The deadline was utterly subjective, of course, a contrived zero hour of no more significance than one of the cracks in the pavement that Dyer hopped over, yet that superstitious side of him was treating it as one of the most vital assignments of his life.

Dyer looked to the Hodder to provide an answer.

Trapped behind rocks and fallen branches on the water’s edge was a band of detritus and foam. Dyer shifted his gaze to the middle of the wide stream and followed it towards the hills. The river had wound through this valley for as long as there were people in it. From its bank, he and his father had tumbled his mother’s ashes into the ripples. For an intense moment, he experienced the thrill of being absorbed into this landscape, tethered.

A goosander exploded from the reeds, dripping water onto the surface. Dyer waited, deciding what lure to tie on. More of his father’s words came back as he leafed through his fly book that one of Updark’s men had turned upside down. ‘All you need is a piece of pheasant’s tail and some copper wire, preferably plum brown in colour from an old transistor radio, and some ochre strands of wool.’ His father hadn’t been living in the days of laptops and mobile phones, or data sniffers.

Anywhere else, he can’t picture his father so clearly. Only on the riverbank does he return, in the dogdays after his mother’s death, cross-legged in the grass in a blue felt hat, smoking a cigarette lit with another, his watery green eyes and index finger raised at the sound of martins swooping in the clear sky above, talking in a rheumy voice about male songbirds.

From his father, Dyer had discovered how to fish. How to tie a knot and lick the line, what fly to use, where to look. The trick of how to cast by tucking a bible under his arm. On the Hodder and then on other rivers and lakes – the Itchen, Ullswater, the Lune, the Nadder – his father taught him patience and respect, and that the only way to succeed in the water was to be unnoticeable. To have any chance of catching a fish so alarmable as the trout, his father had impressed on him, you had to blend in with your surroundings, take on their pace, distil yourself into a still and silent shadow until you were indistinguishable from the trout.

It was a lesson that Dyer had tried to apply to his present situation in order to throw his hunters off his scent.