Lysander sniggered. I grinned at him. “You’re wrong. It was someone else. And we didn’t need a room for what’s on your mind, we’d got one of our own.” I considered the whole truth and dismissed it. “We were exploring.”

Darren said he had never heard it called that before, Lysander capped that with some more innuendo, and then we got down to work. If you’re a woman electrician who works with men, you must expect that sort of thing. Anyway, hadn’t I courted it? Of course it was Silver I had gone with to the Gilmore and in a way we had been exploring. Given a rope and the rest of his simple equipment, Wim could have climbed almost anything, but we needed help in the shape of other windows to climb out of. The houses in Sussex Gardens aren’t very tall and there’s nothing particularly wonderful about their roofs. The attraction of the Gilmore lay in its being a hotel and therefore with rooms to hire, and in its lift.

It was also cheap. Silver and I booked a room for one night by phone and went along at about six. It was early June. Silver said he wanted to pay in advance as we wouldn’t be staying all night and the man in reception was quite unfazed. I suppose he was used to this sort of thing, though I’d have thought that by the late eighties people had got beyond using houses of call. As I soon discovered, I was being naive.

Our room was a single, on the fifth floor and at the back. The receptionist obviously thought we’d taken a single room with a single bed because that was all we could afford, while the truth was that we’d no need for a bed at all. We didn’t intend to sleep in it or make love in it. Being at the back made it less likely anyone would see us climbing out of the window. If the Gilmore had let us, we’d have taken a cupboard so long as it had access to the roof.

I suppose Jonny’s story about the lift wasn’t really funny, wasn’t at all funny, but laughter is often less about amusement than about astonishment, and we started laughing when we summoned the lift and it didn’t come. There seemed not to be a porter about. Silver whispered to me that probably no one would take the job after Jonny’s assault on Tudorlap. We pressed the button again. The receptionist got wearily off his stool and went upstairs. He didn’t say anything but we knew where he had gone.

The lift came so quickly with the receptionist in it that he must have found it on the first floor.

“Shut the inner gate when you leave the lift, will you?” he said.