Someone else said, finishing her turmeric latte: ‘Do you think there’s going to be war in the Middle East?’

The Israeli prime minister in his most outraged attack on Iran had told the BBC that the government in Tehran posed the ‘greatest threat to our world’. He repeated his promise of a fortnight before, that Israel would ‘not allow Iran’s regime to put a noose of terror around our neck’.

Samantha Puckey, rushing to her appointment at Cannelle Medispa, is more alarmed about the rising sea level. She is thinking of her holiday cottage on the Suffolk coast. ‘Instead of shielding us,’ quoting a new report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ‘the world may turn around and become our enemy.’

Chapter Twenty-nine

IN THE ANXIOUS HOURS AFTER the break-in, Dyer walked down Ward Road, searching for a house number, when a black car pulled up beside him.

‘You haven’t been answering your phone.’

Dyer took a second to recognise the mottled face.

‘I’ve been at the library, in fact I’m heading there now.’

‘Let me give you a lift,’ putting away his headphones.

‘I’d prefer to walk.’

‘I don’t care what you want to do,’ Updark said severely. ‘You’re going to come with me now, this minute. Get in.’

In the back of the car, Updark said forbiddingly: ‘You know, John, people add up the faults of those who keep them waiting,’ and slapped down a book on the seat between them.

Dyer recognised it at once. He felt his chest heave.

Updark opened the cover and rotated it so that Dyer could read the inscription.

‘Your handwriting?’

‘It is.’ Dyer picked up the book. ‘Where did you get this?’

‘The headmaster. Someone found it beside the sandpit, I’m told.’

Dyer recalled the Audi parked outside Crotty’s house.

Dully, he read: To Rustum Marvar, who may have solved everything. With his signature. And a date.

What a flat-footed inscription. Even after drinking all that sauvignon, he had been aware of what Marvar faced losing. Marvar hadn’t solved anything, really.

‘Notice the date?’ said Updark.

‘I do.’

‘Which does now – officially – make you the last person to have clapped eyes on him.’

Dyer closed the book. He was conscious of Updark’s gaze. ‘It was a present,’ he heard himself say.

‘Not been in touch, I take it?’

‘No,’ said Dyer. He has to assume that Updark knows his every email, telephone call.

‘What does it mean, “solved everything”?’ Updark pulled out his cuff to cover the plaster on his wrist. ‘What, like the answer to one of Slimy’s fractions? Sounds like he told you something interesting, Basil.’

‘It was a metaphor.’

‘A metaphor,’ said Updark coolly.

‘He’d been having problems with his son and had sorted them out.’

‘That,’ Updark snorted, ‘is the biggest load of rocking-horse manure. I could spread it on my allotment for a year.’