There were newspapers on the zinc counter. Dyer’s eyes picked out a report on Iran. The BBC office was being shut down for ‘conspiracy against national security’. He thought of how Basil Bunting was expelled as Tehran correspondent for The Times in 1952, and how he had joined the masses ululating for his own extinction. ‘I walked into the crowd and stood amongst them and shouted DEATH TO MR BUNTING! with the best of them, and nobody took the slightest notice of me.’ Dyer hadn’t needed to go to the Middle East to find himself in the same pickle. He’d first been drawn to Bunting because of his name – to come across a bracingly good poet also called Basil was a huge comfort. But there was this crucial difference between them: Dyer had been noticed.

No mention of Rustum Marvar, or his wife.

He drank his over-sugared caipirinha, feeling a renewed sense of isolation. Who had ordered those two books? Conscious of being under surveillance, and now of being read, he felt as if he was being crowded simultaneously from all sides by men of different skin colours, religions, politics, a scrum of Phoenix fathers hunting after the same information who had more than a sneaking suspicion that Dyer was in possession of this, and were charging hell for leather down the pitch to tackle him.

It shocked Dyer to realise how connected these people were. Gilles Asselin had a box at Chelsea because – of course! – Katya’s husband was a shareholder of the club. Ralph Cubbage and Lionel Updark were clients of Gilles – and Gilles had boasted to Dyer of his links with high flyers in foreign intelligence services. (‘The intelligence community is a broad church that worships different gods.’) They probably had children at the Phoenix, too.

He ordered another caipirinha with the panic of a man on a foreign shore, surrounded by once-welcoming tribes who had turned hostile. His only salvation, a post-it note covered with impenetrable scribbles. Eight days since it first came into his possession, and he still hadn’t been able to decide whether Marvar had written nonsense on it – like Dyer’s dream – or the answer to everything, like the ‘total book’ in Borges’s story, which was ‘the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest’. Dyer saw no nuances, he was bad at nuances, he was bad at so many things.

He liked to think he had become wiser, but how little his character had matured. Nosce te ipsum. That was the wisdom he had been educated to seek at Leandro’s age. Nearly half a century on, he was a world away from understanding himself. Nuclear fusion was an easier nut to crack.