“Of course I was. I didn’t even know that Sandra bint. They should have got that Wim or whatever he calls himself helping them with their fucking inquiries. Some mate of his lives on a boat down there.” He gave Liv a vicious glare. “I might tell them that next time they come sticking their dirty noses in my business.”

In fact, Wim only slightly knew the man who lived on the boat called Cicero. He was the one I had seen him talking to the first time I encountered him. But he knew him the way I knew Mrs. Clark next door, just well enough to say good morning to and did she know there had been another lot of thefts from parked cars in the street. He had spoken to him no more than three times, as he told us that night, after Jonny had pulled Liv into his bedroom and switched the television on at top volume and we had gone out on the roofs and met him by chance on Peterborough Avenue.

Americans say you live “on” a street and not “in” it the way we do, but we really were “on” streets, on top of the houses. It was midsummer, the longest day just past, and only twilight at nearly ten. We saw Wim a long way off, his head and upper body appearing first as he rope-climbed over a distant gable end. The sky still had a lingering stain of dark red and his black spider shape stood stark against it. Another scaffolding had been put up at the end of the last Torrington Gardens terrace before the first one had been taken down, so we could range a long way before coming to uncrossable abysses. We walked along the Peterborough Avenue leads, just inside the parapet, holding hands.

Wim met us halfway along the terrace, embracing us both in his strange silent way. He had been in Belgravia, on the roofs of Eaton Square, which is supposed to be the finest address in London. We sat on the stone shelf that formed the top of a dormer, in deep shadow high above the street-lamps in their net of plane-tree leaves, and Wim gave us chocolate bars. We lit cigarettes and looked down on the spangled map London becomes at night, lines and rings and studs and stars of light. Our cigarettes made three more bright gleams of orangey-red in the dark.