A need to escape from himself sent Dyer back to the Taylorian next morning. This circuit to the library was his rosary, he had become locked into his telling of it.

After his sleepless night, he felt weak, nauseated even. Continually circling and never moving forward, he trod the grey stone staircase, cold step by cold step, not noticing his surroundings.

But he senses it like a stare from the back. He knows something is going to happen.

In the centre of the room beneath the dome was a round table. Dyer passed the chairs of two people reading, and looked over their shoulders. The gull-faced girl, the bearded man, neither immersed in a book with wine-red covers.

Madrugada’s monograph had disappeared from the stacks, already on its way to whoever had requested it. Conscious now of feeling paranoid, Dyer collected the calf-bound edition of facsimiles relating to Pedro Álvares Cabral’s voyage, and took it into the French and German reading room. No one had switched on the lights, but his tired eyes were grateful for the dull daylight falling through the windows. The only presences in the room were the crouching shepherd and the wounded goddess on the wall.

In the feeble light he sees a movement in the painting, or thinks he does. They look as if they’re about to fall in love, it strikes him for the first time. That’s what they look like.

With pounding heart, he opened the back cover to check if Marvar’s note was where he’d left it – inside a pocket sewn into the endpapers, containing a map of the Brazilian coast.

A part of Dyer buckled to see the yellow scrap of paper. The writing on it stood out. The ink had the dark glare of something that had fallen hissing to earth. He could imagine it burning a hole in the hull of Cabral’s flagship.

How Dyer wished – for the first time – that he had not responded to the lure of the word ‘BOOMERANG’.

Doors opened and closed. Cars hooted. The window-fan whirred. Someone switched on the lights. He swung round; it was the gull-faced girl. He shielded his eyes. He was drowning in the brilliance, as though a hand holding a gigantic magnifying glass had focused all the sun’s beams on him and he was a bright spot curling into flame. His fingers folded the note back into the pocket and flicked through the pages to the first chapter. Dyer tried to concentrate on the words in front of him, about the admiral’s reaction to the Tupi Indians gathering on the beach, how they approached in friendliness and innocence, but when he looked at the words they went blank, until he had the impression that he was gazing through a smouldering cavity at a world that was on the verge of extinction.