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.