‘I sent out one of my people. He came back. It was gold all right – the bars were stacked to the rafters of a warehouse in Tehran. Only one problem, though.’

Dyer encouraged him to go on. His gathering of information was instinctive, what he had been trained to do, even if there was no outlet. It was another compensatory act, a deflection from his hitherto unexciting research. Now and then he might experience a transitory pang that he wasn’t any longer a journalist, but to date not one of the stories that he heard while watching Leandro play football had made him wish to pick up a pen. Fourteen years since he had last filed an article, and he was perversely content for his storytelling muscle to remain dormant.

‘On each and every bar was the stamp of the Central Bank of Kuwait. These were the Kuwaiti gold reserves, stolen by Saddam Hussein!’

‘So what did you do?’ he prompted, reminded suddenly of Marvar.

‘The CIA were keen for me to go ahead, but the Iranians never returned my calls.’

Dyer nodded, poker-faced, as fifteen minutes later he nodded out of the same continuing habit when the father of the Phoenix goalkeeper, a French-Canadian hedge-fund manager who for some obscure reason had developed what his wife teasingly called ‘a man crush’ on Dyer, used the half-time interval to tell him the background to a story that had seized the headlines.

Days earlier, the runaway favourite to be the next head of FIFA had been arrested in Switzerland for assaulting a chambermaid.

Intense speculation in the world’s media revealed no one to be in possession of the facts – save, that is, for Gilles Asselin, whose company, he let slip to Dyer, as their sons changed ends, owned the hotel in Geneva where the assault allegedly had taken place.

‘It’s a story, nobody can prove it except me, but I’m telling you the story.’

Gilles Asselin, thinning grey hair with a jutting bony nose and an amused slur to his accent, was forty-one, but looked older. He was a former speed-skate champion who was known to jog five miles every day – Dyer might benefit from copying his regime, Leandro felt. Gilles had worked for Goldman’s and then for Paribas until he decided to create his own company. He owned a chateau near Liège, and kept a private jet at Kidlington and his long white athlete’s fingers in an awful lot of pies.

Impermeable when it came to business, Gilles was gleeful in relaying to Dyer the genuine reason behind the arrest. ‘It was a case of mistaken identity!’

The FIFA candidate, ‘a connoisseur of rough sex’, had called up his madame to request his favourite girl, who not being available, it was arranged to have her place taken by someone au fait with Monsieur’s forceful tastes. So the madame assured.

‘Am I going too fast?’ Gilles says, at Dyer’s expression.