As Beryl had said, the calls made by the police at the Silvermans’ could hardly both have been concerned with thefts from their car. The second had nothing to do with them and everything to do with Jonny. Two policemen had come to talk to him. Silver went down to answer the door, having first taken a look from his bedroom window at the one who rang the bell and the one who waited in the car, and they both followed him upstairs. They were making inquiries, they said, into the death of a woman called Sandra Furbank who had been found dead on the towpath at Paddington Basin. She lived on one of the boats. Whoever had killed her had taken her key, got into the boat and stolen the money she had there. Quite a lot of money apparently, though they didn’t say how much.

Luckily two of the windows were open in Silver’s room, in spite of the rain, but even so I could smell the lingering scent from the two joints Jonny had rolled. The taller of the policemen kept sniffing but he didn’t say anything about the smell so maybe he just had a cold. They seemed uninterested in any of us, though they looked us over in a distasteful sort of way. It was Jonny they had come for. They had no reason to think he had known Sandra Furbank but plenty of reason, they said, to believe he had been down on that part of the canal that night. Silver said afterward that they must have recently been given information by someone who said he or she had seen him there. After all, the murder had happened more than a month before. But the important point was that Jonny had a record. He had been in prison for causing actual bodily harm to someone. He had gone to the police station with them, the one at Paddington Green, I suppose.

“I wonder how they traced him here,” Silver said, and for the first time since I had known him he seemed worried. The anxiety state he warned others against he had fallen into himself.

“His landlady,” Wim said, “or whoever he rents his room from. She’d have told them he’d an alternative address.” I’d seldom seen him look so happy. “No doubt they’ll keep him down there half the night.” The full force of his unaccustomed smile was turned on Liv. “Maybe for good. Maybe we’ve seen the last of him. Bye-bye, Russia Road, hi there, Wormwood Scrubs.”