In rapturous silence, Leandro picked the fish up with both hands, a flashing blade drawn out of the stone. He caressed it, and for a moment Dyer was convinced that his son would opt to keep the trout, but all at once Leandro turned and bent down to the water.

There’s a righting of the tail, a shiver and a kick, and then it flicks off over the stones into the river.

Down the river. A spladoosh! The salmon kelt, or whatever it was, still out there.

Chapter Thirty-two

DARKNESS WAS FALLING AS THEY returned to the inn. Across the river a car’s headlights swept over the trees, painting the topmost branches orange, dipped, and switched off.

Leandro walked beside him, excited to relive the last hour. Catching the trout, letting it go. It was up there with his goal against Horris Hill, suspending all talk of a dog.

A large silver Mercedes was parked on the lawn. They stepped around it, into the lobby, and propped up their rods behind the big oak front door. While Leandro raced upstairs to have a bath, Dyer paused in the hallway to look at the newspapers.

The word Iran was repeated in all the headlines. Haunted as he was by that subject, Dyer took a copy of The Times into the bar. He was about to order a drink when he heard a familiar laugh.

Elongated head, slate-grey hair, jutting jaw. He sat on a stool, dressed in a bottle-green polo-neck, talking to the bearded man.

Dyer hesitated – should he retreat? – when the eyes of ‘our resident predator’, as he remembered Miranda calling him, swivelled in his direction.

‘Jean Dyer.’

‘Gilles Asselin.’

How had Gilles found him? Only Paula knew his whereabouts.

Any pleasure that Dyer had been feeling was numbed by a premonition this was no fluke.

Gilles released himself from the embrace that he had initiated. ‘Craig here has been telling me how to catch hen harriers with a night-vision camera …’

‘You’d better watch out for the RSPB,’ Dyer warned. ‘They’re a powerful lobby.’ He drew up a stool. ‘Silvi and Pierre?’

‘In Oxford.’

‘What brings you to Browsholme – aside from raptor politics?’

Gilles fluttered his fingers as if touching ice. ‘Business interests.’

‘I tried to ring you.’

‘Silvi said. I’ve been away.’

‘You’ve been gone a while.’

‘I have a little problem. Bit of an issue. Hey, what are you drinking?’

Dyer felt at once self-conscious. ‘I was going to order a ginger-beer shandy.’

Gilles nodded to the barman, who snapped to attention with a servility not previously on display. Reflectively, Gilles watched him pour the spicy ginger beer slowly into the bitter. ‘You know, I’ve never tasted one of those.’

‘It’s what I drank last time.’

He looked at Dyer. ‘You’ve been to this hotel before?’

‘My father used to bring me here.’