It had happened in his life once or twice. There had come into his mind someone he had not thought about in years, and next moment this person had appeared. Never before, though, not even as he walked into the Cantina da Lua, up the stairs, through the bead curtain, holding a book – the same book Rejas was reading – had he experienced a premonition about an event, and it unfolded.
Dyer was making his way down Magdalen Street when a car swerved, skidded to a halt, doors flying open, and two men sprang out and ripped towards him. He had a staccato impression, rat-at-at-at, of black hoodies, gloved fingers clamping his arms, a silver Passat estate, exhaust fumes. A group of Chinese tourists looked on, gawping, as Dyer flailed out a hand, grabbing one of them, a young woman, by the wrist, and yelled at the top of his voice, at the same time clinging with every particle of his strength to his shoulder bag.
One of the hoodies fought to prise Dyer from the terrified woman, knocking him to the ground. The other hoodie knelt and trapped his head in an arm-lock, wrenching his neck and hoisting Dyer’s gaze to the car.
He glimpsed a dark-skinned face peering out at him from the passenger seat, canal-black eyes without expression, until on studying Dyer closer, they registered a shock of surprise. Dyer heard a curt shout, an order barked in a foreign language – but what language? Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi? He couldn’t be sure, either then or afterwards.
The two hoodies, nonplussed, suddenly released him, stood up and ran back to the car. There was a screech of wheels as they dived in, doors slamming, accelerated off.
Dyer lay not moving for a second. Then he picked himself up from the pavement, checked that he still had his bag, its contents were safe, and helped the Chinese woman to her feet.
She was shaken, but unhurt, she insisted.
He escorted her over to a bench to be comforted by her group.
The tour guide – black blazer with brass buttons; blue-red-and-brown striped tie – was an Englishman like Dyer, with a broad moley face. ‘Who were they?’ he asked Dyer in an educated, interested voice.
‘I have no idea,’ said Dyer.
‘Might they have thought you were someone else?’ with glances at the road.
‘It’s possible,’ said Dyer, and after accepting the woman’s assurance that she was fine, really, he went up the steps into the Taylorian.
Sitting down in the French and German reading room, after hanging up Marvar’s coat, Dyer unzipped his bag and felt inside. His fingers had gripped Marvar’s folder moments earlier, but he needed to touch it again, to be certain.
How fast the covering tide. From his leather-seated chair, Dyer looked down through the window, rubbing his jaw. Tilting his head, he could make out the pavement where he had been sent sprawling. A new group of Chinese tourists stood in line, waiting to cross.
The men in the car – where had they intended to take him? What did they want?
Then it hit him. The tour guide was right. They’d mistaken him for Marvar.
In yielding to his superstitious nature, Dyer had put on Marvar’s overcoat as if it would help him decide what to do with the post-it note. Instead, the coat had made Dyer a mark.
Confused, intensely afraid – it had given him a real fright – he occupied himself in setting up his laptop. He plugged it in and stared hard for a moment at the screen. Then he reached out for Professor Madrugada’s book, retrieved from where he had left it on Saturday: a stack in the main reading room, on a shelf reserved for surnames beginning with D. Opening it, he flicked forward to the page that he had marked with the white Taylorian slip, like a boarding pass. He took this out and resumed his journey into the Brazilian interior, but he was conscious of the man in the Passat, his dark blazing eyes, his foreign shout.
Dyer started when the door opened and a stocky young woman in jeans entered and tumbled her computer, charger, books, scarf, bobble hat, and a bottle of water onto the central table. Without glancing her pink round face in his direction, she unzipped her fur-lined parka and, after loudly taking it off, sighed, and walked out.
He felt the tension draining. Is that how it’s going to be? He was alone in a hostile, unfamiliar world where everyone was a potential enemy. He was like Afonso Ribeiro, left to fend for himself among the Tupi. The serpent’s hiss of the surf. The caravel in the distance a dot. He was going to have to learn a new language in order to survive.
