It was amazing they hadn’t renewed it after what had happened. But perhaps the management knew, even then, that the building was to be sold and gutted and all its ancient equipment thrown on the rubbish heap. We carefully closed that inner gate when we got out and, once on the landing, read the notice, perhaps the very one Jonny had been carrying up to attach to the mahogany door when he encountered Tudorlap for the last time. The lettering was huge, like Sun headlines, but apparently still not effective.

We climbed out of the small sash window onto the roof. The evening was fine and sunny and it was still hot up there at half past six. I could feel the heat coming off the roof through my trainers and when I touched the slates my finger tingled as if I had held it close to a flame. We meant to walk all the way down to the Edgware Road on the leads and the slates in one direction and back to the street that leads to Paddington Station in the other. But roof gardens and little cottagey fences put up to divide the plots from one another got in our way. We could get no farther than the hotel next door and there something very odd happened. We were lying on the roof, looking down over the guttering and thinking of going back to the room and then home. I shifted along so that I could look through the top pane of a small window where the curtains were drawn back. In the room inside, in a double bed, lay a man and a woman asleep. I recognized the woman, though I’d only seen her once before. She was the cushion designer I had met at the birthday lunch Max and Selina had given for me.

So I had been wrong about people no longer using houses of call. Seeing them like that made me feel low, like a voyeur. I told Silver and he said, “All right, we’ll never look through windows again.”

“It’s not really excusable, is it? Even if one’s motive is just being interested in other people, it’s still an invasion of privacy.”

“We’ll try to be good,” Silver said. “We won’t just not be bad, we’ll try to do positive good. How about that?”

I never have difficulty in remembering those words and what they led to. But at the time I don’t believe we had any plans for the good we’d do. We never looked into rooms again, though, but the once. And that once was what precipitated us into disaster. I specially remember that night, not only because of our visit to the Gilmore and what I saw through that window, but because when we got back to Silver’s we found Liv alone, convulsed with terror.