Dyer’s heart thumps like a man stamping sand from his shoes. He feels the blood rushing from his face. He’s aware of how bewildered he looks, with a £5 note in his hand, how exposed, as if he’s trying to cover himself with a flannel.

‘Do I know you?’

‘You are John Dyer. Aren’t you?’

Dyer stares at him. Bearded, older, with a dent in his chin.

‘Rougetel?’ is all he can stammer.

PART FOUR

Chapter Thirty-seven

THE FRIZZY BLONDE YAKS AWAY on her phone as Rougetel emerges from his sleeping bag.

Before her unseeing eyes, he stood up, rain on his shoulder, his legs thin as saplings in his black jeans. He remained invisible to her while he slipped his sockless feet into a pair of worn trainers. Nor was she distracted when he bent to roll up the sleeping bag, and strapped it – with the grey felt Inca blanket – to the underside of his backpack.

He stuffed the New Scientist he had been reading into a side pocket, scooped up the remaining magazines, cups, chocolate wrapper, and carried these over to a dustbin, dropping them in. Then he emptied into a pocket the coins from his hat and put it on.

The only trace that he has left behind is his dry outline on the pavement.

To Dyer, the sight of the friend he last glimpsed when he was twenty is overwhelming, a phenomenon so extraordinary that it drives all else from his mind. One look at Rougetel, he forgets Marvar’s post-it note, his scheme to eliminate it from the face of the earth.

‘Are you hungry?’ he asks after a silence.

He was struggling to find Rougetel – his freckled pale face – in the dark deep-set eyes, steady and direct; the aquiline nose; the beard, one side trimmed tidier than the other. Lean, fit-looking, he wasn’t a shambles. He was quiet and watchful. They were the same height.

Rougetel nodded. He hoisted his backpack onto his shoulders, and the two of them set off together without a word.

They crossed the pavement where Dyer had avoided kidnap, and picked their way through the lunchtime throng of released students, who parted to let Rougetel by, gripping the white steel rod in his right hand, as if he were a blind man. His gait was loping and slow, pigeon-toed a little; his face half hidden by his shallow-brimmed hat. In the direction they were going, they walked as if on a predetermined route, up Cornmarket, through the Covered Market, past slabs heaped with whelks, into the Café Lisboa.

The seats by the window were taken. Miguel showed them to a table set against the back wall.

Rougetel unhitched his backpack, placed the white rod on the shiny tablecloth, and sat down.

‘I remember this place.’ His voice was low-pitched and flat, sanded of the middle-class accent which Dyer had largely retained. ‘It was strictly out of bounds.’