He passed behind men in Barbours and scarves, women in ski jackets and woollen hats, until he found a gap.

The parents stood around the pitch, Phoenix on one side, Horris Hill on the other.

Impatient to know the score, Dyer noticed, standing on his own, the father of the Phoenix striker, a Namibian-based bullion dealer whom he had talked to at the Summer Fields game, and walked over to him.

Dyer looked forward to his touchline chats. Somewhat to his amazement, the edge of the pitch had turned out to be an incomparable forum for discovering what was going on in the world.

Leandro’s promotion to the first XI had introduced Dyer to a higher level of achieving parent. The Hong Kong-based mother of the centre forward was heiress to a chain of clothes factories in Cambodia; not only that, her second husband owned a large uranium mine in Niger. The left winger’s father was foreign secretary of his West African republic. As for the father of the full back, he was No. 2 in the Chechen parliament, and, according to Leandro, wanted by Interpol – a fact that emerged after Ma Crotty requested a routine criminal record check so that Mr Abdurashid might join his son on the school skiing trip to Davos …

Dyer had gained through Leandro not merely entrance to a number of arenas where entry in ordinary circumstances was thrillingly forbidden, but a ringside seat.

He had no illusion that what he picked up were titbits. Plutonium grade. But titbits. All the same, it was in his blood to tease these stories out, with their entrails.

It never ceased to fascinate Dyer, how indiscreet people can be when they don’t think you are going to use the information. Everybody loves to talk about what they do, who they are. Phoenix parents who would cross the world twice to avoid publicity behaved incautiously out of character when removed from their security staff and safe bases. Relegated to the touchline – often at a time, if the game was midweek, when most other parents were at work – they became uncalculated, porous. Finding it suddenly intolerable to be standing on a drizzly afternoon beside a prep-school football pitch next to someone who had no idea who they were, they snatched the slightest opportunity to tell him, on the presumption that he was bound to be like them.

Saturday’s match against Horris Hill is a textbook example.

‘How are they doing?’ Dyer asks.

‘They’re losing,’ grumps the striker’s father. ‘Two nil.’

He follows the game with a dutiful expression, no longer like a person expecting to be recognised, until he cannot hide that the score is of far less moment to him than his responsibilities as the proprietor of an open-pit gold mine near Windhoek.

Breathing on his fingertips, he starts to tell Dyer in a confiding tone how not long ago he was approached by the Iranian government to smelt an immense quantity of bullion.