Gennady had appeared, late, like the ominous stranger Dyer once witnessed descend on a Brazilian film set. When Dyer had enquired who this was, he was informed that the man represented the film’s backers – invested with their absolute authority, should the production run over budget, to say: ‘OK, that’s a wrap.’

Cut free of Katya’s gravitational sway, Dyer created the details. He knew how it would be. In the apartment off Jamaica Road, after the match. She waits for him, he has come with a box of salmon for Vasily, a cashmere sweater for her; they go out to dinner at Gee’s. He touches her face, the lights glint on his leather jacket.

‘He doesn’t know,’ she says to Gennady. ‘For a while, I had this suspicion, but – truly – he doesn’t know anything, unless it is about some Brazilian tribe,’ and counterfeits his voice: ‘“My subject is sixteenth-century Brazil. The twenty-first century can go screw itself.”’

To Dyer’s relief, neither Gennady nor Katya nor Whitton nor Cubbage, nor even Hui’s bodyguard, who has popped up wearing a brand new Phoenix scarf, once turn their face in his direction. They display all the indifference of the Tupi to Afonso Ribeiro, after Ribeiro relinquished his one or two metal objects which had so mesmerised the tribe. They have looked into Dyer long and thoroughly enough to be satisfied that he doesn’t know anything useful. He’s been questioned, followed, intimidated, bribed, his house searched, his communications investigated, his research checked. They have run through all their options, and feel confident that he would have cracked by now. With nothing solid to connect him to Rustum Marvar, Dyer is not any longer a target of interest. He has reverted to what Updark always took him to be: an under-employed ex-journalist who likes to stir things up, perverse, stubborn, but not a troublemaker, not a dangerous subversive. A bit player caught, for the briefest of flashes, cringing in the headlights of a juggernaut that has since roared by.

A bark drew him back to the game. Beatrice Updark teetered on the touchline, doing her best to restrain Spassky.

The first time Dyer saw Spassky, he had thought of savage-eyed dogs snapping at him, the metal entrails of unfinished floors rusting upwards to a blue, vulture-specked sky. But Spassky was not like that, with his eyebrows like ‘caramel waterfalls’ as Leandro put it; he wanted to drool over Dyer’s hand, not tear it into shreds as Dyer until very recently had wanted to rip up Marvar’s post-it note.

Held back by his collar, Spassky craned to watch the Phoenix players dash forward. It was a moment before Dyer realised that the dog’s eyes – like Beatrice’s … and now his – were trained on one boy: arm in the air, long legs, sand-coloured hair. His part-Tupi son. He was gesturing to Puckey, who suddenly had possession.