In those months she had never been in touch with her parents in Kiruna. Weren’t they likely to be anxious? And how about the agency who had found her the job with Claudia and James? I thought it likely she had been reported missing and I wondered why there hadn’t been a hunt for her. When I considered what I read in the papers, saw on television and heard on the “wireless,” how a young girl had only to fail to go home immediately after an evening out or be absent from where she lived for more than a couple of hours for a police search to begin, it seemed strange that there was no hue and cry for Liv.

“It’s not strange,” Silver said. “Her circumstances were different. She got drunk and crashed a car and ran away. They know that. I expect they think she’s gone back to Sweden. That daft pair didn’t notice Liv was stashing their money away, they’re feckless about money, so they don’t know she’s got their two grand. They’d probably like to see her in court for driving over the permitted limit but, as for the money, they’d be incredulous if they knew she was sweating over them finding her.”

It was the sensible attitude to take but still I wasn’t convinced. Kiruna was part of the civilized world, even though it might be at the end of the earth. Liv’s parents would have made inquiries, been in touch with the agency, with Claudia and James, with their own police, surely, and with ours. So, if she really didn’t want to be found, she was wise to prefer the streets above to the streets below. Sometimes, when I came out from No. 19 to go to No. 15, I’d look up all those floors and see her white face at Silver’s window, looking for Claudia and James or their new au pair with the children to pass that way. If only she could have accompanied Wim on his journeyings, if he’d have taken her with him, she’d have been entirely happy. Instead she was stuck with Jonny, who used her as the cat burglar’s mate.

His attitude to the roofs was simple. There was no enjoyment in it. If anything, he found the climbing a nuisance, the use of ropes and occasionally a ladder burdensome. They were no more than a means to an end. The views of London spread out in a great relief map below left him cold. He found it literally cold up there and swore long and loudly if it was raining on a night when he’d planned a “job.”

When Silver first met him, leaning over a parapet to see Jonny come out of a window onto a fourth-floor balcony, he was already practiced in gaining access to the inside of houses. But he always depended on scaffolding to help him, branched drainpipes, the trunks of climbing plants, their roots in the earth of a basement area, their tops often reaching twenty or thirty feet up, porch roofs, balconies. The easy means the top-floor windows of 15 Russia Road afforded him of carrying on his trade were a boon.