It was not yet eleven when Dyer broke his routine and left the Taylorian. The cobbles outside were dark from an earlier rain. After a warm snap, the cold weather had returned.

He was walking along Walton Street when he sensed that someone was following him. He dashed into the Dragon Cinema, and bought a ticket to a film that had already begun. He fell asleep after ten minutes, and when he wakes up the three people in the cinema are leaving. It’s the middle of the day as he emerges. He has no memory of what he’s watched. He feels in another time zone, another country.

In slow steps, he headed back towards the town centre, plunged into a canal of images. The asthmatic misfire of an exhaust made his hair stiffen. His eye played tricks. He thought he saw Lorna coming out of Boswell’s, carrying a saucepan. When he looked again, she had transformed into a grey-haired old lady holding a Sainsbury’s bag.

His fears nipping at his heels, he stumbled, caught himself, and continued walking down George Street to Gloucester Green. There was a market in the square. Cloudily, he ordered a hamburger from a van. The chips made him think longingly of cassava fries; the stalls, of the market in Belém – boxes of old comics and blue-and-white patterned teacups of the sort that his parents sipped from. He wolfed down the hamburger. He needed an astrolabe to find his bearings.

Hunger assuaged, he struck out across the cobbles. He was letting his instincts lead him, following one of the goat paths that he had carved out with Rougetel, and behaving with the same furtive watchfulness.

Checking over his shoulder, he left Gloucester Green, and made his way through Wellington Square to Claridge Street, in through the black-glazed door of Barico’s.

This time, he didn’t look at the papers on the counter. The news about Iran no longer touched Dyer. His own drama consumed him.

He ordered a caipirinha, then another, the only customer, a solitary tapir coming to drink. It wasn’t hard to imagine that he was back in Brazil. Looking out from his flaking windowsill. He felt like a car on sugar-cane alcohol. Putter putter putter. The condensation on the glass was the rain on the windscreen of the yellow Beetle taxi taking him to her funeral in Petrópolis.

Dyer hadn’t thought about the ceremony for years, and goodness knows what prompted him to recall it now. How it came back, that humid day, and the smell of rotten mango and the spasm in his foot, and Vivien, who had flown in from Lima with Hugo. He sat by Astrud’s body for some time, and then Vivien handed him a large glass of cachaça.