But she could only talk about the car crash and James and Claudia and running away. She talked about hiding too and watching. She had taken to spending large parts of every day watching the street from one of the front windows. Both the living room and Silver’s bedroom overlooked the front. In her au pair days she had often walked along Russia Road on her way to the shops in Formosa Street, the baby in the buggy, Marcus unwillingly holding her hand. Whoever looked after them now would also pass that way. Or James or Claudia might at a weekend. We reassured her or tried to. We told her the Hindes had forgotten her by now and she had nothing to worry about. Then we went to the end of the roof road, the whole length of Torrington Gardens, and looked over the rim of the gable end at a garden lying deep down below, a mysterious place of tall cypresses and dusky ilexes and in the depths the occasional pale shimmering face of a narcissus. The stucco wall on the other side of this chasm rose to a shaped gable, its peak an ogee arch, its flat surface windowless and with multicurved sides of red sandstone. Silver, seeing my disappointed face in the near-dark, said, “There’ll be a scaffolding going up there in a week or two. That’ll be an enormous help.” After that we went back the way we’d come, down the nailhead steps this time and up the other side, using the drainpipes and the ivy. “Did you notice,” he said, “how many top-floor windows were open?”

I, who pride myself on being observant, hadn’t noticed.

“A good thing for Jonny,” said Liv in a bitter voice.

“People think they’re safe from burglars if they’re on the fourth or fifth floor,” Silver said, “so they leave their windows open and don’t put bars on them.”

We went through our own open window. Neither Wim nor Jonny had returned. Liv drifted off to Jonny’s room where she put the television on. I sat on the broken leather sofa with Silver, filled with peace and joy, and he kissed me, very softly and gently but not like that first time at the gate, not like that at all. I had to go, I said, I had to go home to old Mrs. Fisherton’s.

“Don’t go,” he said. “Stay the night. Stay with me.”

Chapter 10

10