I asked her what she meant by saying she had seen him.

“I recognized him from his photo. Dark-haired guy with a sort of square face and thick eyebrows. It was in Elgin Avenue, the bit where the shops are. He was coming out of the supermarket with two bags of shopping.”

“Hundreds of people have square faces and thick eyebrows and dark hair,” I said. “Thousands. It’s quite an ordinary way to look.” I nearly said she looked like that herself but stopped myself in case she didn’t think it very flattering. “It could have been anyone.”

“No, it was him. I know it was. What d’you think I ought to do about it?”

Morna was always recognizing people in the street. Usually famous ones. The previous week she had insisted she had seen Margaret Thatcher in Whitechapel. But although I didn’t believe she had actually seen Andrew Lane, I felt a surprisingly strong urge to stop her telling the police. Up till then I’d thought very little about him and Alison Barrie, I hadn’t considered what my attitude to them and what they’d done should be, but in that moment my sympathies were for them, perhaps only because one is usually on the side of the hunted.

“What d’you think I ought to do about it?”

“What can you do? You’ve only got to look at the papers to see the police get to hear of hundreds of sightings. They’ve been seen in a train in Scotland and on a ferry to Holland and in a Butlin’s, but none of those people were really them. What makes you think you’re different?”

“Because I saw him with my own eyes.”

“I expect that’s what they all said.”

“He was nervous. He kept looking around over his shoulder.”

“Afraid of getting mugged, I expect,” I said. “It can be a bit dodgy around there.”

Morna remained unconvinced. She asked me if we were still going on the roofs and when I said we were she told me we were all mad. On the way home with my washing I thought about Lane and Barrie and Jason and imagined them living in a trailer on a site on the Essex coast somewhere. Andrew Lane would drive for miles to do the family shopping, maybe fifty miles, which was about what it would be from Southend to Maida Vale. It was harder to convince myself that if he had driven fifty miles he wouldn’t go to a bigger and better food store than a supermarket in Elgin Avenue. But then it hadn’t been Andrew Lane that Morna had seen, had it?