‘Well, do what you like with it. That’s what he said,’ Dyer insisted.

‘You know, John, if there was a degree for stubbornness, you’d get a double-first. You’re irritatingly like Will Ladislaw. Born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards.’

Updark had been listening to Middlemarch on tape. The vinegary effects of those nineteenth-century conversations, like a tennis game in which the stakes were life or death, had served to remind him of the culture that his vocation was dedicated to preserve. He found that the novel nourished his journey to and from work, recalibrated him. ‘It’s taken me a whole year to get through. Interestingly, I’ve just hit the epilogue. There’s a mention of you, Basil – “a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man’s brains”.’

Dyer derived some comfort from Updark’s hostility. It suggested that Updark hadn’t found out more. If his men had taken the fake post-it note, he’d be asking about that, not about the inscription, wouldn’t he?

Beside him, Updark was still drawing the cork on the conundrum posed by Dyer’s book. ‘I mean, to leave it there, a present from you … Couldn’t have been your prose?’ he said cruelly. Then: ‘What do you suppose he was doing by the sandpit?’

‘Building castles. Wishing he was beside the seaside. Wishing he was reading something else.’ He turned, fizzing, to Updark. ‘Why, what do you think he was doing?’

Updark’s mouth opened like a trout sipping on a fly. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you think he’s been murdered?’ said Dyer.

‘No. At least, I’m not sure.’

‘You still suspect the Iranians?’

Updark’s hard watchful eyes were unreflective. ‘Iran is the obvious culprit. But we’re not picking up any chatter.’

‘What about the threats coming out of Tehran?’

‘Nothing more than hot air, steam.’

‘Steam powered the “Rocket”,’ said Dyer.

Updark’s smile was frosty. ‘Do not stir up Lake Camarina, Basil. I don’t need a science lesson—’ He looked about to say more, but his jacket pocket all at once was playing Bach. He pulled out his phone. After identifying the caller – ‘Sorry, I need to take this’ – he listened to the voice at the other end, his gaze never wavering from Dyer, who had to accept that this was not perhaps the right occasion to ask advice about a dog, or even to broach the subject of his son’s friendship with Updark’s daughter.

After a while, Updark said: ‘No, not a dickybird.’ Then, in a grudging tone: ‘OK, Ralph, you can have his scalp, but you’ll find it covered with one of those spongy hair transplants that needs a monthly visit to the Radcliffe to get rid of the bacteria.’