The breeze heightened his senses. Passing the Oxfam bookshop, Dyer caught a smell of body odour and urine. Ahead, he recognised a Phoenix parent. A donnish-looking man in a black beret, unbrushed grey hair growing in every direction: the father of the second boy demoted from the football team, whose name had slipped Dyer’s mind. He was giving wide berth to a dishevelled accordionist seated cross-legged on the pavement.

Blue tracksuit with pale stains on it, scabs on the backs of his hands, sharp teeth blackened around the stumps, and his eyes wincing as if it wasn’t music he was squeezing out of his box, but smoke. The tune was always the same one.

The face staring up had the bitter, porcine features of someone who had never been taken seriously, who had had to fight for every scrap. A thick paperback was open, upside down, pages stained, on a sleeping bag beside him, together with a half-bottle of rum.

He stopped playing. His left hand stretched out, clutching a McDonald’s coffee cup filled with coins, and jingled it.

Dyer was about to enter the Taylorian when he heard a muffled voice call his name. He looked around. A sleek black Audi was parked in the bus lane parallel to the entrance. Knuckles rapped at the tinted rear window, which lowered further to reveal the blotched features of Lionel Updark, who fastidiously dislodged his Apple headphones.

‘John, do you have a mo’?’

Dyer wanted to turn away. He gestured at the Ionic facade behind him. ‘I was about to go in there.’

The driver sprang out and seamlessly opened the far-side door.

‘I’m the last person you want to see, I know,’ said Updark, with a crimped smile, making a little Boy Scout salute with three fingers, and then wrapping the white cable around them and putting it into his pocket. ‘But this shouldn’t take long.’

Dyer climbed into the back, in his mind cursing the red light that he had dutifully obeyed at the pedestrian crossing. The car glided off down the Woodstock Road.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Patience, John, patience.’

Beside him, Updark, in a black coat, sat with his hands in his lap, looking out of the window. The sun lay hidden, smothered by fast-moving banks of cloud, intense white, like the glaze on an iced bun. Lights were still on in some of the houses they passed.

The car slowed down by the speed camera opposite Lynam’s primary school, and after an interval it accelerated on. Over the roundabout. Onto the A40.

It was falling into place.

‘Anything to do with your new posting?’ asked Dyer in a dry, flippant tone. Instead of heading to the Faubourg St Honoré and the former palace of Napoleon’s sister, Updark was whispered to be on temporary secondment to an outreach of GCHQ.