By then it was dark. She used to ask Jonny to buy candles for her, which he grudgingly did, but for once she had lit no candles, put on no lights. The whole house was in darkness. I could hear her mice scuttering about in the kitchen. Liv was huddled into a corner of the sofa, embryo-shaped, her arms around her drawn-up knees and her head on her knees. The only light came from outside the window and Silver’s place was too high up for there to be much of that. She lifted her head when we came in and stared at us, her eyes bright with fear. It’s odd how eyes can shine in a dark room, how they can be the only part of a face that’s visible. Without a word she got up and threw herself into my arms. Silver struck a match and began lighting the stumps of candles left over from the night before.

“The doorbell is ringing,” Liv mumbled into my shoulder, “and I go into Silver’s room and look out of the window, and there in the front, is a policeman down there outside the door.”

“I don’t suppose he’d come for you,” Silver said in that voice I always found so completely reassuring. “He may have been after Jonny but most likely it was something about my dad’s car.” Jack Silverman left one of his cars permanently parked, it seemed to me, in Russia Road. “A lot of cars were broken into last week. He probably wanted to check the radio was still there.”

In fact, this was exactly what the policeman had called about, as Silver found out the next day. But Liv wouldn’t believe him. She was sure Claudia and James had discovered her whereabouts. “I trust you, Clodagh,” she said. “I don’t trust Jonny.” Silver she didn’t mention, nor Wim. “Will you take the money for me and hide it in your place?”

“I thought you were saving it to give back when they rumble you,” said Silver.

“Rumble? What is rumble?”

“Catch you. Bring you to justice.”

“I have told you, I cannot. My hands would not do it. My brain will but my hands, no.” Liv began to cry. “I have to have this money. To live. To escape.”

I don’t know what made me take a stand I’d most likely associate with people twice my age. Perhaps it was because I was happy and had friends, most of all had Silver, was never going to be a business manager or a secretary or married to Guy Wharton, and I had come to understand at last how worried Mum and Dad must have been over me after the pylon and when I was so ill and so totally apathetic and unresponsive.