The scientist is polite and courteous, his accent Latin American but with the softer vowels of somebody who has lived away from their homeland for several years. ‘Yes, indeed,’ he says, with enthusiasm in his voice. ‘It is, as you say, more than a coincidence, perhaps. Sometimes, God intercedes, perhaps.’

Paolo doesn’t offer any thoughts on God for fear of offending this clearly spiritual man. Dr Fernandez runs the AAF. In conjunction with the United Nations and several other charities and church groups, he is endeavouring to match the bodies recovered from endless mass graves, with the names of the disappeared. It is a Herculean task but the interviews that Paolo has read all indicate that the doctor and his team of forensic anthropologists will not slow in their undertaking until every last scrap of bone or clothing is cross-referenced against the growing database of the names of the missing.

Paolo had to spend heavily on his last remaining credit card in order to purchase a bogus log-in to the organization’s intranet. A hacker friend in a coffee shop in Camden had done the necessary in under twenty minutes. He purchased access to the great unwieldy mass of photographs, maps, grid references and official reports that represented the entirety of Guatemala’s war graves. Thousands upon thousands of bodies had been recovered from their hidden resting places. Each body was then painstakingly separated out from those with whom it had been interred. In the pictures Paolo had seen, dedicated young scientists were grimly using paintbrushes and chopsticks to whittle away at dirt embedded in eye sockets, skulls and femurs. Every fibre of clothing, every belt-buckle, eye-glass, training shoe or gold tooth – each were disentangled and individually laid out. Samples were taken. Photographs were taken. And then the blood relatives of the disappeared gave the DNA samples that could allow Dr Fernandez and his team to start cross-referencing. He and his staff have uncovered more than 10,000 bodies – from villages, from wells, from under church tiles, from eighty-foot-deep bone pits in a cemetery. Their unenviable goal is to pinpoint causes of death, identify the bodies and bring the remains back to families who have been searching for their mothers, fathers, sons and daughters for decades.

‘You want to know about the book, I take it,’ says Dr Fernandez, sunnily. ‘I shan’t ask you how you know, but it is certainly something that we have considered asking our press friends to consider running. Of course, there are many incongruities – this is the right word, I hope? But certainly, a volume of English poetry, handwritten, inscribed – it has left us wondering, that much is certain.’