This was beyond Morna and no one enlightened her. She went home soon after that. After he had seen her downstairs, Silver whispered to me, out of earshot on the landing, that maybe Liv would put the molar under her pillow for the tooth fairy in the hope of getting more money. We sat waiting for Jonny to come back. I suggested taking Liv back to old Mrs. Fisherton’s with me and Silver liked the idea but she wouldn’t do it. It meant going down into the street and, although she’d be outside for no more than a few seconds, even that was too much. The fear of encountering James and Claudia was being replaced by a generalized agoraphobia, the opposite of what I had. Yet the roofs were exempt from it—then. She still saw those open spaces as safe.

I had been brought up to think nobody was all bad; in my mother’s words, “there’s some good in all of us.” Human nature wasn’t black or white but halfway between. Of course, I had reached a stage when I had lost faith in most of my parents’ beliefs, but I still clung to that one until I met Jonny. Or, rather, until I came to know Jonny. There was no leaven of goodness in him. He was bad, evil through and through. I tried to make excuses for him on the grounds of his awful childhood, that early life I could barely imagine, those dreadful things happening to a baby, a child of four or five, while his abuser sang nursery rhymes. And I did make those excuses, I told myself that losing his mother so young, losing her love and never receiving love from any other source, he was bound to be unable to give it. I told myself that his greed and meanness came from early poverty, his ill manners from a total lack of instruction in social usage. A lot was still left out. There seemed no accounting for the absence of any sort of empathy in his nature, any thought for others or even of camaraderie with his fellows. Once I had thought he must be in love with Liv to want her so exclusively and feel jealous of her, but he wasn’t in love, he was incapable of love. She was simply his woman, that he had found and intended to keep for his use. She told us that night that sex freely sought and given had ceased between them. Jonny came close to raping her. She gave in to him to save herself being beaten.