THEY CAME OUT OF THE throat of the dawn, three of them, rearing up from behind a parked car as Dyer inserted his key in the lock. They were efficient, well trained, wearing balaclavas. They did not speak as they pinned him up against the boatyard’s wooden entrance and roughly searched him as he stood there. He couldn’t see their faces, they were like beings from another place. Their gloved fingers quickly picked through his coat, jacket, trousers, wallet. Then they pushed him onto the ground and took off his trainers and socks. They must have suspected him of having Marvar’s algorithm on his person after removing it from the library. They had already combed his house, and knew it wasn’t there. If it existed at all, then he must be carrying it. He wished he had a gun so that he could shoot them one by one between the eyes, instead of lying supinely recumbent on the pavement where Paula had spilled her tins of pineapple chunks. He lay there rigid, as if in a coffin the lid of which they were on the point of nailing down, not resisting, not moving, not saying a word, seeing in their black woollen faces the pointy features of Gilles Asselin streaked with warpaint, and for some reason recalling a story that Gilles had told at his dinner party before leading his guests downstairs to eat, how the African king of Kitara was fed by his cook with a fork, but if the fork accidentally touched the king’s teeth he was executed, until a noise disturbed them – Paula opening her front door – and they stood up, tossed his wallet back at him and calmly walked off, abandoning Dyer by the side of the road, his clothes strewn around him, with his heart thumping like a tennis ball, and feeling as if he had come to the end of his ordeal.

Chapter Forty-two

DOWN THE STRAIGHT NIGHT-TIME street in the cold, at the hour when curtains are still drawn and the only thing that tells you which decade it is are the posters on the windows saying ‘Brexit means Brexit!’ and ‘Stick to the Iran deal!’, Dyer had two hours earlier walked to Iffley.

He had followed the route they took as schoolboys when they wanted not to be noticed. Remarkable how it came back, the strategy they’d devised to enable them to melt into their surroundings. It had been learned in the playground as they chased each other around the Rink yelling: ‘Uh-uh-uh-uh,’ and enacting out war games derived from comic books in which there was a lot about Rommel in the desert, and all Germans went: ‘Aaagh …’ or ‘Achtung!’