I was afraid Liv would wake up, discover what had happened, and start screaming the place down, but Silver said Mabel might as well be allowed to eat the mouse once she’d caught it. Quoting someone who wrote a ghost story about a cat, he called her “the redoubtable adversary of the genus mus.” Liv slept on. Mabel ate the best part of the mouse and we wrapped up the remains in newspaper and put them in the waste bin. Then we went into Silver’s bedroom and lay on the bed with Mabel sitting on the end of it washing herself, and talked about my future, what I was going to do instead of psychology and business studies and whether Max was really hunting up suitable courses for me in something I might want to do or if he was too busy with his “scruffy academic,” whoever she might be.

“What are you going to do, come to that?” I said.

“Have you any suggestions?”

“With you it’d have to be something in social sciences.”

“Would it?” he said. “I suppose you’re right. But it’s no use worrying about it, is it? No use at all. I know worrying’s no good to anyone but I’ve been doing it lately. I found a white hair on my head this morning and I’m only twenty.”

“But all your hairs are white, Silver,” I said.

“This one was whiter.”

Liv was awake when we went back into the living room. She’d been lying with her head buried in the cushions and now we saw her face for the first time. It was all over with bruises and one of her eyes was black. Jonny had finally come in at half past three. He hadn’t been able to find the money. Liv said that gleefully, though his failure had resulted in a good many blows to her face, and in spite of the fact that he couldn’t possibly have found it no matter where he’d looked since it was all the time in old Mrs. Fisherton’s sideboard drawer. He meant to go on looking that night. He had accused Liv of giving the money to Wim for him to hide. And that of course implied that it might be almost anywhere, Wim having access to heights and levels none of us dared scale. It was when she denied this that he had started punching her face.