On a bench near the entrance to the priory, staring ahead with an opaque expression, a smiling young woman of about twenty, frizzed blonde hair wound in plaits, sat chattering on her phone.

Down on the damp pavement beside her, back against the railings, a man lay in a sleeping bag of a strange winter blue. He wore a sweatshirt with ‘Cambridge University’ on it, and had close-cropped sparrow-coloured hair with the glint of a tonsure. Quite unperturbed by the world rushing by, he read the New Scientist.

Dyer flicked his eyes over him, thinking at first it was the accordionist, and feeling a pang of empathy. In the space defined by his belongings, he had distributed a Kathmandu backpack; a shallow black hat, upside down, to attract coins; a grey felt blanket with an Inca pattern on it; a KitKat wrapper; two paper cups; and a white metal rod. These were the objects that furnished his world, like the photos that lived beside Dyer’s bed. Dyer skirted past dismal stage sets of this kind every day. Not even the pile of Science et Vie magazines marked him out. To Dyer, this was standard decoy material, like the man’s sweatshirt; designed to manipulate Dyer into mistaking him for a former graduate down on his luck.

Without knowing why, Dyer stops. It’s about his concentration. That, and the absence of a carrion smell and a bottle. He doesn’t have the sadness of a homeless person. He doesn’t look like someone who hates waking up, worrying what the day will bring, caged inside the same inescapable tune. He looks different, somehow.

Dyer has the distraction of a man searching his pockets for money. ‘Are you enjoying that?’

The article that he reads so attentively is headlined ‘The Dark Side of Meditation’. He finishes his paragraph and then glances up, as if Dyer were a policeman looming out of the sky to move him on.

Their eyes clash.

Dark, glowing out of a narrow bearded face. They pin Dyer down with the mesmerised absorption of a precocious child. Dyer has the sudden sharp sense of having met him before.

He’s a man of about the same age, but his brown, pupil-less eyes are those of a person rising up from an immense depth. Dyer wonders for a moment if he’s blind, but he realises when the light catches the irises that they are a very deep brown. He has never seen such dark eyes, and they pull him in.

He is gazing at Dyer as if through binoculars at a shape he isn’t quite sure of, a spectral presence.

Then he sees who it is, and he smiles. ‘Basil?’