This square enclosure, three metres by three, was one of the few remnants of the school as Dyer remembered it. Framed by a low brick wall next to the boundary fence, the box of sand was a continent away from the rush-hour traffic on Banbury Road. Its view over the grass playing fields took in the granite war memorial, the cricket pavilion, and the Cherwell, invisible but indicated by a line of leafless elms. In Dyer’s time, a blue barge nestled on the riverbank, its lower deck doubling during swimming competitions as a changing room. But the barge was gone. Ditto the tuck shop and the woodwork shed where Dyer had learned to cut out a plywood shape which he could almost pretend was a machine gun. Yet Dyer would only have to raise his eyes to the circular Gents clock on the wall outside ‘Slimy’ Prentice’s study, like a cold winter sun, with its hands at 4.03, for his eleven-year-old self to have recognised in an instant where he was. That and the sandpit.

To Dyer’s irritation, another father occupied the spot where, since early February, he had taken to waiting for Leandro. A big, overweight man in his late thirties, hunched over, pale brown face, spectacles, with a sparse beard and thick unbrushed dark hair, and enveloped in a long unbuttoned coat. Dyer didn’t know him, but he recognised the camel-coloured overcoat: exactly what he coveted for himself in this climate, where the cold still caught him unawares. Dyer had envied the coat from a distance during the match against Summer Fields, a fortnight before – he retained a vague image of the person wearing it suddenly producing a notebook, and tucking this away after making a quick entry. When Dyer next glanced across the pitch, the coat had gone.

The man hadn’t seen him. Knees apart, feet in the sandpit, where at Leandro’s age Dyer had sat on a sunny day with a magnifying glass and scored his initials onto a tennis ball, he leaned forward, and with his index finger sketched something in the sand. He looked at this, whatever it was, and muttered to himself in an animated way, finger hovering.

‘Are you Samir’s father?’ said Dyer.

The man’s arm froze. He raised his head. His face tightened when he saw Dyer advancing.

With his palm, he very rapidly erased the marks that he had made. ‘That’s right.’

‘We haven’t met. John Dyer. Leandro’s dad,’ and held out his hand.

The man stood up at the second attempt. He stamped his shoes, once, twice, three times. Then he stared at his hand, covered in moist sand, and wiped it on his coat, before shaking Dyer’s.

‘Rustum Marvar.’

Dyer glanced down. ‘I’m interrupting you.’

‘No, no, I was working something out.’

Dyer craned. ‘Something interesting?’

Before Dyer could determine what this might have been, Marvar kicked out his foot and scuffed away the last traces.