That hammering again. A barrister from Putney had bought the house. He had a boy and a girl going to the Phoenix in September.

After Dyer told him how Astrud had died in childbirth, Marvar fished out a wallet and produced a photo. ‘My wife.’

Dyer saw a face like Samir’s: large eyes, very dark brows, long thick black hair, a small straight nose, and slightly uneven front teeth that lent an elfin element to her smile.

‘And here – with my daughter.’

The baby girl in her arms, she could have been only a few months old.

‘What’s your daughter called?’

‘Jamileh,’ in a small voice.

‘And your wife?’

‘Shula.’

‘She looks lovely.’

‘Oh, she is, she is a very brave, clever woman. My halfness.’ It was almost a whisper

‘You told me you were divorced.’

Marvar inclined his head. ‘I lied.’

Dyer looked up. ‘Any reason?’

Marvar’s faint brown skin stretched over his skull exposed a small pulse that Dyer had not noticed before, showing the race of his thoughts.

He pulled up a chair and sat down, making it creak. People always look around before they lie. He met Dyer’s gaze directly.

‘May I have a coffee?’ as if this was not the only decision he had reached. Lies weren’t going to get him anywhere.

Chapter Ten

EVERYTHING STARTS OVER A COFFEE, he remembered her laughing. Not that Marvar drank much of his. He kept getting up and wandering over to the window, speaking to the window as if to the sky. He belonged not in that room, but in a desert landscape the colour of his coat, rimmed by volcanic peaks, the dogs panting, the groan of the water-wheel, shutters closing, opening. Outside, coming off the canal, the Oxford mist suspended Marvar from normal times, from this red-brick house in Jericho where he stood, or sat noisily down, his lungs wheezing, trying to work out how to explain to Dyer what motivated him to behave in this strange jittery way. And all the while from next door that bang bang bang.

It emerged in fragments between sips. He was afraid of saying too much. He hardly knew Dyer. They’d had – what? – two conversations. Even so, his instincts told him that Dyer was a person to trust, who might understand. Anyway, who else could he talk to? There wasn’t anyone.

He spoke as if his mouth was dry. Yes, he was still married, and happily. But his wife Shula was a hostage in Tehran. They had not let her travel to Oxford. They would let him bring Samir, but not his wife.

Marvar couldn’t deny that it had come as a surprise when the Clarendon laboratory invited him ‘in a spirit of reconciliation’ to spend three years at the Department of Physics in Oxford. He was a junior spectrometrist. Iran had plenty more experienced physicists – plus his mother had been a Christian.