He read some pages. The busiest hours of the morning passed. The library was his sanctuary. Here, he felt safe, unmonitored. The only thing looking down at him from the wall, above a bookcase of Encylopédie Larousse and a red metal rolling ladder, was an unexceptional painting in a tarnished gilt frame. It was of a bucolic classical scene, set high on a hill, with distant mountains below lapped in a blue haze, and showed a young shepherd, possibly Endymion, tending to the injured foot of a semi-naked woman, possibly Diana, who sat on a rock, with hunting dogs and putti hovering.
Dyer spent until the early part of the afternoon in the Taylorian, reading. His place by the window was good for that, even if he leafed through the pages not really taking them in, and several times had to go back over what he had read. Every so often, he stirred himself to make a note on his laptop or to look at the painting. He looked at the painting a lot. The woman in it reminded him of someone.
The Phoenix had no games or clubs on Tuesdays. School would be over by three-thirty, and he wanted to see Leandro; he was still shaken by the attack. At three o’clock, Dyer packed away his computer and walked back through the main reading room.
No one looked up as he passed. Here, at least, he was ignored.
The librarian behind the counter had purple-framed designer glasses and short peroxide hair.
‘May I renew this?’ Dyer asked.
If he had held a more senior library card, of the sort issued to professors, lecturers and PHD students, as Dyer briefly once was, he could perhaps have taken the book home, but something in his character suited Dyer to have it reserved for him, to read here, in the neutral limbo of the Taylorian, and then to renew the book should he require it for longer. This was the first time he had felt the incentive.
She accepted the book from him to enter the details.
‘I don’t expect there’s a queue,’ he murmured absently. ‘I’m probably the only person to have requested it.’
She squinted at the screen. ‘You are the first person. But that’s not the point. It should be available for other readers. Meanwhile, your status as Mr … Madrugada’s sole reader to date is safe.’
‘How so?’
‘Data protection. I’m not allowed to reveal it – once I finish logging in these details,’ speaking in slow motion, ‘thanks to. the Bodleian’s. new. Solo security system.’
She handed the book back. ‘You can have it out for one more week. And just so you know, you can renew it yourself online.’
As he turned to go, she asked in a sharp, authoritative voice: ‘Is that your coat?’
‘No.’
She stared at him for a moment, the way his hands gripped his shoulder bag as if he had a newborn baby in it.
‘Well, you can’t leave it there.’ That rack was for the staff.
He had been in such a state when he came up the stairs. ‘It’s not mine,’ he insisted, feeling caught out. ‘I was just borrowing it.’
She gave him a salty look and pointed to an umbrella stand in the passageway outside. ‘You can leave it there.’
The black Audi had been parked outside the headmaster’s house since lunchtime, apparently, and still Mr Crotty – or ‘Crotch’ as the boys and girls called him – had not emerged.
Mr Tanner wore a grim expression. He headed across the playground to his office in suppressed conversation with the pastoral care officer, a confident, clerkly, heavyset woman, unmarried, who was Crotch’s sister.
Outside the Rink, standing in the cold, the mothers congregated. News that one of their number had gone missing had sent those who preferred to wag their tongues in the Bon Croissant
drifting over to talk to one another. Nodding heads. Pursed lips. They stood absorbing the rumours, smiling gravely, trying to worm out what was going on. A face peeped around now and then at the gate, as if hoping to see Marvar come shambling through it, and not Dyer.
He had walked all the way from the Taylorian. He had walked as though freed, until he noticed the blonde head of Katya, her gloved hands rubbing each other, standing apart from the other parents. She had not spoken to him since the evening of Mr Tanner’s investigation. Dyer had thought of her as little as possible, as if he was responsible. Seeing her there, he felt a slight tightening.
‘Hi,’ she said with an uncertain smile.
He looked at her – it was a lovely face. She might have forgiven him.
‘Hi.’
She appraised him. His olive cotton shirt and his uncombed hair. The shoulder bag that he clutched with both hands.
‘Aren’t you cold?’ she asked.
He drew himself up. ‘Not really,’ was all he said, ridiculous he thought, as if it had been the most natural thing to leave Marvar’s overcoat behind, on this chill February day, on a brass hook in the Taylorian. The librarian was bound to identify the coat as Dyer’s.
