got twins with someone else who are going to Summer Fields.’

‘Did he work for the Daily News?’

‘I’ve never read anything he’s written. He once gave me his book when he came for dinner. Forgot to sign it, though. I’ve got it somewhere.’

‘I love this ice cream.’

In the lush littoral of Summertown, conversation turned again to Samir. His father had apparently taken him back to Iran. His mother was ill. An Updark story, something cooked up with Crotty.