The rest of them walked gingerly on the slates, trying to tiptoe or slide. The chasms between blocks made them draw back as from some awful sight of blood or ruin. Owen was unable to face climbing the gable facade with its nailhead bands, even though a fall would only have brought him down onto the roof of the detached house. Morna was the best of them, adventurous enough once she was up there, though complaining all the while of our ideas of entertainment when pubbing or clubbing would have been so much more to her taste.

We five all had different reasons for going on the roofs. When she was up there Liv felt free and safe. That seems a contradiction in terms, for the rest of us were all aware, however much we loved it, of an element of danger. Liv felt safe on the roofs while she’d have been in peril in the street. On the roofs no one could find her, seize her, bring her to justice.

Paranoia gripped her and, with time, strengthened its hold. The money she had brought with her she kept hidden in a secret place in the flat. No one knew where, not even Jonny. Because she hadn’t been out she had spent nothing in all that time. She had never asked one of us to buy her anything. She used Silver’s soap and toothpaste and shampoo and washing powder. It never occurred to her to dip into her hoard and recompense him.

One day she told me she was keeping the money intact for when Claudia and James or the police found her and wanted it back. This, she believed, was bound to happen. She was convinced they were searching for her with as much zeal and determination as for Andrew Lane and Alison Barrie and the little boy. I said that if she really felt like that she could send the money back, make a package of it and one of us would take it to the post office in Formosa Street.

She shook her head. “I can’t do that.”

“If you’re never going to spend it and you’re so sure you’ll have to give it back sometime, why not give it back now?”

“I couldn’t do it, Clodagh. I could not, I don’t know if this is the word, physically do it. My hands would not work for me.”

There was nothing more to be said. I thought she was becoming sick in her mind and I told Silver so, but all he said was, “Don’t worry about her. As time goes on she’ll come to see no one’s after her and she’ll go out and then she’ll be fine.”