He would collect it next time, pack it into a bag, no one would notice.
Katya watched him with a strange look in her eyes.
There was the gargle of a Summertown voice a few feet away. ‘He always avoided me.’
Without turning, Dyer recognised the speaker. Samantha Puckey. Part of a book group. He had helped her with her novel, it had not worked out. He was associated with the failure.
She was raising her voice to be heard. ‘It’s easy to be wise in retrospect, but I felt there was something not quite, I don’t know, echt about him.’
‘How are you?’ he asked Katya.
The sun had broken through, weak, but flickering a silvery light over everything. The reflection in the noticeboard threw back her bright top.
She had seen Gennady off. He was not in a good mood, she said. She made a movement with her head.
He stood at an angle, keeping his back to the mothers. Her face was very white in the glass. He had the idea that she had been weeping. Just the cast of her jaw.
Her hand touched a mark on her neck. ‘You’ve heard about Marvar?’
‘Marvar?’ To hear the name spoken was a shock. He wasn’t prepared, he had been hoarding it to himself. It made real again everything that he feared.
Dyer didn’t catch what he mumbled, but Katya construed it as encouragement to face and tell him.
No one had seen Samir or his father for two days, she said. The flu, is what everyone had thought. ‘It’s been going around.’
‘I know.’ But he couldn’t pay attention. Behind her was the sandpit. There is sometimes one pose which endures. Marvar, sitting on the low wall, shoes in the sand. Looking at his fingertips as if the grains on them came from a desert.
She tossed a glance at the group behind him. ‘They are telling me it wasn’t flu.’
Katya was about to say something else, but then her son appeared and she thought better of it.
‘Ah, Vasily.’
His hair was trimmed short as if his mother had cut it. He nodded at Dyer. ‘Leandro is coming. I just saw him.’
He was less sullen than Dyer remembered.
Days earlier, Dyer had enquired about Vasily’s behaviour towards him. Leandro, ever surprising, replied: ‘Oh, Vasily’s all right.’ It reminded Dyer that Leandro didn’t judge, kids protect each other. It still worried him, though, that Leandro might be identifying with the bully, and this was more about Leandro saying: ‘Back off, Dad, let me deal with it.’ Dyer knew that he would have to play out his concern. What he was observing was a process, a necessary step in Leandro re-establishing his footing with Vasily – although their friendliness hadn’t yet extended to having Vasily over or going to his place.
On the other hand, his son’s friendship with Samir had not advanced as Dyer would have predicted. Leandro’s twinge yesterday that he might have passed his flu on to Samir had yielded to a more pragmatic view. Too bad. Tough luck. These things happen in sport. If you worry about the friend you gave flu to, you’re sunk, you’re never going to win, was Leandro’s casual new attitude.
‘I was off games for four days, remember. He’ll be back soon.’
‘What if he isn’t?’ Dyer had responded angrily, thinking of what might have happened to him instead.
Because what was becoming clear: a common cold was not the reason for Samir’s absence.
‘What are they saying?’ Dyer asked Katya. It was one thing Marvar being abducted by hostile forces who would doubtless use horrible means to extract the information they wanted out of him, but for an eleven-year-old to be part of this was unthinkable.
Her face stiffened. She spun round and looked at him with the same expression that Vivien used to put on to say Not in Front of the Children.
‘I will see you,’ in a flat voice, and walked away with Vasily, leaving Dyer breathing in the air in which she had left her faint perfume.
Then it was Leandro standing before him. ‘Dad! I didn’t recognise you. Aren’t you freezing in that shirt?’
Dyer was annoyed at being asked. The cold was the least of his worries.
Leandro went on looking at him, still mystified. ‘Hey, I was going to bike home, remember?’ He was finding it strange, this concern of his father’s to ferry him about and turn up unannounced.
‘I thought I’d walk back with you,’ said Dyer feebly.
‘Then can we go to Peppers Burgers?’
