Dyer told Marvar: ‘I waited until everyone was asleep. Then I sneaked out in my pyjamas, down the road – the doors weren’t locked – and I dug around for a bit.’

Marvar, captive, said: ‘You mean here? In this pit?’

‘Somewhere here.’

‘And – did you find it?’

Dyer remembered the night, a little faded maybe, like a restaurant bill in an old blazer. The cool freshness of the air after the bathroom – the tiled floor had reeked of disinfectant. The dark deserted street, the low fence, the sandpit. And the moment when his fingers encountered a hard outline and, brushing away the sand, exposed the curved tip of a plastic wing coloured with Dark Green and Dark Earth markings.

‘It might even have been there,’ pointing to where Marvar had rubbed out his marks. He gazed at the mounds and furrows emphasised in the street light. ‘But as I said, this is many years ago.’

One digs up the past to pay for the future. Climbing the fence to look for something precious in a place where he wasn’t supposed to be – hadn’t this been his initiation as a foreign correspondent?

Marvar watched him with a curious smile. ‘What was the plane?’

Dyer heard himself recite, like a long-forgotten verse learned by heart: ‘An Australian fighter called a Boomerang, made by the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation between 1942 and 1945.’

‘A Boomerang!’ said Marvar, with another smile, full of irony and humour. ‘After the stick you throw and it comes back? Oh, I like that,’ and he repeated the word with feeling. ‘Boomerang …’

Just at that moment a light went off in a window. There was a movement in the playground, and three figures emerged from the doorway to Mr Tanner’s office.

Vasily, the tallest, peeled off when he caught sight of his parents. Katya detached herself from her husband, running forward to place an arm across Vasily’s shoulder.

Leandro walked on towards the Rink with Samir, a slim, good-looking, dark-haired boy who skirted around the embracing mother and son with the loose grace of a young deer.

Marvar, waving, heaved his big body up. ‘Samir! Over here!’

If he hadn’t stayed in neon-lit labs in a cold unyielding climate, and not gone hunchbacked and plump thanks to years of sitting on a stool, this is what he would have looked like, thought Dyer, following.

Under the Rink light, their two sons wore the expressions of boys who had taken an important step. They exuded the sense of being grown up that only children can feel.

Dyer smiled at Leandro. ‘Got all your prep?’

Katya came by, holding Vasily to her. Gripping his son’s other arm, Vasily’s father talked to him urgently, in Russian. He lifted his head, and his face hardened when he saw Dyer. Katya’s eyes turned, finding his. She looked at him and then looked away.