Silver was the only one of us Jonny talked to—I mean in the sense of confiding in. He wouldn’t have dreamed of talking to Liv beyond issuing instructions to her to cook something for him or wash his clothes or come to bed. Wim’s was not a receptive ear, and as for me, most of the time Jonny seemed not to notice my existence. So occasionally, when he had had a few drinks, he talked to Silver and told him about his horrible childhood. His mother had died of a heroin overdose when he was two. His father had abused him from the age of four and later on passed him around among his friends. In order to secure his compliance without beating him—his father did that too—he dosed him with brandy, or in hard times with methylated spirits, so that the boy was insensible when the abuse went on. Jonny wasn’t much more than five feet tall and he blamed his small stature, with or without reason I don’t know, on the quantities of alcohol he was made to consume as a child. His mother had been tall, he said, and his father was tall, so what other reason could there be for him being what he called a “midget”? All this somehow made worse his habit of quoting lines from nursery rhymes. Although highly numerate and speedily able to do the kind of mental arithmetic others needed a calculator to do for them, he was unable to write more than his own name, and while he claimed to read a newspaper, I think it was no more than the headlines that he meant. So it was not the printed word he quoted but from memory of the spoken word. In the context of what he had suffered as a child, I found this gruesome.

In his own way he was as obsessive as Wim. His ambition was to be a millionaire.“That’s a load of crap that money don’t bring happiness,” he often said. “Money is happiness. It’s life. If you haven’t money, you may as well be dead.”

Stealing was the obvious way to get it. If he had been a tall, heavy man, he’d very likely have chosen some other form of theft than that which was the result of climbing drainpipes. But Jonny was made to be a cat burglar. He climbed like a monkey and looked like one, especially when loping across the roofs in a dark close-fitting tracksuit. Of course, he had his car-park scam as well, but the revenues from that and his wages were nothing to what he made from selling the jewelry he stole and his drug dealing.