Perhaps she was pursued, but she thought not. Few people in her situation, after all, would run away in those circumstances, leaving three crying in a smashed-up car. She knew that. It would hardly occur to bystanders and the driver of the Peugeot that this was precisely what she had done. They would assume she had gone for help. So what exactly was in her mind when she abandoned the Range Rover and the children? There was nothing else to be done, she said. The alternative—facing the music, being breathalyzed, recounting events to Claudia and James or listening to some policeman do so, somehow dealing with those hysterical children—was impossible. Staring at her listeners, red in the face from the intensity of her feeling, she said she’d have killed herself first, thrown herself in front of one of those container trucks that pound down the Edgware Road.

It was to Jonny that she went. He was at the car park, sitting in his glass booth, working his scam. His shift ended at five and it was nearly four-thirty by the time Liv got there. Between customers handing over their tickets and paying their fee, she told him what had happened. By the sound of it, he’d have done nothing for her if her story had not also been about the money in the belt around her waist, almost £2,000 by then. Grudgingly (I’m reading between Liv’s lines), he said he knew a place where he could take her.

Jonny had a room of his own. It was in Chichele Road, Cricklewood. None of the people I got to know at Silver’s had ever been there. Jonny kept it on for some private purposes of his own, probably criminal, for all I know he may have sublet it, but mostly he slept at 15 Russia Road. He might have let Liv have that room, he might have lived there with her, the kind of arrangement most young men in his position would have welcomed. For some reason he didn’t. When he came off his shift he took her to Silver’s. Neither he nor Silver suspected that once in there she wouldn’t go down into the street again for nearly six months.

Perhaps he thought it would be cheaper at Silver’s. For him, that is. And he would have unlimited access to Liv. I mean, of course, sexual access. And he wouldn’t have to be alone with her except when they were in bed, for Jonny disliked women, enjoyed the company of Silver and Wim and whoever else turned up at the flat at the top of the house, and of course he liked what he could never have found in Chichele Road, an easy way out onto the roofs.