Miranda opened the front door. She held his envelope in her other hand. ‘It’s here whenever you want it … Ixé oka pupé aikó’ – and after he arched an eyebrow: ‘That’s Tupi for “I am inside the house.”’ She had tracked down one of the titles on his list: ‘Rather impressively, they had it in the Oxfam bookshop.’ She had read it on her hideous balcony in Paguera. Her quick honest eyes looked at him through their polka-dot frames. When she smiled, she tilted her chin downwards slightly, giving evidence of her shyness. ‘I learned a lot. I was interested that they couldn’t pronounce the Portuguese words for “faith” or “law”, and that there’s no future tense – all Tupi sentences are either in the past or the present. But you’d know that.’

Dyer walked away in a thoughtful, calmer mood. He had arrived an hour earlier to retrieve and rip up his interview with Marvar. He didn’t have to leave it with Miranda; it was not what he had intended.

Chapter Thirty-five

IT SOUNDS LIKE AN OWL calling.

Dyer woke in the middle of the night overcome with fear, not knowing where he was, caught up in a dreadful flux of monstrous animal and human shapes. In bed with Astrud or Nissa, he didn’t have time to worry about himself. Alone, his fears gnawed vulturously on each other.

He tensed, waiting for the call to come again, but it didn’t.

Eyes shut, he saw letters and figures, pluses and minuses, brackets of long division, as if he were back in Slimy’s class.

A car, driving slowly, crept along the street. He thought he heard voices speaking. With that animal impulse to seek shadow, he wanted to disappear into another world, crawl into the back of a cupboard and reappear in a third dimension, on a beach somewhere in Brazil where no European had been, no cars. There was always sun in Brazil; it fell through his window that faced the sea.

But he couldn’t disappear. He had Leandro. They knew where he lived. They knew where he worked. They knew where he was each day at 8.30 a.m. and again at 3.30 p.m., where he took his coffee breaks. He was steeled for them to finish him off at any moment, shoot him like a kid in Rio.

Dyer jumped out of bed and went downstairs into the kitchen, in the darkness knocking over a chair. He double-checked the front door, the locks on the French window. Then he returned upstairs, rubbing his shin.

His head sank back, but sleep doesn’t come. He is scared, he feels his body tapping inside. He doesn’t want Leandro to hear his fear. He lies in the dark and listens to the overnight train – the sounds in the distance taking him away. He was not there. He was travelling south. He was coming into Petrópolis.