It wasn’t the first time I’d been offered a bribe. A householder in Pimlico once wanted me to take £100 over the odds to put two socket outlets into his bathroom in contravention of the IEE Wiring Regulations. But he made no suggestion that I was capable of blackmailing him afterward. Very likely Liv had given little thought to what she was doing. The habit of flinging money about she may have caught from James and Claudia just as she apparently treated her children the way they treated theirs. Money, she had seen, really does silence people, keeps them sweet, and may instill fear into them. For hadn’t it been so with her? Of the notes given to her to buy a pint of milk or a loaf of bread, she had habitually kept three-quarters, hoarding up a nest egg that was as much a menace as a blessing. She was unable to resist doing it, saving it brought her the only happiness and satisfaction she had at that time. But it frightened her too. It kept her, more or less uncomplaining, the slave to James and Claudia and their children.

She was always expecting them to ask for it back. It was incredible to her, coming as she did from a prudent family of savers, a household where her parents had a strict plan of domestic finances, her mother keeping a careful account of her weekly expenses to the nearest krona, that they didn’t remember what they’d given her. Claudia and James must know, one or both of them must be keeping a secret tally. Sooner or later she would be asked for it, an account would be submitted to her, a reckoning take place. The screaming of abuse would begin, the threats. She would be in the position of the woman in the dress shop. At night, in her room, she counted her hoard by candle-light, then lay in bed worrying about being found out. She held the tin up against her chest but it was no longer the comforting teddy bear. She thought about Claudia coming into her bedroom or the cleaning woman coming in and opening the cupboard and finding the tin with its contents.

The cleaner, of course, did go in there. One night, in the autumn, while some half-mile away I was trying to adjust to living below ground and jangling the hangers in old Mrs. Fisherton’s wardrobe, Liv decided to leave her stash unattended no longer. She’d find some way of taking it with her wherever she went. They would be unable to detect it was their money if it wasn’t in their house. Unless they had written down the notes’ numbers before they gave them to her. It’s some measure of the state she was in even by then that she seriously considered this possibility.