Paolo listens for a while. Doesn’t want to spoil the flow by talking or asking questions. But he hears himself give a start of surprise when Dr Fernandez confirms the wording in the opening leaf of the little diary found in a mass grave in the Guatemalan jungle – the scene of a civil war atrocity that claimed the lives of dozens of men, women and children. It had been pure luck that he found any mention of the book. Erskine had given him some names. And that, in turn, led to HR #1014. She’d been found along with eighteen other victims, all women. She’d been buried blindfolded. Naked, save a golden cross and bracelet. In her hand she clutched a leather bible. And inside the bible, protected from the damp earth, was a slim volume of poetry. The words were unintelligible in places but it was written in English, in a neat hand, and was filled with half-decent little ditties about the weather, about people known to the poet; about cigarettes and grandchildren and grief. It had puzzled the anthropologists who found it and they intended, at some point, to start asking questions. Now Paolo Fergus had saved them the bother.

In his ear, Dr Fernandez is in full flow: ‘… of course around that time, the paramilitary death squads, they prowled Guatemala City in unmarked white vans and jeeps, snatching people off street corners, from their workplaces, from their houses in the middle of the night. Bodies were often left mutilated along the roadside or strung up from trees. The military targeted leftist organizers, Catholic priests and nuns, teachers, university students, trade unionists and the indigenous Maya – anyone deemed affiliated with the Left. Of course, it was the Cuarto Pueblo murders that first truly decided me on what my life’s work would involve. Four hundred soldiers ordered the villagers into the square. The men were macheted, shot, the women and children smashed against concrete pillars. The entire village was obliterated – once the last survivors had been forced to dig their own burning pits. The jungle smelled of flesh and fire for days afterwards. When we found the site – my team took forty coffee sacks full of teeth and bone fragments back to the lab. It felt as though we had done something of worth, though there is no celebration in such a moment.’

‘We’re here, mate,’ says the cabbie, from the driving seat.