She tried to conjure her more robust self, and view it as a bit of a game, as in the beginning she had treated their Friday-night telephone calls. But the surveillance had changed the way her mind worked. It had reached such a deep invasion of privacy. The men in the car parked permanently outside knew what books she read, what radio stations she tuned in to, the food she ate.

With a deliberate gesture, she put down her hairbrush, fighting off a sick feeling that they could even hear her thinking. The baby was her only relief, swaddled on the bed. When the baby was crying was the best time to have her most subversive thoughts. She couldn’t believe that they would want to listen to those sharp, obliterating shrieks.

The building was silent. It would be after midnight in Oxford. In the city outside, dawn was breaking.

She stepped to the window to feel the early morning’s breath on her neck, her shoulders.

Stars in the clear sky. Smell of hot seeds. The small maple tree below has a red kite trapped in its branches. Between the leaves, the black roof of the Paykan glints in the street light. A second vehicle is drawn up beside it, newer, larger, also without number plates.

Suddenly, footsteps on the roof, a rattling of shutters, someone beating on the door downstairs.

The baby stirs.

A separate hammering on the door at the back.

PART ONE

Chapter One

The playground was deserted. The only adults in sight on that chill afternoon were a couple studying the glass-fronted noticeboard outside the school building known as ‘the Rink’. A short, thickset man in a brown leather bomber jacket and a long blue-and-white striped scarf wrapped ostentatiously around his neck, and a woman in jeans, slender, taller, wearing a fur hat and ear muffs.

Dyer’s heart started to race. Gennady and Katya. They must have finished their meeting, and were waiting for their son to reappear.

To avoid Katya and her husband, but also out of habit, Dyer turned left at the gate and walked towards the sandpit.