‘All will become clear when we get there,’ Updark said. He brushed some hairs from his trouser leg. ‘What do you reckon, Peter?’

The driver answered twenty minutes. Dyer knows suddenly where they are going. Not to the Updark pile in Woodeaton, where he had tipsily complimented curly-headed Audrey – that was her name! – on her clinging scent. (‘That smells exotic, what is it?’

‘Oh, something I got in the souk in Rabat.’) But to an anonymous corrugated-iron warehouse in a business park outside Eynsham where he will be obliged to leave his shoulder bag in reception and submit to a close body search and, after a security wand waves him through, follow Updark up a perforated-metal staircase, through a steel-lined corridor and screened co-axial cables, into a large open-plan room with floor-to-ceiling windows.

The tune of the wheels on the straight flat road removed them from the present.

‘Sorry not to see you at the Asselins’ the other evening,’ said Dyer.

‘Something came up,’ Updark replied in a grave voice.

‘You’d have liked the person who took your place.’

Updark made no response. Dyer thought of Miranda assessing Updark through squashed glasses to encapsulate him in eighty words.

‘How’s Beatrice?’ asked Dyer after a while, and receiving no reply, ‘Spassky?’

Ignoring him, Updark said in a retrospective tone, ‘Did you see that Slimy has died?’

Only to Dyer out of all the parents at the Phoenix would this name have resounded. It was as if, in an obituary in the Phoenician, Updark sought a trench in which the pair of them could shelter, before hostilities resumed.

‘I did read that. A miracle he evaded Yewtree.’

‘Remember Parkhouse?’ said Updark, investing the name with respect and authority. Hair was springing out of his nostrils. He was touching a plaster on his wrist.

Dyer thought back. He would play the game. ‘Robin Parkhouse?’ There came to him a round face in a blue-and-yellow striped blazer. ‘Captain of cricket?’

‘I saw him not long ago,’ Updark went on. ‘He told me how he took his son round a prep school in Dorset, all set to enrol him, when, just as they were leaving the headmaster’s study, a door opened along the corridor – and out stepped Slimy!’

Dyer couldn’t hold back his smile. ‘That would have been a shock. Although, I have to say, he never beat me.’ Slimy Prentice had merely hurled Dyer’s math’s prep into the bin, saying: ‘This, Basil, is damned unamusing.’

‘Nor me,’ reflected Updark, rubbing a distracted finger up and down his wrist. ‘He wasn’t such a bad teacher, actually. Remember him telling us, “Knowledge is power”? Of course, Slimy didn’t let on he was quoting Bacon. Still, it’s quite true.’ Then: ‘Seen any of the others recently?’ He meant from Upper One.