‘Not today,’ said Dyer. ‘Tomorrow – after your history test.’ There were lamb chops in the fridge. Unless eaten tonight, they’d have to be chucked away.
This reminder of his forthcoming test, on top of not being able to go to his favourite takeaway in Walton Street, plunged Leandro into a grumpy mood. He hitched his satchel further up his shoulder.
Overhead, the clouds were like foam behind a ship. The two of them walked down Phoenix Lane, through Park Town, and paused at the grassed-in oval, waiting to cross Banbury Road.
A public toilet had dominated this small lawn when Dyer was at the Phoenix. He remembered once waiting at the bus shelter opposite while Rougetel disappeared inside to have a pee. The boy who had re-emerged was unable to batten down his curiosity about the warning printed on a notice above the latrine. At the top of his voice, Rougetel shouted out to Dyer, standing in a line of serious-faced grey-haired women, ‘Hey, Basil, what’s a venner-real disease?’
Watching for a break in the rush-hour traffic, Dyer met his son’s eye, igniting a crafty smile.
‘Vasily’s mother …’ said Leandro.
‘What about her?’
‘I saw you looking at her bosom.’
Chapter Twenty-three
‘WHAT’S THIS?’
It was Leandro next morning who noticed the mark as he opened the passenger door. A neat purposeful scratch on the side, like a tag.
‘Hooligans,’ muttered Dyer. But he wasn’t convinced. You don’t leave an envy line on a seven-year-old left-hand-drive Beetle.
First, his attempted kidnap. Now this tridentine-shaped sinister scratch. In the way that after narrowly avoiding a serious accident you can become more reckless, Dyer decided to act.
Once he had dropped off Leandro at school, Dyer returned to Jericho, but instead of going to the Taylorian, he seized his shoulder bag from the passenger seat and walked back into the house.
He hung the bag on a hook in the hallway. Then, grabbing the cordless handset, he sat down on the sofa in the small drawing room. He had written out the number that Lionel Updark had asked him to call ‘should you think of anything’, but this was not the number he dialled. Something – a furry tongue at the thought of him, a sensation that his throat was closing up, like when he tasted walnuts, kiwi fruit or aubergines – still stopped Dyer from turning to Updark.
Silvi eventually answ
ered.
When he heard her voice, Dyer obeyed an instinct not to wade straight in, as he might have done with Gilles. With Silvi, obliqueness worked better. He thanked her for the sleepover, Leandro would be writing. And he had a further reason for calling …
At the other end, a suspicious ‘Yes?’
How might he get hold of Miranda?
Silvi the matchmaker couldn’t mask her delight. ‘So you liked her?’
‘That’s not quite why I want to contact her. I promised her a booklist, but I forgot to take her number. I think she was serious.’
‘Here, let me get her details. You know, I have a feeling she’s away at the moment.’
He waited for Silvi to look up Miranda’s address and telephone number (‘I don’t seem to have her email’), and wrote them down in his notebook, and her surname.
Silvi went on: ‘I still haven’t started your book – first, I have to finish Some More Silky Ways. Maybe after that, I will ask Miranda for your booklist! You must give her my special love when you see her.’
‘I will.’
‘You won’t believe this. I said to Gilles, “I know she has a lady-from-Bucharest hairstyle, very not contemporary, but I can see John getting on with that one.”’
‘Actually, Silvi, is Gilles there?’ If Dyer trusted anyone to come up with a plausible explanation for what had happened to Marvar and his son, it was Gilles Asselin.
Her husband was away, she told him in a different voice. In the Sinai.
‘What’s he doing there?’
‘Buying up the desert, I don’t know!’ He had flown off on Monday from Kidlington.
‘Back when?’
‘He didn’t say. You know Gilles. Independent as a hog on ice.’
‘I wanted to ask about Rustum Marvar.’
‘That’s so awful. God.’
‘Silvi, do you have any idea where Marvar might be?’
‘He took Samir away before lunch, before the party. He didn’t stay even to say hello, I never saw him.’ Her tone was self-exculpatory. She had told the story before.
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