Gilles laughed, disappointed. ‘I don’t know, he strikes me as a little … well, incoherent. A few days ago, he was in a flap about letting his son come here for a sleepover. Now all of a sudden he couldn’t be more relaxed.’

‘He’s a scientist, Gilles. Up and down.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Gilles, staring into his glass. ‘I suppose so.’

Everyone got to their feet. Only Cubbage lingered for the rum which Gilles had purchased from Hemingway’s cellar in Cuba.

Headlights in the rain. Sable coat. An overly wrapped figure with a night-case – Jocasta – stood in the open doorway thanking Silvi for a wonderful evening. Out in the street, engine running, a taxi was waiting. She tripped towards it on her high yellow heels like a seagull that has gorged so much it can hardly fly.

‘It’s been fun, I must say,’ said Dyer, kissing Silvi on the cheek.

Over her shoulder, the gravel glinted in the security light.

‘I’ll ring you about Saturday,’ she promised, already looking ahead to Pierre’s birthday party. ‘You must tell me if there’s anything Leandro doesn’t eat. Oh, and thanks for the book.’

Chapter Nine

THE FOOTBALL MATCH ON THE following Saturday was against Winchester House, in Brackley, twenty-two miles away. To celebrate his birthday, which fell next day, Pierre Asselin had invited the Phoenix team home for a sleepover after the game. Leandro never wanted to go to the house of anyone who didn’t have a father, preferring to be with friends whose dads were very visible, but he liked Gilles, and was somewhat in awe of his speed-skating past, having seen a photograph of him crossing the line in Japan that Gilles carried on his phone and had shown to Leandro after a practice.

Dyer would have the house to himself for the weekend to work on his book.

Late on Saturday morning, Dyer tore himself from the Taylorian. His research had suddenly become a lot more interesting, sparked by the monograph that he had ordered up the week before.

Dyer was investigating the first European settlers in Brazil: among them, three weeping convicts left behind in May 1500 on a beach south of the future city of Bahia. The Portuguese chronicler, Pêro Vaz de Caminha, who witnessed their distress from the deck of his admiral’s flagship, reported that the men’s death sentences had been commuted in exchange for their learning about the customs and language of the naked Tupi.

Not much was known concerning two of the convicts, but an historian at Coimbra University had traced descendants of the third – ‘a banished youth’ called Afonso Ribeiro – to Belém on the mouth of the Amazon, a thousand miles north; new documents had led to the discovery of a family of Ribeiros living in the port area.