Even so, the problem remained. What to do with the small square of paper currently sandwiched inside the back flap of Os sete únicos documents de 1500, conservados em Lisboa, referentes a viagem de Pedro Álvares Cabral (Lisbon, 1940). That part of his brain which should have solved it wasn’t working.

He had rehearsed all the options: Updark, Cubbage, Euratom, Wikileaks, his old newspaper. But these were Marvar’s thoughts, not his. He had to come up with ideas of his own. He had tumbled it over and over till he was weary, and he couldn’t put an answer together. What if there is no right person?

And what the hell had happened to Marvar?

His head felt as though it was buried in sand. Tumultuous thoughts coursed through it. He went on playing the scenarios in his mind. They hadn’t changed. Nearly a fortnight after Marvar’s disappearance, nothing had changed. But dead or alive or wherever he was, it didn’t matter. Marvar had wanted Dyer to decide for him.

Initially, Dyer had relished the challenge. His self-esteem had rotted and he saw a chance to earn it back. But the past days had educated him, he recognised that he wasn’t the right person. He was a conduit, a middle man, a quondam journalist with yet another story that he couldn’t tell and had no idea what to do with.

Edit yourself out of the story, the caipirinha is telling him. Spike your interview. Rub the blue pencil over anything connecting you to Marvar. Remember Bunting: ‘Notes are a confession of failure.’

Before Dyer went to collect Leandro, he made another detour to Ward Road. Still, the house lay in darkness. The drawn curtains reminded him of the flat above Yolanda’s dance studio in the Surquillo district of Lima, in which Ezequiel had hidden out even as he choreographed his world revolution. Gilles was pursuing the same kind of dream, and with no less ruthlessness. For the first time, Dyer worried about Miranda. What danger had he placed her in by sending her his notes? Gilles was aware that Dyer was connected with Miranda, from the knowing way that he had referred to her in Browsholme – did this now mean that Gilles connected Miranda with Marvar?

Oxford in the evening and Dyer’s face lit by the windows along North Parade. Gaudy lights from Gee’s restaurant, the night-neon of florists. He walked as if an old dog was following him, his heels clacking on the pavement like the slow tok of a berimbau.

Chapter Thirty-four

LATE NEXT MORNING, DYER PRESSED the buzzer outside number 8 Ward Road and inclined his head to the perforated speaker. This time a female voice answered.

He waited for her to open the door.

She wore an apron over a pale yellow linen dress.