That night they sat up late. Dyer yielded to no one in his ability to extract information. Leandro’s story was followed by another. And another. Until Dyer had a vision of his son like a prisoner of the Tupi Indians, suffering in silence the punishment that they reserved for their bitterest enemies, wrapped in a writhing coil of poisonous toads which had started to shrink around his neck.

Dyer learned how Vasily had tried to drown Leandro in the swimming pool. ‘He pushed my head under and didn’t let me out. His mother was sitting right in front and thought it was just a joke.’ How, arriving for training practice, Leandro had stepped over the rope barrier beside the pitch, ‘and he whipped it up and hit me between the legs.’ How, incited to new heights of malice, Vasily had shut Leandro in a locker ten minutes before his training session with the first team, and started banging on the lockers on either side, not stopping until it was time to go. ‘You’d taken me to the doctor for my earache and it really hurt my ears.’

Leandro wasn’t Vasily’s only victim. ‘He does it to Samir too.’ In his jealous turmoil, Vasily had only to see Samir bouncing a football on his toes for him to march over and kick the ball away as far as he could. He had also posted insinuating comments on a group chat, speculating whether Leandro and Samir might be gay.

Dyer felt sick that he had downplayed Vasily’s behaviour. A surge of guilt overwhelmed him that he had failed to protect his son. Since Leandro’s mother lived 5,700 miles away, and had never displayed much maternal interest, it fell once again to Dyer to do something, even if Leandro himself didn’t want his father to do anything. ‘Please, please, no.’ But this also was part of bullying, Dyer recalled.

Between discovery and action, Dyer lay awake, eyes closed. The smell that she had left in the air. Like wheat. ‘But you don’t have a choice, dear,’ came his aunt’s voice, as if on a crackling old radio. In the favelas, the bullies were the ones you had to neutralise.

Dyer telephoned the school in the morning and was put through to Mr Tanner, head of day children, and a blackbelt stickler for rules. He responded with super-efficiency. ‘I want you to write it all down.’

‘It’s reached a point,’ Dyer added, ‘where I feel it has to be dealt with.’

‘And so it shall,’ said Mr Tanner, a boyish-looking man known as a good rugby player. ‘And so it shall.’