Rather than the result of stealing or dealing, his prison sentence was for something approaching attempted murder. I think the charge must have been causing actual bodily harm. If he confided the horrors of his childhood only to Silver, he spoke freely to everyone about his time in prison and what led up to it. It was an episode he enjoyed describing. Liv was told by him to shut up when she began recounting for what he called the “umpteenth” time the tale of James and Claudia and their children and the crashed Range Rover; his own story he repeated as often as he felt like it. I think he believed it demonstrated his courage and his resourcefulness, that he was a force to be reckoned with.

“I don’t let him mess with me” was a phrase he often used.

He was nineteen and working as a porter in a hotel in Bayswater. The hotel’s address was Bayswater but it was more like Paddington, not far from the station. It wasn’t a private house conversion but had been a hotel for decades, probably since the beginning of the twentieth century, and apart from the narrow winding staircase, the only way to get to the upper floors was by means of one small lift. The hotel management in 1906 or whenever had very likely been immensely proud of this contraption. It was capable of carrying four people or up to a weight of forty-five stone, had an inner sliding door of metal mesh that closed with a clang and an outer wooden door. In other words, the lift was a moving box in a shaft to which there was a door of scratched and scuffed mahogany on each one of the five floors.

Jonny had been there no more than a few hours when he discovered the flaw in the lift system. He said he hadn’t bothered to read the notices pinned to the mahogany door in the reception area. What he meant was that he had been unable to read them. It sounded as if they were in several languages. If they’d been in a hundred, all would have been equally useless to Jonny. After he had had experience of the lift, someone told him what the notices said: PLEASE CLOSE THE INNER DOOR ON LEAVING THE LIFT.

Of course, around half the people who used it forgot to close the inner door. If you left it open, the lift couldn’t be summoned from another floor and the mahogany door remained locked. Say, for example, you were in the reception area and wanted to go to a higher floor, pressing the button would be useless if someone on the third floor had forgotten to shut the inner door when leaving the lift and going to his room. The only way to make the bugger (Jonny’s word) work again was by going up to the third floor by the stairs and closing the inner door. That was just an example, it might as well be the fourth floor or the fifth.